How is it May already!!!?
Did anyone get a chance to spin up a Minikube cluster and try out our lab from our KubeCon Session mentioned in last week's post?
https://community.veeam.com/topic/show?tid=4698&fid=90
VeeamON
VeeamON is fast approaching and we have two weeks till we paint Miami Veeam green. Who is going? We have a few things Kubernetes focused on happening and I will share more about this probably next week.
We also have a product strategy “Ask Me Anything” session planned for the 11th of May so be sure to jump on that where we will answer some of those questions from the field.
I have so much to do though, don’t tell Josh and Rick though… Everything will be fine and I will have my slides with me on the plane to Miami!
WTF is SRE?
This week I am heading down to London for the first in-person “WTF is SRE?” event. I am not going to break down all the abbreviations here but I will take a little bit of time to talk about SRE or Site Reliability Engineering.
Over the years we have seen many a new title associated with maybe what used to be solely called a Systems Administrator.
I thought it was quite clear from the site and the people that should attend:
“People with titles like Cloud Director, IT Director, Engineering Manager, Site Reliability Engineer, Ops Engineer, SysAdmin, Head of Ops, Head of Platform, Tech Team Lead, Software Engineer, DevOps Engineer, Tech Recruiter...
And Chief (Innovation/Tech/Finance/Executive) Officers interested in uptime, site reliability and more frequent deployments.”
Over the last few years, I have found myself speaking to a lot of SREs out in the field and their responsibility when it comes to Data is growing hence me speaking to them. I believe the term SRE came from Google so let's see what their definition is:
“SRE is what you get when you treat operations as if it’s a software problem. Our mission is to protect, provide for, and progress the software and systems behind all of Google’s public services — Google Search, Ads, Gmail, Android, YouTube, and App Engine, to name just a few — with an ever-watchful eye on their availability, latency, performance, and capacity.”
In breaking this down I believe What an SRE does is, a combination of keeping important, revenue-critical systems up and running despite fire-flood-blood situations, bandwidth outages, and configuration errors.
I guess with the above descriptions a lot of us are SREs in what we do or what we have done in roles. “Keeping revenue-critical systems up and running” Ok mostly this is about architecting the system to have resilience but this also includes the data. If that system happens to be a database and a user makes a simple mistake (Have you seen how easy it is to drop a table in a database?) then there is very little high availability and resilience that will get that table back, you need a level of restore, also we talk a lot about disaster recovery to the point of fire-flood-blood but also that growing trend around ransomware attacks.
There are some great speakers and sessions so my intention is to go and watch some sessions and see how much data comes up when it comes to that reliability story. I think the following image tells me what I am going to discover though…
There was one session on Friday that does have data at least in the title, so maybe I am not being fair mentioning the above and will be sure to report back on my findings. This session interests me as SREs are always as many of us are going to be focused on observability, monitoring, logs, metrics and reports to learn about their applications and environments and when things go wrong. How important is that Observability data? Should we be protecting it, I think I know the answer to that.
KubeHuddle
Following on from the event above in London next week, I have a week at home where I will be frantically finalising my VeeamON presentations and demos before I head off to Toronto for KubeHuddle. KubeHuddle started in Edinburgh around September 2022, I have to say that the event was probably the best of the smaller community events that I attended. Because of that, I wanted to make sure I submitted a talk but also that I supported this event for 2023. I am also told there will be another Europe-based KubeHuddle later in the year.
You can find more information here - https://kubehuddle.com/2023/toronto/
I am 98% finished with my slides for this event, I just need to add two demos and we are ready to go. To give you a sneak peek this is the opening slide.
Some of you may remember back to 2018 when I did a similarly themed session around Veeam Backup & Replication and the unsung features we have there. This session will walk through the storage fundamentals of Kubernetes, what options we have natively with Kubernetes to protect data that lands on that storage and then what open-source tools do we have available to help with the burden of maintaining scripts. Just because you can doesn't mean you have to, want to or need to.
I think that wraps things up for this post, if you are in the UK and anywhere else that holds a bank holiday, enjoy the day off. For anyone going to be in London this week, let me know and we can meet up.
Have a great weekend everybody!
