Azure DevOps deployment agent - deployments failing when registering the agent with auto-deploy tag

Hi all,

I am running into a problem where we auto-deploy code to newly registered agents in deployment groups via a 'Deploy' tag. But when new agents come online, the deployments trigger immediately, without waiting for the agent to actually be ready.

Is there a way to delay this action so that the deployments can happen successfully upon new agent registration? My alternative is to somehow hack together a bunch of ADO API endpoints to re-do the deployments to just that agent, but that's going to hurt my brain.

https://redd.it/108kzyj
@r_devops

What device to choose

Hi there,

I'm in a weird situation where i can choose between several devices for my job. I have the following choices:

1 - Macbook pro 13 M2 which work pays for.
2 - BYOD (and they pay me a certain amount of money until it's paid off) and buy my own and i'm kind of interested in a Surface device, primarily the surface pro for the notetaking stuff.

I'm going to use the following tools: Kubectl, AWS CLI, Azure CLI, Docker, Terraform, Powershell, Visual Studio Code so yea .. mainly DevOps stuff haha.

I've only used x86 macbooks so i'm familiar with the new ARM chipset and how it works with all these tools but according to my own research most of the tools should work just fine. But seeing as i've mostly coded stuff on Windows laptops and i do like the notetaking capabilities on the Surface Pro and the fact that it supports multiple displays out of the box which the macbook doesn't ( i know it can via certain docking stations) .. i'm just not sure what to do to be honest.

As far as i know, the workload on the local machine won't be that high seeing as everything is mostly put in pipelines and run from there so it's just editing code locally and push it to repo's and such.

What would you guys do/pick?

Thanks!

https://redd.it/108bgtp
@r_devops

Looking to set up azure virtual environment on Linux

Hi All,
We have an AKS setup done for our Kubernetes cluster and I want to know if there is a way where I can set up an azure virtual environment on a linux box to access this AKS.
Meaning, like as we have python virtual environment, we source the virtual environment and we can use the packages of that python version, so I am looking for something along those lines.

So far I haven’t found anything and would appreciate the help/pointers to get started.

https://redd.it/108ae0r
@r_devops

Advise for engineers wanting to 'make it'

Not specifically DevOps related (I posted this in r/python also) but thought this as solid and concise a set of tips I could give people early into their devops career (as I wish I'd used it for my own career in SRE & SWE). Hope it can help some of you.
In this article, I share the advice I wish I had been given when I was starting out in my career. From understanding what you want and how to get it to demonstrating your value to your employer, these tips can help you set yourself up for success in the tech industry. Check it out and let me know what you think! \#CareerAdvice \#TechIndustry \#SuccessTips


https://www.petermcconnell.com/posts/advise\_to\_engineers/

https://redd.it/1088vq2
@r_devops

https://twitter.com/ITRevBooks/status/1612841435958738945?t=qFSomKuncToew-IjgD5cXA&s=19

The OG devops book "The Phoenix project" is available for free for a limited time. Go and get your copy before time runs out! Buy the book here

https://redd.it/108olp5
@r_devops

what's the difference?

A recruiter is considering me for a job role as an IT Systems Specialist but I mostly work as a Cloud Engineer/DevOps in AWS with 2 YOE. It's my first time hearing this title btw.

How different are the roles or how similar are they?

As part of the JD I am expected to know building RESTFUL APIs, deploying CICD tools, managing both Linux and Windows servers in GCP while also utilizing SAAS apps such as Google Workspace, Microsoft 365 and Sophos.

https://redd.it/108du01
@r_devops

Finding a DevOps Part Time Job

Hey everyone,


I was wondering if anyone had any experience getting a part time DevOps jobs. I want to do something outside my regular job, get paid for it, and get experience with a start up so I thought a part time job might be awesome. I am however still pretty new to DevOps but getting a lot of experience at my current company.


Any Advice?

https://redd.it/1085qyq
@r_devops

I see these consultants offering “Kubernetes for startups” packages, which is wrong! If you don't routinely need to spin up and configure new containers, you don’t need Kubernetes. That pool of Terraform step functions could probably have been built more quickly & easily as a plain old API

Likewise, if you’re not working at the FAANG scale, you probably don’t need FAANG-scale tooling to get your job done.    https://sprkl.dev/37-tips-for-improving-productivity-in-software-development-teams/

https://redd.it/10d9j2j
@r_devops

Essentials to getting started in AWS?

I already know Linux and I want to learn AWS, but I don't want to commit that much time to it yet as im already learning Python. However I would like to at least get up and running with it... I.e. maybe spin up a few cloud instances.. What would you say is the most essential information I should know in order to do that?

https://redd.it/10d9wjb
@r_devops

As the sole web developer in an enterprise, I was tasked with building a web app to view CSV files of a manufacturing apparatus. How do I deploy this if our entire stack is on-premise SAP?

