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We’ve all had challenging years before. However, none were quite as challenging as in 2020. In the conclusion of last year’s post, I wrote, “I am hopeful that whatever economic upheaval we face as a society in 2020 is limited.” At that time, economic indicators were bubble-ish. However, a global pandemic was not something I had in the cards. No one did. A global pandemic, international protests against horrific injustices, and a US government damn near inept at helping with any of it. These events led to the largest voter turnout in this nation’s history. Hopefully, this will change our path and put the country back on track. ...

We’ve had a tragic loss in the cloud native community. Last weekend we lost Dan Kohn. Dan Kohn is the former Executive Director of Cloud Native Computing Foundation and was leading up COVID-19 response for the Linux Foundation. He passed away after losing his battle with stage four colon cancer. Dan’s passing happened far too soon. I knew Dan was battling something, but we hadn’t been in the same place for quite some time. It’s not one of those things you necessarily want to initiate a conversation about either. I did not know of Dan’s blog about it until he was gone. I would encourage all of us to look at our physical ailments as we age (perhaps more rapidly because of 2020) to take care of ourselves. ...

This post was originally written as the introduction to DevOps’ish 188, has been modified based on feedback, and deemed worthy to share as its own blog post. Photo by Christina Morillo from Pexels We kinda went down a rabbit hole the other day when I suggested folks check out yq, “The aim of the project is to be the jq or sed of yaml files.” First, there’s nothing wrong with this project. I like it, I find the tool useful, and that’s that. But the great debate started over our lord and savior, YAML. Yeah, I know, XML vs. JSON vs. YAML vs. TOML vs. the next thing is a tired and old debate. ...

(Obvious answer: No) Take a break from your normal DevOps and cloud native content for something, rather beautiful… Yesterday, Julie, Max, and I took a fun little family trip over to Kensington Metropark (Kensington). This is part of Michigan’s Huron-Clinton Metropark system. Kensington itself is, “4,481 sprawling acres of wooded, hilly terrain surrounds[ing] beautiful Kent Lake”. It is a big park on the outskirts of the Detroit Metro area. The amount of outdoor activities you can do at this park is astounding and it’s a quick trip over to it. ...

Update I joined Rob Hirschfeld on the The 2030 Cloud where we discussed some additional behind the scenes investigatory work that went on by a nameless Amazon Web Services (AWS) employee. Summary Here’s a summary in case you just got a scary AWS bill: I received an AWS bill for $2,700, which was much higher than expected. I traced the high bill to a 13GB disk image that he had stored in an S3 bucket and exposed through a CDN. The CDN was trying and failing to cache the disk image, which was causing high bandwidth utilization. ...