Using Older Oracle Linux Release With DNF Install/Update

I recently migrated our software from CentOS 8.2 to Oracle Linux 8.4 and everything was going smooth for a week or so. Then a new kernel was released (kernel-4.18.0-305.25.1.el8_4) which broke our dependencies, and then a new minor version (8.5) soon after. I need to lock the version to 8.4 to keep it as stable as possible which is seeming to be difficult with Oracle.

With CentOS I just set Artifactory to use the mirror for 8.2, but Oracle is either latest or 8.4 for BaseOS only (older kernel etc.) and I really don't want to have to deal with switching kernel versions for our product again. Anytime the kernel changes or any other major change happens, it breaks our ISO build process which is an absolute PITA to fix.

I've tried using --releasever=8.4 among many other things including -C option to prevent updating (cache gets cleared in docker multiple times due to nested containers), using --exclude=*el8.5* (still gets newer kernel than I'd like) and manually pruning el8_5 rpms in a textfile output by repoquery (causes dependency issues as it doesn't replace with el8_4 version).

I'd like to lock it to use 8.4 but get the latest packages for that version if possible without upgrading anything to Oracle 8.5. With 50-100 packages using something like Versionlock doesn't seem like the best/easiest/cleanest way to do it if there are other options.

Anyone have anything else I can try? Thanks!

-----

Edit:

I just found out you can Versionlock with a text file, so I think I'll just do that using all the packages with the versions I want until I can come up with something better.

https://redd.it/rblm5h
@r_devops

Assistance with Gitlab CI/CD YML file

Hi all,

I'm very new to CI/CD and come from an ops background so please forgive my ignorance. I'm currently trying to automate my homelab a bit so I've recently started placing my docker-compose files in GitLab and trying to deploy them using Gitlab CI/CD

I have my docker host which is also configured as an on-prem runner and have the following pipeline yml file:

image: docker:latest

services:
- docker:dind

stages:
- test
- deploy

test:
stage: test
only:
- develop
- production
script:
- echo run tests in this section

step-deploy-prod:
stage: deploy
only:
- production
script:
- docker stop portainer
- docker rm portainer
- docker pull portainer/portainer-ce:latest
- docker-compose -f docker-compose-portainer.yml up
environment: production
when: manual
allowfailure:
exitcodes:
- 1

The first time it ran as the docker container exists however if the container is not present the "docker stop portainer" commands errors out and rightly so as the container does not exist.

I'm trying to have the pipeline skip that and continue with the rest of the shell scripts however it just stops with the exit code of 1 even though I have specified it to allow failure.

https://redd.it/rb7x71
@r_devops

Automatic update design?

Hi mates,

I am trying to design an automatic update agent for my windows application, so basically whenever new updates available, agent should pull them and silently install them.

Is there any open source application which can do this?
I found one Omaha. I know this is very straightforward but wanted to achieve this in more smarter way.
Please share your thoughts on this.

Cheers 🍻

https://redd.it/rb624w
@r_devops

Production level AKS Cluster using Terraform

Hello,
I'm looking for some links where we have the creation of Azure Kubernetes Service with terraform which includes creation of new Vnets, security groups, Ingress rules etc etc..

There is no much context on the official terraform site..

Please help here

https://redd.it/razqex
@r_devops

Can we talk about GitLab?

Hi all - Interested in opinions on GitLab. Are there strong feelings around GitLab vs. GitHub for SCM? How about code testing? Seems like GitLab has been building out its functionality to provide more of platform. Anyone have experience deploying GitLab wall to wall for a large team/organization?

Just trying to gather thoughts on why people like it, if the functionality has legs beyond SCM, and if there are any big dissenting opinions out there.

https://redd.it/rb3n30
@r_devops

Newbie needs help

Hi I am very new to devops. I wanted to see if someone would be willing to talk to be for about 10 minutes on testing and enterprise monitoring. t am looking into an opportunity and would like to talk to someone that has experience in the area.

https://redd.it/rb30l2
@r_devops

How do you adopt helm for an existing LAMP / Wordpress / Drupal / application? Specifically, when using a public chart like bitnami/wordpress, how do you get your existing data into the deployed environment?

