Where do you put your Guides?

I'm creating internal tools for the company I work for (Terraform projects, python tools, internal React pages, etc.)
My team likes to use Confluence pages, but it's a bit of dumping ground of thoughts so it's difficult to find guides quickly (Theres a backlog item! It's just extremely low priority)
Where do you keep your guides for using the tooling? Not just how it works, build stuff, maintaining it, etc.
In a separate wiki/Confluence page? In a readme in the repo? Word document in the repo? SharePoint page?

https://redd.it/10w9khf
@r_devops

Help Please! So I’m coming from a BA role but just landed an interview for DevOps Release Engineer

I’ve searched the sub but am not clear still on how to best prepare for the interview. I understand the DevOps mindset but am concerned about the technical bits.

What hard skills and/or technical talking points should I be ready for? Besides tooling i.e. Jenkins for CI/CD and K8s for deployment etc

I’ve done a little bit of SDET through internship. I know SDLC/STLC, Jira, Confluence, Selenium just rattling a few

I’m also currently reading Continuous Deployment by Jez Humble..

How can I best translate my requirements elicitation knowledge into the new role?

All constructive feedback welcome.

https://redd.it/10wb1dg
@r_devops

Dev Ops Interview Questions

https://www.interviewkickstart.com/interview-questions/devops-interview-questions

Do you guys think knowing and going over these questions would be good enough for entry-level Dev Ops role.

https://redd.it/10we5z3
@r_devops

Rebuilding my careerv (I got laid off). I could use some advice.

Hey guys,

I got laid off five months ago from a Site Reliability Engineer position. I worked heavily in incident response. My physical and mental health took a massive dive during covid, which led me to be laid off. I had to work on my health before working 12 hours a day to catch up.

I haven't had to deal with the interview process in almost eight years. I am horrible at it. I have been looking for DevOps and SRE roles, but haven't had much luck in interviews.

I have worked in IE and SRE for ten years, so I know not all hope is lost. I love my industry and want to keep at it.

I'd love some good resources and books on DevOps and some thoughts on how to build myself back up.

Here is what I have been working on.

* Wrote a Python Module that builds objects based on responses of the official MLB Stats REST API. I worked and mentored a friend of mine who is a CS major that never was able to get hired. It was a lot of fun and helped build confidence in my Python Skillset.
* AWS studies. I primarily used GCP at my last job, but really didn't get much time to develop and interface with it.
* I have been working on a project to build a Kubernetes cluster from scratch in a free-tier AWS cluster. The first part of the project was to build it from BASH scripts, and now I'm working on ansible configuration management to build it. The idea is to automate the entire deployment, so I can spin up another free tier account when I run out of resources. I also plan to do this with GCP.
* Studying and Reading books on microservices and Kubernetes certifications.

Some thoughts on what I want to begin working on soon

* Create a Docker application that utilizes my Python MLB Module, and write a deployment pipeline that deploys it to a free tier Kubernetes cluster from my ansible scripts.

I wasted some cash on some DevOps books. They just are how-to guides on how to automate certain tasks, which is great, but I can already figure that material out. I'm looking for a good book on the principles of DevOps so I can have better discussions during interviews.

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

kaniko cant copy venv to final container

I am running in to a weird issue where I can't copy a venv between the build container and the final container. I am using

COPY --from=builder /builds/virtual-enviroment/venv /project/venv

and get the error

error building image: error building stage: failed to execute command: resolving src: failed to get fileinfo for /kaniko/0/builds/virtual-enviroment/venv: lstat /kaniko/0/builds/virtual-enviroment/venv: no such file or directory

weirdly seems to work on a run where the layer does not get cached but any subsequent runs it fails with the above error. i have other COPY commands above that are working without issue


this is run as part of a gitlab-ci pipeline. I am running the latest kaniko debug executor (1.9.1) and have also tried downgrading to other versions. I have no .dockerignore file

https://redd.it/10wi3hb
@r_devops

never "rm -rf" the wrong thing again with this handy script

Since rm -rf is so dangerous, I've put together this handy script to let you preview what files will be deleted. Let me know what you think or any ways to improve it!

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

Any Log management alternative for ELK.

Hi Guys, how do quickly identify errors proactively from applications logs? Do you use any tools like ELK? We are finding it difficult to manage ELK. and looking for an alternative. Any pointers?

https://redd.it/10wam49
@r_devops

When is a "broad" skill-set too broad?

For context, I'm a Software Engineer with just 1-2 years of industry experience. The problem is that, I love everything that I pick up.
Before getting the job, I was really into Development so I learned stuff like MERN stack and .NET Core. I got decent at it. But then I got a job at a company as a fresher and they put me in the Platform Engineering team. I love the technologies I get to work with (GitHub Actions, Python Scripting, GCP, Kubernetes, etc.) And then when I'm done with my day job, I really crave working on some personal projects and I make use of every technology I know.
I feel like I'm "good" at a lot of things but not an "expert" at anything. If I was focused on a single path, I would have been way better at it.
Should I try to narrow down my interests?

https://redd.it/10we4rd
@r_devops

Valid Clickops use case?

