Bombed a software development interview

So I work as a DevOps/Cloud engineer and randomly applied to a development job. I didn't expect much but got a call and later an interview.

I have to admit I didn't prepare but I went with a "I got nothing to lose" attitude. Then after a short talk, I had to do some really simple programming exercise, some list sorting problem.

I'm not sure if it was a combination of nervousness, the fact that I haven't been actively programming too much lately, that I had to share my screen and camera or what, but I severly bombed the test. It was like I suddenly forgot most of the programming stuff I used to know and couldn't do that test, and that was supposed to be the first in a series of programming tests.

After a while I felt very uncomfortable and had to call it quits and explain the guy I had lost practice and couldn't keep going. I didn't want to lose anyone's time and the guy was cool about it but I felt and still feel awful. Sure, I don't NEED the job but it would've been a really good step up in my career and the fact that I couldn't pass even that simple task really hit hard.

While I do some programming in my current role, I feel like it's not enough. I do some automation, scripts, pipelines, etc.. but it's not the same as a software development job. This short and awful test opened my eyes that I really have to step up my programming.

Does anyone else have a similar story? What happened and what did you do / are doing to not go through that again?

https://redd.it/nev0nk
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Could someone explain how ansible container is supposed to work ?

I am trying to setup multiple ansible with multiple requirements for multiple network vendors to push configurations to the devices.

​

We are using Jenkins to push these said configurations, at first I was using multiple virtualenv per project, but this proved to be not the best away to go forward with, since some packages require a host installation.


So, I was thinking of having one ansible per branch/ vendor, but I'm not sure how to deploy said containers using docker-compose (the standard that we have set internally). Could someone please explain?

​

I have managed to make a compose file that relies on a DockerFile, but I can only run the container, I can't have it set to "up -d".

https://redd.it/nem524
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Using QA Automation Experience in Resume while Applying for Devops Position?

Graduated with a SE Degree. Didn't want to do dev work as my main thing (I like to code as a hobby in my free time when I feel like it instead of it being required of me.) I have a couple of personal projects on github. Bots, android apps, automation scripts, etc). I'm comfortable with most of the big languages, js, java, c/c#/c++, python, kotlin. I'm pretty comfortable with linux. I have a home server running ubuntu 24/7 where I host a bunch of different stuff.

I've been a QA Automation Engineer for about 2 years. Unfortunately a big chunk of that has been manual testing but I have done some coding. It's mostly consisted of using Postman (js) to automate API tests and using Ranorex (C#) for automating test cases. Otherwise I just write tests and click buttons which is easy enough.

I took the QA position because I needed a job ASAP, and figured I could transition to something else later if I didn't like it. No issues with QA or anything, but I want to get into something more technical and pays a bit better. The automation part of QA is fun, and I enjoy working with linux and writing scripts for automation. I figure something like devops would be suit me.

So now I'm looking for a devops position. I hear a lot of people have trouble breaking out of QA, and that some resumes get thrown out just because of the fact they have QA experience. I'm thinking I could apply to a junior devops position and work my way up from there. But I'm not sure if I should include my qa experience on my resume. Thoughts?

https://redd.it/nejzrt
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Potential New job - Questions inside

Hello Everyone,

So recently I had a colleague tell me about a job opening at a company he works for. The role is for a sole DevOps engineer position at a company full of developers. It sounds like they are 'experimenting' with DevOps, as some of their developers are doing DevOps tasks (wearing the hats), but they don't have the bandwidth to do both their development duties + DevOps stuff.

Background:

My background is more of a cloud engineer currently and while I have an interest in a lot of the DevOps principles, I'm not sure if I would be capable of stepping into role to scope out and define DevOps vision and principles (Release Pipelines, Logging, Alerting, etc.) and turn around and build those building blocks. However, they are subjects I've been wanting to learn and get deeper knowledge in and are areas that do interest me.

Anyway, just thought I'd make a quick post asking the community of their thoughts on the subject, and if this was a good idea to consider this job. I know there are a lot of variables, so feel free to message me directly if it's easier to chat about specific topics.

Thanks!

https://redd.it/nem8vi
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Interview feedback questions

Little background on myself: worked for a small /medium business for 12 years as first a Sys Admin and then Director of IT (did a lot of software development and architecting). Company was in an industry severely impacted by COVID and was fortunate enough to find a landing spot with a good role at a consulting firm. Strong background in Sys Admin work (10+ years), GCP (7 years), Ruby on Rails (8 years), Terraform (2 years).

