Tag: devops

Did Disney have to fail?

Well it was a big day for Disney a couple of weeks ago when they launched the much anticipated Disney+ streaming service.

And of course as widely reported, they had a really bad outage.

We’ve heard the old refrain before. We never saw traffic like this before. We were absolutely buried.

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Indeed, Disney, in their own microcosm never saw traffic like that before. But does cloud computing know how to solve this problem? Has the software, techops and devops profession solved these problems?

Answer: Yes. Just look at Facebook, Google, Netflix or a million other high traffic sites.

Interestingly, I got a letter from a recruiter over at Disney just the other day!

Hi Sean,

I wanted to reach out again to see if you’ve had an opportunity to think about exploring a future role with Disney Streaming Services?

The company is in the midst of a massive engineering expansion, as Disney+ launched today in their US, Canadian and Dutch markets. While phased with natural issues, given the pure scope of their launch, paired with unforeseen customer engagement, the team is continuing to actively to build out their engineering team in order to ensure seamless launches in Western Europe and the Asian Pacific countries in late 2019/ early 2020.

While you may not actively be on the market, I would be interested in having a preliminary chat to see if joining and impacting one of the largest scale technical projects the international video streaming industry has ever seen, could align with future career goals?

Looking forward to your response!

**Name redacted**

1. Management maturity

When I was reading the article above I stopped at this line:

“This is a new ballgame for Disney”

And that tells the whole story doesn’t it? Just because the industry has solved a problem, just because there are technologists out there who know how to do this, doesn’t mean they work at Disney! And further doesn’t mean Disney’s management is ready for their new reality.

But they learn quickly!

Read: Infrastructure provisioning – what is it and why is it important?

2. Streaming is a solved

The challenge of streaming content on the internet is not new. The pipes are there, the cloud can scale seemlessly. But yes there are a lot of moving parts. That’s what testing is for. And for a launch like this, one could easily launch a million test clients, using aws regions and zones around the world. And point them all at your new streaming service. Don’t want to spend the money? Scale down your stack, and send a proportional amount of traffic.

If you’re not seeing the autoscaling happen quickly enough, spinup *lots* of spare compute before launch time. That’s another option. You can always scale back after the flash hits.

And yes flash sales, daily deals or deal-a-day sites are another example. ideeli and the first unicorn Gilt Groupe

Sites like these deal with an explosion of traffic in a short period each day. Typically 90% of their traffic occurs in half to one hour of the day. So it’s a real herd that pummels the site.

Related: 6 Devops interview questions

3. Have doubts? Ask experts

To my mind, if a problem is solved, there’s no excuse to fail. But then it happens again at Airbnb and again at Dropbox and again many others.

Yes we can monitor. Yes we can test. Yes we can automate. Yes we can react. But still systems fail.

As a small pitch, I’ve helped companies like Hollywood Reporter (100m uniques per month), AppNexus, ideeli and SoulCycle scale their systems for hypergrowth. It’s not easy but it can be done!

Read: Is zero downtime even possible on RDS?

4. Good problem to have?

Oscar Wilde said…

The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.

And if today’s political climate is any indication, their is some prescient irony buried there.

So even though Disney+ and many other big names have failed…

Perhaps it’s a good problem to have?

Read: How to hire a developer that doesn’t suck

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Tags cloud, devops, failure, outage, scalability

All Cloud Computing CTO/CIO Devops

I’m interviewed in a new book Devops Paradox

Post author By Sean Hull
Post date September 9, 2019
No Comments on I’m interviewed in a new book Devops Paradox

I had the good fortune to be interviewed earlier in the year by Viktor Farcic. I’m excited to see the book finally released. You can pickup your own copy of Devops Paradox here.

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Our interview is pretty wide ranging, touching on aspects of database administration, cloud operations, automation and devops.

1. Defining Devops

Viktor Farcic: Moving on to a more general subject, how would you define DevOps? I’ve gotten a different answer from every single person I’ve asked.

