In this episode, we sit down for a deep-dive conversation with Mischa van den Burg, a former nurse who made the leap into the world of DevOps. We explore the practical realities, technical challenges, and hard-won wisdom gained from building and managing modern infrastructure. This isn't your typical high-level overview; we get into the weeds on everything from homelab setups to the nuances of GitOps tooling.

We start by exploring the journey from nursing to DevOps - the why behind the career change (00:54) - focusing on the transferable skills and the mindset required to succeed in a field defined by continuous learning and complex problem-solving.

What are the most engaging aspects of DevOps (04:49)? We discuss the satisfaction of automating complex workflows and building resilient systems. Conversely, we also tackle the hardest parts of the job (05:48), moving beyond the cliché "it's the people" to discuss the genuine technical and architectural hurdles faced in production environments.

We move past the buzzword and into the practical application of "breaking down silos" (07:36). The conversation details concrete strategies for fostering collaboration between development and operations, emphasising shared ownership, transparent communication, and the cultural shift required to make it work.

We discuss critical lessons learned from the field (13:07), including the importance of simplicity, the dangers of over-engineering, and the necessity of building systems that are as easy to decommission as they are to deploy.

The heart of the conversation tackles an important perspective: Why choose Kubernetes for a homelab? (23:06) We break down the decision-making process, comparing it to alternatives like Nomad and Docker Swarm. The discussion covers the benefits of using a consistent, API-driven environment for both personal projects and professional development. We also touch on the hardest Talos OS issue encountered (36:17), providing a specific, real-world example of troubleshooting in an immutable infrastructure environment. Two of Everything & No in-place upgrades are important pillars of this mindset, and we cover them both (41:14). We then pivot to a practical comparison of GitOps tools, detailing the migration from ArgoCD to Flux (46:50) and the specific technical reasons that motivated the change.

We conclude (50:40) by reflecting on the core principles of DevOps and platform engineering, emphasising the human element and the ultimate goal of delivering value, not just managing technology.

🍿 This entire conversation, as well as the screen sharing part, is available to Make it Work members as full videos served from the CDN, and also a Jellyfin media server:

• DevOps Sushi 1 - conversational part
• DevOps Sushi 2 - screen sharing part

Scroll to the bottom of those pages 👆 for CDN & media server info

LINKS

• 🍣 Jiro Dreams of Sushi
• ✍️ I'm In Love with my Work: Lessons from a Japanese Sushi Master
• 🎬 Why I Use Kubernetes For My Homelab
• 🐙 Mischa's homelab GitHub repository
• 🎁 Mischa's Free DevOps Community
• 🎓 KubeCraft DevOps School

EPISODE CHAPTERS

• (00:00) - Intro

Hugo Santos, founder & CEO of Namespace Labs joins us today to share his passion for fast infrastructure. From sharing childhood stories & dial-up modem phone line wiring experiences, we get to speed testing Hugo's current home internet connection: 25 gigabit FTTP.

We shift focus to Namespace, and talk about how it evolved from software-defined storage to building an application platform that starts Kubernetes clusters in seconds. The underlying infrastructure is fast, custom built and is able to:

• Spin up thousands of isolated, virtual machine-based Kubernetes clusters
• Run millions of jobs concurrently
• Control everything from CPU/RAM allocation to networking setup
• Deliver exceptionally low latency at high concurrency

A significant portion of the conversation centres on a major service degradation Namespace experienced in October 2024. Hugo shares the full story, including:

1. How a hardware delivery delay combined with network issues from a third-party provider created problems
2. The difficult decision to rebuild the network setup rather than depend on unreliable components
3. The emotional toll of not meeting self-imposed high standards despite working around the clock
4. The surprising customer loyalty, with no customers leaving despite an impact on their build system

Hugo emphasizes taking full responsibility for this incident: "That's on us. We decide which companies we work with..."

The episode concludes with Hugo sharing his philosophy on excellence: "I find that it's usually some kind of unrelenting curiosity that really propels people beyond just being good to being excellent... When we approach how we build our products, it's with that same level of unrelenting curiosity and willingness to break through and change things."

