Leveraging operator pattern and VolumeSnapshots to backup databases in Kubernetes @BlaBlaCar

BlaBlaCar completed its migration to GCP and Kubernetes recently and decided to go multi-cloud in the near future. When moving to the cloud, we started to use disk snapshots to backup our MariaDB and Cassandra clusters running on Kubernetes.

As we are going multi-cloud we needed a cloud-agnostic solution, flexibility in our backup policies (frequency/retention) and trust in our backup process so we ended up building an operator to do the job. We wrote a Medium post explaining why and how we built the operator to manage our disk snapshots using the new VolumeSnapshot resource and how we continuously test these snapshots.

We think it's a good example to show when an operator can do a better job than core Kubernetes resources and we hope you'll find it interesting. Feel free to ask any question.

https://medium.com/blablacar/leveraging-operator-pattern-and-volumesnapshots-to-backup-databases-in-kubernetes-3a28aa425100

https://redd.it/opzlem
@r_devops

Women in DevOps

I'm interested in making the most inclusive team possible, and, for better or worse, I've been moved out of the DevOps Engineering position I was in, to a DevOps manager

In my current role, I think I've screened and interviewed roughly 70-80 candidates, and hired a handful out of those

That being said, only 3 of those candidates were women, all exceptionally capable, but none returned the skills test we sent out, and all of them accepted positions with other companies

My company is an exceptionally successful startup, with a focus on diversity and inclusion, but we have been, thus far, unsuccessful in diversifying the genders within the membership of the DevOps team

I'm curious to hear the experience of others when it comes to diversifying your DevOps team with more women in a male dominated field

https://redd.it/opx4el
@r_devops

How to transition from software dev to devops

Hey guys the title kind of says it all, I have been in a software development position for 3 years now working on ibm systems doing the full software cycle from conception of projects to deployment so I figure DevOps wouldn't be a hard transition. But I'm not sure how I transition to this role? Has anyone had a similar change that they could share with me?

https://redd.it/oqdird
@r_devops

Got an offer from Rural Sourcing

So I am moving from graphic design to DevOps and I have been interviewing for a month now. I was offered a decent amount over what they normally pay for Analyst II. It has been a very long month and very emotionally draining to be passed up so many times.

But! Because of all of your help, I finally got an offer.

So, thank you all.

https://redd.it/oqf687
@r_devops

How to migrate one iis website out of multiple websites from onprem data center to aws.

Hi All,

Please could you guide me, how can i migrate just one IIS website from a webserver present on VMware infrastructure to AWS.

I was thinking to use cloud endure but seems that is only use in case of migrating the entire webserver.

Sorry if I asked dumb question.

https://redd.it/opwcu1
@r_devops

Kubernetes Gremlins: What Broke My Cluster?

Tooling that helps finding nasty gremlins in Kubernetes clusters that create lots of troubles in cloud native applications.
https://kubevious.io/blog/post/kubernetes-gremlins-what-broke-my-cluster

https://redd.it/oqgv24
@r_devops

Packer vs User Data scripts

I have only used User Data Bash scripts to boot up my instances but I'm considering learning Packer because I have heard good things from my fellow colleagues. What are the advantages/disadvantages of using Packer with Terraform. (Using AWS cloud provider).

https://redd.it/oqgdu6
@r_devops

S3 Presigned URL issues

Hi,

I have a presigned URL to perform getObject

Yet when I try to use it I receive a 403 error.

Not sure what I need to change. I'm using axios like axios.get(getURL) where getURL is the signed URL response from an earlier request.

Do i need to pass a header along with it? The object I'm trying to get is already in the getURL with the bucket name

https://redd.it/oqg8o6
@r_devops

York University Certificate in devops course.

Hi! I’ve been in IT Operations for 3 years. I’m hoping to upskill myself. I’m torn between enrolling in this course or self-study and get certifications. Here’s the link of the course.

https://continue.yorku.ca/programs/certificate-in-devops/

Do you think it's better to self-study or enroll in this course?

https://redd.it/oqjctc
@r_devops

Wall mountable monitoring devices

Anyone have any good suggestions for a wall mountable device that can load websites for active monitoring like Grafana?

