How to pass the new Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate (KCNA) Exam

I have just finished my latest blog to help people study and pass the new KCNA exam, hope it helps!
https://blog.bradmccoy.io/how-to-pass-your-kcna-exam-cf98cfa7d70f

https://redd.it/qzr44i
@r_devops

What are the biggest issues you guys face on a day to day?

Hey guys, as the title says I'm just curious towards what are the biggest issues you guys face on a day to day or consistent basis working in devops? And how are you solving these issues if they are solvable?

https://redd.it/qzxvfc
@r_devops

Best way to overcome my weaknesses?

I'm in a "senior sre" position (seems like just a title and not reflective of the truth) where I mainly do k8s, cicd, platform and iac work. I'd like to start moving towards architecture and providing solutions for developers, like helping them to choose cloud technologies for their projects. The problem is that while I'm strong in the infra and cicd and networking world I have never been a developer. I write IAC with typescript and do some golang for tests but that's about it.

I'd say my weakest points that I will need to improve to reach my goal is probably writing code and having a deeper understanding of technology requirements (message queues, db tech, step functions, etc), as well as understanding database technologies (differences between them, what to use and when, writing queries, their architecture, etc).

Should I go to college for these things? Ie computer science. Or should I start taking online courses? Does anyone have experience going from becoming a platform architect (providing a platform for devs) to a true SRE? would the aws architect certs help me with this?

Thank you!

https://redd.it/qzw4k1
@r_devops

Production Support

Where does production support fall when it comes to development on servicenow or RPA platforms for example?

Does production support land on developers with support of the platform's engineer/admin? Does it land on the engineers of those platforms? Do you have a point person or team that does triage?

Curious how this works elsewhere for production support. Our company's product is not an app or software itself. Our development is all improvements that enhance internal functions.

https://redd.it/r010al
@r_devops

I deploy using AWS beanstalk, should I move to cloudformation or something else?

Hi,


I work on a startup and I have a small experience on deploying software to the cloud. I spent quite some time setting up the deployment of our solution (python-django API Back) to AWS servers using Docker + AWS elasticbeanstalk. Bitbucket push triggers circleCI jobs that test and then deploy to beanstalk.

In the near future, we will need a higher availability of our API as well as complex deployment strategies (ex: Canary Deployments). We will also want (in a little further future) for our application to run on client's cloud environment that could be google or azure.

I wonder if I should stick to this and spend my time learning more about elasticbeanstalk or if I should use that time learning something lower level like cloudformation.

https://redd.it/r0744n
@r_devops

What we learnt by migrating from CircleCI to Buildkite

We recently rolled out a new CI system at Hasura and we are writing this post to take you on a journey about why and how we did it. This is a collection of ideas and implementation details which we believe to have helped us arrive at an optimal solution that worked out for us.


To control costs and for a better CI experience, we moved from CircleCI to Buildkite. We wrote about the various choices we explored, how costing differs in these solutions and why we chose Buildkite.


Read it from here - https://hasura.io/blog/what-we-learnt-by-migrating-from-circleci-to-buildkite/

https://redd.it/r0al0u
@r_devops

Ops guy transitioning to SRE or devops

Hi people,


Just popping in hoping to get some feedback from people in the devops/SRE field. I'm considering transitioning into SRE or devops.


I'm a 42 years old guy, been into IT since my mid 20's and almost all of my career is in ops (virtualization, networking, linux).


Can't say I have done any extensive development but I'm quite comfortable scripting automation with bash and python. I have pieced together automation and CLI tools (integrations with APIs and so on) that made my life easier. Got a few projects on my github account.


Fast forward until 2-3 years ago. I work for a pretty small company (50 employees). I started, on my own initiative, getting into Azure as I didn't see how we would be able to keep hosting our own hardware and continue to scale. Slowly but surely I adopted IaC using Terraform. I started implementing config management using Ansible, for some 200+ linux hosts. I have set up and learned Kubernetes for running micro services loads. I have developed a couple of micro services myself for executing automation tasks (kind of like my own Ansible Tower) and simple stuff like Slack integration for alerts. I'm running Prometheus for gathering metrics on everything we run in K8s. The CI/CD pipeline I have set up is based on Bitbucket pipelines to automate tests/validation and trigger image build. FluxCD running in our K8s cluster to automatically deploy new versions. I love git and I kind of like the concept of gitops.


Now, I feel I have outgrown my company. Actually I have felt that way for several years but stayed because of loyalty (which I realize now was pretty stupid considering the management have changed, and now they don't really care about tech). The concepts of devops just doesn't make that much sense within the company, and the other ops people don't seem too keen on learning new skills. The only driving force to learn has come from myself.

​

Anyway, I see there are a tonne of jobs out there, mainly devops and SRE type roles. I feel what I'm lacking to move on is experience working in a team, working within that discipline framework, and considering I'm self taught I might not adhere to best practices. And finally I'll admit that I lack some confidence. Like, I know a bunch of these tools, but perhaps not on the level I need to.


