Do you have a strategy for dealing with 100s of alerts/rules?

Started a new job recently and their alerting seems a bit of a mess. We have default alerts enabled in tools like Datadog and Lacework, monitoring a few dozen AWS and GCP accounts and it seems like a little bit of a mess.



Hoping for some help/advice on how you guys have approached the high level strategy around alerting. I think it will start with an audit of what rules are enabled and where (there seems to be some overlap).


Maybe categorising alerts at a high level and churning through them to assess whether its useful?

https://redd.it/1em6kf3
@r_devops

Side Projects to Deepen My Knowledge

Hello everyone,


I'm currently studying computer sciene and I'm most interested in DevOps. So far I've learned and used various tools and technologies such as K8s, Terraform, Ansible, using AWS, monitoring solutions, CI/CD, GitOps tools and some programming languages (recently picked up Go aswell).

I'm now interested in creating a side project to deepen my knowledge in the mentioned things above and also acquire new skills.
Do you have any ideas or suggestions for a project?


Thanks for reading. Suggestions are appreciated!

https://redd.it/1em7gca
@r_devops

Azure DevOps Server pre-production upgrade - Two machines in application tiers?

Hi. I have done pre-production upgrade of Azure DevOps Server 2020 to a new Windows Server to Azure DevOps Server 2022. The new Windows Server (new DevOps Server) is isolated on network level. I changed IDs as the MS documentation states. I deployed (upgraded) new DevOps Server with pre-production option. Everything was successfull, everything is working, no errors during deployment, no errors in event viewer.

However there is one thing... When I open Azure DevOps Server Administration Console on the new Windows Server (new DevOps Server) I see two servers in Application Tiers part. The first is the new Windows Server with version Azure DevOps Server 2022. The second is the actual production Windows Server with version Azure DevOps Server 2020. Why? It doesn't make sense to me. Does this view has something to do with a fact that I have done pre-production upgrade? Because no network connection is even available between these two servers (I see it in netstat). Why is the actual production machine in application tiers???

https://redd.it/1em97md
@r_devops

Do phrases "lower environments" and "pre-production environments" refer to the same thing?

Somehow, I have not come across the term "lower environment" earlier in my career, and now I'm struggling to understand what it means and what are its origins.

Is it safe to say that anything apart from production and environments that stand by for production (canaries?) are "upper environments", whereas local development, CI environments, and test environments are all "lower environments" a.k.a. "pre-production environments"?

Also, which of these categories does staging fit in?

Bonus points for any knowledge of how this lower/upper distinction came about historically.

Thanks.

https://redd.it/1em9pxg
@r_devops

How much do you know about the applications you maintain ?

Hey all

Junior engineer here in a devops role ( read junior sysadmin that also deals with miscellaneous requests related to our application)

Was just curious how well do you guys know the applications you help develop as in our company i’ve found we are quite detached from a lot of the aspects of the development,

I’ll sometimes be dragged into calls and feel very useless as when debugging an issue if it’s not infrastructure , networking or pipeline related I won’t have much to offer

I’m currently learning to code for the past few months as feel this is a major gap in my skills

What are your responsibilities in your role ?

https://redd.it/1embl37
@r_devops

What to learn first? AWS or Terraform

I bought two courses from KodeKloud to learn about AWS and how can I use Terraform with AWS

While I have little experience in AWS, I must still learn a lot to tell myself that I can manage some tasks in an AWS environment

And with Terraform I have 0 experience, both professional and as a student.

What would you choose to learn first?