Two weks ago I made a thread in r/cscareerquestions about conving my company to try things the web way(i.e. no SAP wix-likes) as a new web hire in a SAP department.

Wouldn't you know, but I have made some headway (I feel like a Catholic missionary lol). I need to make a simple GUI where manufacturing engineers can browse CSV files that are generated on a daily basis.

I can google everything so I'm not too worried about the "build" part. But the "deploy" worries me. Everything here runs on SAP, which is basically 80% SaaS 20% PaaS. At the very least I need Vercel for the client/backend and something like Atlas for the persistence.

Needless to say, we don't work with these technolgies or their equivalents. I assume deploying things on the enterpise is different than just paying 5$ for a DO droplet. I assume getting it all to work would be a mix of politics and some guidance from internet strangers.

Some caveats

1. No I can't "run and look for a different job". Might as well make the best of it and get some experience while at it.
2. Yes it's obvious a DevOps engineer should handle the deployment.
3. Yes in a perfect world a Senior Dev should hold my hand and a Team Lead should caress my cheeks as he whispers words of wisdom and VScode snippets in my ears. We don't live in a perfect world and I don't have onboarding. Making the best of it.
4. I'm not being a JS hipster - our SAP workflow absolutely cannot satisfy the business requirements. The senior ABAP engineer suffered for 3 months trying to build a simple form app with SAP Drag N Drop tools like Neptune. Web is the way to go.
5. Closest thing to DevOps are sysadmins. I've already asked and they are not familiar with IaaS or PaaS. Only SAP and windows.

Thoughts?

https://redd.it/10dboli
@r_devops

The UI is not about ClickOps

This is going to be a controversial opinion but I want to make the argument that the UI is not just there to serve ClickOps.

I mention this because I continuously see a lot of derision towards the UI every time someone mentions it in this subreddit, often dismissing it as ClickOps nonsense.

Don't get me wrong, I know where this comes from and I am the kind of guy who will spend two hours to automate a five minute task, the underlying sentitement is in the right place but to completely dismiss the UI as just ClickOps is short sighted.

There are three areas where a UI is VERY helpful:

1. As a didactic tool - to teach you how to use the product.
2. Observability.
3. Aiding you to create a conceptual model of a product (How everything fits together)

If you are new to any tool, the UI helps A LOT to help you understand what the tool does, how it does it and how everything is organized. This is far more taxing for a user to do with code, CLI tools and documentation than with a well designed UI.

If you have been using the tool for a very long time, a well designed UI can help you find features and commands to do the job in code. For example GCP lets you output the action seen on screen with the CLI and API calls, which can be used to help you do the job easier in code. Much easier than having to peruse documentation for flags and features.

Creating a conceptual model of a new complex tool or platform is hard as a new user, for example knowing how things connect together and the relationship between items and products, an UI can help a lot with this... also it can often show when the underlying design of the tool is a confusing mess or not.

Finally the UI is a chance to provide observability features without having to type commands to get logs, stats, etc.

Anyway, my point is not to glorify ClickOps, we all know it's mostly a bad approach, I am simply saying that a well designed UI is very useful, and it shouldn't looked down upon as just ClickOps.

https://redd.it/10dfwgj
@r_devops

Jailer, a universal database tool.

# Jailer Database Tools.

Jailer is a tool for database subsetting and relational data browsing.

It creates small slices from your database and lets you navigate through your database following the relationships.Ideal for creating small samples of test data or for local problem analysis with relevant production data.

The Subsetter creates small slices from your database (consistent and reverentially intact) as SQL (topologically sorted), DbUnit records or XML. Ideal for creating small samples of test data or for local problem analysis with relevant production data.

The Data Browser lets you navigate through your database following the relationships (foreign key-based or user-defined) between tables.

# Features

Exports consistent and reverentially intact row-sets from your productive database and imports the data into your development and test environment.

Improves database performance by removing and archiving obsolete data without violating integrity.

Generates topologically sorted SQL-DML, hierarchically structured XML and DbUnit datasets.

Data Browsing. Navigate bidirectionally through the database by following foreign-key-based or user-defined relationships.

SQL Console with code completion, syntax highlighting and database metadata visualization.

A demo database is included with which you can get a first impression without any configuration effort.

https://redd.it/10dezsn
@r_devops

How to organize credentials of so many tools?

I work as a senior software engineer in a company that uses k8s daily. We have many components that requires password, like grafana, dev/prod machines, cloud provider accs, vpn, cluster config, etc.

