How do I continue to improve as a solo devops engineer?

I joined a small company a few years ago. The thing that motivated me was that I will be able to build a cloud based system from a ground up. However, now the development really slowed down. We have a niche b2b product that is used by small set of customers. I don't feel that I'm learning much in this job. However, my salary is quite high. I tried applying to other jobs and found that a) we are in the much better state then other companies in terms of devops adoption 2) salary in my current position is quite high and I can't expect much of increase if I join some other company.

Therefore my plan is to spend an hour each day to improve and learn some new skills. Do you think is a good idea? What platforms can you suggest for learning stuff? One of the areas I wanted to improve was k8s. We don't use it and it'd be impractical for us to move to k8s but it seems that the knowledge of it is required in almost all devops jobs these days.

https://redd.it/orxf6f
@r_devops

The late night deploy

I love the company I work for--good pay, good culture, very good benefits, but I'm venting a little to express my frustration. I would say we're marginally profitable, like the owner lives in a house that is a pretty normal house and drives a 2014 volvo station wagon, so it's not like we're killing it on the revenue side. However, all of that aside, we do late night deployments and host our own private cloud/data center, have no blue/green or anything that would permit business hours deployments/updates. The company is 12 years old and despite all of the perks, I'm astonished that they haven't felt the urgency to address these concerns to create something that is closer to a 9-5 schedule for the employees.

While i had some initial enthusiasm, everyone says it's not in the budget and the DEVS are also just used to this because this is how it's always been. Feeling demoralized.

I would consider going elsewhere but this is my first DevOps gig and i'm learning a ton and being well mentored. I doubt I could pass a coding interview elsewhere or stand up a CI/CD scenario with any efficiency. But just frustrated by the late nights and the things that are clearly avoidable if you have your priorities in order.

https://redd.it/orxn6s
@r_devops

I have difficulty being DevOps. Please advise.

Good day my fellow IT professionals, I'm in a bit of an anxiety-ridden pickle and I made a throwaway (?) so I can freely talk.

I'm almost three months in my new job for a Large Tech Company and I'm pretty cool with the company so far. My role is DevOps, and I have quite some difficulty adjusting to it, however.

My previous company is very traditional and has been using outdated practices and technologies (read: Waterfall, Java 7, name it). I am a Computer Science graduate, and my previous work experience is purely database development (I write complex SQL queries every day). In short, I have zero experience in the operations/infrastructure side of things.

I was told by my new boss that I was hired since I am proficient in Java and databases, but my daily tasks these days have very little development and more on supporting users having difficulties on our platform.

I feel like I am not going to perform well being entirely new to the DevOps scene, and I feel I won't be regularized by my 6th month. It doesn't help that the new hire, who started on the same day as I did, is able to do more, since he has experience being operations/support.

Please tell me what should I study more so I can finally adjust to this position. I want this job, but I feel like I'm lost at the moment. Thank you very much.

Notes:

- We aren't using stuff like AWS or Terraform like what I've been seeing in this sub. We use Kubernetes/Docker, and a mix of Grafana, Prometheus, Kong, Kibana, and other tech I have no clue what they're precisely for. Like there's so MANY tools to study about, it overwhelms my ADHD brain.

- I wish it could be as easy as "talk to your supervisor about it" but he's currently in the hospital.

https://redd.it/orxhao
@r_devops

Beginner re-deploy service upon push to master creates docker image artifact

Hi,

I'm quite a beginner. I'm working in a big company and I have a question.

We have internal service that uses HTTP requests.

Anyway, it's behind nginx, inside VM server.

What we would like to do is, when pushing to master, the pipeline already creates docker image, and pushes artifact. But what we also like to do, is when it finished pushing artifact, we want to stop the current service (which is outside the 'CI/CD slave/worker'), remove container, remove image, docker pull image from artifactory, and re-deploy the service, with some parameters.

Is that possible?

Currently, I do this manually (docker stop, docker rm, docker pull, docker run).

https://redd.it/orzhiz
@r_devops

Runbook.md -- Bash executable runbooks in markdown

Runbook automation and literate programming are both not new ideas, but I think the two play well together. So, I got this idea last week, and hacked up a simple tool that I think would be useful to SysAdmins, Ops people, or SREs. Please check it out - https://github.com/kjkuan/Runbook.md

https://redd.it/os3lnd
@r_devops

What is the most mentally challenging stuff that you had to work on ?

I am feeling like having a lack of mental challenge, creating Kubernetes yaml files, troubleshooting jenkins pipelines or writing HCL all day long... It was fun at the beginning but begin to be bored.