Thanks!

https://redd.it/1emdrhc
@r_devops

Interview advice

I seem to be having a harder time in interviews now than I was a year or two ago. And I don’t really understand it. I’m far better at my job than I was in 2021 or 2022 and I was getting tons of interviews back then and it was going really well. I got some really decent offers. But I got promoted at my job and chose to stay for less money because I was comfortable here. Now I’m mostly self taught. I took a code bootcamp during the pandemic. Got hammered on an interview on system architecture questions and it went so badly that I took some udemy courses about AWS and studied really hard and then I interviewed for a cloud engineer role at a company that had just started building environments in AWS, I’d been playing with the AWS CDK and making my own sandbox environments. It was an older company and most of the people had been there for 10+ years and were doing things in very manual, very backwards ways. And this is a single tenant SaaS product with 5,000 plus servers. I actually knew a lot more about AWS than they did. So they hired me. I was criminally underpaid. Like $50k. But they’d been hiring entry level IT people. I’m up to $80k plus bonuses and equity which is a little better. But I’m doing DevOps work in addition to CloudOps work. They keep telling me i have a raise and promotion coming but cannot right now due to budget constraints related to higher interest rates and slowing growth. Which is I why I’m looking for something new.

So I came on, I knew no powershell, no bash, no python, just JavaScript, but I started automating everything. Kind of embarrassing but first I built a web app that triggered simple tasks. I kept researching things. I built more tools. I discovered SSM automations. I learned powershell. I started using terraform to manage New Relic alerts. Then I was tasked with provisioning new SMTP servers and I used ansible to configure them. I started writing self healing lambdas that would start stopped services and perform simple troubleshooting steps based on the alert that was received and I managed them with terraform. I taught the team git. I routinely hold training sessions. I implemented code reviews. I’ve got this whole team of IT people working as engineers now. We just migrated 3500 servers to AWS. I did not come up with the plan to migrate and I think we did it in the most difficult and painful way possible, but I pulled it off. I worked with consultants from AWS to set up the new VPC, the subnets, the network routes, the domain. Set it all up in terraform. I handled all the Active Directory stuff. I didn’t even know what Active Directory was until I started working here. I configured all the shared services, wrote the SSM docs that run during migration to update config files to point at the needed services in the new VPC.

I’ve done all this stuff but I get hammered in interviews over basically trivia. I don’t know the right terms for things or I struggle to explain how to do things without documentation right in front of me. But I know exactly where to look. I remember more or less what to do I just can’t speak to it in detail off the top of my head without a reference. And I get nervous so a lot of the things I do know escape me. Or like I’ll get asked a question and I say I don’t know and I realize I actually did know. I was just caught off guard because I wasn’t familiar with how the question was being asked. But my work should speak for itself. Interviews where I’m asked to whiteboard a solution or do a code challenge go significantly better for me than when I’m just getting drilled with DevOps trivia. It’s like I have knowledge and understanding of this stuff I just don’t have the formal education. I can explain it in code or in a diagram but putting it into the proper words is hard for me. I don’t understand though because before I was getting offers and now I’m barely making it past the phone screen. And I’m a much better engineer than I was two years ago. And this week I had three jobs I was interviewing for all tell me they decided not to fill the position at

all. I’m very frustrated. I’ve probably applied to 100 jobs. 20 phone screens. Maybe 8 interviews no offers. 2 years ago it was like 30 jobs, 10 phone screens , 7 interviews, 3 offers.

https://redd.it/1emdppb
@r_devops

Transitioning to DevOps - Seeking Advice and Validation

Hi everyone,

I'm a System Engineer with 5-6 years of experience, starting my career in 1st and 2nd line support. I spent about 3-4 years focused on support roles and various projects before moving into a Junior System Engineer role, which was essentially still support but with greater access to servers, O365 tenants, Azure, firewalls, etc.

Later, I transitioned to freelancing and worked as a System Engineer at an international company. My responsibilities included server management, patch management, some networking, project management, IAM, and L3 support.

Recently, I delved into SCCM and Intune, becoming part of a team dedicated to SCCM and Intune management. We handled everything possible in SCCM or Intune except setting up the environment. After 10 months, I took on a new project at a major client where my primary role was Mobile Device Management and L3 support.

