AWS

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. ...

I recently spoke at AWS Michigan about cloud migrations. The talk wasn’t AWS specific but we sure did talk about it a ton. From defining cloud to addressing priorities to preventing cost overruns we covered a lot during the meetup. I was peppered with questions by a lively audience. After speaking on stage at DevOpsDays Atlanta 2018, there was this awkward moment for me when the first question was asked. I wasn’t mentally prepared for questions during the talk but, adjusted quickly. ...

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. ...

I have been trying to fit a lot of square pegs into round holes lately. Eliminating technical debt with modern day DevOps practices to reduce costs is seldom fun or glamorous but is very often beneficial. Reducing costs should be the mindset of IT and one surefire way to do that is to spend the right amount of time on a task to complete it successfully. Finding that balance is definitely tricky especially when a lot of us are human time division multiplexers now. But, that right combination of good work and adequate time spent is definitely out there. ...