I am hoping that somewhere outhere, some people had the possibility to work on something more rewarding.

https://redd.it/os4p07
@r_devops

Unpopular Opinion Terraform HCL is fedding me up

Although there are some alternatives now to HCL, people still advocating for using HCL for it's simplicity and readability.

While in fact it is a real struggle using it at scale, it is hard to template anything in hcl, hard to validate, hard to extend, hard to integrate with other systems, hard for secret management, hard to maintain due to versions change and provider instability, it's hard to make smart changes, hard to use the state versioning, hard to loop through variables, hard to check drifts.

Other alternatives include terraform cdk, and all other templates systems like jsonnet, CUE, etc.

How do you handle of the hard tasks I just defined.

https://redd.it/os3elx
@r_devops

Need help in architecture of a cloud gaming service - Storage

Hi folks,
I am trying to create a cloud gaming service and wanted to understand how can we move games across multiple user sessions/vms easily like GeForce Now or Google Stadia.

For example we have a set of 1000 game virtual disk running on ssds on a SAN.

How can we securely give access to user and also maintaining zero user logs or that means anything the user does with the virtual hard-disk should be immediately deleted as soon as the user leaves the platform.

+

What if multiple users are requesting to play the same game, do we let say copy the virtual game image from original storage to let say Servers Ssd storage and unmount the disk ?
Dont you thats gonna be too much IO and will kill the SSDs in a year by doing let say 2-5TB read/writes per day (avg game size 50gb)

https://redd.it/os7tgl
@r_devops

Validating k8s deployments using Sparrow

Sparrow is a wonderful tool to automate @daily devops tasks. Recently I've dropped a new plugin called k8s-deployment-check to verify k8s deployments. It lets you with a little bit of Raku code effectively test entire k8s infrastructure, including k8s deployments.

Read about this here - https://dev.to/melezhik/validating-k8s-deployments-using-sparrow-5f3f

https://redd.it/os2ayz
@r_devops

Is Kubernetes really as awful as it sounds?

Working on an application using containerized microservices and I'm trying to decide between Kubernetes and Hashicorp's Nomad for container orchestration. From everything I've been reading, it sounds like Kubernetes is a management and security nightmare that only improves if you spend money on commercial subscription SaaS products that do the heavy lifting for you. Either you become an expert in Kubernetes and your entire life is ruled by it, or you outsource its management. Am I getting the right impression? We're a startup with a very small team and k8s seems extremely daunting. Nomad, on the other hand, seems fairly straightforward and easy to implement but, obviously, there's the dilemma of vendor lock-in and far-less community buy-in and support. Is k8s easier than I'm estimating, or if I can avoid it, should I?

https://redd.it/osadk8
@r_devops

Building an internal Developer Platform?

We're in the process of validating a couple of ideas and I'd love some help from the /r/DevOps community. For the last six months, we've been navigating the startup waters and building and improving.

We're thinking of building a platform that enables teams at mid/large sized companies to build, run, and scale applications in AWS (and soon other cloud providers) without forcing developers to become cloud experts.

Practically speaking, our product would be your internal developer platform where you (DevOps/Platform/Site Reliability Engineers) can build boilerplates / templates for your teams that meet your business requirements. Then, the developers can quickly deploy/launch these templates/boilerplates in an "App Store" type of fashion with the "Heroku"-like experience. The end goal is avoid having developers install unnecessary CLI tools or managing kubernetes clusters.

Building this solution would help developers move at their own pace and give Platform/DevOps / Site Reliability engineers more time back.

Before we continue to pour more effort in to this, I wanted to ask if this is of interest to anyone?

Is it something that you think you'd personally setup and give to your developers?

https://redd.it/os4dbb
@r_devops

Varnish Cache Migration from Version 3.x to 4.0

I think there's a lot of syntax changes that happened. Now, the question is what are the tools that will allow me to migrate my default.vcl code to the newest syntax and where can I verify that the syntax is ok, because I keep getting errors when I try to run the default.vcl code I have on my docker machine, but it doesn't tell me where the syntax errors are.

https://redd.it/os8zmd
@r_devops

Best practice: terraform + Ansible or Terraform + Puppet

This is a noob question, so I apologize in advance. I am wondering what is the best practice or at least common practice being used in the industry. Is it Terraform with Ansible or Terraform with Puppet? I mean do you run Terraform then run Ansible or Puppet afterward?

The context of these questions is that I have not used Ansible or Puppet, so I want to know which one is best suited to learn with Terraform.

https://redd.it/os8svp
@r_devops

CROSS-POST: Interesting Task

I wrote this in Markdown, so hopefully this comes through for everyone.

I have an interesting task coming down the pipe, I am wondering what people have done and if you all have suggestions for what the best most sustainable path forward is, that'd be hugely appreciated!