The client is high-level and has multiple ongoing projects, one of which was deploying Azure Virtual Desktop using Infrastructure as Code (IaC). This project was handed to me because I had previously built AVD using the Azure Portal. Initially, I struggled to understand the IaC approach. I reviewed the code built by the previous engineer and started building everything from scratch in a test environment using IaC tools like Terraform, Ansible, and GitLab.

In just 4 weeks, I learned a lot. I successfully created resources like resource groups, vnets, subnets, network settings, workspaces, virtual machines, key vaults, Azure Image Gallery deployments, storage accounts, fslogix, etc. – basically everything related to Azure Virtual Desktop.

Surprisingly, I found that I really enjoy working with Terraform and Ansible. Although I used to dislike software engineering, this blend of coding and cloud engineering has been incredibly engaging. I've been so absorbed that I almost forgot about the world outside.

Now, I'm wondering if this path aligns with DevOps. If I know Azure, Terraform, Ansible, Python, Linux, and dive into CI/CD pipelines and Docker, am I on the right track to get into DevOps?

Looking forward to your insight.



https://redd.it/1emh9qr
@r_devops

I declined a PR because the developer is using a different commenting format from the rest of the code. Is this being to critical?

Example..

Format throughout codebase..

"""

This function does xyz

param: This is a param that accepts a string

returns: bool

"""

Format in PR..

' ' ' This function does xyz ' ' '


fuck them params. we dont need to describe them

lol

https://redd.it/1emixom
@r_devops

I am in Application/production support role with 1 year of experience , how can i transition to Devops role. if possible please let me know the path.

I am in Application/production support role with 1 year of experience , how can i transition to Devops role. if possible please let me know the path. I have basic exp of linux and windows and sql etc but i lack depth in all above mention tech and i am pretty confuse to choose between devops and development . If i want to do develoment then i have to study all things from scratch .

https://redd.it/1emkve6
@r_devops

Shall i be a devops engineer ?

I hope you guys give me the time to read this cause im having hard days of overthinking because of it.
I'm a network engineering student ( i study networks, Telecom engineering, some development and a lot of math)
I see myself as a web developer and i am currently learning that and improving myself . However everytime i see articles ,CEO and professors talking about AI and how it will reduce the need for developers. This is constantly stressing me and make unfocused on learning but always searching if i ll find a job when i graduate or not on backend dev.
Lately i have asking myself about devops i saw a lot of things in it that made me think about learning it like:
I am a network engineering student so it's more correlated with my studies.
It's highly payed

I'm not sure but i believe it's not very
saturated with people because it's not easy as web dev to get to market.

I thinks that AI can't replace it (correct me in this)

If i switch to learning Devops shall i be learning backend too?
Please tell me ur opinion.

https://redd.it/1emm6n0
@r_devops

Automation Friendly Find and Replace for Excel (xlsx) files

While struggling with D365 Operations and Finance Testing automation ( the testing tool RSAT uses xlsx files for parameters) I ended up putting together a little C# console app that uses the OpenXML library to find and replace strings in a non destructive manner (most other libraries caused formatting/file corruption).

I made it so its a self-contained, cross platform, single executable, so its easy to add into pipelines:
dkopec/excel-find-replace: A simple cli program to find and replace values in excel xlsx files. (github.com)

Hopefully it comes in handy for someone else.

Happy for feedback and suggestions.

https://redd.it/1emsqin
@r_devops

deploying rails apps using devops workflows

We have a develop managing a ruby on rails app that they want to deploy from their laptop directly to production using capistrano. this isn't how we manage our other apps but frankly we don't know enough about ruby on rails

there has to be a better way.

what's the best way to do this?

https://redd.it/1emv6at
@r_devops

Hiring Freelance Web Developer

Hi guys, we have added a new job on our platform, if you are looking for a job of Freelance Web Developer please check the job link below.



Role - Freelance Web Developer (Remote, Part-Time)



Job Link - https://devloprr.com/jobs#230

https://redd.it/1emyl48
@r_devops

Degree vs AWS Certs for SRE/ Security Engineer Progression?

