Azure dashboards

all,

Is it possible to display list of VM's matching with a criteria on a dashboard? Criteria could be a matching tag.

https://redd.it/euthew
@r_devops

What administrative process is involved when your company decides on adopting a new tool or tech?

I'm sure answers will vary. Some companies are very ad hoc, some have a team that considers new tools. How does yours operate?

https://redd.it/eur36z
@r_devops

When is a DevOps Engineer's day?

Hi y'all!

Some days ago I was interested this little question. Because the developers have their professional day as well as sysadmins, web-developers and QA-engineers. but nowhere I found any mention of DevOps Engineer's day.

Does somebody know when we may celebrate this day?

https://redd.it/ev8yyk
@r_devops

Whats wrong with Jenkins?

I've been learning up on the various CI/CD tools (there are so many!) and every discussion I see on here, people are avoiding Jenkins. I'm I big fan of the CloudBees podcast, but haven't tried Jenkins yet myself.

Currently I'm using CircleCI, GCP Cloud Build, and AWS CodePipeline. I'm also just starting a Travis CI experiment.

Whats wrong with Jenkins?
Is it worth learning for my future projects?
**Is it worth learning for my career progression if I want to job hunt?**

https://redd.it/ev9gtx
@r_devops

Learning Vim macros in 4 minutes read

Hi everyone, I published a short blog post explaining Vim macros which I think are essential to any user. I would love any kind of feedback!
[https://dev.to/prodopsio/unleash-the-power-of-vim-macros-in-4-minutes-35a8](https://dev.to/prodopsio/unleash-the-power-of-vim-macros-in-4-minutes-35a8)

https://redd.it/ev86ny
@r_devops

Build logs and secrets

How do you prevent a commit someone made causing secrets in a CI system getting leaked to build logs.

Most CI systems have a way for you to describe the CI steps within the repo. This can be as simple as someone creating a PR with the following:


commands:
description: "This is needed to run the build"
steps:
- run: python -c \"import os; print(os.environ['SUPER_SECRET'])"


Some CI systems know to filter build logs for secrets they are aware of but this doesn't particularly prevent someone from exfiltrating it.

commands:
description: "Save this important secret so I don't lose it"
steps:
- run: ./http_exfiltrate_secret.sh


There appears to be different strategies and tactics for preventing this, but I'm wondering what strategies there are if you have a monorepo/ consolidated repo where both the CI and the application are described.

https://redd.it/ev7jao
@r_devops

ML for Distributed Systems: Conceptual Background and Metrics

I'm putting together a [series of posts](https://medium.com/@mattstump/modeling-complex-systems-part-1-distributions-850d3591b8f8) that go through the step by step process in building machine learning models that out perform humans in performing root cause analysis and performance tuning. The first post covers how humans perform the task as a way to set the stage for how to automate the process.

https://redd.it/evcpwv
@r_devops

Terraform + Ansible/Chef/Puppet/Saltstack

So I am alone in deciding and implementing our IaC techstack and my company.

Terraform is what I've used for about a year, but now I need to figure out what Configuration tool that meshes best with Terraform.

Do you guys have any experience with any of them? Got any cool links for best practices?

Cheers!

https://redd.it/evag2b
@r_devops

How to remove brackets and apostrophes in ansible?

the second one i have use join but when i add the excel i get pound sign. I just the output to be /root, /home/mydocument, \]

\[ ' /root, '/home/my document/,....\]

\- name: mount

debug:

msg:

\- "{{ ansible\_mounts | json\_query('\[\*\].mount') | regex\_replace(u', '') }}"

\- "{{ ansible\_mounts | json\_query('\[\*\].size\_total') | join(',') }}"

https://redd.it/evb3r0
@r_devops

Backup and Quick Deploy Solution

What are the best options for creating a ready-to-go copy of a VM with an associated volume that I can deploy within an hour and avoid burning up costs while we are not using the applications deployed on it?