I would like to know what should be an efficient effective way to organize all those credentials so that I dont need to go through all the slack conversations to find the message that the Devop guy send me the username and password?

https://redd.it/10dhqeu
@r_devops

VPS hosting provider recommendation

Hi! I am thinking moving from digital ocean droplet VM which costs me $56 prt month pre tax for 4 cpu ( dedicated chip ) and 8 ram. I am thinking about cheaper provider and probably increase RAM to 12-16 GB. Any recommendations?

https://redd.it/10dq9u3
@r_devops

Send physical mail using Terraform (terraform-provider-mailform)

Hey folks! You may remember some of my posts. I made the mcbroken Terraform provider and the Grafana dashboard to track Elon Musk's jet :D. Well I have another stupid project to share. I thought it would be hilarious to be able to send physical mail using Terraform so I built a Terraform provider for https://mailform.io


I hope you all find it as funny as do. Enjoy!


https://github.com/circa10a/terraform-provider-mailform

https://redd.it/10dtvno
@r_devops

IaC management at large organizations?

Wanted to get a discussion going and some perspective on how large companies manage and organize their IaC. For example, are all teams required to use the same types of tools (Terraform vs CDK or ECS vs k8s) or are individual teams allowed to pick and choose the tools that fit their needs. How do you ensure a tool that is picked is well supported within the company, etc.

I find it challenging and unwieldy getting teams all aligned on architecture and tooling as orgs expand and grow to be very large. Curious if anyone else deals with this or has experience with getting everyone on the same page.

https://redd.it/10dfu13
@r_devops

General Company Backend Setup

I just want to become more familiar with how company backend's work(in a very general sense). Can you guys tell me if I have anything glaringly wrong?

You have 1 developer team who develop the products by writing code.(these are your typical programmers)

You have 1 platform team(devops) that takes care of the CI/CD pipeline in which the developer team uses for their products. This team also takes care of provisioning and configuring the deployment environments used by the developer teams products(i.e. qa, staging, production).

​

However, since the platform team also writes code in order to provision and configure the environments(via tools like Terraform and Chef), the platform team also uses CI with tools like jenkins/bamboo. However, the platform does not use the CD part of CI/CD since there is nothing to deploy. They are just writing Terraform or Chef code.

Did I get the general gist correct, or am I misunderstanding how DevOps generally works?

https://redd.it/10dztmf
@r_devops

tgenv is dead, long live tgenv!

For any current or former tgenv users out there, just letting you know that while the OG project (cunymatthieu/tgenv) appears to have been abandoned for a couple of years now, it has recently
been forked and revived at tgenv/tgenv for ongoing maintenance and improvement.

Most of the issues and pull requests opened against the original have been resolved and merged in the fork.

https://redd.it/10drh8y
@r_devops

Is the ultimate endpoint of devops a homebrewed web app?

Warning: Incoherent train of thought ahead.

So I'm learning as best I can terraform and ansible and how they relate to app platforms.

No matter what it seems like there isn't a dev ops build pipeline going from code push through to deploy and config. Are you supposed to write up a bunch of github actions to handle this for you?

It seems like you would need someone internal to your organization make a web app that handles the github hooks, has terraform, docker repo, and ansible on it - and then you have some custom web forms that show the state of your apps - what is their build status - metadata. Then you have a page that has buttons on it

​

* "stand up infrastructure" (specify which db snapshot to use)
* "tear down infrastructure"
* "deploy artifact to blue",
* "deploy artifact to green",
* "point balance at blue or green"
* migrate database
* holding feature flag files to pass to built apps? - I'm sure there's some web app that handles feature flags - but would you want to depend on it? What if it goes down?

Then the manual parts would be updating the terraform, ansible, and custom scripts to do what's needed. The only thing that would have to be manually set up would be this devops orchestration tool server.

I just don't currently see how all the tools we have are tied together without someone writing an app.

I don't even want to bring kubernetes or microservices into this either. I'm just thinking of all the parts that would go into creating a build tool pipeline even WITH all the advanced tools we have today.

https://redd.it/10e0xua
@r_devops

qemu-img resize & virt-customize // cloudinit FS size

Hello,

These last days I try to automate the creation of my labs (vms) with cloud images (debian, ubuntu, fedora)

And I have a problem with

With :

Fedora 36

Debian 12

Debian 9

Ubuntu 22-04

Ubuntu 20-04

I DL my base images(cloud provider images) that I copy and resize (qemu-img resize +10G)

Which works very well for Debian 10 and 11, because when I run "df -h" I see 12\~go but not in other distributions.

I use

qemu-img resize & virt-customize

To get around the problem I add to virt-customize

\--firstboot-command "growpart /dev/vda 1 -u auto"

\--firstboot-command "resize2fs /dev/vda1"


​

https://redd.it/10dtsnp
@r_devops

Free server to deploy api backend and job writen in Node.js

Free server to deploy a node.js api backend and a node.js job/worker that runs every week possibly 100 monthly users

https://redd.it/10e148t
@r_devops