If you follow me on Twitter, you know I spent the first half of the week in Raleigh attending All Things Open and hanging out with my opensource.com family. All Things Open is one of my most looked forward to conferences of the year. I had already committed to attending before I moved to Detroit and I’m so glad I was able to go. One of the coolest things I did while there was announcing a new Opensource.com DevOps Team with Jason Hibbets on the main stage after my lightning talk. Join us on this journey! It’s going to be awesome! [Video] Continuous Delivery 101 from GoCD This video series covers the history of CD, concepts, best practices, how to get started, and popular tools. You’ll gain a holistic view of continuous delivery and a deeper understanding and appreciation of critical concepts. SPONSORED I read Last Week in AWS religiously and you should too Corey Quinn’s Last Week in AWS: You Had Me at Free (Tier) SPONSORED ...

Is DevOps dying? I’ve had this thought for a few weeks now. Since DevOpsDays Detroit when Richard I. Cook, M.D. sat shaking his head at Gene Kim on stage in a panel discussion titled, “DevOps, Safety, And Lean”. Like a concept twisted by bad marketing DevOps has become almost a cult. There are those that practice it religiously and others that cannot adhere to every tenet every moment of every day but do try to “DevOps”. Site Reliability Engineering has gained significant ground. As have many other practices and ideas that if embraced would balance the future of information work. Those of us in DevOps often forget where we came from. Never doing a deploy while the sun is up, only on the lowest traffic period, and rarely completed within the allotted time slot. Damn near anything was better than those days. Let’s not be too high and mighty about DevOps. We all should focus on making things better for everyone. I’ll be in Raleigh at All Things Open this week. If you’re around definitely come say hello and get a DevOps’ish sticker. Also, come check out my lightning talk on Tuesday. ...

My week started with a migraine Monday afternoon. My week ended with a right ear infection. I spent two days dead to the world. Having to take a knee and heal sucks. If a team can’t handle a member taking a sick day, something has broken in the team building process. Any member of a team should be able to call in sick without any other team member feeling like a ball will get dropped. Humans are going to get sick, humans are going to fail, and the team should be able to adjust to that. If it can’t, the team is in dire shape and a holistic strategic assessment should happen. The team is likely trying to do too much, move too fast, or does not have enough skilled people. If that’s the case, sharpen the ole business skills and make the case for whatever it is the team needs. Make sure the team literally stays healthy. Join Our Research Group — GoCD Take our short survey for the chance to join a great group of continuous delivery practitioners in our research group. You’ll be eligible to get your name on our contributors list, and win great schwag, and gift cards. SPONSORED ...

As part of the Open Spaces at DevOpsDays Raleigh, the group decided to do a “Book Club” to share interesting books, podcasts, etc. that would be interesting to us DevOps folks. The members of the conversation were Magnus Hedemark (thanks for tweeting all these), Nirmal Mehta, John Willis, Aaron Huslage, and myself. Here is a compiled list from that discussion: Note: DevOps’ish may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs. The End of Heaven: Disaster and Suffering in a Scientific Age by Sidney Dekker — Accidents and disasters have become technical problems without inherent purpose. When told of a disaster, we easily feel lost in the steely emptiness of technical languages of engineering or medicine. Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software by Michael T. Nygard — A single dramatic software failure can cost a company millions of dollars — but can be avoided with simple changes to design and architecture. Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World’s Most Unusual Workplace by Ricardo Semler — Semler turned his family’s business, the aging Semco corporation of Brazil, into the most revolutionary business success story of our time. By eliminating unneeded layers of management and allowing employees unprecedented democracy in the workplace, he created a company that challenged the old ways and blazed a path to success in an uncertain economy. ...

I had the pleasure to travel to our South Florida office this week. I participated in five quarterly planning meetings and Bankrate’s 2nd Hackathon. The quarterly planning meetings were pretty cool. It was interesting to see what all our dev teams were going to be pushing forward with for the year. But, the highlight of the week was the Hackathon. There were some incredibly creative ideas built around the Bankrate platform that I’m sure a few will be brought into our products soon. I had the modest goal of standing up a Kubernetes cluster in AWS and deploying an example app to it. Luckily I had enough support from our team of Phippineers to make it happen. Phippineers you ask? Several members of the team have only heard me talk about Kubernetes. The first thing I asked the team to do was to watch The Children’s Illustrated Guide to Kubernetes to get an idea of the concepts at play. In the guide, a cute little giraffe named Phippy represents a PHP app looking for a home. The team latched on to this and off we went using Terraform to roll out CoreOS Tectonic to AWS. There were some bumps along the way and at one point I was almost ready to throw in the towel. But, with some help from various CoreOS folks on Twitter we got everything up and running. One of the devs on the team set out assembling a Laravel app to be deployed to the cluster. They marveled at the ability to roll out multiple versions of the app, scale up the whole cluster, and scale it back down by editing a variable here or there. It was an awesome experience! My team didn’t win any prizes or accolades but we definitely took a huge leap towards our future infrastructure. ...