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. ...

It has been a very busy week for me. I have been in Scotland since Tuesday. Jet lag is a real thing but, I have to say I have met some of the nicest people here (and I am a Southerner). As far as DevOps this week, I have been head down DevOps’ing. I have also been building bridges between teams in our global company. It is very exciting and despite constantly being tired the connections are happening. Department of Choice Concepts The OpenShift Developer Evangelist Team announced this week that they are releasing OpenShift tutorials targeting developers. They have teamed up with Katacoda and the first tutorial is Getting Started with OpenShift for Developers. philippta has released a handful or two of great *Go Web Examples. *The goal is to show simple code snippets to handle common functions with Go. Department of Data Defense GitLab released their detailed postmortem on last week’s outage. Two big takeaways: 1) they freely admit their database infrastructure is lacking. 2) A GitLab engineer accidentally started to delete the primary database. Their openness is a breath of fresh air. ...

What a week in DevOps ! There is so much news to share this week it took me an hour to collect it all! I also went to the Open Source 101 conference this week to pick up some knowledge on communities. It was a very good conference. If the future of open source software was represented there it will definitely not be a white male dominated field. Department of Choice Concepts Like a lot of sysadmin and DevOps teams, I bet you have some random cron jobs that are critical to your daily/weekly/monthly workflows. The problem with these jobs is that they always seem to never have a great place to live. Marc Cuva and the Serverless movement might have given us a solution to consider. Make SELinux Enforcing Again! We all do it… To some extent. Let’s try to stop disabling SELinux in 2017. 18F at GSA ran a small experiment in September and it turned out that working more hours did not net more productivity. Confining work schedules and after hours phone checking actually made a team more effective. The crazy thing is this analysis came from a US government agency. Kudos to The U.S. Digital Service! ...