# Objective:

Create a template for customer builds. One that is highly parameterized, easy to add/remove from etc, and my most important requirement is it all be in code. The challenge is that every customer has different values to their variables. Moreso, sometimes there can be a "parent" customer and child customers and some of the parent values get inherited at the child level unless the child customer has that variable defined.

## Currently:

The way the current workflow goes is three parts

1. Customer build (unique)
2. Build job (generic)
3. Test job (generic)

When we add new customers we copy a job through the UI and edit the values. If a "parent level" value changes that affects several jobs it is a very laborious process clicking through the jobs and editing.

## Gold Standard
everything is in code

I would like a way to be able to copy/paste the template, edit the parameters based on the customer requirements and "apply" the changes. "Applying" could be running a script against Jenkins, committing to SCM and kicking off a job in Jenkins to then update itself.

## Current
1. At my previous job the entirety of Jenkins was all in code. We would blow away our entire Jenkins instance and just copy/paste the config back into Jenkins and it would all be back. I believe that also had all of the configurations for the jobs as well. In that case, that could be ideal. If I remember correctly this was all done in Groovy and not using the Configuration as Code (YAML) plugin.

2. I don't quite love Groovy and most of my coworkers work in Python, I was unsure if there was an equivalent to this.

The current plan of action is to just write a big wrapper around Jenkins to handle all of the different customer builds.
Appreciate any suggestions!

https://redd.it/os8n39
@r_devops

Can someone explain me a few things?

version: '3.7'
services:
php:
image: tatterdocker/certgeneration.php:1.0.0.1
build:
context: .
dockerfile: ./Docker/Dockerfile

command:
- /bin/bash
- -c
- php main.php

volumes:
- .:/var/www/:consistent

What does :consistent do, isn't this something that should only work on an iOS system? I don't remember what is was exactly for.

Also, can you put anything on image? I tried finding the box on Dockerhub and couldn't find it.

Also, where's the documentation for docker-compose? I couldn't find anything. Is there a cheatsheet for the docker-compose file?

https://redd.it/os8oqu
@r_devops

Basic CD/CI help

Hi, I was struggling to set up a CD pipeline using docker and Jenkins. I really don’t know where to start but want to automated my tests suite/framework written in Python. Any advice?

https://redd.it/osgigx
@r_devops

GitLab 14 is out and fans must be thrilled to know about all the new features along with all the fixes and removals. In this post, we will go through the many changes and improvements, bug fixes, and some remarkable deprecations. We will see all of that here. So, let's start.

https://www.p3r.one/whats-new-in-gitlab-14/

https://redd.it/osh3z8
@r_devops

What type of leaders do you guys have ?

Yo guys,


I'm just curious what type of leaders you guys have in your department ? I'm just curious, because at my current company, I feel like the leadership style is more synonymous to management and I'm not sure whether this style is just an inherent result of us being a consultancy, where value/money is measured on a task level. Keen to hear your thoughts ?

https://redd.it/oshtv9
@r_devops

Deployment of web app

What would be the optimal devops stack for deployment of a web app including ci/cd, automated testing, container management (Portainer?), cloud computing hosting (heroku, aws, azure) etc.

https://redd.it/osi8l6
@r_devops

Auto Fill forms

I need some idea on how i can accomplish the following:

Need to create form (Maybe windows forms) is accessible via UR code, where users’ will key in their daily temp when they come to site.

But I don’t wish the users to key in all their information each time they scan the QR, i.e. Name, date, Employee number etc I want it to be autofilled.

The process,

First day :

User scan QR codes keys in the all the details for the first time including temperature

Second day

User scans QR, the form auto fills, user just keys in temperature.

​

​

Is it possible to accomplish this?

https://redd.it/oshxjh
@r_devops

How would you extract "good examples" from the existing Jenkinsfile collection in your company/group ?

What I noticed is that if Jenkins (or equivalent) is heavily used, and even if there is a base library of functions for it, Jenkinsfile grow "different" if there are hundreds of different projects to build with different needs.

Anyway those needs could be clustered in "macro" cases. In my experience having good examples to look for - especially for colleagues that do not have deep experience with the jenkins pipeline - can help.

Moreover all Jenkinsfiles are exactly equally well done, it depends who did it and how much experience the contributors had. Not so great Jenkinsfile can also slowdown things as they need more adjustments than better ones.

Our collection is over 300 different Jenkinsfiles and I would try to extract good examples in the following way:

- list the jenkinsfiles
- pick a sample
- analyze them
- save the ones that I and the team find the best as reference (that possibly will be used as template to create new Jenkinsfiles)
- periodically repeat the steps above.

Do you see alternative approaches to the one above?

https://redd.it/osjz7e
@r_devops