Sean Hull: I have a lot of opinions about it actually. I wrote an article on my blog a few years ago called The Four-Letter Word Dividing Dev and Ops, with the implication being that the four-letter word might be a swear word, akin to the development team swearing at the operations team, and the operations team swearing at the development team. But the four-letter word I was referring to was “risk.”
To summarize my article, in my view the development and the operations teams of old were separate silos in business, and they had very different mandates. Developers are tasked with writing code to build a product and to answer the needs of the customers, while directly building change into and facilitating a more sophisticated product. So, their thinking from day to day is about change and answering the requirements of the products team.
On the other hand, the operations team’s mandate is stability. It’s, “I don’t want these systems going down at 2:00 a.m.” So, over the long term, the operations teams are thinking about being as conservative as possible and having fewer moving parts, less code, and less new technologies. The simpler your stack is, the more reliable it is and the more robust and less likely it is to fail. I think the traditional reason why developers and operations teams were separated into silos was because of those two very different mandates.
They’re two different ways of prioritizing your work and your priorities when you think about the business and the technology. However, the downside was that those teams didn’t really communicate very well, and they were often at each other’s throats, pushing each other in opposite directions. But to answer your question, “what is DevOps?” I think of DevOps as a cultural movement that has made efforts to allow those teams to communicate better, and that’s a really good thing.

Read: What happened when I offered advice outside my pay grade?

2. How to adapt to change

Viktor Farcic: I have the impression that the speed with which new things are coming is only increasing. How do you keep up with it, and how do companies you work with keep up with all that?

Sean Hull: I don’t think they do keep up. I’ve gone to a lot of companies where they’ve never used serverless. None of their engineers know serverless at all. Lambda, web tasks, and Google Cloud functions have been out for a while, but I think there are very few companies that are able to really take advantage of them. I wrote another article blog post called Is Amazon Web Services Too Complex for Small Dev Teams? where I sort of implied that it is.
I do find a lot of companies want the advantage of on-demand computing, but they really don’t have the in-house expertise yet to really take advantage of all the things that Amazon can do and offer. That’s exactly why people aren’t up to speed on the technology, as it’s just changing so quickly. I’m not sure what the answer is. For me personally, there’s definitely a lot of stuff that I don’t know. I know I’m stronger in Python than I am with Node.js. Some companies have Node.js, and you can write Lambda functions in Java, Node.js, Python, and Go. So, I think Amazon’s investment in new technology allows the platform to evolve faster than a lot of companies are able to really take advantage of it.

Read: What did Matt Ranney discover scaling Uber to 1000 microservices?

3. What does the future hold for Devops?

Viktor Farcic: I’m going to ask you a question now that I hate being asked, so you’re allowed not to answer. Where do you see the future, let’s say a year from now?

Sean Hull:
I see more fragmentation happening across the technology landscape, and I think that that is ultimately making things more fragile because, for example, with microservices, companies don’t think twice about having Ruby, Python, Node.js, and Java. They have 10 different stacks, so when you hire new people, either you have to ask them to learn all those stacks or you have to hire people with each of those individual areas of expertise. The same is true with all these different clouds with their own sets of features: there’s a fragmentation happening.
Let’s look at the iPhone as an example. Think about how complex application testing is for Android versus the iPhone. I mean, you have hundreds of different smartphones that run Android, all with different screen sizes, different hardware, different amounts of memory, and the underlying stuff. Some may even have some extra chips that others don’t have, so how do you test your application across all those different platforms?
When you have fragmentation like that, it means the applications end up not working as well. I think the same thing is happening across the technology spectrum today that happened 10 to 15 years ago, where for your database backend there was Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, and Postgres. Maybe somebody who’s a DB2 enterprise customer uses DB2, but now there are hundreds of open source databases, graph databases, and DynamoDB versus Cassandra, and so on and so on. There’s no real deep expertise in any of those databases.
What ends up happening is you have cases like what happened with customers who were using MongoDB. They found out the hard way about all of the weird behaviors and performance problems it had, because there just weren’t people around with deep knowledge of what was happening behind the scenes, whereas in Oracle’s space, for example, there are career DBAs that are performance experts that specialize in Oracle internals, so you can hire somebody to solve particular problems in that space.
There aren’t, as far as I know, a lot of people with MongoDB internals expertise. You’d have to call MongoDB themselves; maybe they have a few engineers that they can send out, so what’s the future? I see a lot of fragmentation and complexity, and that makes the internet and internet applications more fragile, more brittle, and more prone to failure.

