Come listen to experts in building infrastructure and enabling development and deployment processes discuss the ideas and technologies involved in DevOps.
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DevOps 009: Learning DevOps
Episode Summary In this episode of the Adventures in DevOps podcast, the panelists talk about getting started with DevOps and learning its principles and technologies. Lee and Scott mention that they share a similar journey, initially starting as system administrators and working their way into DevOps. Nell says that she was a Ruby and .NET developer before learning cloud technologies such as Heroku, Chef, and Docker. To someone with a programming background wanting to get into DevOps, Lee highly recommends three books - The Practice of System and Network Administration, The Practice of Cloud System Administration: DevOps and SRE Practices for Web Services - Volume 2, and Time Management for System Administrators. He mentions that they are technology-agnostic and help in understanding what is really going on in the system. Scott stresses on the importance of understanding basic networking, linux systems and commands, bash scripting and knowing the core fundamentals and interactions of the underlying systems. He suggests going for online resources, tutorials and boot camps which are plenty nowadays and easily accessible as well. Nell advises listeners to pick a cloud provider such as Digital Ocean and learn the basics by working with it, which can later be applied to any other cloud provider. She also recommends learning programming languages to get a good software development foundation. The panelists talk about working on specific projects and getting hands dirty rather than traditional learning, to enhance their DevOps skills. Nell explains how they implement the 'learning by doing' concept at work. She mentions that understanding how virtual machines and physical servers work is crucial before moving on to learning about containers. Lee suggests Vagrant - a tool for building and managing virtual machine environments, as a good resource for the same. They caution that while it is important to learn things during our time off, self-care and setting healthy boundaries is paramount. It is ok to take longer to learn something given that DevOps as a whole can be extremely complex, and working in a non-pressure environment can be very beneficial. They recommend Ops School for beginners which is a comprehensive program aimed at people who want to get into operations engineering. They then share their insights on monitoring and how to get started with it. Lee recommends the book Practical Monitoring, and Sensu - a monitoring event pipeline, as good starting points. DevOps can be considered as a technical as well as a cultural movement. To that effect, they discuss where should people start learning the associated cultural elements. Nell recommends reading the books - Effective DevOps, and The Phoenix Project and Crucial Conversations. Lee advocates going old school with the writings of Richard Stallman, and books of the 80s and 90s such as The Art of C Programming. They mention that conversational skills and dealing with people are critical skills in today's work environments. Scott recommends Google's Site Reliability Engineering books which have a lot of great stuff to build a solid foundation and are also free to read online. Finally, they talk about how to keep learning and expanding knowledge. Some effective suggestions discussed include extensive practicing, working professionally, solving business problems, building expertise in programming, and attending DevOps Days events and Linux Users groups. They end the episode with picks. Panel Nell Shamrell-Harrington Lee Whalen Scott Nixon Sponsors iPhreaks - Devchat.tv The Dev Rev - Devchat.tv React Round Up - Devchat.tv CacheFly Links A Cloud Guru Digital Ocean Linux Academy The League of Professional System Administrators Vagrant Ops School Curriculum Practical Monitoring Sensu Effective DevOps: Building a Culture of Collaboration, Affinity, and Tooling at Scale The Phoenix Project The Art of C Programming Crucial Conversations Site Reliability Engineering - Google DevOps Days Picks Nell Shamrell-Harrington: Fresh Tarragon Lee Whalen: The Practice of System and Network Administration The Practice of Cloud System Administration: DevOps and SRE Practices for Web Services, Volume 2 Time Management for System Administrators Scott Nixon: How to Stay Motivated: Developing the Qualities of Success
DevOps 008: Disaster Recovery
Sponsors iPhreaks - Devchat.tv The Dev Rev - Devchat.tv React Round Up - Devchat.tv CacheFly Panel Nell Shamrell-Harrington Scott Nixon Episode Summary Coming to you live this time from the studio is a brand new episode of the Adventures in DevOps podcast! Regular panelists Nell Shamrell-Harrington, Principal Engineer at Chef Software, and Scott Nixon, Principal Consultant at Cloud Mechanics, discuss one of the most significant aspects of any given software environment - disaster recovery, what is it and what to do when the unimaginable happens. They start the show by explaining that disaster recovery can be considered as a subset of business continuity planning. They state that two main things need to be defined while planning for disaster recovery in any organization. First one is the recovery time objective (RTO), which is the maximum acceptable length of time that an application can be offline, and this information is generally included in a Service Level Agreement. The second one is Recovery Point Objective (RPO), which is the maximum acceptable length of time during which data might be lost from the application due to a major incident. Nell gives examples of each and Scott mentions that we need to understand the time taken for restore as well, and it is very important to restore data regularly. Once the RTO and RPO have been established, the software needs to be prepared for disaster recovery, including verifying that the software can be installed correctly, as replication can be very hard, especially when it has been installed long ago. They transition to the topic of security concerns, for