I started a new on-call rotation this week and it has really sucked. The team whose rotation I was added on to is mature in a few areas but monitoring and alerting seems to be lacking a little. They acknowledge that and my coming on to the rotation is partially to identify areas of improvement. The rotation I was on a couple weeks ago for a different team resulted in no pages all week and my bringing the team donuts. This week’s rotation has resulted in a page every night (and two shorter maintenance events). The team that got donuts is very weak in some areas that this week’s team is not. But the donut team focused on monitoring and alerting as well as not waking people up and it shows. Part of my job is to bring consistency to these teams that are separated 3,676 miles apart. Sharing expertise, processes, and procedures is part of the gig. The deficiencies in tooling have been identified. The need for personnel has been fulfilled. Now it’s time to bring on the processes and results. ...

Last Sunday, shortly after DevOps’ish Weekly 015 went out, Nicole Forsgren of DORA reached out on Twitter to demonstrate how easy it is to find great people in DevOps. This is Nicole’s list of great folks out there DevOps’ing: Alexa Alley Alice Goldfuss Amy Nguyen Amye Scavarda Aruna Ravichandran Ashley McNamara Betsy Beyer Bridget Kromhout Caitie McCaffrey Camille Fournier Cat Posey Charity Majors Courtney Kissler Courtney Nash Dinah McNutt Dominica DeGrandis Heather Mickman Heidi Waterhouse Ines Hegedus-Garcia Ines Sombra Jennifer Davis Jessica DeVita Jessica Hilt Jessie Frazelle Katherine Daniels Laine Campbell Lara Hogan Lisa Phillips Mandi Walls Megan Anctil Nell Shamrell Pamela Howell Phoenix Johnson Rikki Endsley Susan Fowler Rigetti Tuuli Bell Zee Alexander unpixie If Nicole Forsgren can bust out 38 awesome people DevOps’ing surely you can come up with ten. Share your ten awesome folks of #DevOps with me on Twitter. Nicole also started a “Ladies in #DevOps” trend in the process of sharing this list. Show people respect where it is due. Department of Choice Concepts Jacob Hoffman-Andrews was on The Changelog recently discussing Let’s Encrypt. It is a fairly journey through the birth of one of the most important projects of the last couple of years. ...

I have recently taken over as a co-organizer of Triangle DevOps. In a meeting with the other primary co-organizer we talked a little about performance. DevOps considers network, code, system, and other aspects of performance. Yet, we rarely, if ever, consider what we can do to help the most critical part of our products; the front end. The customer cares the most about the interface they use for the products we facilitate. If we do not consider caching, CDNs, and asset utilization at some point in our journey are we doing DevOps justice? I would argue it’s not the job of development or design to consider global optimizations such as this. Don’t get me wrong, it would be awesome if someone else cared but so often it is not even a thought. This is a part of what DevOps is all about! Optimization, reduce costs, and gain efficiencies. DevOps is everything and everything is DevOps. Department of Choice Concepts Speaking of front end performance, Google just announced Guetzli. It can create high quality JPEG images with file sizes 35% smaller. ...

March is Women’s History Month and this past Wednesday was International Women’s Day. I have a lot of people that influence me. I observe and take notes from a wide group of people who have great experiences to learn. This week I would like to take a moment and recognize some of the fantastic people that have influenced and helped me over the course of my DevOps journey. This list is 100% personal and selfish. You should make and share your own (even if it’s just one). Jessie Frazelle: Jess has been a wealth of knowledge both technically and socially. If I ever have a question about containers or Go I can go read something Jess has written or in a pinch ask her flat out. Jess is one of the smartest people I know. What’s even crazier is despite how in demand she is, Jess is one of the nicest people I know. I nominated Jess for The 2017 Women In Open Source Award because she will likely go down in history as one of the greatest contributors of our generation. Thank you, Jess, for everything. ...

I have been sick all week. I have pushed through it as much as possible but this was not a great week physically. However, there is plenty to discuss in the land of DevOps. Department of Data Defense The Amazon S3 outage is the big story of the week. How many of you were impacted by it. I was to a minimal extent. Our products have been architected for failure pretty well. There was a little work to be done during the outage to work around one issue. Aside from that my time was spent monitoring things anticipating the catastrophe to expand (which it did to an extent). This did not cause any additional burden on my teams and I though. Why am I not mentioning the reason behind the outage? Because it should not have been as devastating as it was. Folks, the cloud is still something you have to manage. Remember error budgets from Google’s Site Reliability Engineering book? You have to anticipate outages and down time for just about everything in this world. Your code should not depend on one cloud provider’s regional resource, ever. Diversify your cloud, folks! ...