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! ...

This week has been highlighted by multiple security events What an incredibly busy week news wise. No matter where you are in your DevOps journey it’s very likely one of the major events this week affected you. I am in the process of fighting off a sinus infection too so this week was a lot to handle. Department of Sane Workplaces Unless you live under a rock I am almost certain you have heard about the insanity Susan J. Fowler went through during her time at Uber. This shit is #NotOkay, folks, period. If you proposition your coworkers, you are in the wrong. If you harass your coworkers, you are in the wrong. If you cover up sexual misconduct, workplace violence, or any other human resource issue in your organization, YOU ARE IN THE WRONG. I have said this a lot in the past year, I did not spend 11 years in the military so ignorant jerks can harass people. You can read the incredibly well written piece by Mike Isaac for an impartial point of view. ...

Alexander Graham Bell Birthplace, Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom My apologies for the delay in this week’s DevOps’ish newsletter. When I opened the ole MacBook last night to hammer it out it dawned on me how exhausted I was. Instead of this newsletter I spent time with family and went to bed early. Sorry, not sorry. It was an eventful week in the world of DevOps though. Department of Choice Concepts Google Spanner was introduced as, “The first horizontally scalable, globally consistent, relational database service.” After some initial reading on Wired about Spanner my interest has piqued. There is a white paper in regards to CAP Theorem and Spanner that is like reading a sci-fi novel in which laws of physics are bent to humanity’s will. But the true gem in Spanner is Google’s handling of time (dubbed TrueTime) to create consistency. Software licensing is becoming an incredibly important factor in DevOps. You might have cobbled together some tools and some code to solve a problem but can your employer legally use it? Tom Callaway is the person behind making Fedora legally legit. The story about his work in the Fedora teams is a must read. ...