If you follow the instructions on the binami/wordpress chart, one can have a working app up and running in 30 seconds after executing 2 lines of code. There are 24,243 billion internet articles that reiterate exactly how to do that. Personally, I find it baffling that I cannot find an official or best practices approach to migrating existing traditional architectures and their data into kubernetes. What I can find is all over the place - "use a configMap; use an init container; don't use k8s but connect to a db server outside of the cluster; use kubectl to ssh into the container and manually copy; put an sql file in the ... init.d folder"


So how is it done?


Scenario 1)
I use a public Helm chart to install the app. Helm creates PVCs for the db and mount that will contain the mutable files (wp-content/*) I see it up and running in a few seconds. Now how do I get my data into that db, and how do I get my existing plugins and other files over to the file mount?


Scenario 2)
The above is post-deployment and manual. How can this be automated so that when I do "helm install <chart> everything makes it over as part of the deploy process? I feel like the values.yaml file plays a role here, but I haven't been able to figure it out.



Links to references and tutorials are very welcome!

https://redd.it/rbrx8s
@r_devops

AWS Lambda: Can you have too many? Or is it more nuanced than that?

Hi all,

I have an interview in 3 weeks time for my company as a Technical Lead. They've asked me to prepare some answers for a couple of questions. One of these questions being:

Should X reduce how many Lambdas we use? If so, then how should we go about doing this?

Now AWS isn't my strong suit and they know this so I think this question is to see how I cope going about answering something I don't really know much about. Which brings me here.

I was wondering;

- Is there even a limit to the amount of Lambdas you can have setup in AWS? I can't seem to find much online, but I think it boils down more to cost vs benefit and whether using a Lambda suits the needs of the feature, or what you've got in place to manage the amount of Lambdas you have?

- I'm not sure how best to even answer the question, I was contemplating going down the route of comparing Lambda vs EC2, their costs, what situations they're best used in and then matching that against what we use in the company and whether we could swap one for the other

Gone on a bit of a ramble but hope I make sense. Any advice is much appreciated as my lack of knowledge is overwhelming my confidence and I'm struggling to identify how best to approach it.

https://redd.it/rbsk9u
@r_devops

Automating Creation of Bitnami Sealed Secrets

Hi,

I've been using Bitnami Sealed Secrets (https://github.com/bitnami-labs/sealed-secrets) for a while now and have created a script that will take a file as an input and generate a sealed secret to be deployed into the cluster from the input file.

This still involves manual step of running the script. Has anyone automated the process of sealed secret creation from a commit trigger or any way that doesn't require manual work?

https://redd.it/rbs25p
@r_devops

Adaptive Request Concurrency. Resilient observability at scale ?

This is a post written at the Vector.dev team that discusses Adaptive Request Concurrency for observability pipelines. Automatically optimizing HTTP communication. It introduces an old networking concept into ⠀the o11y domain. Let us know what you think! https://vector.dev/blog/adaptive-request-concurrency/

https://redd.it/rbrr0y
@r_devops

Capitalization and abbreviation of technologies in Jira, Slack, etc.

Lol random thought but I'm just curious, do you guys have rules you follow for when to properly capitalize technologies like docker and kubernetes?

Because technically they're proper nouns so they should always be capitalized, just like days of the week (Monday, Tuesday, ) and the word "Internet".

But when a sentence has like a dozen capitalized words and abbreviations, it just looks weird... Like How Jaden Smith Would Capitalize Every Word on Twitter...

An example might be, "You can update the RDS DB with the AWS CLI". Or, "JIRA and Slack are updated when a GitHub PR is opened"

Even the word "DevOps" has a 33% letter capitalization rate haha

https://redd.it/rbxk53
@r_devops

A library to improve scalability of yaml

Hi everyone, hope you all doing well!


Let me assume I'm not the only one who both love and hate YAML at the same time, love it because it's human-readable, and hate it due to its lack of composability and reusability.


#### The problem


There are `tags`1 in yaml spec, which supports custom rendering of field values. In theory, you can do anything with these custom tags, so you can make yaml scalable with these tags. But in reality, seldom case there is custom tag support in existing applications. One reason could be it's simply hard due to lack of parsing library support, or just not worth it to implement such support, and another reason I can think about is these tags make yaml files look overly verbose.


But to make yaml scalable, we have to overcome such obstacles, especially when it comes to existing DevOps solutions, most of which consist of many yaml files, and we want to manage these files for all kinds of use cases.


#### My solution


I implemented `rs`2, a golang library providing easy integration of custom rendering, using its unique rendering suffix syntax or ordinary yaml tag (with special tag prefix and certain limitations).