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Tags automation, cloud, devops, interview, linux, operations, packt publications, sean hull, techops, unix, viktor farcic

All Cloud Computing Consulting CTO/CIO Devops

Viktor Farcic Interview excerpts

Post author By Sean Hull
Post date July 9, 2019
No Comments on Viktor Farcic Interview excerpts

via GIPHY

I recently did an interview with Viktor Farcic all about operations, DBA & Devops. Here are some excerpts: What does Dev-Ops mean?

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Continuing where I left off, I’ve included a few more highlights below. Enjoy!

1. Can I use a tool to migrate to the public cloud?

Viktor Farcic: I’ve seen quite a few of these tools that tell you if you buy our tool, we’re going to transfer whatever you have to the cloud. For example, Docker announced in the last DockerCon that they’re going to put in containers without a single change and everything will work. What do you think about that?

Sean Hull Salespeople often simplify things quite a bit in order to sell a product; in my experience, the devil is in the detail. It’s not to say that an automation tool like that might not be valuable and useful. It might be a good first step to getting your application in the cloud, and it might be an easier way than to rebuild everything one by one. But I doubt that it’s going to work magically just by one script.
EC2 instances, for example, have different performance characteristics, not only in terms of the disk I/O, memory, and CPU, but in smaller instances, they actually throttle the network access so you might spin up an instance and it just might not behave well. It might take time. In fact, all sorts of things could happen. You might have written MySQL scripts that assume you have root access to the server and then you rebuild that in an RDS and you get errors because you don’t have access to those resources on RDS. There’s a lot of things to consider.

Read: What happened when I offered advice outside my pay grade?

2. How do you adapt to change?

Viktor Farcic: I have the impression that the speed with which new things are coming is only increasing. How do you keep up with it, and how do companies you work with keep up with all that?

3. What is the future of Devops?

Viktor Farcic: I’m going to ask you a question now that I hate being asked, so you’re allowed not to answer. Where do you see the future, let’s say a year from now?

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Tags automation, aws, azure, dev, developer, devops, interview, operations, public cloud, tcp, techies

Book Review Devops

25 lessons from Adrian Mouat’s Using Docker book

Post author By Sean Hull
Post date March 5, 2018
No Comments on 25 lessons from Adrian Mouat’s Using Docker book

I spent some time digging through Adrian Mouat’s great book on Docker. Although it’s almost two years old now, it is still chock full of useful information on container goodness.

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I flipped through page after page, and chapter after chapter, and found the bits that I thought were particularly useful. And I have summarized those here.

1. Basics

o docker-compose organizes docker runs with a yaml config
o multiple services in one container is an antipattern
o deleting files don’t reduce container size, because they still exist in previous layer
o export followed by import can be a quick way to reduce image size
o docker-machine allows you to provision containers on virtual hosts locally or in the cloud

2. Testing

o build a private registry node, then push & pull images through it with deploy pipeline
o unit tests are key and provide tests for individual functions in your code
o component tests are also important to test api endpoints for example
o integration tests can be useful, verifying an auth service or external API is working with app
o end-to-end tests verify that the entire application is working

3. Networking

o by default containers can talk, consider –icc=false & –iptables=true
o passing secrets with env variables or better yet use a file, vault or kms
o SkyDNS on top of etcd can provide a powerful service discovery solution
o use registrator project to automatically register containers when they start
o orchestration with swarm (native), fleet, mesos or Kubernetes

4. Security

o don’t run as root – because a breakout would have root on host
o use limits on memory, cpu, restarts & filesystem to avoid DoS
o defang setuid root binaries with a find +6000 & chmod a-s
o use gpg keys & verify checksums when downloading software
o selinux & AppArmor may help, but buyer beware

5. Miscellaneous

o you can use logsprout to send docker image logs to logstash
o add elasticsearch on top with kibana as frontend to give a great searchable logging UI
o Jason Wilder’s docker-gen can streamline config file creation from templates
o we can modularize compose files with the extends keyword (like library import)
o audit containers & use docker diff to find issues

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Tags agile, automation, containers, devops, orchestration

All Consulting CTO/CIO Devops Hiring Serverless Trends

Is there a serious skills shortage around devops space?