Current role doesn't have a lot of GCP-based opportunities and I'm missing the day-to-day hands-on keyboard work I was used to. I've been looking into and pursuing some DevOps / SRE roles and got some feedback on an interview I'd be curious for thoughts on. Interviewer said I had good high level knowledge of all the concepts interviewed over (GCP, Terraform, Kubernetes) but I didn't show good knowledge of the low level pieces and was concerned how I would be able to handle the environment and duties required of the role. Would recommend me for an architect role if one were available.

Any advice on how to show more engineering knowledge vs high level topics in an hour long interview? Another general question is if I'm barking up the wrong tree and, based on my background, should be looking into more architect focused roles?

https://redd.it/nelchy
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Apache JMeter vs NeoLoad

Has anyone used NeoLoad?

I wanted to know which one would suit a small start up better, I know NeoLoad is expensive though.

Thanks

https://redd.it/nel5jz
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How do you version releases?

How do you version software? Are you using build numbers, Semantic Versioning (SemVer), Calendar Versions (CalVer), milestone versioning, or something else? What are the reasons for using each of those and which one do you use?

https://youtu.be/xvPiZyx0cDc

https://redd.it/neinbv
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Help with Helm Chart



Hello!

I'm have a problem at my current work with a Helm chart. I need to deploy this Helm chart https://artifacthub.io/packages/helm/evryfs-oss/dependency-track but I need to use a PaaS database (postgresql), nevertheless I can't change this chart to work properly with my PaaS database. Sorry to bought you guys but I'm recently started to learn about Helm and I really appreciate if any of you could help-me.

Thanks in advance!

https://redd.it/nf0i4m
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Career Decision: A Fork in the Road

Hi everyone, I've been lurking Reddit for a long time and the r/DevOps since I started working as an SRE, I've been at the company for a but over two years and everything has been going fantastic, I work on interesting projects, it's a very small crew, only three SREs, I'mve been able to become certified in both AWS and Azure through the work I do. Anyway, we've been WFH since early March 2020 and we've been EXCELLING, fast-forward to last month when the CEO announced at the Global meeting that we would NOT be a remote work force and would all have to go back to the offices. So far, 3 out of 11 have returned to pre-covid life, so he's where the problem lies, in the last 3 week ~14 people have left and the few that I've talked to said that they asked to WFH and we're denied and it's basically non-negotiable. Recently, my wife and I had our first child and it has been a blessing to be here with her through the whole pregnancy and now through the four months after, we've been talking a lot and we both agree that it's best if I WFH permanently. So my question: Would you guys bring it up to management now or wait until you find another job before bringing it up in case they get angry or basically give me an ultimatum... any advice would be great.. thanks!

https://redd.it/nexvpb
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How to Build and Package 3rd Party Software Into an Existing Project

I'm trying to figure out how to best build and distribute a 3rd-party package which we are integrating into our project. The two main things I'd like to do are:

1. I would like to build a 3rd-party software package (Suricata) from source so we can use non-default features which the Suricata team doesn't include in their distributed RPM. Does it make sense to do this in a docker container?
2. Should I include the outputs of 1 as a separate RPM or as part of our project's existing RPM? Note, I will have to build at least two separate binaries for 1: a binary with performance profiling enabled and a binary without performance profiling. The binary with profiling enabled will always have a performance hit so we would not want to use it by default.

For 1, we currently have a VM which has a ton of software on it. Jenkins and our devs use this machine to do builds... Rather than installing a bunch of new dependencies onto this monolith build machine, I was thinking of creating a docker container to use for building and then possibly generating an RPM for Suricata. Does this sound reasonable? Also, does this team's build process seem odd?

Thanks for any help.

https://redd.it/next6v
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Considering Dev-Ops or AWS. OSCP holding Brother suggests AWS to get started.

I have a brother who's doing particularly well in Dev-Ops, he's rather young, and I want a change. I am a decade older (almost 30), have a 4 year business degree, and some basic experience on a few various things--but nothing that's great.

Since he's young & a family member I don't like pestering him since it involves business.
I do not wish to look for a "leg up" with his employer but want to find a pathway that works for me and talk to him if I gain competence down the road.

He told me AWS (always found it rather interesting when I play with LightSail) doesn't pay as well but is in decent demand in the US (we live in the US) and if I can learn enough to do some basic projects I should have a chance of scoring a job--that could set me up for a position down the road.

I'm unable to study for the OSCP or burn 1000+ hours right now (as he did)--but do have 1-2 hours a day, learn quickly, and am self motivated with everything I do. I have a family to take care of and am highly motivated to take it.

