Kubernetes

There are a lot of ways to get started with Kubernetes. But, I’ve long said there are two paths to getting started with Kubernetes: maintaining Kubernetes or consuming Kubernetes. They’re distinctly different but, you have to understand consuming Kubernetes before maintaining Kubernetes, in my opinion. Either way, as surprising as it may sound, I feel like these illustrated children’s guides are a good step towards understanding Kubernetes. From the original The Illustrated Children’s Guide to Kubernetes blog post: ...

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. ...

In November, I went down to Raleigh to meet my team for planning meetings and team building. For a few of my teammates, this is our first face to face interaction with each other ever. My boss wisely gave us a relatively simple assignment. Create a slide sharing what we’ve done this year and want to do next year (which I’ll share to an extent in a later post). Create another slide listing three things that make us who we are (born in a unique place, grew up on a farm, etc.) and three things we’re professionally known for. The assignment seemed simple enough, but it turned out to be way better than I thought it would be. It fostered a shared knowledge amongst the group about each other that I think others could benefit from using potentially. ...

Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat, my views and opinions are solely mine though. I had the pleasure of speaking at and attending DevOpsDays Raleigh 2019. First off, this event routinely out punches its weight class as far as quality. Don’t get me wrong the McKimmon Center on NC State’s campus has gotten very dated but, this five-year-old event keeps getting better. Note: If you are not familiar with DevOpsDays, please consider attending one near you in the next year. They are affordable and encourage networking better than most events I’ve been to. I spoke at my first DevOpsDays in Detroit in 2016. We lived in Raleigh, and I wanted to work for Red Hat. Now we live in Detroit near my wife’s family, and I work for Red Hat. Who says DevOps doesn’t make dreams come true? ...

Background: I started using Ansible in 2014 at a data center company. I implemented Ansible to deploy our customer portal, which contained hundreds of war files, load balancer changes, database schema changes, etc. I’ve used Ansible at every position since. I joined Red Hat as part of the Ansible team in June 2018. I moved over to the OpenShift team in June 2019. I’m a long time Ansible user, advocate, and fan. I work for Red Hat, these views and opinions are solely though. ...