I'm building a GUI tool for a previously headless Open Source AWS cost optimization tool I'm building.

The idea is to allow new users to 1) quickly estimate their potential savings, 2) generate the basic configuration (a bunch of Ec2 tags) that configures it and enables it on multiple existing Autoscaling groups by mass-tagging them as per the configuration done in the GUI.

For 1 I have a spreadsheet but it's error prone and a bit effort intense. 2 is totally doable in whatever IaC you may be using but it's relatively painful, error prone and time consuming.

I've been contemplating between deploying something like this in my own AWS account or the customer's account but I was concerned about the security and privacy implications, so for now it's a native desktop GUI application that you need to install and configure with access keys or existing profiles from .AWS/config. I have a MVP but it's not ready yet for widespread use.


What do you think about such a tool? Would you find it useful enough to install it as a desktop application?

What if it was not open source itself?(I'm considering keeping it proprietary as part of my monetization strategy for my OSS project, but there's no special secret sauce, it's just a mass tagging tool after all).

Thanks!

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

Terraform state

Guys, I just started digging deeper into Terraform, so please forgive me if my question is silly or dumb (and also forgive my English, not my native language)

All tutorials and beginner materials on Terraform tell you about the magical state file, which is produced after you run your main.tf file. You can even store the state file remotely in a storage account. OK, that's wonderful but all these tutorials don't mention one single thing: state file is produced in the scope of the current "terraform apply" run. I've been playing locally with Terraform and behavior is the following:

You declare a resource in your [main.tf](https://main.tf)
You run terraform apply, tfstate file is generated
You remove the resource from the [main.tf](https://main.tf) file and add another resource, run terraform apply
Terraform will destroy the former resource and provision the new one

Probably I'm the only one who thinks it's counter-intuitive, but initially I thought that state file is the source of truth and has a log structure, so whenever you create or change resources, it will just add new information. No resources destroyed, unless you explicitly ask for it. It turns out to be very different from my thoughts. Hence, the workarounds:

Keep all resources in [main.tf](https://main.tf) file and add new ones in the same file (horrible, lol)
Store as many state files as you have resources and pick them up if you need something to know about your current infrastructure(that's how it's done currently at my company)

Did I miss something? Probably you can point me in the right direction, maybe there are best practices on handling state files? Or, if this is really how Terraform behaves and you can't change it, how about the others, like Pulumi?

Thank you in advance!

https://redd.it/10w5r9y
@r_devops

Prototype review?

I'm looking for developers that are interested in reviewing a DevOps software deployment platform. Please let me know if you are interested and I can send you more info. Thanks!

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

Do you think being a DevOp engineer is a difficult job to learn for the average man?

I’ve recently been looking into this career but in all honesty, I’m not the brightest person.

https://redd.it/10vr3er
@r_devops

Persisting a config setting in /etc/ssh/sshconfig of container

We have an app that runs as a container in a VM. The app routinely SSHs into an SFTP server to download files and stuff. Anyway, we want to change a value in ssh\config of the container, particularly the ServerAliveInterval since we've been experiencing sporadic SSH connection timeout errors. Since this is a running container, that value won't persist after a restart. How can we make it persistent?

https://redd.it/10wrf9j
@r_devops

Running multiple VMs as nodes for Kubernetes cluster on a laptop

Basically the title: I have a Dell Latitude with the below specs:

* CPU: Intel Core i5-1145G7
* RAM: 16GB DDR4
* SSD: 1TB PCIe/NVMe

Is the above machine adequate to run a Kubernetes cluster with a master and two nodes for learning purposes? If so, what's the recommended configuration for each VM? I prefer full or normal Kubernetes, by the way, no weird or unusual spin-offs.

https://redd.it/10wr82j
@r_devops

How to manage all different pieces of Infrastructure in a perfect world - Production cluster

Hi Everyone,

What I'm looking out in this thread is to put up the discussion about how to manage all the different pieces of infrastructure that there is in a production ready world!

I have some experience in the devops world, however I've just came into a new job and my role basically is to automate and to lay all the infrastructure that there has been build via "clickOps" :P

I'm pretty excited with this and I think this is the most funny, enthusiastic and growth potencial, experience that someone can have in this sort of position, because you can build things from ground up, right? :)

However I found myself having tooooo much options to go, and now knowing exactly what is the right way to go!

I have some experience with terraform, terragrunt and helm and I want to leverage that. And I will need to manage many different parts of the infrastructure and basically I'm having some struggle in thinking through all the different pieces and that's why I'm here :)

Let me explain a bit the struggle in the hopes that you can help me!

I will need to setup a K8s cluster in GKE. I will do it in Terraform, Terragrunt for multi environment management.

I need to create LB's and Ingresses, which i will use maybe Helm charts for it.

Helm charts will be in a repo in Github for example.

And this is only what i thought in a bit, and i'm pretty sure that i will have way more Infrastructure to handle afterwards, so what's the best way to start in an organized way? What about the automation part of it!?

