In Elixir Wizards Office Hours Episode 8, hosts Sundi Myint and Owen Bickford lead an engaging Q&A session with co-host Dan Ivovich, diving deep into the nuances of DevOps. Drawing from his extensive experience, Dan navigates topics from the early days before Docker to managing diverse polyglot environments and optimizing observability.

This episode offers insights for developers of all levels looking to sharpen their DevOps skills. Explore the realms of Docker, containerization, DevOps workflows, and the deployment intricacies of Elixir applications.

Key topics discussed in this episode:

• Understanding DevOps and starting points for beginners
• Best practices for deploying applications to the cloud
• Using Docker for containerization
• Managing multiple programming environments with microservices
• Strategies for geographic distribution and ensuring redundancy
• Localization considerations involving latency and device specs
• Using Prometheus and OpenTelemetry for observability
• Adjusting scaling based on application metrics
• Approaching failure scenarios, including database migrations and managing dependencies
• Tackling challenges in monitoring setups and alert configurations
• Implementing incremental, zero-downtime deployment strategies
• The intricacies of hot code upgrades and effective state management
• Recommended learning paths, including Linux and CI/CD workflows
• Tools for visualizing system health and monitoring
• Identifying actionable metrics and setting effective alerts

Links mentioned:

Ansible open source IT automation engine https://www.ansible.com/
Wikimedia engine https://doc.wikimedia.org/
Drupal content management software https://www.drupal.org/
Capistrano remote server automation and deployment https://capistranorb.com/
Docker  https://www.docker.com/
Circle CI CI/CD Tool https://circleci.com/
DNS Cluster https://hex.pm/packages/dns_cluster
ElixirConf 2023 Chris McCord Phoenix Field Notes https://youtu.be/Ckgl9KO4E4M
Nerves https://nerves-project.org/
Oban job processing in Elixir https://getoban.pro/
Sidekiq background jobs for Ruby https://sidekiq.org/
Prometheus https://prometheus.io/
PromEx https://hexdocs.pm/prom_ex/PromEx.html
GitHub Actions - Setup BEAM: https://github.com/erlef/setup-beam
Jenkins open source automation server https://www.jenkins.io/
DataDog Cloud Monitoring https://www.datadoghq.com/