Guidance on getting into DevOps from Sys Admin

Hello,

I've been reading around and flopping back and forth between different certs every time I stumble on new information. I'm a bit lost on what to ultimately pursue and wanted to ask for your advice on how to proceed.

Some background on my current experience. I've worked a cumulative of 3 years doing help desk, PowerShell scripting, O365 management, SharePoint administration, and a little bit of server work. The places I worked at primarily employed Windows environments. I've worked a little bit with Linux in an academic environment for programming classes during college.

I'm slowly being given tasks to prepare me for a DevOps role at my current job. We use an Azure environment, so I'm being shown how are VM web servers and databases are being built as well as some of the processes that we employ such as database refreshes. Before being offered this direction an opportunity, I was studying the AWS Solutions Architect course on CloudGuru. I've taken a pause and switched to studying Developing Solutions for Microsoft Azure (AZ-203) on Pluralsight. I know I'm going to be staying at this current company for another 18-20 months because I'll be moving afterwards, so that's why I'm hesitant on my choices because I feel that AWS, Kubernetes, and the typical tools listed on most resources is where I should be studying, but my current work doesn't employ any of that. I'm going to be moving to the Bay Area in Northern California, so I want to prepare as best I can to enter that tech hub.

Any advice is much appreciated. Thank you!

https://redd.it/ej6ja2
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Coding certifications for Devops?

I work on a small team of devops engineers some of whom are just beginning their careers in the devops field. One thing that I feel very strongly about is that in order to succeed in this field, you need to be able to code. We have been doing team mentoring on this subject but I was wondering if there are any good formal training/certification courses that folks here would recommend concerning coding. Not coding with the goal of being a full on developer but to be able to write scripts and basic coding algorithms for CI/CD pipelines and to be able to stitch together services that we use.

https://redd.it/eiwhk0
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CircleCI New UI

Anybody know what's going on with CircleCI's "new" UI?!

It seems to be a half-baked rewrite in React that they are trying to force down everybody's throat now. Been in progress for a long time but there is still tons of missing information and features. It only applies to a small section of the site as well; going to org settings or insights switches back to the "old" experience.

A new post on the forum indicates they won't be spending time fixing bugs in the legacy, feature complete, UI in favor of allocating all resources on the new UI. The way everything is going down makes it feel very political even from the outside. I can't imagine it's a very popular project externally or internally.

The user hostility in the way they are now trying to get people to use it is concerning if it's indicative of the future IMHO.

https://redd.it/ej1rnz
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AWX Linode API error

I'm getting this error when trying to run a simple playbook in awx.

>ERROR! the Linode dynamic inventory plugin requires linode\_api4.

the play is nothing special just runs apt or yum update against some VPS hosts

`---`
`- hosts: all`
`tasks:`
`- name: update packages`
`apt:`
`name: "*"`
`state: latest`
`update_cache: yes`
`when: ansible_distribution == 'Debian' or ansible_distribution == 'Ubuntu'`

`- name: update yum`
`yum:`
`name: "*"`
`state: latest`
`update_cache: yes`
`when: ansible_distribution == 'CentOS' or ansible_distribution == 'Red Hat Enterprise Linux'`
Has anyone seen this b4? I haven't been able to find answers anywhere, I even went as far as installing the linode\_api4 pip module

https://redd.it/eiypzo
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Repeat builds for Build Validation and on merge

So we're got Build Validation on to ensure our things build before the PR can be completed.

We've also got builds triggered on commit to our main branch, which then gets deployed to our QA server.

The problem is when someone puts in a PR, it builds to verify that it's okay to merge, then once merged, it builds the same thing over again, wasting time. Sometimes it's needed if there's multiple PRs (validations last for 12 hours), but there are often times when it's not. Is there a way to tell it that it's building the same thing again and cut down on this duplication of work?

https://redd.it/ej9eqm
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Does your company use a geolocation service?

We are looking to evaluate geolocation services to replace a legacy hosted third party service and was wondering what others may have experience with.

https://redd.it/ej8jwd
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Issue with spinnaker and automated trigger

I am trying to get Spinnaker to have a pipeline use an automated trigger which is an image pushed to an ECR repo. I can add different repos fine but can't seem to see the images. I am following this guide and below is the example code I followed plus a second variation I tried.