I currently have required uptime in order to run Tanium and other security scans on a daily basis. However, these applications are no longer being used and will not be needed for several months, so I'd like to potentially remove them from our AWS account apart from a backup in order to not incur costs and avoid a lack of vulnerability scans due to the VM being shut-off.

**My potential solution:**

1. Create an AMI from the VM
2. Create a final copy of the Volume attached to it
3. Shut Down and Destroy VM (Will this remove the AMI?)

https://redd.it/evavyg
@r_devops

Azure DevOps as a SaaS product?

I was about to embark on the creation of a highly specialized SaaS product of my own that would offer a lot of the functionality offered by Azure DevOps (which I just started using at work). Question: Can Azure DevOps be used as a "framework" on which to build a custom SaaS product? One critical thing I would have to be able to do is add a LOT of additional data elements that are specific to my application. OR - should I be looking at something like Dynamics365 or PowerApps?

https://redd.it/ev5v7u
@r_devops

AWS Cognito

Hey guys, I have a weird question.

I started as devOps some months ago. The company I'm working atm uses aws for basically everything. I don't have the experience to firmly suggest other technologies (yet), and I'm happy to start learning from any point.

Now, my issue. We have been requested to implement a VPN for the workers for security reasons. The idea is simlpe: You're not connected to the VPN, you can't access \[X\] (A certain tool, the database, gitlab...).
My seniors are suggesting Cognito, and normally I learn and then argue, but Cognito seems like... For something else. It seems like a tool for developers to verify the users of their app, not a tool for companies to secure their inside tools and resources.


Is Cognito a valid substitute for a VPN? At the moment we just temporarily whitelist whatever IP each worker has at home (Or wherever they're working at)

https://redd.it/ev4x1f
@r_devops

Jenkins vs Gitlab?

Hey, folks. I’m kind of confused between the platform that need to be used on my personal existing project for CICD. If you guys are using any one of these, please comment down below why you chose to work on that.

https://redd.it/ev70os
@r_devops

Metaphore for CI/CD pipelines (or: how do you explain what you do at a birthday)

Hi all,

Are you ever at a birthday and unable to explain in simple words what you do for a living? How do you explain it in simple words? I think it would be really cool to use a metaphore, so that I can compare it to something all people know and understand, but I cant come up with a good example.

Do you all have any good ones?

https://redd.it/ev52qs
@r_devops

Single-node easy container deployment

I'm looking for some projects which make app deployment/upgrades easier. I'd like to be able to deploy a container with an app easily and seamlessly without dealing with common issues like swapping endpoints in the proxy, process management, rollback, etc. Basically looking for a self hosted single-node premade manager. Let's say, heroku for containers.

This is of course doable by hand, but... I'm getting tired. We're enough years into this stuff that I expect some common templates to exist.

From open source offerings, as far as I can tell only dokku fits this description. But maybe I'm missing something? I want this to be pretty lightweight, so no unnecessary things like etcd or clustering which drops rancher/k8s/container Linux. I want some existing deployment and proxy handling which drops silverblue/atomic.

https://redd.it/ev4cth
@r_devops

Hackathon - still a thing this year?

Hi! I am a tech recruiter and our company would like to hold tech events this year. We have done Hackathon last year but with a low turn-out, I am not sure if this will be supported by the business again. Will appreciate if you guys can confirm, or suggest any other events. TIA.

https://redd.it/ev2pj5
@r_devops

Private Subnet in Azure

I am new to Microsoft Azure, As in AWS, We can create Public Subnet and Private Subnet with Internet Gateway and NAT Gateway.
Can we Create Public Subnet and Private Subnet in Azure as well?
If we can, then how? Its urgent guys

https://redd.it/evn0f2
@r_devops

Insight About starting into a New Environment

Hello there !

I will be starting a new job as a DevOps Engineer in a month (Pretty exited/scared !).

This will be my first "real" DevOps experience. I am living in France , and studied IT for 3 year , with an "Internship" system , I studied 20% of the time , and was working in a company the other 80%.

