Cloud

I found a topic that I’m going to suggest for an Open Space at every DevOpsDays I go to from this point forward: “Container Conundrum: Pain points around containers” These notes are presented here without opinion. Distilling these notes into a concise narrative will be the topic for an introduction to an upcoming DevOps’ish newsletter. Please subscribe today! I think the best way to look at these notes is to assume that each bullet point is a pain point. ...

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. I contacted AWS support, and they were able to waive the bill. This will likely be the case with you as well if this is the first time this has happened to you. AWS also explained that I could have avoided the high bill by setting the bucket to private and not using a CDN (an S3 best practice; but in this case the bucket was intentionally public for various reasons). ...

A former co-worker and now friend has a tagline, “Every day is a school day.” I remind myself of this fact almost every time I learn something new. 2019 was the hardest year of my life. I’d like to share some things I picked up on this most recent journey around the sun we call 2019. I’ll make some predictions about 2020 in the process too. Kubernetes Last year, I said I thought Kubernetes would get easier. That didn’t happen. It’s not any easier to use Kubernetes. But, to be honest, I’m not sure if Kubernetes itself will ever get easier, it’ll be us getting more used to using it and building tools around it. I still think vendors need to focus on ease of use if they want to see their products getting adopted. But, the project in general, might not need to worry about ease of use. This seems like hair splitting, sure, but, it seems like Kubernetes did manage to penetrate every sector of tech in 2019. This is going to lend itself to a big ole ecosystem of people and orgs working on ease of use on behalf of the community. ...

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. ...

Red Hat invited me to speak at DevNationFederal. The organizers requested I present my DevOps is Not War talk to technologists in the Washington DC area. This crowd is a group of folks that are at varying points in their DevOps journeys. Many folks from government agencies and systems integrators were present. I was able to sync up with one of my Airmen from my time at Pope Air Force Base. He was fascinated by Ansible, Kubernetes, and showed particular interest in the concepts of DevOps. He works for a siloed systems integrator and was curious how he could help influence change from within. I gave him a ton of advice and offered to help him implement Ansible playbooks and roles in his workcenter. It was pretty damn cool. ...