It'd be nice to have something that you could mount like a digital picture frame instead of a monitor that could load a website. It'd likely need a cable dangling I guess for power and not be a tablet as a tablet battery would likely bulge if it was left plugged in for ages.

The easiest would likely be a vesa mounted monitor plugged into a rasberry pi or something, but I'm wondering if anyone else has found anything neat to use. Even if it only refreshed every 5-10 minutes.

https://redd.it/oqjrnj
@r_devops

SOCKS5 proxy provider

Hi,

We have different resources on all the major cloud providers (GCP, AWS, AZ, IBM) and we'd like to present some of our egress traffic as coming from a limited set of static IP addresses.

Leveraging our current VNET/VPC gateway IPs is not an option as the number of IPs it would require would exceed the number of IPs we would like our egress services to use.

The only viable option I can think of is to launch a bunch of SOCKS5 proxies, and configure the egress service to use those proxies to establish egress connections.

If possible, we'd like to not have to maintain this piece.

1. Is there any other technical solution to achieve this?
1. I can't find out-of-the-box proxies provided by the big cloud providers (e.g. AWS SOCKS5 Proxy as a service). Is there an offering from them I'm missing?
1. In the sea of personal VPN offerings, the only business oriented product I found is https://www.quotaguard.com/static-ip-features/ Does anyone know other serious providers?

https://redd.it/oqll1a
@r_devops

Working as a "DevOps Engineer" but with caveats. Have the option of switching to Telco engineer. Interested and want to make a career in DevOps. Would this move be burning the bridges?

So I'm working as a DevOps Engineer right now but the work is more of release management. The day to day involves monitoring of our test environments hosted on Linux servers, troubleshooting them, monitoring test results (not writing the tests) and creating new releases. The thing is I'm not actively working with tools and technologies such as Ansible, Terraform, Kubernetes or public cloud. I'm trying to learn these by myself and also trying to get some azure certifications but that's going slow.

Now I have an offer for another job which is a junior Telco engineer. Part of it involves some system administration, Ansible and python/bash for automation. But main part is working with VoIP technologies and using Asterisk and Wireshark etc.

I'm confused if I should take this one or not. Because I do want to continue my career in DevOps. And I feel like the job that I'm in right now doesn't give me the exposure and opportunity to work with the tools and technologies that are in DevOps.

And I could get Ansible and some automation experience with the new one (my situation with the rest of the stuff stays the same). But I'm worried that it would be a change into something very specific as VoIP and I would move away from DevOps. Would it be a good idea to switch jobs here?

Also the new job pays a little bit more but involves some on call work which is potentially 1k-2k plus per month
Any opinions will be appreciated! I have to decide by Tuesday 😅

https://redd.it/oqpn5i
@r_devops

I hate the cloud

Over last few years I designed or redesigned multiple different infrastructures (all as IaC, some with k8s stuff) and worked on few more. All of those were on prem stuff built on top of open source tools (with some proprietary bullshit I had no influence over, VMware, Oracle etc).

My growth as an engineer was mostly iterative, I was building skills on top of previous experience with similar standards and tools. It was all I wanted from my job, cause it was in sync with my views on software (foss first, proprietary vendor lock only if there is no choice).

Recently when I was looking for new client to work for (I run a single person business, it has some financial and freedom related benefits in my country), I've noticed that 90% of the job offers involve some kind of cloud environment, so I figure, it's time to get better idea about it.

I never held cloud in high regard, cause it seemed like a worst possible vendor lock in, just better marketed. Sadly it had to be done.

Few months into the project as a more of a cloud architect (though I write automation too), I find myself learning stuff that does not translate into anything else, but single vendor product. Unlike my previous experiences, none of this is going to benefit me if I have to change project into something that uses different cloud provider or even on-prem stuff.

