Adventures in DevOps

Or Weis is the CEO of Rookout. He walks us through the problems of tracking bugs through multiple layers, services, and nodes. He talks about how to aggregate, sort through, and intelligently use the information provided from each of your infrastructure nodes to find problems in your applications. This is the cure for logging FOMO.PanelistNell Shamrell-HarringtonCharles Max WoodScott NixonGuestsOr Weis

In this episode of Adventures in DevOps Charles Max Wood interviews Stephen Chin. Stephen runs developer relations at JFrog. Stephen starts by sharing what JFrog has to offer and their most recent announcements. Including their new free version of Aritfactory. Charles and Stephen consider the biggest trends to emerge in 2019 and speculate on what’s going to be big in 2020. This leads them into a discussion about security and inheriting vulnerabilities from packages. They share examples of vulnerabilities in code being exploited. Stephen shares how JFrog helps with identifying and fixing vulnerabilities in code. Stephen shares the characteristics found in the ideal pipeline. It needs to be highly flexible so that it will work for every team and every project. It needs to give you a single source of truth and account for security. He explains how to get started with JFrog and what is included in the free version. PanelistCharles Max WoodGuestsStephen Chin

In this episode of Adventures in DevOps Charles Max Wood interviews Priya Nagpurkar, Paul Castro and Nick Mitchell. They all work for IBM and are here to talk about their new DevOps tool Kui. They start by explains what the IBM cloud research team is all about and what motivates them. Their goal is to make programming on the cloud as easy as possible. They share past tools that they have made for this goal. Charles asks the guests about the future of Kubernetes and DevOps. They explain why Kubernetes is so popular and what makes it a powerful tool. Kui is built mostly on Kubernetes. They discuss the evolution of DevOps tools. They compare CLIs and browser-based consoles and explain why people gravitate towards CLIs. Kui lets developers have the best of both worlds.The guests walk Charles though different scenarios of getting started with Kui. The workflow of using Kui inside an established Kubernetes cluster is discussed. They also explain how to move over from a VPS easily with Kui. They explain how Kui betters the developer experience. They go over the features that make developers DevOps experiences easier.  They end by discussing how to get started in Kui if developers are new to Kubernetes.PanelistCharles Max WoodGuestsPriya NagpurkarPaul CastroNick Mitchell

In this episode of Adventures in DevOps the panel interviews Lance Albertson. Lance Albertson works for the Oregon State Open Source Lab. The lab is a program at the Oregon State University that provides the infrastructure to open source projects. The program works with graduate students who walk away with valuable hands-on experience in DevOps. Lance starts by explaining how they choose graduate students and what their experience looks like working for the lab.  Lance explains what they provide for the open source projects they support. He says they provide anything within reason and gives examples of some of the projects they are supporting. The panel asks about their hardware set up and Lance explains that they have a physical data center. He shares details of some of the hardware donated over the years.  The panel asks how much work is managed by the students. Lance explains how open source projects can reach out to them and how they are chosen. Nell Shamrell-Harrington works for Chef and asks Lance how their Chef project is coming. Lance shares some of the work he has been doing on their exciting project. Finally, he tells the listeners how they can contribute to the lab. PanelistsNell Shamrell-HarringtonCharles Max WoodScott NixonGuestLance Albertson

In this episode of Adventures in DevOps the pane interviews Adam Nowak. Adam is a part of the DevOps team at Netguru. He joins the panel today to share his DevOps transformation story. Adam starts by explaining the title he chose for today’s episode. He also shares his definition of DevOps.Adam explains the age-old story of a misunderstood DevOps team that was overworked and underappreciated. The organization grew but the DevOps team didn’t scale with it, leaving them with piles of tickets and everyone else wondering what was taking so long. The panel commiserates with Adam and shares some of their own similar stories. Reaching out to others to help solve the problem, Adam found that many DevOps teams had and are experiencing the same problem. He found help from others in the DevOps space and recommended books. His team started by making their work more visible. To do this they streamlined their communication and published documentation. Next, they made more focused goals. Instead of trying to do everything and never meeting their goals they chose a couple things to work on and focused on that. Another change they made was to diversify their meetings, projects, and initiatives; they brought in people from all the teams to collaborate, making the projects even better. The panel discusses the importance of empathy in the workplace and in life. Most people are trying their best and probably have a reason for doing the things that they are doing. Instead of treating others as if they are incompetent, talk them and discuss the reasons behind their actions and decisions. PanelistsNell Shamrell-HarringtonCharles Max WoodGuestAdam Nowak

In this episode Adventures in DevOps, the panel interviews Grant Schofield. Grant is Director of Infrastructure at Humio. He being by discussing the growth of logging and logging tools. Grant explains the business value of logging and analytics. He shares some real-life examples of how longing helped gain insight into the user experience. The panel wonders how Humio takes the data gathered in the logs and separate out specifics of user experience. Grant explains that by aggregating all data in one place Humio uses the logs, tracing and other metrics to draw conclusions about user experience. He shares some of the conclusions that can be drawn from that data and explains that the conclusions all depend on what you are looking for. The panel discusses how tracing traditionally works and asks Grant what process Humio uses to good sampling. Grant explains that sampling is a good way to save on costs and depends on how much indexing is taking place. He explains that knowing when to sample is very important if you want an accurate sample. Compliance concerns are the next topic the panel discusses with Grant. He explains what Humio does to remain compliant and keep user info safe and private. The panel moves on to discuss index-free logging. Grant explains how index-free logging works. He explains how fast it is and how easily clients can retrieve their data. PanelistsNell Shamrell-HarringtonScott NixonCharles Max WoodGuestGrant Schofield

