Photo Courtesy of Kim McMahon

ChefConf 2018: DevOps is Not War

If you read DevOps’ish, you already know I spoke at ChefConf 2018. I was able to meet 1,400 new friends while I was in Chicago (not really but kinda). I presented my talk, DevOps is Not War to a standing room only audience. From a speaker’s perspective, I have never felt more prepared for a talk. There were speaker office hours every week for 10 weeks before the event to address any questions we may have had. On top of that, Anna Boynton, was available to all speakers to coach us through some of our not so great points. Anna looked at video from DevOpsDays Atlanta 2018 to help me hone the talk to a very tight time slot while hitting every main point needed. ...

May 29, 2018 · Chris Short

AWS Michigan: Heaven is Not a Cloud

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. ...

April 30, 2018 · Chris Short

Lessons Learned from Cloud Migrations: Planning is Everything

Abstract “Migrating to the cloud saves money!” “Not running your own infrastructure reduces your bottom line!” “Lift and shift is a legitimate first step towards moving to the cloud!” These are all potential pitfalls if you’re not careful. Proper planning prevents piss poor performance. Using a real chaotic cloud migration as a guide, we’ll walk through the pitfalls of cloud migrations and how to avoid them and the terrifying vendor lock-in (when it makes sense). ...

March 7, 2018 · Chris Short

Permanently Remove Any Record of a File From git

A co-worker and I needed to remove all instances of a binary blob from one of our git repos a while back. This was a lot harder than I thought it should have been, in my opinion. However, distributed version control is not really designed to easily allow folks to delete every instance of a file. But, if you ever run into a case where you do need to expunge a file in git here is how we did it. This would work to remove a file from any cloud, service, or local git repository. ...

June 25, 2016 · Chris Short