🍿 This entire conversation, including all three YouTube videos, is available for members only as a 1h+ long movie at makeitwork.tv/fast-infrastructure

LINKS

• Post mortem: Oct 22, 2024 outage
• 🐙 namespacelabs/foundation
• Google's Boq (mention)
• 🎬 Open-source application platform inspired by Google's Boq
• 🎬 Why is this 25 gigabit home internet slow?
• 🎬 Remote Docker build faster than local?

EPISODE CHAPTERS

• (00:33) - Weekend projects

Today we talk with Matvey Kukuy and Tal Borenstein, co-founders of Keep, a startup focused on helping companies manage and make sense of their alert systems. The discussion comes three years after Matvey's previous appearance - https://shipit.show/36 - where he talked about Grafana Labs' acquisition of his previous startup Amixr (now Grafana OnCall).

Keep tackles a significant challenge in modern tech infrastructure: managing the overwhelming volume of alerts that companies receive from their various monitoring systems. Some enterprises deal with up to 70,000 alerts daily, making it crucial to identify which ones represent actual incidents requiring attention.

We explore real-world examples of major incidents, including the significant CrowdStrike outage in July 2024 that caused widespread system crashes and resulted in an estimated $10 billion in worldwide damages. This incident highlighted how critical it is to quickly identify and respond to serious issues among numerous alerts. Matvey tells us about his most black swan experience.

The episode concludes with a hint that some of Keep's AI features may eventually be released as open source once they're sufficiently polished.

LINKS

• 🎧 Keep on-call simple
• CrowdStrike - Wikipedia
• 🎬 The Black Swan Theory
• Keep Playground
• Show HN: Keep - GitHub Actions for your monitoring tools

EPISODE CHAPTERS

• (00:00) - What is new after three years?

This is a follow-up to Let's build a CDN - Part 1

A new friend joins us. We talk about the high-level, including why Varnish and why we are doing this in the first place. We go through the plan for this session, and then just make it happen. The video in the show notes captures most of this pairing session.

If you enjoyed this podcast and the YouTube video, you can now watch the full movie in 4k on 📺 makeitwork.tv. Offline download is available.

LINKS

• Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) Field Name Registry
• RFC 9211 The Cache-Status HTTP Response Header Field
• libvmod-dynamic

EPISODE CHAPTERS

• (00:00) - Who is James

This is the audio version of 🎬 Ninjastructure - Move fast & break nothing

Matias Pan, a professional maté drinker & Senior Software Engineer at Dagger, is showing us an approach to Infrastructure as Code built with Pulumi.

We look at Go code, discuss procedural (imperative) vs. declarative, spend some time on state management & introduce the concept of Ninjas in the context of infrastructure: move fast & break nothing.

In the second half, Matias uses diagrams to talk through different ideas of rolling this out into production. Which of the two approaches would you choose?

LINKS

• Testing Pulumi programs

EPISODE CHAPTERS

• (00:00) - Why Pulumi instead of Terraform?

We have 3 conversations from TalosCon 2024:

1. Vincent Behar & Louis Fradin from Ubisoft tell us how how they are building the next generation of game servers on Kubernetes. Recorded in a coffee shop.

2. We catch up with David Flanagan on the AI stack that he had success with in the context of rawkode.academy. David also tells us the full story behind his office burning down earlier this year. Recorded in the hallway track.

3. As for the last conversation, Gerhard finally gets together with Justin Garrison in person. They talked about TalosCon, some of the reasons behind users migrating off Cloud, and why Kubernetes & Talos hold a special place in their minds. Recorded in the workshop cinema room.

LINKS

• 🎬 25,000 servers at Ubisoft - Vincent Behar & Louis Fradin - TalosCon 2024
• Agones is a library for hosting, running and scaling dedicated game servers on Kubernetes
• 🎬 Managing Talos with CUElang - David Flanagan - TalosCon 2024
• Xiu is a simple, high performance and secure live media server written in pure Rust
• 🎬 From Homelab to Production - Gerhard Lazu - TalosCon 2024

EPISODE CHAPTERS

• (00:00) - Intro

How does Michal Kuratczyk, Staff Software Engineer at RabbitMQ, access Kubernetes workloads securely, from anywhere? Regardless whether it's a Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) cluster or Kubernetes in Docker (KiND), Tailscale is a simple solution for this particular use case. This also makes it easy to share private services with all devices on a tailnet, including with friends that want to access them on a smartphone.