​

ADDRESS=123456789123.dkr.ecr.us-west-2.amazonaws.com
REGION=us-west-2


hal config provider docker-registry account add my-ecr-registry \
--address $ADDRESS \
--username AWS \
--password-command "aws --region $REGION ecr get-authorization-token --output text --query 'authorizationData[].authorizationToken' | base64 -d | sed 's/^AWS://'"

hal deploy apply

Variation I tried

ADDRESS=123456789123.dkr.ecr.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/api

​

Currently I can see the repo in registry name then I load the image section and nothing shows up. I have checked many times and I do have images in the repo - I've even deployed them to my kubernetes cluster and tested they work when building my helm charts.

​

What am I missing or can I try?

https://redd.it/ej7wj1
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Tools for Server Monitoring

Any recommendations for tools for basic server monitoring, paid or free? I'm looking for something that will show me storage capacity remaining, memory utilization, CPU utilization, server up/down. Ideally I can monitor multiple servers, and have alerts for when thresholds are crossed, like storage capacity at 95%.

https://redd.it/ej7b1f
@r_devops

A php based newsletter tool that supports template emails, dynamically inserted data, send rate limits and campaigns?

Good day everyone.

I'm looking for possible solutions / options - one time paid or free (maybe subscription based) that offers a complete tool for sending out emails with the following features:

1) Sending rate limits to accommodate for allotment quita by your SMTP server provider.

2) Creation of Email Templates

3) Creation of campaigns (Sending the same email to all your subscribers)

4) Dynamically insert content into the page like thumbnails, titles, content, links.

​

Now I don't expect all of this to be GUI based, API calls are just fine as well. I just want to see if there's something already out there before I start creating my own with PHP, Cron and mysql.

https://redd.it/ej1dfc
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What certification looks good on a devops resume ? AWS SA professional, AWS devops or CKA

I have 2.5 years of ops experience and I'm trying to move to a devops role. I already have aws SA associate certificate and looking for the next certificate. I'm aware that certifications are only used to screen resumes by recruiters and their value is not much as it used to be. My employer is ready to pay for certification cost. Which one is worth spending the time on and which has a good value?

Thanks

https://redd.it/ej1c92
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Editing Kops masters via the cli

I was wondering if it was possible to edit the number of kops masters and nodes via the cli instead of using the kops edit ig <group name> where it brings up a text editor. I'd like this so I can script scaling the cluster both for the masters and the nodes, idea is I want to cut costs on a cluster that is for dev reasons only and doesn't get used often but can't rebuild cluster because of other tooling needing to connect to the same cluster.

https://redd.it/ej010s
@r_devops

Best Certification Prep classes to recommend on the Company's dollar?

My company was recently acquired, and the parent company until that point had no well defined DevOps team concept. The company has since gathered the DevOps people from it's acquired companies, promoted us and solidified a Site Reliability team. Now they want to get us certifications that support our new role.

Currently, the company pays for Pluralsight, which is great for skills training, but for exam and cert prep seems very sparse.

What courses of study would you recommend for the following subjects:

* AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
* Microsoft Sysadmin

In addition to actual classes that will get us ready for certification exams, I'm interested in getting us books to do for a book club with my teammates, and adding those to the proposal. Thanks for any recommendations!

https://redd.it/eizmwt
@r_devops

Web Dashboard for Process Scheduling

Hi Everyone,

I am building a system (largely in python) that will need to start, stop, and moderate processes periodically.

&#x200B;

The use case could be:

\- I have a script I want to run everyday at 12 AM

\- I have a executable I want to run constantly (so in this case should just start the executable on bootup and have the executable infinitely run)

\- I have a process I want started at 10am and terminated at 2pm.. daily

&#x200B;

In the past I have used Jenkin's for task scheduling like this. I liked how you could see the progress of each build. However I've been told to not use jenkins for long running processes. I just figure there has to be something out there like this... that has Web Dashboard access.

https://redd.it/eizhkw
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DevOps Blogs + Reddit

Sadly I don't have time to read all of these. Which 3 do you recommend? Already reading AWS, CloudTech News & following most of these on Twitter.

https://redd.it/eiw9fy
@r_devops

Consultant and company rates difference

Hi,

I work as a devops consultant with 6 years of experience and I started thinking about the difference in my md rates vs rates of a company that does the same.

