Adventures in DevOps

In this episode of the Adventures in DevOps podcast, the panelists talk about getting started with DevOps and learning its principles and technologies. Lee and Scott mention that they share a similar journey, initially starting as system administrators and working their way into DevOps. Nell says that she was a Ruby and .NET developer before learning cloud technologies such as Heroku, Chef, and Docker.

To someone with a programming background wanting to get into DevOps, Lee highly recommends three books - The Practice of System and Network Administration, The Practice of Cloud System Administration: DevOps and SRE Practices for Web Services - Volume 2, and Time Management for System Administrators. He mentions that they are technology-agnostic and help in understanding what is really going on in the system. Scott stresses on the importance of understanding basic networking, linux systems and commands, bash scripting and knowing the core fundamentals and interactions of the underlying systems. He suggests going for online resources, tutorials and boot camps which are plenty nowadays and easily accessible as well.

Nell advises listeners to pick a cloud provider such as Digital Ocean and learn the basics by working with it, which can later be applied to any other cloud provider. She also recommends learning programming languages to get a good software development foundation. The panelists talk about working on specific projects and getting hands dirty rather than traditional learning, to enhance their DevOps skills.

Nell explains how they implement the 'learning by doing' concept at work. She mentions that understanding how virtual machines and physical servers work is crucial before moving on to learning about containers. Lee suggests Vagrant - a tool for building and managing virtual machine environments, as a good resource for the same. They caution that while it is important to learn things during our time off, self-care and setting healthy boundaries is paramount. It is ok to take longer to learn something given that DevOps as a whole can be extremely complex, and working in a non-pressure environment can be very beneficial. They recommend Ops School for beginners which is a comprehensive program aimed at people who want to get into operations engineering.

They then share their insights on monitoring and how to get started with it. Lee recommends the book Practical Monitoring, and Sensu - a monitoring event pipeline, as good starting points.

DevOps can be considered as a technical as well as a cultural movement. To that effect, they discuss where should people start learning the associated cultural elements. Nell recommends reading the books - Effective DevOps, and The Phoenix Project and Crucial Conversations. Lee advocates going old school with the writings of Richard Stallman, and books of the 80s and 90s such as The Art of C Programming. They mention that conversational skills and dealing with people are critical skills in today's work environments. Scott recommends Google's Site Reliability Engineering books which have a lot of great stuff to build a solid foundation and are also free to read online.

Finally, they talk about how to keep learning and expanding knowledge. Some effective suggestions discussed include extensive practicing, working professionally, solving business problems, building expertise in programming, and attending DevOps Days events and Linux Users groups. They end the episode with picks.

Nell Shamrell-Harrington

Lee Whalen

Scott Nixon

iPhreaks - Devchat.tv

The Dev Rev - Devchat.tv

React Round Up - Devchat.tv

CacheFly

A Cloud Guru

Digital Ocean

Linux Academy

The League of Professional System Administrators

Vagrant

Ops School Curriculum

Practical Monitoring

Sensu

Effective DevOps: Building a Culture of Collaboration, Affinity, and Tooling at Scale

The Phoenix Project

The Art of C Programming

Crucial Conversations

Site Reliability Engineering - Google

DevOps Days

Nell Shamrell-Harrington:

Fresh Tarragon

Lee Whalen:

The Practice of System and Network Administration

The Practice of Cloud System Administration: DevOps and SRE Practices for Web Services, Volume 2

Time Management for System Administrators

Scott Nixon:

How to Stay Motivated: Developing the Qualities of Success

Coming to you live this time from the studio is a brand new episode of the Adventures in DevOps podcast! Regular panelists Nell Shamrell-Harrington, Principal Engineer at Chef Software, and Scott Nixon, Principal Consultant at Cloud Mechanics, discuss one of the most significant aspects of any given software environment - disaster recovery, what is it and what to do when the unimaginable happens.

They start the show by explaining that disaster recovery can be considered as a subset of business continuity planning. They state that two main things need to be defined while planning for disaster recovery in any organization. First one is the recovery time objective (RTO), which is the maximum acceptable length of time that an application can be offline, and this information is generally included in a Service Level Agreement. The second one is Recovery Point Objective (RPO), which is the maximum acceptable length of time during which data might be lost from the application due to a major incident. Nell gives examples of each and Scott mentions that we need to understand the time taken for restore as well, and it is very important to restore data regularly.

Once the RTO and RPO have been established, the software needs to be prepared for disaster recovery, including verifying that the software can be installed correctly, as replication can be very hard, especially when it has been installed long ago. They transition to the topic of security concerns, for example, how to deal with cases when there are multiple security groups, ACLs, etc, and the cloud service in an entire region goes down.

