Grow from Senior DevOps to DevOps Lead

Hey,

it looks like my soft skills are very useful to manage the team and the head of engineering told me I'm really good at that. I'd like to become a Lead in this company and lead the team of 5 DevOps. However this is new role for me and I'm not sure if this is the path I want to grow further.

How management roles are better/worse than pure engineering roles? Especially salary wise? I still see myself growing salary wise, but I'm not sure I can get more by moving to more managing roles than to continue growing as Senior DevOps.

Any thoughts or real life examples could be really helpful!

https://redd.it/q2nhir
@r_devops

How do you manage JIRA tickets across different teams - support/devops/engineering?

Looking for experiences/suggestions on structuring JIRA for work that flows across multiple teams, i.e. support to devops to engineering.


External and internal customers report production issues and request work into a JIRA Service Desk project run by tier-1 support. Some things get resolved by tier-1 support but most require escalation to functional teams.


The DevOps JIRA project has become the dumping group for anything needing escalation from support. Outages, functional bugs, requests for new environments - it all ends up with DevOps to fix or escalate.


If DevOps need support from other team such as infrastructure or software engineering then DevOps create a new ticket with that team, linking to the old DevOps ticket which in turn links to the Support ticket.


This process results in loads of linked tickets, with each team having to click through lots of related tickets to try and find the latest updates. Also the DevOps tickets end up hanging around for ages waiting for the other functional teams to resolve theirs, which for things like functional bugs could take months or even years.


Somehow I need a cleaner way of managing work that ends up spanning multiple functional teams with different reporting lines.


Options seem to be:


1 - Having multiple queues in the Support JIRA Service Desk for the different teams, but this means each team has to look in two places for work - their own team JIRA project and the Support JIRA project;


2 - Having one combined "escalation" project for the functional teams to use, which is only a slight variation on (1);


3 - Moving JIRA tickets between projects, which avoids having lots of linked tickets but ends up with issues pinging back and forth between the different functional teams JIRA projects;


4 - Something else I can't think of....


How have other people solved this project? How do you handle JIRA tickets that end up spanning multiple functional teams for resolution?

https://redd.it/q2t6zm
@r_devops

Any good references for automating the buildout of DataDog dashboards? Preferably with Jenkins.

Thanks

https://redd.it/q2nur8
@r_devops

Overcoming Organizational Momentum

i wash hired help modernize the entire stack of a proprietary monolithic application based web presence for a state government department and they asked specifically to incorporate the devops tooling that's popular in the software development world since a huge majority of the organization's budge goes into software development. the tools are straight forward and path to getting it setup, technologically, is a little challenging because our vendors have never heard of this stuff and have legal protectionist government contracts against having to update anything.

however the biggest challenge by far is getting my colleagues and immediate management to understand how this works (upper management understands how this works and is forcing this upon my department). i've created functional ansible modules that are already useful and shared them with my colleagues; i've created example pipelines in gitlab that show how this is supposed to work to the software developers; i've created proof of concept environments showing how much easier it is to us these tools compared to the very legacy procedures that they're used to.

despite all of it; there's no improvements to my department's understanding. I can see NO ONE using the ansible modules during collaboration times during regular maintenance or outages; NO ONE has logged into gitlab to inspect the pipelines in almost a year now; and the proof of concept is just sitting there with no plans to expand it beyond proof of concept even though upper management loves it.

nearly all of my colleagues are close to retirement age and have been working in this department for 15+ years; am i wrong in thinking that's why they don't want to update? is there anything else i can try? does this spell doom for my future with this organization?

i suspect that if it keep my mouth shut and just collect a paycheck i could stay there until i retire like the rest of these guys.

https://redd.it/q2n0kb
@r_devops

Thoughts on Telepresence for local development integration in K8s?

I’m curious to hear people’s opinions and/or experiences with using telepresence by ambassador for local dev integration with their dev cluster(s).