Post author By Sean Hull
Post date February 19, 2018
No Comments on Is there a serious skills shortage around devops space?

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As devops adoption picks up pace, the signs are everywhere. Infrastructure as code once a backwater concept, and a hoped for ideal, has become an essential to many startups.

Why might that be?

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My theory is that devops enables the business in a lot of profound ways. Sure it means one sysadmin can do much more, manage a fleet of servers, and support a large user base. But it goes much deeper than that.

Being able to standup your entire dev, qa, or production environment at the click of the button transforms software delivery dramatically. It means it can happen more often, more easily, and with less risk to the business. It means you can do things like blue/green deployments, rolling out featues without any risk to the production environment running in parallel.

What kind of chops does it take?

Strong generalist skills

For starters you’ll need a pragmatist mindset. Not fanatical about one technology, but open to the many choices available. And as a generalist, you start with a familiarity with a broad spectrum of skills, from coding, troubleshooting & debugging, to performance tuning & integration testing.

Stir into the mix good operating system fundamentals, top to bottom knowledge of Unix & Linux, networking, configuration and more. Maybe you’ve built kernels, compiled packages by hand, or better yet contributed to a few open source projects yourself.

You’ll be comfortable with databases, frontend frameworks, backend technologies & APIs. But that’s not all. You’ll need a broad understanding of cloud technologies, from GCP to AWS. S3, EC2, VPCs, EBS, webservers, caching servers, load balancing, Route53 DNS, serverless lambda. Add to all of that programmable infrastructure through CloudFormation or Terraform.

Competent programmer

Although as a devop you probably won’t be doing frontend dev, you’ll need some cursory understanding of those. You should be competent at Python and perhaps Nodejs. Maybe Ruby & bash scripts. You’ll need to understand JSON & Yaml, CloudFormation & Terraform if you want to deliver IAC.

Strong sysadmin with ops mindset

These are fundamental. But what does that mean? Ops mindset is born out of necessity. Having seen failures & outages, you prioritize around uptime. A simpler stack means fewer moving parts & less to manage. Do as Martin Weiner would suggest & use boring tech.

But you’ll also need to reason about all these components. That’ll come from dozens of debug & troubleshooting sessions you’ll do through years of practice.

Understand build systems & deployment models

Build systems like CircleCI, Jenkins or Gitlab offer a way to automate code delivery. And as their use becomes more widespread knowing them becomes de rigueur. But it doesn’t end there.

With deployments you’ll have a lot to choose from. At the very simplest a single target deploy, to all-at-once, minimum in service and rolling upgrades. But if you have completely automated your dev, qa & prod infra buildout, you can dive into blue/green deployments, where you make a completely knew infra for each deploy, test, then tear down the old.

Personality to communicate across organization

I think if you’ve made it this far you will agree that the technical know-how is a broad spectrum of modern computing expertise. But you’ll also need excellent people skills to put all this into practice.

That’s because devops is also about organizational transformation. Yes devs & ops have to get up to speed on the tech, but the organization has to get on board too. Many entrenched orgs pay lip service to devops, but still do a lot of things manually. This is out of fear as much as it stands as technical debt.

But getting past that requires evangelizing, and advocating. For that a leader in the devops department will need superb people skills. They’ll communicate concepts broadly across the organization to win hearts and minds.

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Tags automation, cloud, delivery, deployment, development, devops, iac, infrastructure as code, jobs, ops, skils, software, startups, talent

All Cloud Computing CTO/CIO Data Database Management

How do I migrate my skills to the cloud?