In this episode of Adventures in DevOps the panel interviews Oleg Chuninkin, CTO of Kublr. Oleg starts by explains what Kublr is all about and how he got the idea of using Kubernetes as an infrastructure abstraction. He and the Kublr team were trying to decide the most productive way to think of Kubernetes.   Oleg advocates for using Kubernetes locally and shares how you can then orchestrate your architecture so you can see what it will do in productions. Charles breaks down a few of the ideas Oleg shares. Oleg explains how the portability of Kubernetes can be used and shares recommendations with the panel on how to run a Kubernetes in a lightweight way.  The panel asks Oleg about the pressure for a cloud independent service and how these effects application requirements. Oleg shares some resources in answer. Moving on the panel considers Olegs comment about the layered architectural approach. Oleg outlines the layered architectural approach and explains what he means by layered. He explains the benefits of this approach. PanelistsScott NixonCharles Max WoodGuestOleg Chunikin

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This episode of Adventures in DevOps is joined by John Epperson. John is a developer and has worked in DevOps for his whole career spanning about 12 years. He is also the author of Shiplane. John made Shiplane after working with Docker for a while and getting fed up with some features not being as he wanted them to be. The panelists begin the discussion with going over John’s talk “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly”, where he covers three camps of developers namely pioneers, settlers, and townsfolk and the panelists go into detail about these camps. They also talk about how docker and Shiplane fit into this idea. John shares that Shiplane is a tool that converts docker-compose yaml files into production-ready docker deployments. John details more of how shiplane came about, the problems it solves, how it works, and how it helps users to cross knowledge barriers. He also shares how Shiplane provides customizability as it will give the user everything they need but lets them choose the pieces they want. The panelists also discuss what websites are running Shiplane as well as some of the support that Shiplane has. Currently it does not support Kubernetes but John is working on it. Chuck then asks John what the use case is for running Shiplane. They discuss specifically whether Shiplane is used locally, or as a SAAS service and why it is the way it is. Nell then asks John what his hopes are for the future of Shiplane. John would like to have Kubernetes capability added within a year. If someone wants to get involved with Shiplane they can do so by trying it out, reaching out to him on his discord server, and helping him find edge cases.  PanelistsNell Shamrell-HarringtonScott NixonCharles Max WoodGuestJohn Epperson 

Julian Fahrer is a software engineer with a systems administration and operations background. He currently works at Hover and is helping them move towards continuous delivery. Nell opens up the discussion by asking Julian to explain what continuous integration and continuous delivery are. He shares that continuous integration revolves around having testing and automation around the code being pushed to ensure that it works and conforms to standards. Continuous delivery feeds off of the concept of continuous integration and is the ability to deploy to any environment at any point in time. Chuck puts these ideas together by saying that continuous delivery and continuous deployment is about making sure that it’s possible to deploy at any time and actually doing so. The next topic covered by the Adventures in DevOps panelists is how to handle apprehension around having a continuous integration / continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline. Julian shares that big cultural changes are required to make CI/CD successful. They share that a lot of organizations are nervous about code with breaking changes immediately being deployed. One way to handle this vulnerability is by hiding features behind feature flags so that only certain people, for example the QA team, will have access to the feature.They share why an organization would want to change to a continuous delivery pipeline and some real world examples that they have experiencedChuck asks what some prerequisites are for a CI/CD pipeline. Scott says that one thing that needs to happen is backfilling areas of the application that previously did not have tests and expanding the testing coverage of the system. Julian shares that these prerequisites depend on how changes are made and shares some specific examples of what that entails. Nell asks what it takes for an organization to be able to do continuous delivery. Julian shares that it is mostly process driven. They establish some rules such as shortening the lifetime of development branches and improving how they are deployed. They also have a discussion on how integration tests should come about and who should write them. Julian mentions that you want to empower people and give them the tools they need to succeed. They then cover some of the work that Julian has done with Hover and some of the details of the continuous delivery environment he is building and the steps they took to begin moving towards that workflow.The topic then moves to dependency management. Nell asks Julian how he approached dependencies in his applications. Julian details how his usage of containers and specific tools helped him. For external environments he says that a database is required and that it would help to have standards for managing dependencies. They share how the current development culture is to give the QA team enough time to test a feature before it goes out. With a CI/CD environment, feature flags can be used to gradually roll out a changes and if a certain users needs a specific set of features then an individual environment can be spun up for their use case. The panelists share some thoughts on environments setup and production best practices and tooling. PanelistsNell Shamrell-HarringtonCharles Max WoodScott Nixon GuestJulian Fahrer