What do you guys think? Would I be a reasonable fit for devops or SRE? Sorry for the rambling, I'm just looking for some feedback! Many thanks!

https://redd.it/r0f40b
@r_devops

Netmaker v0.9 release updates

# Hi all,

Just wanted to keep you updated on the progress with Netmaker, a WireGuard VPN automation and management platform.

We've just released v0.9, which comes with a couple cool updates. The first is a totally refactored UI. It doesn't change the functionality much, but we think it looks and works a lot better.

The second is support for routers. We've now built in support for OpenWRT and FreeBSD systems. This means you should be able to run the netclient on a lot of open source router OS's and mesh everything behind the router into your network.

For those of you who are just now learning about Netmaker, here's a recap on the features:

Centralized WireGuard config management
Automatic Peer discovery and configuration.
UDP hole punching to establish connections behind NAT, firewall, etc.
Add in phones to your networks
Create gateways into networks (e.g. home / office network)
Configure peers as relay servers
self-hosted with easy 1-click installation
Works on Linux, Mac, Windows, and FreeBSD devices.

https://redd.it/r0d3ws
@r_devops

Continuous Deployment with Github Actions: An Example

Wrote a blog that takes a deeper dive into setting up CD with Github Actions https://www.dolthub.com/blog/2020-11-23-continous-deployment-with-github-actions/

https://redd.it/r0i16n
@r_devops

What's it like being a Cloud Engineer?

I'm currently working in private cloud but have been eyeing a role change. At first, I thought I wanted to be a frontend developer but ended up deciding not to do it.

Anyways, I wanted to get to know more about the field of Cloud Engineering as a possible career choice, specifically:

1. How often are you coding? Daily, monthly, quarterly?
2. Is there such thing as a Cloud Engineering role where you spend most of your day, every day in a public cloud designing infrastructure, implementing it, scaling it, configuring it, thinking of ways to secure it? That sounds like a lot of fun.
3. Is it true that the kind of role I just described is becoming obsolete thanks to Infrastructure as Code?
4. This question is probably unique to your situation but do you think you've worked more hours in Cloud Engineering than you did software development?
5. Whats the stress level like for Cloud Engineering?

https://redd.it/r0jtrd
@r_devops

IT Infrastructure vs. DevOps

Can anyone tell me the general ideas and differences between these two roles?

https://redd.it/r0hsyk
@r_devops

Creating GCP disk images with (for?) TerraForm

Good evening Reddit,

We have a pretty big application deployed on GCP. Given its increasing complexity we have decided to start (learning about and) using Terraform.

Currently, we have multiple MIGs for services that need to be scalable (k8s would probably be better for that long term?), some ML models on Vertex, and everything is duplicated x2 to have prod and staging environments. That and load balancers, VPCs...

So we're very happy to discover Terraform, it looks like it'll help limit the number of clicks in the GCP interface, which I'm quite literally having nightmares of.

Getting to the point: we use MIGs to deploy some extra-large ML models using instances that boot from custom images. These images are usually Ubuntu server + tons of custom stuff (CUDA, libs, monitoring...).

Is there a way to automate the creation of disk images? For now we run scripts but we are hoping for a stateful way to define what we want eg: Ubuntu-16.04, conda, CUDA, ...

Can Terraform be used for that? or can any other tool?

https://redd.it/r0ow6j
@r_devops

Enigma

Enjoyed The Imitation Game? Must have felt amazing after solving Enigma right! How about you too being the one to solve Enigma?

We bring back to you a mysterious quest that has yet to be solved: ENIGMA 8

With confounding questions, unique power ups and a fascinating storyline to keep you hooked for over 48 hours!

Register now https://enigma.ieeevit.org/

Enigma goes live on 26th November at 4:20 PM. Let’s see if you can be on top of the leaderboard ;)

https://redd.it/r0zgjz
@r_devops

Limitations with GitlabCI, any alternatives on the market?

Hello,

I'll try to give a brief overview of my current situation and the limitations I'm facing. My main question is that how do I overcome these and what is the right tool for the job?

So, currently I am using GitlabCI for my builds and deploys.Build for me means using gradle to build a java product and upload it to nexus.Deploy basically means downloading that zip to a certain server and unpacking it there (done using an ansible script).There are about 50 servers currently I want to deploy to. Deploy is a manual process meaning I will mostly get a request to deploy version X to server Y.Currently my pipeline reflects this processes as I explained it. Each pipeline has a build stage where I have a task to build the product and also a deploy stage where the version build in current pipeline can be deployed to every server - so about 50 tasks there.

The biggest limitation I am facing is that I cannot deploy old versions to new servers. So for example if someone adds a server today and I get a request to deploy a version that was built yesterday then yesterdays pipeline doesn't have a task to deploy to this new server.