I’m a junior DevOps engineer and was recently tasked with implementing a method for local dev integration. By all accounts, telepresence seems like an awesome and powerful tool, but I am having a ton of difficulty getting it set up and working correctly on my machine for a POC and am wondering what the general consensus is.

https://redd.it/q2wwc4
@r_devops

History of CI/CD on Windows?

Hello,

I am hoping someone with some knowledge and experience of DevOps can shed some light on the history of CI/CD in Windows environments. At my current workplace we are still using the copy and paste method for deploying all of our software. We will be going from TFS (only used to store code) to Azure DevOps Server and I'd like to be able to share some insight and provide some information as to why CI/CD in general, can be a good thing.

Specifically, I was hoping to gain some knowledge about the different "phases" of DevOps/CI-CD on Windows and what each new "phase" solved in the previous. I'm ignorant to how deployments were managed over the years but I'd imagine it would be something like copy-paste -> script -> script orchestration tool -> TFS -> Azure DevOps.

Any insight would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

https://redd.it/q308te
@r_devops

Can you enter a container and execute commands on Gitlab CI while it's running a pipeline?

I have a particular environment with a strict firewall. Making small incremental changes and then running a job takes forever, it would be much easier if I could execute commands in the container and see results in real time. Is it possible? If not what's the second best thing? Is there a CICD provider that allows that?

https://redd.it/q2ldyx
@r_devops

Understanding Octopus Deploy Targets

After reading this post, I'm not de-mystified from the pricing from Octopus deploy
https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/dejlae/understanding\_octopus\_deploy\_pricing/


I have 3 clusters of EKS (dev, stage, prod) - with varying number of nodes powering it.
I have some serverless functions on AWS

I have several namespace within EKS and about 50 or so microservices but I'm probably going to increase this in the future.


According to Octopus Deploy - What is a Target? Is it the 50 microservice? is the ENV? is it ENV + Lambda? is it the very ultra expensive path: ENV + Services + lambda + ???

https://redd.it/q31uxy
@r_devops

Need suggestions regarding my terraform code

I'm working on bringing up a kubernetes cluster infrastructure through terraform.This is what I have right now:

1. I have created separate directories for each component and each component has a terraform.tfvars file.
2. If I have to bring up a new cluster for a different environment, I'll have to copy the root directory and modify the terraform.tfvars files for the environment specific configurations.
3. Then go to each component directory and do "terraform apply".
4. Using Ansible for software provisioning.

What I'm trying to achieve is to bring up a new cluster for a new environment with one click. At the moment, I'm considering to use "terragrunt". Any suggestions would be highly appreciated.

k8s-msvcs

├── bastion

│   ├── backend.tf

│   ├── main.tf

│   ├── provider.tf

│   ├── terraform.tfvars

│   └── variables.tf

├── elb

│   ├── backend.tf

│   ├── main.tf

│   ├── provider.tf

│   ├── terraform.tfvars

│   └── variables.tf

├── iam

│   ├── backend.tf

│   ├── iam_policies

│   ├── main.tf

│   ├── provider.tf

│   └── variables.tf

├── master_nodes

│   ├── backend.tf

│   ├── main.tf

│   ├── provider.tf

│   ├── terraform.tfvars

│   └── variables.tf

├── security_groups

│   ├── sg

│   └── sg_rules

└── worker_nodes

├── backend.tf

├── main.tf

├── provider.tf

├── terraform.tfvars

├── utils

└── variables.tf

https://redd.it/q32k54
@r_devops

Openstack popularity? Career advise

I'm currently working with k8s, AWS and Azure and I see the market for those is very hot. I'm looking for a change to get a little better pay, but mostly for career growth, and I have this offer to join a team in a software development company running Openstack and looking to start migrating their services to k8s (within Openstack)

I feel like I might be taking a step backwards with going away from public cloud, but still the opportunity seems promising in that I could be part of the team migrating to k8s as well as introducing devops practices to the company.