Watch the demo 🎬 Access your Kubernetes pods anywhere

If you want to watch the full, 32 minutes-long video, go to 🎁 https://makeitwork.gerhard.io

LINKS

• 🎬 Access your Kubernetes pods anywhere
• Tailscale Kubernetes Operator
• RabbitMQ Cluster Kubernetes Operator
• 🎬 TGIR S01E07: How to monitor RabbitMQ?
• 🗂️ Observe and Understand RabbitMQ - RabbitMQ Summit 2019
• 🎬 Observe and understand RabbitMQ - RabbitMQ Summit 2019

EPISODE CHAPTERS

• (00:00) - INTRO

What does it look like to build a modern CI/CD pipeline from scratch in 2024? While many of you would pick GitHub Actions and be done with it, how do you run it locally? And what do you need to do to get caching to work?

Tom Chauveau joins us to help Alex Sims build a modern CI/CD pipeline from scratch. We start with a Remix app, write the CI/CD pipeline in TypeScript and get it working locally. While we don't finish, this is a great start (according to Alex).

This was recorded in January 2024, just as Dagger was preparing to launch Functions in the v0.10 release. While many things have improved in Dagger since then, the excitement & the joy of approaching CI/CD with this mindset have remained the same.

LINKS

• 🎬 Modern CI/CD from Scratch (using Dagger TypeScript Modules)
• 🎉 Introducing Dagger Functions (a.k.a. Dagger Modules)
• 🌌 Daggerverse

EPISODE CHAPTERS

• (00:47) - Intro

This started as a conversation between James A Rosen & Gerhard in August 2023. Several months later, it evolved into a few epic pairing sessions captured in these GitHub threads:

1. thechangelog#480 (reply in thread)
2. thechangelog#486

The last pairing session eventually lead to 🎧 Kaizen! Should we build a CDN? This is the follow-up to that. How far did we get in 1 hour?

LINKS

• The 5-hour CDN
• varnish - Docker Official Image
• Introduction to Varnish
• Magento2 Varnish config
• Magento Internals: Cache Purging and Cache Tags
• Varnish modules

EPISODE CHAPTERS

• (00:00) - Intro

For our 4th episode, we have four conversations from KubeCon EU 2024.

We talk to Jesse Suen about Argo CD & Kargo, Solomon Hykes shares the next evolution of Dagger, and Justin Cormack dives into Docker & AI. We also catch up with Frederic Branczyk & Thor Hansen on the latest Parca & Polar Signals Cloud updates since our last conversation.

Each conversation has a video version too:

1. Jesse Suen: 🎬 GitOps & ClickOps beyond Kubernetes
2. Solomon Hykes: 🎬 Pipelines as Functions
3. Justin Cormack: 🎬 Works on my Computer
4. Frederic Branczyk & Thor Hansen: 🎬 always BPF

LINKS

1. Jesse Suen

- What's New in Kargo v0.5.0

- 🎬 Navigating Multi-stage Deployment Pipelines via the GitOps Approach 

2. Solomon Hykes

- Introducing Dagger Functions

- A Keynote heard around the world - KubeCon EU 2024 Recap

- 🎬 Local & open-source AI Developer Meetup

3. Justin Cormack

- AI Trends Report 2024: AI’s Growing Role in Software Development

- Building a Video Analysis and Transcription Chatbot with the GenAI Stack

4. Frederic Branczyk & Thor Hansen

- Correlating Tracing with Profiling using eBPF

LET'S MAKE IT BETTER

If you enjoyed this episode, I will appreciate your feedback on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

If there is something that would have made it better for you, let me know: [email protected]

• (00:00) - Intro