I suspect without some legislation about standards in the cloud (like not allowing cloud providers to create proprietary APIs or vendor specific tools), this is only going to get worse.

https://redd.it/oqq1mg
@r_devops

Easy to use Open Source self hostable serverless platform?

I've been using GCP cloud function quite extensively and really enjoy them. They are easy to set up and cheap. Basically you just write a function or service in a specific format defined by Google, push it to a git repo and with a few a clicks it's up and running, with autoscaling and monitoring and pretty much no overhead or configuration required.

Is there something like that that I can just run on my own server(s) or kubernetes cluster? Currently when I want to self-host a simple service with those features there is significant overhead involved in containerizing it and configuring it properly for kubernetes. In practice, CF and probably AWS lambdas are much easier to get up and running (for simple applications).

https://redd.it/oqt6fa
@r_devops

26 week devops boot camp no experience/cs required

I’m considering this course for a mid-career change. It is from full stack academy, through my local state college. It says I can become certified as AWS certified developer-associate, AWS solutions architect-associate, AWS Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate, and the certificate of completion of the boot camp for devops. It covers a bit about Linux, Python, and networking,coding. But seems heavy on AWS.
My current position is financial and data analytical but most of what I am using is proprietary specialized software. I do not have computer science degree.
Could I get an entry level job in devops after this boot camp? Are companies hiring for positions like this? It seems that most of the jobs posted currently are looking for several years of experience. I don’t know anyone in this field that I could ask.

https://redd.it/oqt04j
@r_devops

When you interview with a company that claims they do DevOps...

I've been interviewing and the job description always seems to sound like they got it all... but when you talk to them there's a lot of well... and we are working towards it... which I don't mind but it's frustrating when people try to make it sound like they did it all when it's definitely a subset of it.

​

DevOps CI CD automation Meme | Knowledge Sharing - YouTube

https://redd.it/or1qs7
@r_devops

DevOps Interview Coding Question

I am doing my first DevOps interview with a large tech company (shocked Pikachu). The first round is a coding interview, which they say isn't as hard as a software interview. I have no clue what that means, but I happen to also want to do software eng as a career (though more interested in Ops).

So I came here to understand what is typical DevOps interview? What are peoples experiences?

https://redd.it/or277b
@r_devops

Docker is dumb

After years of wasting my time with Docker, I'm done. It is a pointless, waste of time. You know what is better than docker? Anything.

https://redd.it/or570u
@r_devops

How does your company interpret DevOps?

Companies still interpret DevOps differently between each other. Some see it as more of a dev-based role, some more of an ops-based role, some try to keep the balance, while some match it with something one might see completely unrelated to the field.

What is the case for you?

For me, I currently work at the biggest company in my country, which doesn't happen to be a tech company, but an oil one that recently invested a lot in the IT department. We work in the IT development sub-department and are essentially software developers.

The difference between those with a dev role and those with a DevOps role is just what exactly we are developing. The devs are focusing on end client solutions. We are focusing on internal, dev solutions. We develop the tools, pipelines, dashboards, etc. that are used internally. But 95% of the time is spent towards their actual development, primarily using our own edition of the Quarkus (Java) framework, with the idea of some Go in the future. The other 5% can be seen as operational, or system work.

How about you? I want to see a trend of how the word is used out there.

https://redd.it/or6bu0
@r_devops

Basic question regarding transfer of databases

I'm not a devops guy, but I happen to have an application running on a VM that has a stack of 9 docker containers, 4 of which are databases (MongoDB, Postgres, and 2 Redis). I'm now looking to transfer the application and all data to another VM from another provider.

Would it be sufficient to copy the vols folders of the database containers and set up the folder structure in the exact same way on the new system?

Or is there another process?

https://redd.it/or6hrr
@r_devops

Stories of actual DevOps implementations

Over the past few days I have been seeing posts complaining about the term "DevOps Engineer" and how companies are implementing DevOps all wrong.

Are there good stories of DevOps implementation done right and companies reaping measurable benefits ?

https://redd.it/or6p5i
@r_devops