Post author By Sean Hull
Post date November 6, 2017
1 Comment on How do I migrate my skills to the cloud?

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Hi, I’m currently an IT professional and I’m training for AWS Solutions Architect – Associate exam. My question is how to gain some valuable hands-on experience without quitting my well-paying consulting gig I currently have which is not cloud based. I was thinking, perhaps I could do some cloud work part time after I get certified.

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I work in the public sector and the IT contract prohibits the agency from engaging any cloud solutions until the current contract expires in 2019. But I can’t just sit there without using these new skills – I’ll lose it. And if I jump ship I’ll loose $$$ because I don’t have the cloud experience.

Hi George,

Here’s what I’d suggest:

1. Setup your AWS account

A. open aws account, secure with 2FA & create IAM roles

First things first, if you don’t already have one, go signup. Takes 5 minutes & a credit card.

From there be sure to enable two factor authentication. Then stop using your root account! Create a new IAM user with permissions to command line & API. Then use that to authenticate. You’ll be using the awscli python package.

Also: Is Amazon too big to fail?

2. Automatic deployments

B. plugin a github project
C. setup CI & deployment
D. get comfy with Ansible

Got a pet project on github? If not it’s time to start one. 🙂

You can also alternatively use Amazon’s own CodeCommit which is a drop-in replacement for github and works fine too. Get your code in there.

Next setup codedeploy so that you can deploy that application to your EC2 instance with one command.

But you’re not done yet. Now automate the spinup of the EC2 instance itself with Ansible. If you’re comfortable with shell scripts, or other operational tools, the learning curve should be pretty easy for you.

Read: Is AWS too complex for small dev teams? The growing demand for Cloud SRE

3. Clusters

E. play around with kubernetes or docker swarm

Both of these technologies allow you to spinup & control a fleet of containers that are running on a fixed set of EC2 instances. You may also use Amazon ECS which is a similar type of offering.

4. Version your infrastructure

F. use terraform or cloudformation to manage your aws objects
G. put your terraform code into version control
H. test rollback & roll foward infrastructure changes

Amazon provides CloudFormation as it’s foundational templating system. You can use JSON or YAML. Basically you can describe every object in your account, from IAM users, to VPCs, RDS instances to EC2, lambda code & on & on all inside of a template file written in JSON.

Terraform is a sort of cloud-agnostic version of the same thing. It’s also more feature rich & has got a huge following. All reasons to consider it.

Once you’ve got all your objects in templates, you can checkin these files into your git or CodeCommit repository. Then updating infrastructure is like updating any other pieces of code. Now you’re self-documenting, and you can roll-forward & backward if you make a mistake!

5. Learn serverless

I. get familiar with lambda & use serverless framework

Building applications & deploying only code is the newest paradigm shift happening in cloud computing. On Amazon you have Lambda, on Google you have Cloud Functions.

6. Bonus: database skills

J. Learn RDS – MySQL, Postgres, Aurora, Oracle, SQLServer etc

For a bonus page on your resume, dig into Amazon Relational Database Service or RDS. The platform supports various databases, so try out the ones you know already first. You’ll find that there are a few surprises. I wrote Is upgrading RDS like a sh*t storm that will not end?. That was after a very frustrating weekend upgrading a customers production RDS instance. 🙂

7. Bonus: Data warehousing

K. Redshift, Spectrum, Glue, Quicksight etc

If you’re interested in the data side of the house, there is a *LOT* happening at AWS. From their spectrum technology which allows you to keep most of your data in S3 and still query it, to Glue which provides an ETL as a service offering.

You can also use a world-class columnar storage database called Redshift. This is purpose built for reporting & batch jobs. It’s not going to meet your transactional web-backend needs, but it will bring up those Tableau reports blazingly fast!

8. Now go find that cloud deployment job!

With the above under your belt there’s plenty of work for you. There is tons of demand right now for this stuff.