Advice?

edit: I'll say that it's a government company (european) so they're stuck running a private cloud

https://redd.it/q33jit
@r_devops

As a sysadmin what’s your main job responsibilities or day to day tasks right now ? In your humble opinion what’s the main differences between a junior, intermediate and senior sysadmin today ?

1) Do you do a lot of the advanced stuffs AWS / Azure, Powershell, database, server hardening, Ansible, Active Directory on premise with exchange or system center, advanced storage clusters Kubernetes things like that etc or it’s mostly routine things changing password, updates, checking sercurity, hyper v or something else ?

2) In your humble opinion what’s the main differences between a senior sysadmin and a junior starting out learning windows server / linux etc or a intermediate ? Do you feel it’s more about knowing things or getting experience or it’s about understanding concept and know where to go what will work what will break etc

3) Do you prefer on premise or in the Cloud ? Have you ever worked in a large Data Centers with a Hybrid solutions of on premise with the Cloud ? Do you miss the old day of pure sysadmin with no cloud everything was in the building so to speak. What’s your opinion about scripting and automation, do you consider yourself a advanced scripter / programmer in Bash / Powershell ?

4) Prefer Linux or Windows Server and why ? What's your opinion about some youtuber or microsofties who knows just Azure and nothing of Linux would you consider them real sysadmin or ?

https://redd.it/q33z40
@r_devops

Automated build and release of Python packages using CircleCI and bump2version

Hi,

I am in the process of trying to imagine how I can change the development process for our team of 3 developers. We create and maintain a number of python packages that we deploy to a private PyPI server.

What I would like to do is to automate the versioning of the packages. We have a master and a development branch currently.

At the moment we manually update the version number in a setup.py file and tag the corresponding commit and CircleCI deploys it based on that.

Is it viable/possible to set up a development workflow where the CI/CD tool tags and updates the version number?

I've been looking at bump2version, but if the new version number needs to be updated for developers too, does that mean their local branches will often be one or several commits behind because of the version commits?

How do other people do it?

https://redd.it/q2kzhv
@r_devops

What are you using for handling incidents in the cloud?

How well is it working?

https://redd.it/q35u6k
@r_devops

Post monolith success stories?

A little groggy after another PM deploy and I'm feeling discouraged about the state of things and don't have the expertise currently to pave the way forward.

On my most recent gig at a small, not new company, we've been trying to make some headway breaking down the mono-repo and it's not been encouraging. Devs are stuck in the way they've been doing stuff since mid 2000s and like most of us aren't super into change. So cultural and technical friction on all fronts, though in conversations people are into it, but afraid of breaking shit.

We're currently hosting everything on VSphere and are tied into Oracle. The approach to ween them off of Oracle is anything but clear. I don't at hand have any good ways to suggest how we deal with apps having different schema dependencies or how we can gradually shift our architecture towards intermediary steps at building and deploying microservices.

I've never worked at a shop with such stringent coupling and dependencies, nor have I had to concern myself with architectural decisions way out of my comfort zone (seemingly everyone else at the company as well) to try and address this.

For the sake of a better work life balance I feel like my org should be making this a number one priority to keep Devs from late night deployments. Additionally, it's just clear that the ripple effect and coupling is beyond what anyone can keep track of in their heads.

Currently reading The Tao of Microservices which has been a gold mine, though I'm 1/3 of the way through it. Hoping the sections on dealing with monoliths is helpful.

One of the founders of Acloud Guru has a video describing their evolution and how they've always been serverless. He noted how they managed to pickup more efficiency and decouple more and more over time. One decision in particular about how they found ways to stand up environments with less and less dependencies using ETL jobs so that a CACHE/DB etc wasn't necessary for all environments really rang true.

https://redd.it/q2kpgp
@r_devops

Using Jenkins for development server deployments

Hi guys, I just started working as a Junior DevOps and I'm looking to automate some deployments for my software development team.