Developers can support very flexible yaml configuration with `rs`2, and still keep their config type-checked; End-users will be able to configure the app with almost unlimited flexibility once granted a proper set of renderers implemented by developers. Please have a look at the `rs`2 if you want to know how it satisfies both developers and end-users, and also check out our task runner `dukkha`3 built with `rs`2 making YAML files Makefiles.


I wish this library could inspire new ideas around yaml, or at least can improve yaml's user experience in existing or future tools (currently limited to tools written in go). More ambitiously, I'd like to make changes happen in the existing DevOps pipelines that rely heavily on plain text templating for yaml.


What do you think about it? Do you like the rendering suffix syntax? Or do you think I'm doing it in the right direction? Leave your comments here or in github discussions.


Looking forward to hearing from you!


Thanks for your interest!


P.S.


I'm a long-time follower of this subreddit, but using teddit for privacy reasons, I learned a lot from your posts. Recently I got the idea to improve existing tools using yaml, and here it is. Fix me if I'm doing posting the wrong way.


1: https://yaml.org/spec/1.2.2/#3212-tags
2: https://github.com/arhat-dev/rs
3: https://github.com/arhat-dev/dukkha

https://redd.it/rbosz5
@r_devops

Onboarding New Engineers

Typically for the first week(s) we have the engineer

Meet with the manager for a 1-on-1 session every day for the first few weeks then scale it down
15-minute meet and greets with all the primary teammates (BA, Dev's and OPs) on first week
Have a team zoom ice-breaker game day at end of the week (everyone is remote)
We create a support ticket welcoming them to the team listing out many of the applications used and ask them to familiarize themselves with the different tools.

What does your team do to onboard new engineers?

https://redd.it/rbzxud
@r_devops

Do you terraform your application registrations in Azure AD, or is there a more intelligent way that is less work?

Hey all

I've just written a module to handle this but the amount of work involved is quite staggering for our use case.

Is there a better (Microsoft native, perhaps) method of managing app registrations and enterprise applications vs doing it all in TF?

https://redd.it/rc0pjs
@r_devops

Customer Success Engineer? Curious about those with experience in a role such as this or similar

I am currently a DevOps Cloud Engineer and looking at switching companies. A role I've been learning more about is the 'Customer Success Engineer' (post-sales role) as it utilizes my engineering background with my soft skills / communication (which is something I excel in). Has anyone made a similar jump (to or from) in their career?

Thanks in advance to everyone for your time and help, it is greatly appreciated!

https://redd.it/rc0f6d
@r_devops

Why the heck is there not a repo for Prometheus?

So annoying that I can’t just install Prometheus from a repo. Makes installing it take extra steps especially when working with ansible and you have to run several tasks to find the latest version and download/extract it etc. it seems like there’s a repo for everything else but I’ve never come across one for Prometheus.

https://redd.it/rc33xz
@r_devops

Survey on Multi/Hybrid Cloud CI/CD systems

Hello there. I am a researcher doing a study on CI/CD system in multi/hybrid cloud environments. I am trying to evaluate if there is a use case for offering multi-cloud ready CI/CD systems. Here is the survey link - https://forms.gle/dLNGSJipWxKKBfVVA. I'd highly appreciate if you can help out with answering this survey. Thanks a lot in advance.

Context

This is a research study being conducted to investigate the multi-cloud/ hybrid-cloud use-cases for continuous software delivery (CI/CD) systems.

What is Multi-Cloud

The future of infrastructure platform is multi-cloud, meaning that users will invariably use more than one type of cloud for their infrastructure needs. This could mean they use a private cloud (on-prem deployments) along with one or more public clouds (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, etc) or in some cases skip private clouds altogether and use one or more public clouds. Customers tend to avoid deploying all their workloads on the same cloud due to concerns of vendor lock-in and to protect against unfair pricing practices from being locked into one cloud platform.

CI/CD on Multi-Cloud

Given that there will be more than one cloud platform that users will use to deploy their software, it is expected that software they develop will need to be deployed/ delivered onto different cloud platforms, each with their own configuration, policies and semantics.

We are trying to understand if there is a use case to offer this CI/CD support for multiple cloud platforms and simplify user workflows that are manual today.

https://redd.it/rbm8jv
@r_devops

How often do you release to production?

