I committed to the team that I would be around here some more, Let’s see how long before I get on a plane again I can keep these weekly brain blurts up.
Following on from last week's post -
I wanted to make this a weekly thing and just use this to document interesting things I am finding during the week and what I am doing.
#90DaysOfDevOps
Firstly, I wanted to highlight that this week we will complete the 90DaysOfDevOps challenge for 2023, the big part of this year’s version was that it wasn’t me running through each topic but it was friends from the community who are subject matter experts in the areas they cover.
Those topics and authors can be seen in the table below
| Topic | Author | Date | Twitter Handle |
|---|---|---|---|
| DevSecOps | Michael Cade | 1st Jan - 6th Jan | @MichaelCade1 |
| Secure Coding | Prateek Jain | 7th Jan - 13th Jan | @PrateekJainDev |
| Continuous Build, Integration, Testing | Anton Sankov and Svetlomir Balevski | 14th Jan - 20th Jan | @a_sankov |
| Continuous Delivery & Deployment | Anton Sankov | 21st Jan - 27th Jan | @a_sankov |
| Runtime Defence & Monitoring | Ben Hirschberg | 28th Jan - 3rd Feb | @slashben81 |
| Secrets Management | Bryan Krausen | 4th Feb - 10th Feb | @btkrausen |
| Python | Rishab Kumar | 11th Feb - 17th Feb | @rishabk7 |
| AWS | Chris Williams | 18th Feb - 24th Feb | @mistwire |
| OpenShift | Dean Lewis | 25th Feb - 3rd Mar | @saintdle |
| Databases | Taylor Riggan & Andrew Pruski | 4th Mar - 10th Mar | @triggan & @dbafromthecold |
| Serverless | Kristi Perreault | 11th Mar - 17th Mar | @kperreault95 |
| Service Mesh | Marino Wijay | 18th Mar - 24th Mar | @virtualized6ix |
| Engineering for Day 2 Ops | Alistair Hey | 25th Mar - 31st Mar | @alistair_hey |
If you have not checked the overall project out yet then apparently it is quite good and is still getting quite a few stars on a daily basis.
https://github.com/MichaelCade/90DaysOfDevOps
DevOps Continued..
I want to continue the DevOps theme here with some of the things I saw last week and maybe that I have been thinking about. For me, speaking to customers and prospects I am seeing the natural evolution of what we may have been called Systems Administrators having to understand more about automation and DevOps principles. This is not a new concept by any stretch but when you start to see our own Systems Engineers asking you questions about Terraform it validates that there is a shift happening.
How many of you have found a use case for Infrastructure as code or application configuration management with tools like Terraform or Ansible?
Microsoft defines DevOps with the following:
"DevOps combines development (Dev) and operations (Ops) to unite people, process, and technology in application planning, development, delivery, and operations. DevOps enables coordination and collaboration between formerly siloed roles like development, IT operations, quality engineering, and security."
DevOps does not need to mean you are developing applications, many of us are buying off-the-shelf software and running that within Virtual Machines or even SaaS-based applications. All fine and not going away. There is still a use case for DevOps tooling when it comes to all off-the-shelf software, Let’s take Veeam products, all of which have a use case for automation, be it installation across multiple sites in a consistent repeatable way or creating policies or backup jobs to automate the capture of your application data.
My ask to the community is to consider a tool this week or this month and just have a play with it, run through some of the scenarios in #90DaysOfDevOps to get some hands-on with a tool you would not normally use, I would choose to Terraform to start things off.
I am going to explore the evolution of the Systems Administrator to be more DevOpsy in a later week and in more detail..
Kasten K10 updates
I am sure Geoff already beat me to it but on Friday K10 5.5.7 was released. Another 2-week sprint was completed and a new update was released.
https://docs.kasten.io/latest/releasenotes.html#relnotes-5-5-7
Every two weeks K10 releases a new update, these updates will consist of bug fixes, security patches and known issues that are to be resolved. Most of the time as well though you will see some new features, these new features are what makes up the announcement for the big .0 & .5 releases you see around the KubeCon timeframe.
In this release the one new feature that is an important one is
New custom resource can be used to automate blueprints assignment to applications by K10 without having to manually annotate workloads.
For those familiar with blueprints within K10 you would have to create your blueprint, install that into your K10 deployment and then for each data service you would like to use that blueprint against you would need to annotate that blueprint to the deployment or statefulset. This new feature actually removes that requirement and should make things more automated.
An example, if you have a postgreSQL blueprint this feature would attach this blueprint to any namespace that has postgres deployed meaning that if a policy is created it would be protected in a consistent manner with this blueprint.
YouTube video - Cloud Updates
I know this stretches this topic within Kubernetes Korner but I actually believe that many environments are not going to be just using Kubernetes and that is it, we are seeing Kubernetes alongside virtualisation and physical systems and we see Cloud and other platforms alongside so think it is still relevant to share.
I created a short Veeam Backup & Replication v11 to v12 upgrade video, not for the virtualisation and physical data centre upgrade though, this was for anyone running a cloud-based Veeam Backup & Replication server (mine is running as an EC2 instance in AWS) I then have Veeam Backup for Cloud (AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud) appliances protecting services in those clouds that are all added to this VBR server to give me a central way to manage everything in one place.
This week for me
Firstly it is about that webinar that I mentioned last week and at the top of this post, would be great to see you there, asking questions (nice and easy ones please)
We are then only 20 days away from KubeCon EU which is to be held in Amsterdam week commencing the 17th of April. if you are attending then please comment, let me know and we will make plans whilst out there. I will get a whole post on this in the coming weeks.
A little further out but fast approaching is VeeamON! I have an action-packed VeeamON this year, We have Kubernetes & Kasten learning happening on Day 0 (more on this to follow) We have some breakout sessions to continue that learning journey into the land of Kubernetes and we will no doubt have some Kasten K10 featuring on mainstage (Just need to convince the boss)
Lots going on, as usual, Let me know if these are useful. I think we got some good comments last week from everyone, let me know if you have any questions and if you would like me to cover anything in particular.
Have a good week!