They have a Plesk development server where websites are stored and accessed via subdomains (webpagex.ourdomain.com) before going to production. My question for you is:


Would it make any trouble if I installed Jenkins on that server and run the CI/CD together with bash commands without having to SSH into the dev server?


FYI, I have already created a docker service for Jenkins and its accessible via jenkins.domain.com. If you would suggest a better practice, I would be open to follow. Thank you.

https://redd.it/q2k191
@r_devops

Need help chosing the next work laptop

Hey people, I'm working in a tech company where 99% of tech employees use Intel MacBooks, and it's time for me to get a new laptop.

Right now I'm working on 13inch MacBook Pro from 2018 and I've grown to hate it for a few reasons:
- battery sucks
- if you turn on docker, battery becomes even worse
- heats up a lot
- if you turn on docker, it heats up even worse
- butterfly keeyboard (luckily docker doesn't affect this)

As a replacement i see myself going in one of three directions:
- another Intel Mac (at least keyboard will work properly, but still, this is the choice I'd like to avoid)
- M1 Mac
- Thinkpad X1 carbon gen 9 (running Linux)

I'm using Thinkpad X1 Carbon gen 6 as my personal computer and I'm very happy with it - thus the idea of running Thinkpad for work as well. My concern is that I'll be the only guy running Linux in the whole team. I can't think of a concrete problem with that since we are using Unix-based tools and are running our code on Linux machines, but still i guess there is advantage of everyone on the team running the same OS(X).

On the other hand, I've heard good things about M1 Macs, but the two biggest gripes with it are:
- not sure how well docker runs on it, but it's hard to imagine it will be close to how it runs on a Linux machine
- it might be using the same-named OS as the rest of the team, but it's a CPU with a different architecture, i can imagine that this can result in some issues.

So tldr of the question is:

Should i be the only guy on the team running Linux, the only guy on the team running an ARM CPU, or should I just get another shitty Intel Mac?

I guess the question doesn't make much sense without some perspective of what tools I use for my day-to-day work:
- a lot of docker
- a lot of terraform
- a lot of kubernetes
- some bash, python, go and js
- a little ansible

Not sure how well i managed to formulate my thoughts into a question - sorry if I did a poor job! Any insight would be appreciated :)

https://redd.it/q399jj
@r_devops

Battle-tested tricks for efficient CircleCI workflows.

Our super talented Simon shares tricks from his toolbelt:
https://dev.to/otomato_io/circleci-the-matrix-3c17

https://redd.it/q2qjs5
@r_devops

What means "Always ship trunk"?

I'm having a tough time finding a good working definition or meaning really for: "Always ship trunk". I realize this is an older mantra in one of Allspaw's prezzos but I'm kind of a devops noob. I would like to understand what it means and any other comments or discussion on it is a bonus.

https://redd.it/q3bzaw
@r_devops

Your views on daily stand ups

I’ll start with mine and I accept it might be very controversial…. Doing them everyday is a total waste of time especially if they’re run badly like ours often our (to the extent where our scrum master asks for updates on tickets in the sprint backlog). Doing them every other day, fair enough. If there’s anything hyper urgent it can go on an email and a dedicated session can be set up to discuss it in detail (which should happen anyway). If other team members need help, they should feel comfortable going to anyone at anytime and asking even if the response is “I’m busy now, let’s talk later” or something along those lines.

I’m interested to know what you all think of daily stand ups! Maybe I’m just anti them because ours are so awful!

https://redd.it/q3e1ze
@r_devops

Devops hackathom ideas

Hi folks!
Hope everyones having an amazing day :]

Had a question to all the devops gurus out there. Im very very new to the devops world but would love to join a hackathon that's coming up....
What do you consider a good devops hackathon project? are there any particular problem statements that we can use devops to solve efficiently?

https://redd.it/q3elfv
@r_devops

has anyone here created Azure DevOps using TF? I would like to get your experiences and or pros and cons.

TF seems limited on the configurations one can make in Azure DevOps. But that could be by design

https://redd.it/q3i0g0
@r_devops