When i change something in the helm charts i don't want to run kubectl by hand. I would like to automate that process. Should i do it via Terraform integrated with Helm? or should i have Argo for example checking for github changes and deploy it automatically?

When I change something in terraform i need to apply those changes! Should i automate that? How?

Probably this is just to start the discussion as probably there are so many missing parts here, but i would like to hear your opinions about it.

Any Architectural guidance or "mental picture" would be welcome!

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

Seeking feedback from Front-End Developers (think Shark Tank)

Hi DevOps Community!

I’m helping a startup that’s building a developer tool that turns design images into front-end code. They’re looking for feedback from Front-End developers on their product vision (think Shark Tank) over a 30-Minute call. We keep you anonymous so you're not being sold to (unless you choose to expose your identity). We just ask that you provide your brutally honest feedback on the clarity & uniqueness of their pitch. You can set your rate for the engagement.

If you're open to it, please review the project details below [persona fit is a requirement to participate\]:

Description of Startup Seeking Feedback: Developer tool that turns UX designs into fully functional ReactJS, using computer vision, the same technology in self-driving cars, to render perfect code with the goal to eliminate manual HTML, CSS, and JS development to allow companies to ship code faster and cheaper.

Desired Persona:
Front-End Developer at a venture-funded UI-based SaaS organization (Series A to C) that has raised at least $1M. They actively use Figma, React JS and Material UI. [Use of Material UI is a requirement to participate in this project\]

Their environment has a minimum of 3 engineers (max 25) and an in-house or contract-based designer for software design.

Requirements to Participate: Your answers to the following questions will help the Startup ensure that it's a fit for both parties before moving forward with the call.

1. Can you please describe your responsibilities as a front-end developer at your current organization? What size is your engineering team? Please elaborate.
2. Does your company currently have a custom component library it uses to build markup? What is your biggest challenge in the front-end development pipeline to ship code? What is the scale of your UI? Please explain.
3. Do you personally write markup in your organization? If so how many hours per month do you spend writing markup? [must be using Figma, ReactJS, and Material UI to qualify for this project\]

If this is of interest please send me a dm with your responses to the above required questions, your LinkedIn profile, and your email address so I can invite you to the project.

Thanks!

https://redd.it/10vn2a2
@r_devops

What do you guys use to manage .env files?

I have worked on a lot of projects over the years. I have yet seen a good solution to managing env, secret and config. The standard is “can you send me your env file”. You might need one for dev one for stage. So many bugs, because someone updated env without telling anyone else. I made a tool for it now that manage my env I can connect it to AWS ssm and azure key vault. I’m really happy with it, but I forgot to check if any thing existed before I made my own cli. I’ll still use my baby but would be nice to see other solutions

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

Testing Terraform infra - terratest alternatives?

Hi all,

So we've got our AWS EKS etc infra in Terraform Cloud / Enterprise, and I've setup a pipeline to apply / destroy a separate ephemeral cluster similar to existing ones - just to daily test the TF code.

There are multiple states of it, and after deploy / before destroy I want to run some tests, like see if security groups actually have the ports open / closed, DNS records are correct etc etc (we have a shitton of stuff to test like that tbh with dozens of IAM roles, buckets, CF distributions and so on). Application E2E tests will be added to this pipeline later as well.

Terratest isn't an option since it doesn't work with a remote backend (at least not without some stupid hacks I guess), and it deploys / destroys infra by itself, which my pipeline already does.

I'm considering something like BATS, but maybe there are other specialized tools? Ofc I could just write some bash myself and add to that as the time goes on, but there has to be a better way.

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

GitHub Actions Manager for JetBrains IDEs

I created a JetBrains plugin to manage GitHub Actions from IntelliJ/PyCharm/Rider.

Download it here: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/19347-github-actions-manager

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

Looking to get feedback from DevOps/Engineering Professionals!

The startup I'm working with is looking for SaaS leaders like you to provide feedback on a new automated solution they are building for the DevOps/engineering community. The goal is to enable SaaS companies to quickly automate software deployments to the cloud using a visual interface, saving users time by not having to create 1,000+ lines of configurations. This solution is being developed for companies that don’t have a large engineering team.

We want to show you a prototype within the next couple of weeks. This will take less than an hour. Please book here: https://calendly.com/d/zvr-39k-95x/opscanvas-prototype-review 

Thank you for your time in advance.

https://redd.it/10vl52p
@r_devops

Any government GS employees that are DevOps? How's work/life balance?

A friend of mine is a GS13 and the way he explained it is that all he does is oversee architectural meetings with his team and contractors. Basically building out, deploy, and provide support for cloud environments (mainly Azure). Says he gets to telework but comes in sometimes out of boredom. Has a set schedule. The contractors handle all the off hours support. He asked me to apply for a role, but I'm hesitant. I make WAY more in my current role in the private sector. It'll essentially be a pay downgrade, but great benefits and a pension. Was wondering if any federal employees can chime in that worked both public/private sectors? Is a GS position worth it with even with less pay?

https://redd.it/10x1vrq
@r_devops