Blog

This Monday (2019-08-19) will be my first day as Principal Technical Marketing Manager on the Cloud Platforms team at Red Hat. What does that mean? OpenShift (a lot of OpenShift), Kubernetes, containers, Operators, and all the associated bits will be my day job. Helping folks help themselves with technology is still and always will be the name of my game. But, working full time in the Kubernetes or cloud native ecosystem was a 2020 goal. Crossing off 2020 goals in 2019. #winning ...

This article is based on the introduction to DevOps’ish on 2019-07-28. Some parts are duplicated but this is a much deeper dive than I could do in the newsletter (and these 1500 words barely do the topic justice). Also, yes, I work for Red Hat. No, these views do not represent theirs. Please take a moment to read my disclaimer. Above all things, I’m an American, and this issue trancends business. Let’s talk about JEDI. Not the lightsaber wielding type; it’s US Department of Defense’s Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI). JEDI is a $10 billion, single-award, indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contract for the largest department in the United States’ government’s cloud business. The process started in late 2017 and has had all sorts of twists and turns. The competition for the contract had come down to two suitable companies: Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. But, Oracle has been pitching a Larry Ellison sized fit over the process. Specifically, Oracle has protested JEDI’s selection process since last November. ...

At Red Hat Summit this year, I had the task of explaining Kubernetes Operators with Ansible in two, fifteen-minute talks, separated by three hours, in the middle of the busy Red Hat booth to anyone that walked up. I had to explain Kubernetes, the difference stateful and stateless apps, what a Kubernetes Operator is, how to write an operator with Ansible, and then demonstrate this capability. Use of video and sound was discouraged. Also, there wasn’t going to be an ethernet cable available, meaning only conference show floor WiFi was available for a demo. ...

I was working on things for work (as one does) when it dawned on me. Very few folks understand the difference between upstream and downstream as it relates to open source software. I used Red Hat projects as a pointer. Here is the output of that effort (which was scratching the surface). Upstream vs. Downstream Upstream vs. Downstream is confusing at times. But, for the bigger Red Hat projects this holds true: ...

I made an innocent comment on Twitter last week that led to WAY more feedback than I was expecting. The Kubernetes community showed me there are a lot of options when creating Kubernetes Secrets. I made the statement: Every single time I have to create a secret, I have to read the docs. I should have this figured out by now." Years ago, a colleague asked Albert Einstein if he knew his phone number. The rebuttal was short and rather Einsteinian, “Never memorize something that you can look up.” So when a reminder of how “Memorization is an anti-pattern.” came up during the conversation about Kubernetes Secrets, I was quite relieved. ...