example, how to deal with cases when there are multiple security groups, ACLs, etc, and the cloud service in an entire region goes down. They advise listeners to make sure that the disaster recovery environment should match the compliance requirements, make cloud storage a part of daily backup routines, and to use configuration management tools most suitable to the work environment so as to make the process seamless. They talk about cloud-agnostic tools that help in cross-cloud replication and syncing data across. They also raise certain points to consider for successful recovery, including estimating the time and bandwidth required to transfer large amounts of data, balancing image configuration and deployment speed along with the time needed to handle dependencies, image consistency across hybrid environments, implementing tiered storage, and share relevant examples. Another pattern they discuss is the idea of maintaining the same IP address for an application to make disaster recovery easier, which can be possible if it's in the same region, using elastic IP or load balancing, but can be challenging with multiple cloud providers across different regions. However the solution would be quite challenging as well as expensive, so there is always a tradeoff involved. They then move on to some common mistakes that people make in disaster recovery. Nell says that while creating a good plan it is really crucial to bring in people from across various businesses, while Scott talks about regularly documenting everything including bits and pieces like manual configurations and such. They discuss that security consistency is often overlooked, and describe some recovery services offered by cloud providers such as Amazon, Azure and some multi-cloud services like Zerto and Arcserve. They end the episode with picks. Links Boto 3 MSP360 CloudEndure Disaster Recovery Azure Site Recovery Zerto Arcserve Picks Nell Shamrell-Harrington: Wild mushrooms Scott Nixon: Nine Lies About Work : A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World
DevOps 007: Monitoring in a Technical Environment
Sponsors CacheFly Panel Nell Shamrell-Harrington Scott Nixon Episode Summary In this episode of the Adventures in DevOps podcast, panelists Nell Shamrell-Harrington and Scott Nixon talk about monitoring in the software world. They start the discussion by talking about the difference between monitoring and alerting. They discuss how logging comes into picture in monitoring, two main types of logs - structured and unstructured, log management in the DevOps environment, information storage, parsing logs and log aggregation. They list two major kinds of monitoring software - pull and push. Nell explains what they mean and how they work, and Scott gives examples of each including syslog, healthcheck, etc. They then talk about what it means by a "working" system, and consequently, when can something be considered to be non-functional. This leads to answering the important question of what exactly should be monitored. They explain to what extent should one go while monitoring and how to determine the significance level of the events in general. They discuss some concepts from Mike Julian's book "Practical Monitoring" including anti-patterns such as tool obsession, what not do do in monitoring and the fact that businesses need to customize their systems based on what works for them. They talk about the tool Nagios, benefits in using default monitoring tools provided by native cloud systems, using monitoring as a crutch, and manual configuration. They then discuss some good practices, namely composable monitoring, performance monitoring from the users' perspective, the mantra - 'buy not build', and continual improvements. They briefly touch on the topic of security in monitoring, and wrap up the episode with picks. Links Practical Monitoring-Mike Julian Accelerate: The State of DevOps with Dr. Nicole Forsgren High Output Management - Andrew S. Grove Picks Nell Shamrell-Harrington: Mauer Museum Tetris 99 Scott Nixon: Automated Reasoning Byron Cook, Amazon | AWS re:Inforce 2019 Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph
DevOps 006: All Things Cloud with Bob Quillin
Sponsors CacheFly Panel Nell Shamrell-Harrington Lee Whalen Charles Max Wood Joined by special guest: Bob Quillin Episode Summary This episode of the Adventures in DevOps podcast is joined by Bob Quillin, Vice President - Oracle Cloud Developer Relations, based in Austin, Texas. He manages a team of developer advocates working on cloud native solutions. He explains what developer advocacy means in terms of the work they do at Oracle and elaborates on the term 'second generation cloud'. He then talks about how feature compatibility works with different types of cloud platforms, moving legacy applications to cloud and the best practices involved in cloud operations in general. With respect to the Oracle cloud, he talks about how isolation is achieved when dealing with different customer requirements, hybrid models and their inter-workings, machine learning and artificial intelligence applications on top of the cloud, GPUs, Kubernetes and managed services. He presents his thoughts on what could be the next big thing in cloud technology given that newer concepts are being introduced day by day, and shares anecdotes where clients such as CERN have migrated to Oracle's cloud infrastructure and even those who have transitioned from a different cloud provider to theirs. In the end, he mentions some of the most heavily used cloud features and applications, and they move on to picks. Links Bob's Twitter Bob's LinkedIn Refactoring - Martin Fowler The US Air Force Is Adding Algorithms to Predict When Planes Will Break Picks Nell Shamrell-Harrington: Ubuntu ubiquity bug report Canlis Lee Whalen: AI made from a sheet of glass can recognise numbers just by looking Hugo Micromastery: Learn Small, Learn Fast, and Unlock Your Potential to Achieve Anything Charles Max Wood: Adventures in DevOps Recommendations Canny Good to Great - Jim Collins Bob Quillin: CERN Uses Kubernetes to Reduce WebLogic Deployment Time Cloud Native Labs - Oracle Oracle Developers Special Guest: Bob Quillin.