So this is where my question comes from. My idea is to keep the build part in GitlabCI, but use a new tool for deployments and environment management.

To put it simply from UI perspective I need a tool that gives me a list of all product versions available in nexus and lets me deploy a chosen version to any server.

In the backend I imagine getting a list of product versions would just be a GET query to nexus and parsing the data from there and deployment job would be executing my current ansible script for chosen host.

Could you please recommend what are the tools I could use for this job?

https://redd.it/r10wj6
@r_devops

Amazon introduces IPv6-only subnets and EC2 instances

Amazon announced about IPv6-only subnets and EC2 instances

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/networking-and-content-delivery/introducing-ipv6-only-subnets-and-ec2-instances/

https://redd.it/r17xp6
@r_devops

Save your engineers' sleep: best practices for on-call processes

A solid on-call process is key to saving your engineers' sleep (and keeping them sane!)

Here's how we have optimized our on-call process at Ably:

☉ We treat alerts as code
☉ We use percentiles over averages
☉ We use playbooks to document each alert
☉ We use Prometheus Alertmanager
☉ We use PagerBeauty to show who is on-call
☉ We automate all our pages
☉ We use routine tests
☉ We have an incident management framework


This is full reasoning behind each one:

Save your engineers' sleep: best practices for on-call processes

https://redd.it/r17tv3
@r_devops

AWS Fargate: how to get the nginx container to read

We're using aws fargate, we have two containers, a PHP container and a nginx container. The files are mounted to the PHP container.

How to get the nginx container to read the static files (css/js/images) so that the pages are rendered correctly?


In docker-compose, I mount the volume on the nginx container and on the PHP container, but AWS fargate doesn't support docker compose

https://redd.it/r0yce8
@r_devops

Black Friday Deals For Developers 2021

Hey everyone,I hope you guys are doing fine.

I'm sharing here some awesome black Friday deals for developers 2021. I hope you find it helpful.

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* [Vue School – Premium VueJS Tutorials – 40% OFF](https://vueschool.io/sales/blackfriday?)
* [Pluralsight - 40%](https://www.pluralsight.com/)
* [Mockplus – Product Design Platform – Up To 72% OFF](https://www.mockplus.com/buy/black-friday?)
* [Laracast – 50% Off](https://laracasts.com/)
* [75% OFF on DataCamp Annual Plan](https://www.datacamp.com/)
* [Udemy Black Friday Deals 2021 Up to 85%](https://www.udemy.com/)
* [Zyro – Website Builder – up to 86% OFF](https://zyro.com/in)

Thanks.

https://redd.it/r1vhmz
@r_devops

Help with circleci persist_to_workspace?

I'm running a circleci pipeline with a plan and apply step for terraform, and it is my first time using `persist_to_workspace` functionality so that i can cache the working directory, and use the outputted terraform plan file as an input on the apply step, not to mention it doesnt have to reclone the repo, or re initialise terraform and download all the plugins again. However the `persist_to_workspace` is not.... persisting to workspace.... I am following this example in the terraform documentation: [https://learn.hashicorp.com/tutorials/terraform/circle-ci](https://learn.hashicorp.com/tutorials/terraform/circle-ci). When running the apply job with SSH enabled, and SSHing onto the worker instance, there is nothing there in the working directory, nothing has been "persisted".

Below is an snippet from the pipeline, can anybody tell me what im doing wrong? Please dont tell me that I am missing a huge portion of the pipeline, I have simply just pasted what is relavent to the question, there is of course much more to the pipeline than this hahahah.

jobs:
plan-staging:
executor: terraform
steps:
- checkout
- terraform-plan:
aws_access_key_id: '${AccessKey}'
aws_secret_key: '${SecretKey}'
tf_var_file: 'staging/staging.tfvars'
tf_backend_config: 'staging/backend.hcl'
tf_cloud_token: '${TF_CLOUD_TOKEN}'
environment: 'staging'
- persist_to_workspace:
root: .
paths:
- .

apply-staging:
executor: terraform
steps:
- attach_workspace:
at: .
- terraform-apply:
aws_access_key_id: '${AccessKey}'
aws_secret_key: '${SecretKey}'
tf_cloud_token: '${TF_CLOUD_TOKEN}'
environment: 'staging'

https://redd.it/r1xg6g
@r_devops

Nginx rewrite requests in Nginx without extension and not ending in / to add .html

I need help to implement something like this from express static options.

Sets file extension fallbacks: If a file is not found, search for files with the specified extensions and serve the first one found. Example:

'html', 'htm'

https://redd.it/r1x4od
@r_devops

those that take on contract roles outside of your full time employment, how do you do it?

Lets assume one is fully aware of the time management issues that might arise from doing something like this.

What advise or cautionary tales can you give for someone looking to take on short term contract roles on the side while working their full time job?

bonus points, if you are canadian (to understand laws if any)

https://redd.it/r252sq
@r_devops