What would be more ideal for time commitment?

Focusing on finishing a CS from WGU or getting 2 AWS Certs?

https://redd.it/1en0dut
@r_devops

Devops at AWS Shoreditch UK - a suit overkill?

I've been offered a DevOps role at the Shoreditch offices in the UK. When I visited previously, most people I saw wore tech-bro clothing (polo shirt, chinos, loafers). I usually wear a suit to the office, so not sure if I'll stick out like a sore thumb wearing one here?

https://redd.it/1en1f42
@r_devops

Triage bot summary issue in project - GitLab EE.

Hello,

I'm running into something I don't fully understand at the moment and I hope someone can clear it up for me. I think it has to do with best practices, the gitlab repository doesn't clear it up for me or perhaps I'm simply blind.

This is my goal:

Check all projects within a main group "groupname" (or that the token has access to) and create an issue with a summary. I want it to always create a summary in a specific project called "triage-ops", within that "groupname"


This how i've set it up now:

groupname/subgroupname/triage-ops > .triage-policies.yml and .gitlab-ci.yml are in this project.


Within .gitlab-ci.yml I have the following pipeline:

policy:run:
image: ruby:latest
stage: run
script:
- gem install gitlab-triage
- gitlab-triage --token $APITOKENTRIAGE --source projects --source-id groupname/subgroupname/triage-ops --host-url https://domain.com --debug
when: manual
except:
- schedules



The above works fine and it checks the specific project I've mentioned, and also creates an issue there.

So far so good.

I also know that I can reach my actual goal of checking all the issues in the projects by using

- gitlab-triage --token $API_TOKEN_TRIAGE --source groups --source-id groupname --host-url https://domain.com --debug

But when I do that, and run the summary, it always tries to create an issue within "groupname" but it ofcourse can't, because that's a group, not a project.

How would I, in this situation make it so that it does indeed write to a repository I want? Or is this simply not possible to check everything


Or, would I be forced to check everything specifically for the project, and then create a summary within that project, which means I need to run several jobs?


I'm kind of missing the best practice here I think.








https://redd.it/1en2mi2
@r_devops

Could we talk about IBM acquiring Hashicorp for a moment?

So, although it’s been about four months since IBM announced their plans to acquire Hashicorp, I feel like I have seen comparably few posts/mentions of this.

What does your future for IaS look like? Are you going to continue using Terraform etc. with the new licensing model, or are you moving to either open-source solutions like OpenTofu or the complete opposite direction like Bicep?

I feel like we are standing in the middle of a great upheaval and it’s getting really tiring to talk to companies that ask “Ah, so you have NOT worked with X?” when discussing which tools one has experience with.

https://redd.it/1en5mm6
@r_devops

Apono.io is driving a fake marketing campaing on Reddit with fake posts and comments. They are trying to play up their own service while badmouthing alternatives. Here is the evidence:

**TL;DR:** Apono is creating fake posts with fake user review comments, who get vote manipulated, then end up on google, also shit on competitors and block me in an attempt to silence alternatives/critique.

Hi r/devops, I've already commented on a few of their posts and wrote a longer linkedin post on the topics. Feel free to read the full story there:

- [https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/1elp829/db_access_and_all_night_pings/lguk4qs/](https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/1elp829/db_access_and_all_night_pings/lguk4qs/)
- [Linkedin Post](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jaschabeste_would-you-buy-fake-votes-fake-reviews-and-activity-7226985915125010433-oNqX)

But there is no better place to call them out than on the very communities that they are trying to manipulate, is there?

**Who is Apono.io even?**

Apono.io is a cybersecurity, privileged access management software. That is used to allow developers and other members of an organization, to access restricted resources like databases, servers, etc. at least this is what I got from their web page, correct me if I am wrong.