DevOps 005: Chef Explained
Sponsors CacheFly Panel Nell Shamrell-Harrington Lee Whalen Episode Summary This episode of the Adventures in DevOps podcast is all about Chef. Nell Shamrell-Harrington - Principal Engineer at Chef Software is interviewed by panelist Lee Whalen starting with what Chef is and what it is used for. Nell describes how Chef works with containers, Chef Habitat and how it fits into the overall DevOps culture. Lee asks if it can be used to manage systems with push-pull based configuration management as well. Nell shares how Chef can be advantageous for the higher management and the business as a whole by being automated and high-speed. She compares different configuration management tools and lists certain compromises when using Chef over the others. She explains why they had to apply Apache 2.0 license to the software, but explains that it does not include the code which is totally open source, only the executable build. She mentions some popular Chef code bases that have numerous good contributions from the community. She says that Chef has about 1000 open source projects currently, and appeals to listeners to take a look at the GitHub book that they've written containing information about all of those. Links Chef Chef Habitat Picks Nell Shamrell-Harrington: Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle Lee Whalen: Neuralink Elon Musk’s Neuralink Says It’s Ready for Brain Surgery
DevOps 001: What is DevOps?
Sponsors CacheFly Panel Nell Shamrell-Harrington Lee Whalen Scott Nixon Episode Summary Welcome to the first episode of the Adventures in DevOps podcast! The panelists Nell Shamrell-Harrington - Principal Engineer at Chef Software, Lee Whalen - Principal Engineer and President at Fuzzy Logic Tech, and Scott Nixon - Founder at Cloud Mechanics, kickstart the show by introducing themselves and their work. They begin the discussion by attempting to answer the fundamental question - What really is DevOps? They discuss at length the intersection of DevOps with cloud native computing. They talk about what it means to implement the DevOps way of working, what factors does it depend on, the importance of having a DevOps measuring index to make its deployment successful, prioritizing disaster recovery especially for startups, and the security concerns associated with DevOps deployment in general. This being the first episode, they discuss what they would each like to cover in the future episodes and come up with interesting topics. They end the episode with picks. Links Nell's Twitter, LinkedIn Lee's LinkedIn Scott's Twitter, LinkedIn The Phoenix Project DORA The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code The Twelve-Factor App Kubernetes Failure Stories Picks Nell Shamrell-Harrington: Quiver Captain Marvel Scott Nixon: The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs AWS Simplify
DevOps 002: Castigated by Containers
Panel Nell Shamrel-Harrington Lee Waylin Scott Nixon Episode Summary The panelists introduce themselves. Nell is a principal engineer at Chef, Lee runs the DevOps consulting team Fuzzy Logic Systems, and Scott runs Cloud Mechanics consulting. The topic of today’s podcast is containers. They begin by defining what a container is, with each sharing their own definition. Containers aren’t really new, they’re just a hot topic because companies like Docker made them easier to use and has brought them into the mainstream. The panelists agree that containers are not for storing data, only for running applications, but that data can be mounted to a container. This is one of the biggest beginner mistakes. They discuss situations that are conducive to the proper use of containers. Containers are best added to mature and large scale projects. They discuss the pros and cons of Kubernetes. The panel gives advice on how to start using containers, suggesting new users start by containerizing one thing at a time rather than trying to do it all at once. They remind listeners that if you want something to stick around for each deploy, it should not be in the container itself because containers are temporary. They talk about how to create a container, good patterns and anti-patterns found when using containers. They discuss possible security concerns with anti-patterns in containers. They finish by talking about other container orchestrators and how to get traffic to Docker boxes Links Docker Container LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) Kubernetes Habitat.io CICD Docker Swarm Apache Mesos Follow DevChat on Facebook and Twitter Picks Nell Sharmell Harrington: Trader Joe’s Iced Coffee Big Little Lies Lee Waylin: Magic Sandbox Fall, or Dodge in Hell Whisper Room Scott Nixon: An Absolutely Remarkable Thing The Book of Beautiful Questions