If you were in my situation of limited time, carried some technical aptitude, learned at a decent pace, and wanted to get into the first step what would you consider doing?

(Thus far I've read the entire AWS whitepaper, done some basic tutorials on Amazon, and will start learning Python--to get a bearing of what's actually out there)

\---------------------------------

Currently I make a living with CNC routers fabricating complex 3d models that I cut out and market direct online in the states. I manage all of the marketing, customer service, design work, CAD/CAM, and all the stuff involving the machines....I've dabbled with LinuxCNC (CLI for setup and installs), Arduino (C++ but just basic things of using premade libraries), Wordpress (HTLM, CSS, DNS, SSL, random things involving Cloudflare, Lightsail, etc), and a lot of graphics/CAM/CAD programs over the years.

https://redd.it/neuirk
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AWS Lambda support for Node.js 10 is becoming to an end in August 2021. It’s time to switch!

It’s the end of AWS Lambda support for Node.js v10. AWS Lambda support for Node.js 10 is due to end in August 2021. It’s time to switch! In this article, we’re discussing and comparing the differences of working with Node.js 10 and Node.js 14 + AWS Lambda, the impacts, and benefits of this change:

https://dashbird.io/blog/aws-lambda-nodejs-10-vs-14/

https://redd.it/nej1jl
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Super interesting links for DevOps Interview

Heya Techies!

Would you mind listing down some perfect links which would help me in cracking the Devops interview.

Really needed....!!!!

https://redd.it/ne7dnx
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Log (Observability) Overview

Observability and logging are always complex and bespoke solutions. Over the years, I understood fragments, and recently I assembled the knowledge into a mental mindmap that I thought others would like.

The core roles of components:

Log (data) shipper \- send logs somewhere (such as router or aggregator). These are also called log forwarders.
Log (event) router \- collect logs, and send them somewhere based on rules you define. These are also called log collectors, log processors, and log forwarders.
Log aggregator \- centralized datastore + indexing; essentially where to store and retrieve logs
Visualization \- create graphical dashboards for data sources (like centralized logging)
Ingestion \- buffer logs so that it doesn't overwhelm the system (HA), these vary, some platforms integrate this, have direct support, or can be hacked into any solution.
Alerting \- an alert system based on metrics (metrics extracted from logs, such as a single event, or past a threshold)

There's a lot of overlap with log shipping, log routing, and log collecting, as tools have varying levels of this. For example, Filebeat and Promtail can fetch from files or use discovery with docker and Kubernetes, while Fluentd, Fluentbit, and Logstash have plugins to collect logs and other data from a variety of sources.

These components may have different features, common ones:

Transformation Pipeline \- filter and transform logs, e.g. apply regex to break up a log line into JSON, create metrics from logs, or transform to another text format.
Discovery \- find systems to get logs, such as Docker container labels or container names, or Kubernetes labels.

Different tools may fill one or more of these roles, and you may not use all of the components, as logging and in general observability is always a bespoke solution.

Examples:

Stacks (combination of roles): PLG (promtail-loki-grafana), TICK (Telegraf-InfluxDB-Chronograf-Kapacitor), ELK (ElasticSearch-Logstash-Kibana), EFK (ElasticSearch-Fluentd|Fluentbit-Kibana), ElasticStack (ELK + Beats)
Log (Event) Routers: Logstash, Fluentd
Log (Data) Shippers†: syslog, syslog-ng, rsyslog2, Filebeat, LogStash, Fluentbit, Fluentd, Promtail, Telegraf
Log aggregators: ElasticsSarch, Graylog, InfluxDB, Loki
Visualization: kibana, grafana, chronograf
Transformation: logstash, Fluentd, rsyslog2, syslog-ng, ElasticSearch ingestion pipeline
Discovery: Logstash, Fluentd, Fluentbit, FileBeat, Promtail, Telegraf†††
Alerting: Kapacitor, Grafana, Kibana, Prometheus AlertManager††

† Logging libraries like Log4j may have built-in capability to ship logs, such as supporting syslog protocol. Docker for example through Docker driver resource supports a variety of sources.

†† In PLG, alerts can be triggered by Grafana or Prometheus Alertmanger. Prometheus would be something akin to a metrics aggregator or centralized data source for metrics, and it scrapes logs from a variety of sources but also supports pushing metrics to it. Loki uses the same Prometheus library, but logs are pushed (shipped) to it from promtail (or another shipper like Fluentbit) and stored in an object-store. Promtail can create metrics that are based on log data that can be used to trigger alerts.