I'm weighing up what I should aim for. I know very subjective, but interested to hear peoples experiences with what worked for them.

https://redd.it/rc4179
@r_devops

Automation of Pipeline Creation

Hello,

I'm a software engineer working on creating a CICD architecture for an organization with over one hundred repositories. All of our applications are hosted on AWS, primarily applications deployed through the serverless framework or fargate.

We are currently using Jenkins for CICD, but want to move away from it due to support for it going away company-wide. We want a solution in place that is self-managed.

Given the AWS centric nature of our org, I primarily explored AWS CodeBuild and CodePipeline as the means for an alternative. However, I've not been thoroughly impressed by the means to automate the process of creating pipelines. I've explored using cloudformation to script the process out, so a one time script that builds out the pipeline for our applications. Though, having boilerplate code in every repository to create the pipeline, and having someone run the script with the correct permissions seems awfully inconvenient especially during our transition over. Given that the vast majority of our repositories use the same deployment process, having this duplicated code seems unnatural and not DRY at all.

Am I missing something, or am I to ambitious to think there has to be a better way to automate this process? The boilerplate code required in each repository for jenkins is incredibly small compared to aws codebuild, where all we need to do is specify which type of deployment the application is. With CodeBuild we have to include a buildspec, the cloudformation template for the pipeline, which you could argue gives more customization for your build, however it also opens up a gateway of misuse and misconfiguration that could lead to issues that would be more difficult to debug and assist other teams with.

I'm not going to pretend I'm an expert in devops, but there has to be a more centralized and automated way of creating these pipelines. It is driving me crazy to think that this much boilerplate is needed and can't be automated in a better fashion. Is this really the approach people take using this platform? Manually creating each pipeline?

https://redd.it/rc3jkz
@r_devops

Am i a devops engineer ?

Hey ya'll. My name is Isaac, 24 years old and i'm from the Netherlands.

Currently i'm working for a secondment, and i've been employed at University of Leiden to do some workplace management by removing their old workplace, and placing a new one (new display (sometimes a dockingstation extra) keyboard, mouse)

But that's not what i want to do, i want to become a devops engineer.

Currently i can work with:

C#, Ansible, YAML, Json, Jquery, Ajax, PHP, CSS/HTML, docker (compose), and kubernetes. I can create a server in Linux, host it from on prem to the internet with a traefik reverse proxy/loadbalancing deployed. I could create a new WAN that has to be used, or configure the local WAN. I can code, script and now how to system management of Windows (xp, 7, 10 and now 10). i can create my own powershell scripts and deploy them on prem, and place my code in a local repository or github.

&#x200B;

I do some work for customers in which i automate alot of workprocesses which would be done by hand. I could maintain contact with the Dev department and Ops department, but i do not know in what degree you should also have work experience as a manager to become a devops engineer (since you're almost managing two or more teams to adopt a different work mentality) I'm a nerd for sure. I wake up with devops and go to sleep with it. There is nothing else that i would want to become in my career (and i think i'm almost there) but my problem also seems to be i do not have any certificates.

TLDR: i have around 4 years coding experience with different languages all which are used to automate or develop things. I have around 4/5 years IT system management work experience and i would like to transition to becoming a devops engineer (or maybe i can already be considered one)

I've read alot, and the only thing i do not seem to have are the following things that in my opinion hinder me to become a full fledged devops engineer:

1) never managed a development or ops team, but i do know how they operate, and i can bridge them

2) do not have any masters degree, or certificates which prove i'm a engineer

3) never worked as a devops engineer (except for some freelance projects i do for customers i get)

&#x200B;

someone i spoke with which works at google said that i'm already a devops engineer, and i just need to market myself as such. I could put up my resume, maybe that will give people more food to see what i've have done up till now (school and bussiness wise)

https://redd.it/rb0xfi
@r_devops

Just got an online internship at a local firm. Need some advice.

So its a 3 months training program, with assessments in between each month and after 3 months 2 people will be selected for the job. They gave us 5 people a login to acloudguru and directed us to follow the AWS SAA-02 course.

Everday we're supposed to email our daily progress to 3 people in the training team.

I am completely new to this sort of thing.
What i want to know is, is this the usual way of training new employees?

And am i just supposed to put something like "Chapter 7 EBS: Done" in the progress email? How is this credible progress they cant even track individual progress via acloudguru since we all have the same login.

im so confused because its all online and the only interaction i have with the company is through emails sent by HR.

https://redd.it/ravo0g
@r_devops