Understanding member base of DevOps SE

Howdy!

A couple of years ago, the founder of DevOps Stack Exchange Q&A community asked for participation.

Today, that SE community counts about 16K members, while r/devops has 128K memebers.

How would you explain this large difference?

https://redd.it/ekkhsd
@r_devops

What's the point of doing tests on a build server (e.g. Jenkins, Circle CI, GitHub Actions) when you can just do pre-commit/push hooks and test locally?

I'm still new to DevOps, so I'm finding it hard to understand. Why can't I just have some pre-push hook that will run some automated tests locally on my machine? (This is with Docker). Why do I need a build server that does the exact same thing, but in the cloud?

Is there a point in doing the same thing twice? Is there something that you can run with Jenkins that you can't do locally?

https://redd.it/ekc9b7
@r_devops

Deployment tools

Hey guys, I'm trying to find a solution for the deployment of our code to our servers with an option to roll back versions, currently, we are not working in a docker environment so I'm trying to find other solutions please suggest me one

Thanks!

https://redd.it/ek9zl2
@r_devops

How do you guys measure Python proficiency?

Hard to measure so it's hard to track my progression and knowing if I'm a candidate for some roles...thanks in advance.

https://redd.it/ekqt3c
@r_devops

I have a docker image that runs Python interpreter. How do I handle this?

* Newbie to docker
* Currently you submit code in a json format like \[{code: "print(1+2)"}\] and it returns response in a similar format.
* I am planning to let users on the website compile python code
* Should I have one docker image per user/per session/ or do I use the same image for everyone
* Also when people do stuff like import numpy , how do I handle the libraries? Should I download and keep every single library or is there a better solution?
* Thanks for the suggestion

https://redd.it/ekqwfi
@r_devops

On-Prem Email Queue

Hi All,

Looking for an assist, I need to create a mail queue for our custom apps BEFORE they are sent to our regular SMTP server. Our IT department is constantly having issues with their SMTP Servers and we often lose emails, so what we're trying to do is have all our app emails funneled through our own queue which stores and then sends to our internal IT-provided SMTP server. If there is an error then it waits and then resends - ideally we'd have some sort of logging and see the contents of the email as well. Any help would be appreciated.

I guess this would be some sort of Mail Transfer Agent with a GUI.

https://redd.it/el0an5
@r_devops

Network engineer trying to go devops. Before I spend a fortune on the udemy sale what classes can I start free elsewhere?

Or better to do cbtnuggets or cloud guru

Edit: thank you all and please keep the comments coming. I’m choked up what a great community reddit can be for those willing to ask for help.

https://redd.it/el03t2
@r_devops

Can you simplify for me one thing about Varnish Cache?

The documentation says:

>Varnish Cache is a web application accelerator also known as a caching HTTP reverse proxy. You install it in front of any server that speaks HTTP and configure it to cache the contents

Its pretty straightforward, but the case whenever I can use it seems to be "it depends".

On example if I have a site that with the help of backend language (ie. PHP or Python) generates the HTML output containing current epoch timestamp then it's not cache'able because every page refresh would return different second on the page.

However, if instead of the epoch timestamp I would print current day, then Varnish could suite better since the cache could be invalidated once per 24 hours... oh wait, no, it depends where you live since if you live in USA the date may be different than ie. in Europe...

If I start googling for a Varnish Cache in front of popular ecommerce shops (a very dynamic content), then there are some configuration examples so this has to somehow work, or be helpful at least.

I cannot understand how this work to bring more help rather than pain

https://redd.it/ekzxx2
@r_devops

Update excel data through ansible

I have data in my excel about 140 lines. I want to add a next line through ansible, Instead of adding manually. My next line 141 should come through ansible. Existing file to update new line from ansible.

https://redd.it/ekyqoq
@r_devops

Unit Tests coverage integration with Datadog

My team has finally decided to integrate the coverage for unit tests (created by devs) with datadog. If anyone has experience with datadog or another tool, how was the experience? I've been told DD can get pretty expensive. It is being used for mostly UI tests currently.

https://redd.it/ekyq3t
@r_devops

Bit.dev has announced a new feature for Github integration

We're used to having our remote repository as the single source-of-truth but when you share components to a collection, it becomes more complicated than that.

The Bit team has built an integration tool so that your repos are always in-sync. pretty neat.

​

[https://blog.bitsrc.io/announcing-auto-github-prs-for-component-version-bumping-74e7768bcd8a](https://blog.bitsrc.io/announcing-auto-github-prs-for-component-version-bumping-74e7768bcd8a)

https://redd.it/ekypjb
@r_devops

What are important factors when choosing a CI tool?

We are tasked with choosing a suitable CI tool for about 150 engineers. When comparing different options I found that cost is not very relevant, since most solutions are cheap compared to engineering time. What properties / features of a CI tool did you find make it worth using? How does this apply to the CI tool that you are using?

https://redd.it/ekx264
@r_devops

Overcoming lack of mentor on a job

What would you recommend to someone to overcome a lack of mentor on the job in DevOps space, given that he needs one? Hoping to get some better answers than: watch videos, do bunch of labs etc.

https://redd.it/ekwagb
@r_devops

Secret handling in Serverless

Hi guys, what is your way around handling secrets in a serverless environment (for example AWS Lambda). Couple of things to consider and I'd love your opinion about.