DevOps 004: Blameless culture and Reliability with Ashar Rizqi
Panel Charles Max Wood Scott Nixon Lee Whalen Joined by Special Guest: Ashar Rizqi Summary Ashar Rizqi, co-founder and CEO of Blameless, Inc., shares his approach to taking an unreliable system and making it reliable. The panel discusses the importance of maintaining a blameless culture. Ashar explains what an error budget is and principles to use when creating an error budget. The panel considers the benefits of using an error budget. What to measure and how to measure for reliability are considered and the panel discusses how to manage the data received. Ashar explains the importance of cultures and how this affects reliability. The panel asks Ashar about Blameless, Inc; Ashar explains what they are all about, what they do and what types of companies need Blameless, Inc. Links https://www.blameless.com/ Site Reliability Engineering https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashar-rizqi-6614487 https://twitter.com/blamelesshq https://www.blameless.com/blog/ https://twitter.com/citadelgrad/status/1141832712195493888 https://www.facebook.com/Adventures-in-DevOps-345350773046268/ Picks Charles Max Wood: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/ Lee W: https://restic.net/ https://www.backblaze.com/b2/ Scott Nixon: https://fs.blog/mental-models/ The Great Mental Models https://devops.com/devops-shift-left-avoid-failure/ Ashar Rizqi: Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams Special Guest: Ashar Rizqi.
DevOps 003: The Tool Chain Crisis with Priyanka Sharma
Panel Charles Max Wood Lee Whalen Scott Nixon Joined by Special Guest: Priyanka Sharma Summary Priyanka Sharma gives an intro to the tool chain crisis; the panel shares their perspective on the crisis and where they see this problem. The panel considers how to solve this problem and Priyanka outlines a solution. She gives examples of how to start the data modeling process she believes will help solve this crisis along with suggesting guard rails for developers. The panel discusses this solution and considers how this will work in startups and smaller companies compared to well-established companies with their own tooling. Priyanka shares how to overcome the “we invented it here” syndrome. The panel considers how to choose the tools and the criteria to follow when considering tools. The panel asks Priyanka about The Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Priyanka explains how it works and how projects are submitted and chosen. She shares where she thinks the DevOps industry is going and how the true promise of DevOps can only be reached by putting it in the hands of developers. The panel ends with a discussion on developer compensation problems, an increase of workloads and the benefits and need for remote work. Links https://kubernetes.io/ https://jenkins.io/ https://travis-ci.org/ https://aws.amazon.com/eks/ https://about.gitlab.com/2019/07/03/group-conversation-podcast/ https://about.gitlab.com/ https://meetings.hubspot.com/team104/adventures-in-devops-episode Enterprise Leaders’ Protips for Scavenger Hunting Through the Cloud Native Tool Weeds https://blogs.vmware.com/cloudnative/files/2018/01/Screen-Shot-2018-01-22-at-4.19.03-PM.png https://linkerd.io/ Https://nginx.org https://www.cncf.io/ https://www.envoyproxy.io/ https://prometheus.io/ https://twitter.com/pritianka https://www.facebook.com/Adventures-in-DevOps-345350773046268/ Picks Lee Whalen: http://www.catb.org/esr/loadsharers/ http://boringtechnology.club/ Scott Nixon: Byron Cook, Amazon | AWS re:Inforce 2019 https://aws.amazon.com/security/provable-security/ Priyanka Sharma: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/web_ide/ Keynote: Commercial Open Source Business Models - Sid Sijbrandij, Co-founder & CEO, GitLab https://ai.google/research/pubs/pub36356 Go Remote- https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/#resources Charles Max Wood: Air Conditioning https://conferences.oreilly.com/oscon/oscon-or The Expanse Special Guest: Priyanka Sharma .