††† Telegraf can extract logs as well as metrics (so it like Prometheus in this aspect) as well as traces (so combined with InfluxDB, like Jaeger w/ ElasticSearch or Cassandra, or Tempo with an object store).

Many of these tools, such as Fluentbit, FluentD, and Logstash have plugins to gather data beyond just logs, including metrics or SNMP, and the Beats family of tools have specialized beats for different data sources, such as Filebeat for logs and MetricBeat for metrics.

https://redd.it/ne740z
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Question about tech stack/servers setup using kubernetes. Dealing with uploading images

Hey all,

Current project is broke down into 3 servers right now.

* Auth server
* Main API server
* Chat server

I'm currently setting up the uploading images for users and I'm wondering if it would be smart to separate it from the Main API server.

It's my first time handling image uploads and I'm looking at using [multer](https://github.com/expressjs/multer#readme).

I'm wondering if anyone who has experience with uploading files could point me in the right direction with the tech stack they used and how their servers were setup.

Appreciate any insight,

Cheers

https://redd.it/ne44ds
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Looking for advice - I have to automate all the company applications and don't know where to start

Hello, let me tell you the whole story:

I work in a small startup, we have around 3 to 4 SaaS products all hosted at AWS.

I'm currently acting as a Jr Devops (moved from embedded dev) in a 5 dev team. The Company used to give all the devops responsibility to one senior dev in our company but he just takes too long (he hates it) and well, now it's my responsibility to make it all as quick and seamless as possible but the thing is, I don't know where to start.

I've already written and deployed the CI/CD in bitbucket pipelines, but I still have to manually get into every instance and set every new env.

Every time we need to scale up or down, I have to reinstall everything through the terminal command by command.

From my point of view I have to:

1) Change all the different deploys from manual installation to containers. (That way I don't have to install everything by hand, nor the devs)

2) Use Terraform (Ansible?) to start using infrastructure as code instead of logging every time to the AWS console and manually set up instances, buckets, R53 and IAMs

3) Kubernetes (Docker Swarm?) To control and orchestrate said containers. (Is it really necessary?)

4) Monitor everything with Prometheus and forget about having to ssh to each instance so see if the API collapsed

5) Plug and pray

I want to know if I'm headed in the right direction given this is my first devops experience.

Thanks!

https://redd.it/ne3vrk
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Help identifying tool icons - in comments

I just joined a new devops team and am trying to get up to speed on their tools. Could anyone identify the tools by icon below (I tried reverse google image search - no luck)

https://redd.it/nfduev
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Deploying a transformer-based text classification NLP model with FastAPI

Hello all,

I recently wrote an article about deploying spaCy NLP models with FastAPI for entity extraction. As many people told me it was helpful, I did a new article about deploying transformer-based NLP models with FastAPI for text classification (using Facebook's Bart Large MNLI model).

FastAPI is a great is great framework for API development in Python in my opinion. It helped me save a lot of troubles when developing the NLPCloud.io API.

Here's the article:

https://nlpcloud.io/nlp-machine-learning-classification-api-production-fastapi-transformers-nlpcloud.html

I'd love to have your feedback on this! Have you ever deployed transformer-based models to production? If so, which tools did you use?

Thanks!

https://redd.it/nfao41
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What are your killer tips for kubernetes cost optimization?

Title says it all

https://redd.it/nfdtct
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Major Pagerduty Downtime

Pagerduty experiencing a major downtime

https://status.pagerduty.com/incidents/wt6p4xl7htft

https://redd.it/nfk60i
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What’s the Difference Between Django and Flask

Flask and Django are mature, extensible web frameworks that fundamentally provide similar functionality in handling requests and maintaining documents but differ in scope.

Let's check out the difference between Flask vs Django performance.

Most of the differences between the two frameworks stem from different approaches, the rest from excellent basic design decisions. Here are a few key differences that might influence your decision:

Request object – Flask uses local streams, and Django passes the request where it needs to be.

Forms – Django is available with built-in forms that integrate with the ORM and site admin area. Flask doesn’t support forms by default, but you can use WTForms to fill that gap.

Databases – Django is available with a built-in ORM and migration system that can manage databases. Flask doesn’t do that, but tools like SQLAlchemy provide similar functionality (or even more).

Authentication and User Privileges – Django provides an authentication application that provides a default implementation for user control and privileges. Flask provides secure cookies as a tool for your own implementation.

Admin Panel – Django includes a fully integrated admin interface for managing application data. Flask doesn’t have these features, but Flask-Admin is a very popular extension that can be used to create a similar admin tool.

https://redd.it/nf9ngo
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