They advise listeners to make sure that the disaster recovery environment should match the compliance requirements, make cloud storage a part of daily backup routines, and to use configuration management tools most suitable to the work environment so as to make the process seamless. They talk about cloud-agnostic tools that help in cross-cloud replication and syncing data across. They also raise certain points to consider for successful recovery, including estimating the time and bandwidth required to transfer large amounts of data, balancing image configuration and deployment speed along with the time needed to handle dependencies, image consistency across hybrid environments, implementing tiered storage, and share relevant examples.

Another pattern they discuss is the idea of maintaining the same IP address for an application to make disaster recovery easier, which can be possible if it's in the same region, using elastic IP or load balancing, but can be challenging with multiple cloud providers across different regions. However the solution would be quite challenging as well as expensive, so there is always a tradeoff involved.

They then move on to some common mistakes that people make in disaster recovery. Nell says that while creating a good plan it is really crucial to bring in people from across various businesses, while Scott talks about regularly documenting everything including bits and pieces like manual configurations and such. They discuss that security consistency is often overlooked, and describe some recovery services offered by cloud providers such as Amazon, Azure and some multi-cloud services like Zerto and Arcserve. They end the episode with picks.

Nell Shamrell-Harrington:

Wild mushrooms

Scott Nixon:

Nine Lies About Work : A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World

CacheFly

In this episode of the Adventures in DevOps podcast, panelists Nell Shamrell-Harrington and Scott Nixon talk about monitoring in the software world. They start the discussion by talking about the difference between monitoring and alerting. They discuss how logging comes into picture in monitoring, two main types of logs - structured and unstructured, log management in the DevOps environment, information storage, parsing logs and log aggregation. They list two major kinds of monitoring software - pull and push. Nell explains what they mean and how they work, and Scott gives examples of each including syslog, healthcheck, etc.

They then talk about what it means by a "working" system, and consequently, when can something be considered to be non-functional. This leads to answering the important question of what exactly should be monitored. They explain to what extent should one go while monitoring and how to determine the significance level of the events in general. They discuss some concepts from Mike Julian's book "Practical Monitoring" including anti-patterns such as tool obsession, what not do do in monitoring and the fact that businesses need to customize their systems based on what works for them. They talk about the tool Nagios, benefits in using default monitoring tools provided by native cloud systems, using monitoring as a crutch, and manual configuration. They then discuss some good practices, namely composable monitoring, performance monitoring from the users' perspective, the mantra - 'buy not build', and continual improvements. They briefly touch on the topic of security in monitoring, and wrap up the episode with picks.

Nell Shamrell-Harrington:

Scott Nixon:

CacheFly

Joined by special guest: Bob Quillin

This episode of the Adventures in DevOps podcast is joined by Bob Quillin, Vice President - Oracle Cloud Developer Relations, based in Austin, Texas. He manages a team of developer advocates working on cloud native solutions. He explains what developer advocacy means in terms of the work they do at Oracle and elaborates on the term 'second generation cloud'. He then talks about how feature compatibility works with different types of cloud platforms, moving legacy applications to cloud and the best practices involved in cloud operations in general.

With respect to the Oracle cloud, he talks about how isolation is achieved when dealing with different customer requirements, hybrid models and their inter-workings, machine learning and artificial intelligence applications on top of the cloud, GPUs, Kubernetes and managed services. He presents his thoughts on what could be the next big thing in cloud technology given that newer concepts are being introduced day by day, and shares anecdotes where clients such as CERN have migrated to Oracle's cloud infrastructure and even those who have transitioned from a different cloud provider to theirs. In the end, he mentions some of the most heavily used cloud features and applications, and they move on to picks.

Nell Shamrell-Harrington:

Lee Whalen:

Charles Max Wood:

Bob Quillin:

Special Guest: Bob Quillin.

This episode of the Adventures in DevOps podcast is all about Chef. Nell Shamrell-Harrington - Principal Engineer at Chef Software is interviewed by panelist Lee Whalen starting with what Chef is and what it is used for. Nell describes how Chef works with containers, Chef Habitat and how it fits into the overall DevOps culture. Lee asks if it can be used to manage systems with push-pull based configuration management as well. Nell shares how Chef can be advantageous for the higher management and the business as a whole by being automated and high-speed. She compares different configuration management tools and lists certain compromises when using Chef over the others. She explains why they had to apply Apache 2.0 license to the software, but explains that it does not include the code which is totally open source, only the executable build. She mentions some popular Chef code bases that have numerous good contributions from the community. She says that Chef has about 1000 open source projects currently, and appeals to listeners to take a look at the GitHub book that they've written containing information about all of those.

Nell Shamrell-Harrington:

Lee Whalen:

• Nell Shamrell-Harrington
• Lee Whalen
• Scott Nixon

• Quiver
• Captain Marvel
• The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs
• AWS Simplify