1. Do you get the secrets at application runtime, using <a tool>?<an api call> or do you store the secrets during deployment time in something like ENV and then get them using process env variables? I suppose the latter is harder when secrets change often.
2. How do you go about handling secrets across different environments and granting temporary credentials or credentials that change often?
3. Do you prefer to authenticate against your secret backend using AWS IAM or more traditional app based authentication?
4. In what way does secret handling transfer to your local deployment - run of applications? Did it play a role in eliminating the need for an integrated testing environment, so you can run all/most of your tests already on featurebranch lvl and only need a release branch after to go to dev - staging - prod?
5. Do you version your secrets? If yes, how? Do you do that in git, then deploy them, then deploy the app, or directly in your secret backend?
6. Do you keep an audit trail of who accessed or changed or created your secrets?

https://redd.it/ekw11c
@r_devops

Dev-Ops vs No-Ops for career prospects?

Hello all,

I've recently joined this Reddit community because I'm looking to moved into this field from my current job. I'm 26yo and a Software Engineer with Computer Science background but mostly worked in automotive industry developing software in c, kind of got stuck here since it was the first well paid job right out of college and I couldn't turn it down.

Anyhow, I want to get more into the cloud field. Particularly Dev Ops, serverless it really interesting interesting to me. To account for the missing experience I've gotten cloud certs (AWS practitioner and AWS solutions architect). My goal is to get the AWS DevOps Cert as well in next couple of months.

Trying to get an understanding of the job market in DevOps so I've been reading blogs and forums. Serverless is the buzz word it seems. However, after a bit of googling, it seems not many companies are looking for NoOps (serverless) engineers and are still hiring for DevOps with cloud experience. There's a lot of tools and services to learn while I study for this and I'd like to do some small projects along the way to show off on resume later.

I'm still undecided if while I study I should focus on regular DevOps stuff like AWS EC2, CodePipeline, CodeBuild, Chef/Puppet, GitLab, etc. Or for more serverless tools like Lambda, API gateway, AWS SAM, Serverless frameworks, AWS chalice (for python), etc.

I'm worried if I do go the serverless route for DevOps, then it'll be difficult to find a job since not many companies might be hiring for this. People working in DevOps, what do think? Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

https://redd.it/ekwf2f
@r_devops

Book recommendations or guides for Terraform .12

Trying to get up to speed on the new features of terraform .12 and looking for the best resources.

https://redd.it/ekvx78
@r_devops

Security advantages of a pull-based CD pipeline

I feel pull-based CD pipelines are under-appreciated and have a lot to offer on the security front.

I wrote a blog post detailing the risks associated with your traditional CI/CD tools and how adopting GitOps practices for Kubernetes (for example, with flux) increases your security posture, removing some attacks paths that threat actors may wish to abuse.

I then argue that this idea needs to be taken a bit a further and extended to the rest of the pipeline.

Would love to get your feedback on these ideas and discuss it here:

https://medium.com/@alexkaskasoli/pull-based-cd-pipelines-for-security-4e044b403f56

https://redd.it/ekuvlm
@r_devops

What are your 2020 projects?

New year, new work. We all have to keep busy to improve the production environment. So what projects do you have lined up or would like to attempt? We're looking at getting more into terraform and serverless on our end. Maybe look at new APMs.

https://redd.it/elcg4w
@r_devops

Looking for an actual comparison between configuration management tools

I am setting up myself a homab, and I want to centralize the configuration of my VMs (tens, not thousands) . There are countless articles of chef vs puppet vs ansible vs salt, but what I'm really looking for is a side-by-side comparison of the of the syntax of these tools.

For example, Im looking for a resource which shows the same configuration files for each of these tools so I can compare what Ill actually be writing.

I'm mainly looking at salt and ansible right now since I like the idea of running agentless. But, in regards to ansible I'm concerned that the configuration is strictly in yaml while salt allows templating through jinja. Is this something I should be worried about or is ansible considered powerful enough that it wouldn't matter?

I know this question gets asked all the time, but I was hoping to get a little more insight on side-by-side comparisons between the actual configuration of these tools as opposed to a list of pros and cons or a table comparing agentless / configuration language / etc

https://redd.it/elc289
@r_devops

Developers: How did DevOps change your working routines?

Hello Fellow Redditors and Developers,

I would like to collect and discuss the impacts of DevOps on your working routines. Any experiences, either bad or good, failure or success, are welcome! Especially I\`m interested in pitfalls, which you encountered and how you would bypass them in retroperspective. E.g. What advice would you give fresh DevOps-Engineers focusing on development?

Some question do get us going:

How did continous feedback improve your software?

What delusions did you have and how did they stand "the test of time"?

Do you think more about Operations? If yes, what aspects?

What anti-pattern did you encounter?

Im thankful for any comment. Let's have fruitful discussion!

Greetings,

\- Martin

https://redd.it/elfjo6
@r_devops