Did you do learn all that? You’ve now got very very in-demand skills. The recruiters will be chomping at the bit. Update those buzzwords (I mean keywords). This will help match you with folks looking for someone just like you!

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Tags automation, aws, cloud computing, devops, ec2, linux, unix

All Cloud Computing CTO/CIO Devops

What’s the real way to deploy on Google Cloud?

Post author By Sean Hull
Post date October 31, 2017
No Comments on What’s the *real* way to deploy on Google Cloud?

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I was talking to a customer recently and they asked about deployments. They wanted to do things the real way. Here’s a snippet…

I’m helping out a company called Blue Marble and they are getting ready to deploy a new POS system. The app has been built using a Node.js back-end and Google Cloud Datastore for storage. The current dev build is hosted on AWS and connects to Google for the data bits.

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For prod launch, they are interested in migrating to the “real” way of deployment on Google for everything.

They are pressed on time and looking for someone who can jump in quickly. Are you available? Do you have Google Cloud expertise?

Here’s what I said.

Cultural hurdles

Yep, I’ve have used Bigquery & GCE.

What are they looking for specifically? Full deployment automation? Multiple deploys per day?

I’ve found that sometimes the biggest hurdle to fully automated deploys can be cultural issues.

In other words yes you can automate your deployment so it is push button, get all the artifacts & moving parts automated. Then deploy without much intervention. But to go from that to the team having *faith* in the system, that is a challenge.

Also: Why would I help a customer that’s not paying?

Unit testing

Once the process has been streamlined, a lot often still needs to happen around unit & smoke tests.

If the team isn’t already in the habit of building tests for each bit of code, this may take some time. Also building tests can be an art in itself. What are the edge cases? What values are out of bounds?

Consider for example odd vulnerabilities that show up when hackers type SQL code into fields that devs were expecting. Sanity checking anyone?

Read: Is AWS too complex for small dev teams? The growing demand for Cloud SRE

Integraton testing

What makes this all even more complicated is integration testing. Today many application use various third party APIs, service-based authentication, and even web-based databases like Firebase. So these things can complicate testing.

Getting there

Although your project, startup or business may be pressed for time, that may not change the realities of development. Your team has to become culturally ready to be completely agile. Many teams choose a middle ground of automating much of the deployment process, but still having a person in the loop just in case.

Same with testing. Sure automating can make you more agile & more efficient. But you’ll never automate out creative thinking, problem solving & ownership of the product.

Related: Why did Flatiron School fail?

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Tags agile, automation, bigquery, deploy, deployment, devops, gce, google cloud, node.js

All CTO/CIO Hiring

1. How do you automate deployments?

A. Get your code in version control (git)

Believe it or not there are small 1 person teams that haven’t done this. But even with those, there’s real benefit. Get on it!

B. Evolve to one script push-button deploy (script)

If deploying new code involves a lot of manual steps, move file here, set config there, set variable, setup S3 bucket, etc, then start scripting. That midnight deploy process should be one master script which includes all the logic.

It’s a process to get there, but keep the goal in sight.

C. Build confidence over many iterations (team process & agile)

As you continue to deploy manually with a master script, you’ll iron out more details, contingencies, and problems. Over time You’ll gain confidence that the script does the job.

D. Employ continuous integration Tools to formalize process (CircleCI, Jenkins)

Now that you’ve formalized your deploy in code, putting these CI tools to use becomes easier. Because they’re custom built for you at this stage!

E. 10 deploys per day (long term goal)

Your longer term goal is 10 deploys a day. After you’ve automated tests, team confidence will grow around developers being able to deploy to production. On smaller teams of 1-5 people this may still be only 10 deploys per week, but still a useful benchmark.

Also: Top serverless interview questions for hiring aws lambda experts

2. What is microservices?

Microservices is about two-pizza teams. Small enough that there’s little beaurocracy. Able to be agile, focus on one business function. Iterate quickly without logjams with other business teams & functions.

Microservices interact with each other through APIs, deploy their own components, and use their own isolated data stores.

Function as a service, Amazon Lambda, or serverless computing enables microservices in a huge way.