The only reason I noticed what they are doing is because I tried myself founding a company in a similar space and ended up open-sourcing it. But this isn't a self promotion post, look into my post history if you're interested.

**What are they doing?**

Apono is systematically creating posts on various subreddits where they post a problem statement in on way or another and then comment with another account how Apono was the best solution for a person. Problem is: Neither the original Account, nor the user responding are actually real. Both of them are usually bought accounts with minimal relevant post history. And they never answer anything else, often aren't even used again after this usage.

These threads are also heavily vote manipulated on the thread from wednesday, my comment suggesting my open-source tool went from +6 votes to -4 within half an hour (now it's even at -8 but this could also be the hivemind).

**Why would they do this?**

Developer/Tech People marketing is notoriously difficult. Engineers are well known to be more or less immune to Ads, and hang up on Sales calls. Instead we often rely on social proof (recommendations by friends and colleagues) or user reviews on what we think are somewhat neutral platforms like reddit, hackernews and Github. Additionally Reddit has been ranking very highly on Google since about one year so if you create a reddit post "Alternative to xyz" and the first comment is your tool, this can drive a lot of traffic to your website for cheap.

**Examples**

| Account | Post/Reply | Blocked u/eng_jascha? | Note |
| :--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | :--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | :----------------------- | :-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| [https://www.reddit.com/user/MalachiHauck/](https://www.reddit.com/user/MalachiHauck/) | [https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/14xerxk/seeking_alternatives_to_stongdm/](https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/14xerxk/seeking_alternatives_to_stongdm/) | No | |
|

[https://www.reddit.com/user/Canisitwithyou1/](https://www.reddit.com/user/Canisitwithyou1/) | [https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/14xerxk/comment/jrmxzoh](https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/14xerxk/comment/jrmxzoh) | No | |
| [https://www.reddit.com/user/donasapertumz96/](https://www.reddit.com/user/donasapertumz96/) | [https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/1elp829/db_access_and_all_night_pings/](https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/1elp829/db_access_and_all_night_pings/) | Yes | |
| [https://www.reddit.com/user/James_Methew_678/](https://www.reddit.com/user/James_Methew_678/) | [https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/1elp829/comment/lguuuqw/](https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/1elp829/comment/lguuuqw/) | No (but u/SergeantAskir) | |
| [https://www.reddit.com/user/Anassilva](https://www.reddit.com/user/Anassilva) | [https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/1dpkvlq/alternative_to_strongdm/lakopv5/](https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/1dpkvlq/alternative_to_strongdm/lakopv5/) | Yes | StrongDM CEO reply on double rates |
| [https://www.reddit.com/user/DanielWalker12/](https://www.reddit.com/user/DanielWalker12/) | [https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/1dpkvlq/alternative_to_strongdm/](https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/1dpkvlq/alternative_to_strongdm/) | Account suspended | |
| [https://www.reddit.com/user/ehlinkhadif/](https://www.reddit.com/user/ehlinkhadif/) | [https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/1b2gtyt/unifying_access_control_across_cloud_providers/](https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/1b2gtyt/unifying_access_control_across_cloud_providers/) | Yes | |
| [https://www.reddit.com/user/ruhagarvan2/](https://www.reddit.com/user/ruhagarvan2/) | [https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/1b2gtyt/comment/ksnlu4i/](https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/1b2gtyt/comment/ksnlu4i/) | Yes | |
| [https://www.reddit.com/user/alexfoot420/](https://www.reddit.com/user/alexfoot420/) | [https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/18gg1s4/looking_for_alternatives_to_strongdm/](https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/18gg1s4/looking_for_alternatives_to_strongdm/) | No | |
| [https://www.reddit.com/user/plabon353/](https://www.reddit.com/user/plabon353/) | [https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/18gg1s4/comment/kd0e79t/](https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/18gg1s4/comment/kd0e79t/) | No | |
| [https://www.reddit.com/user/bindradugow/](https://www.reddit.com/user/bindradugow/) |