So this will not be my first working experience , nor my first DevOps related Job.

But I will work in a relatively young Company and I will be the only DevOps.

As said before the company is very young (created about 6 month ago I think) , and my job will be to setup the baseline of the future architecture , everything need to be done , they currently have a test environment on a handful of EC2 , but nothing more and everything need to be set ( the Architecture , CI/CD,Monitoring, ect...)

So I am here to get insight of real SRE/DevOps engineer (whatever you are called in your company !) , that went down the same path (or not , I am eager to learn , and any insight is good to have !)

What are for you , the bid DO's and DON'T while thinking and building a new architecture from scratch ? Or what are for you, the best practices ? Do you have any resources (Book , article , or else) that you consider usefull in this situation ?

https://redd.it/evohki
@r_devops

How to automate Github releases with drone

I recently switched to automatic Github releases and wanted to share the journey.

Hope it helps :)

[https://blog.nicco.io/2020/01/29/automate-github-releases-with-drone/](https://blog.nicco.io/2020/01/29/automate-github-releases-with-drone/)

https://redd.it/evnhay
@r_devops

JMX APM solutions recommendations?

Hi. Can you show me some free or paid solutions to collect application metrics from jmx or javaagent? We are currently running on NewRelic, but it\`s pricey. We run our apps within tomcat and spring on VMs in GCE. We have plans to migrate all the stuff to GKE, so it would be great if the metrics system supports this. Moreover, we are switching our logs to Stackdriver, so it would be nice if the APM supports this.

Right now I\`m looking at Apache Skywalking, BindPlane(supports Stackdriver), Elastic APM, DataDog.

https://redd.it/evlptj
@r_devops

Improving Packer builds - or use something else

I'm a former Linux-sysadmin transitioning to Cloud-DevOps in my current role of the last 12 months. 20 or so developers in the company with limited DevOps experience/mindset between us all. Core product is a niche java application.

Main CI/CD is jenkins in AWS using EC2s for testing along with a couple of legacy onprem servers.

We fundamentally use Packer to (manually) build Centos and windows 2008/2012 AMIs for the development teams. The linux AMIs are configured via Packer-Puppet provisioner (changing to Ansible w/local-exec soon). The Windows AMIs are configured in Packer via PS + scripts. A huge number of dependencies (testing frameworks, applications etc) are baked into the AMIs, so the AMIs can get quite big (50+ GB). The AMIs are plugged into AWS jenkins-EC2 and all our testing is done from there. When it works, it seems to work well enough.

Because the AMIs are so big, manually troubleshooting packer-build issues with them is tedious and time-consuming and taking up an obscene amount of time. I try things like testing with virtualbox-iso first, or RDP’ing into the currently running packer-build to see what’s going on and so on - but again it is a very manual process.

Specific problems are:

1. Packer is used manually - it needs to be run manually from the command line whenever the AMI’s need updating. We do have a Jenkins-script that can invoke the packer build, but it has to be manually triggered.
2. Windows AMIs seem a nightmare to debug issues with.
3. It seems to be extremely tedious to debug even simple issues with Packer.
4. The Packer - AMI build process is not part of any CI/CD - it’s all done manually.


Specific Questions I have are:

1. What alternatives exist to build AMIs?
2. Should we be in the ‘Packer Build AMI’ mindset at all? Could/Should we be using CodeDeploy/Other tech ?
3. How do others handle big AMI builds ?
4. Can we split the Packer-build into more manageable, discrete building blocks ? Has anyone done this with Jenkins-Pipelines ?
5. What tools/tech is available to automate and test Packer-builds ? I know of serverspec, but it seems to be more for the ‘test the configuration of the AMI itself’ rather than ‘build and test the Packer-AMI building process’ ?

We are basically at the limit of what we can achieve manually. There’s no room for any further manual builds or AMIs or so on. We need to drastically automate Packer, or consider an entirely different way for this process.

https://redd.it/evkzm0
@r_devops