The other day my Vice President asked me a question, "What would it take to turn a good SysAdmin into a DevOps engineer?" He followed it up with, "Don't spend more than ten minutes thinking about it." He was not disappointed when I told him the next day I am spending way more than ten minutes on answering the question. This is a hard question for me to answer. This is a question that you won't know if your answer is right for at least six months.

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I had more than ten minutes worth of thoughts pop into my head within seconds of the question. A deluge of DevOps lessons learned washed over me. I realized that I needed to build a framework to help others embrace DevOps culture and thinking. It's not feasible to have

Disclaimer: These are real world experiences I have had within organizations that I have been employed by. Identifying information is intentionally anonymous. If you read this and think you are one of the teammates please keep that to yourself for the sake of others.

A lot of people think that DevOps, Cloud Native, Agile, GROWS, etc. are all rainbows and roses. You start small and work your way up to full blown operations or you decide as an organizational unit to change. These are the two patterns associated with a Jedi-type maturation process of DevOps. What if I told you that, like in Star Wars, DevOps has a dark side? I have seen the light side everyone thinks of and have carried the red lightsaber as well. Let's walk into the cave on Dagobah together.

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Since the release of Apple's iOS 9, iPhone and iPad owners are able to install content blockers. These content blockers are often referred to as ad blockers. Providing content blocking functionality through third party apps is a reasonable request. Apple has had this functionality in iOS since 16 September 2015. As a user of content blockers on the desktop, I jumped at the opportunity to install one on my mobile devices. I have been rotating them in and out of service for well over a year and a half.

Content blockers became necessary as sites started demanding more data from users. All the data usage by trackers, ad networks, analytics, and other plugins has gone unchecked for quite some time. For example, one of my favorite sites has over 20 plugins, most of which are for advertising. Imagine how much

I feel like I should say I don't like to toot my own horn. But, if I don't toot it who will? December and January were very busy months for me and February is definitely going to be busy. You should always be working outside your personal and professional comfort zones.

Last month, a DZone editor reached out to me asking to write a piece for the DZone DevOps: Continuous Delivery and Automation guide. This was my first true writing assignment. It was a tremendous learning experience. I banged out an article relating to my recent speaking engagements. A copy of the PDF is being kept here for posterity.

In other news, I recently received an e-mail from Jason Hibbets of Opensource.com. He informed me I won the Opensource.com 2017 Emerging Contributor Award! In December, I wrote my

The team here was trying to align AWS resources for billing by using Tags. Seems easy enough but we were having issues trying to figure out which EC2 instances were not tagged. We also wanted to find EC2 instances that are missing a ROLE tag. We searched high and low and found that several people needed a solution. We tried to cobble something together with the AWS CLI and then Ansible. We could not come up with a viable solution. So we did what any could DevOps team should do; we opened a ticket with AWS Support.

The response from AWS came quickly and succinctly. Here is what we came up with after their input.

Display instances that have no tags:

aws ec2 describe-instances --query "Reservations[].Instances[].[InstanceId, Tags]" --output text | grep None | awk '{print $1}'  

Display instances