Usually the companies that have several consultants and several references charge way more than my md rate, lets say double the amount. I find it weird, as I have worked fir these companies in the past and there wasn't much of a difference in the delivered services between theirs and mine.
Still, I might be a no-name to the client even though I do have good references if my own, so I charge less.

Is there a coeficient of how much less should I as a freelancer charge in comparison to companies that do the same of the same quality and experience (basically everything the same)? Because if it is the same, why exactly should I get paid less (I don't want to sound greedy, I just don't know).

Could you please advise me?

https://redd.it/ejfi2q
@r_devops

Book recommendations on Architechting for deployability

As per Nicole Forsgren and Jez Humble’s Accelerate. The biggest factor that impacts the deployability of a system (measured by how often it is deployed) Is it's architecture and I really do agree with it (reading it was line was one of those “aha!” momments as I’ve been repeating the same thing for years). Now comes the tough part, how can i learn to architect for deployability? I mean i think I know how to do it, I’ve been “doing” it, but I also feel that it may not be the best way to do it and my method is absurdly tainted by my biases. Is there any book or training or articles or case studies you would recommend to learn how to do this from other people? Like i feel Im versed on event-driven archs and kafka, but im sure there is a lot more things out there.

Thanks!

https://redd.it/ejgyqk
@r_devops

Kubernetes Secrets vs Hashicorp Vault

I am currently working on removing secrets from code and have come across both k8s secrets and vault. Half my system is k8s. I'm having a hard time seeing what vault provides that k8s secrets cant do. Even for nodes outside of k8s could access secrets using the api and rbac right? Any insight would be helpful.

https://redd.it/ejfzhl
@r_devops

Vault Root Account Replacement

Once I revoke the root token, I want to create a couple of accounts that have root access to all of vault.

The documentation seems to suggest creating an admin policy for this that looks like this: [https://gist.github.com/kawsark/4cdb66093d6206d9e036ecd1294e6509](https://gist.github.com/kawsark/4cdb66093d6206d9e036ecd1294e6509)

But I am wondering why not create a policy that looks like this instead?

path "*"
{
capabilities = ["create", "read", "update", "delete", "list", "sudo"]
}

This block seems to do the same (and more?) and it is less verbose than the above, also (I assume) it covers all cases. Is there any best practice against this?

https://redd.it/ejfc1w
@r_devops

Which flow should I take during deploy of big API changes to keep the consumers in sync?

Hello

I am running a project that is in dev stage (so there are breaking changes etc.), but I met with a problem of keeping the changes in sync with UI client / consumer.

Let's say that there is 1 developer to maintain both backend API and frontend App, when this developer commits a change to develop branch then Jenkins is doing some shell magic to deploy the stuff.

So, if the developer pushes change to API, then a long process of deployments starts; Before the API deployment ends he pushes another change to UI App which deployment takes seconds and we are in a state where UI can throw random errors since the API deployment did not finish.

Even if we reverse the case, ie. the first deploy goes for UI App, the API changes are still not deployed so there still will be random errors in UI App.

While I know about things like backward compatibility and such, a big changes still may happen in the process, and this scenario is from what I can think of - the simplest. This is no rocket science microservice architecture but plain API - UI project for now.

In perfect world the API and UI deployments ends in the same time.

https://redd.it/ejds19
@r_devops

Pubsubbeat + elasticsearch creates only one index

Hi.

I've just set up pubsubbeat + elasticsearch in order to get logs from stackdriver to my private elasticsearch cluster. Everything works fine except that it's only using one index. It created an index called pubsubbeat-8.0.0-2019.12.31-000001 and it's adding all the documents inside the same index instead of creating one every day. Do you know how to force it to create an index daily? I've found the delete\_by\_time query but I would prefer to delete a whole index, looks cleaner.

Thanks

https://redd.it/ejdgfs
@r_devops