3. What is serverless computing?

Serverless computing is a model where servers & infrastructure do not need to be formalized. Only the code is deployed, and the platform, AWS Lambda for example, takes care of instant provisioning of containers & VMs when the code gets called.

Events within the cloud environment, such a file added to S3 bucket, trigger the serverless functions. API Gateway endpoints can also trigger the functions to run.

Authentication services are used for user login & identity management such as Auth0 or Amazon Cognito. The backend data store could be Dynamodb or Google’s Firebase for example.

Read: Can on-demand consulting save startups time & money?

4. What is containerization?

Containers are like faster deploying VMs. They have all the advantages of an image or snapshot of a server. Why is this useful? Because you can containerize your microservices, so each one does one thing. One has a webserver, with specific version of xyz.

Containers can also help with legacy applications, as you isolate older versions & dependencies that those applications still rely on.

Containers enable developers to setup environments quickly, and be more agile.

Also: 30 questions to ask a serverless fanboy

5. What is CloudFormation?

CloudFormation, formalizes all of your cloud infrastructure into json files. Want to add an IAM user, S3 bucket, rds database, or EC2 server? Want to configure a VPC, subnet or access control list? All these things can be formalized into cloudformation files.

Once you’ve started down this road, you can checkin your infrastructure definitions into version control, and manage them just like you manage all your other code. Want to do unit tests? Have at it. Now you can test & deploy with more confidence.

Terraform is an extension of CloudFormation with even more power built in.

Also: What can startups learn from the DYN DNS outage?

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Tags Amazon, automation, aws, ci, cloud, container, deploy, devops, docker, git, hiring, jenkins, jobs, linux, sre, sysadmin, unix

All Book Review Data Database Operations Devops Scalability Startups

Key lessons from the Devops Handbook

Post author By Sean Hull
Post date March 27, 2017
2 Comments on Key lessons from the Devops Handbook

I picked up a copy of the DevOps Handbook.

This is not a book about how to setup Amazon servers, how to use git, codePipeline or Jenkins. It’s not about Chef or Ansible or other tools.

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This is a book about processes & people. It’s about how & why automation & world-class infrastructure will make your business more agile, raise quality & increase productivity.

1. Infrastructure in version control

With technologies like Terraform and CloudFormation, the entire state of your infrastructure can be captured. That means you can manage it just like any other code.

Also: Myth of five nines – Why high availability is overrated

2. Pushbutton builds

You’ve heard it before. Automate your builds. That means putting everything in version control, from environment building scripts, to configs, artifacts & reference data. Once you can do that, you’re on your way to automating production deploys completely.

3. Devs & Ops comingled

In the devops world, devs should learn about operations, infrastructure, performance & more. What’s more operations teams should work closely with devs.

Read: Why were dev & ops siloed job roles?

4. Servers as cattle not pets

In the old days, we logged into servers & provided personal care & feeding. We treated them like pets.

In the new world of devops, we should treat servers like cattle. When it begins to fail, take it out back and shoot it. (tbh i don’t love the analogy, but it carries some meaning…)

Also: Are SQL databases dead?

5. Open to learnings & failures

Organizations that are open to failures, without playing the blame game, learn quicker & recover from problems faster.

Also: Is Amazon too big to fail?

Get more. Grab our exclusive monthly Scalable Startups. We share tips and special content. Our latest Why I don’t work with recruiters

Tags automation, ceo, cloud, cto, devops, excellence, operations, vc

All Cloud Computing Cloud Migrations CTO/CIO Database Management Devops NoSQL

30 questions to ask a serverless fanboy

Post author By Sean Hull
Post date March 13, 2017
5 Comments on 30 questions to ask a serverless fanboy

Everyone is hot under the collar again. So-called serverless or no-ops services are popping up everywhere allowing you to deploy “just code” into the cloud. Not only won’t you have to login to a server, you won’t even have to know they’re there.

As your code is called, but cloud events such a file upload, or hitting an http endpoint, your code runs. Behind the scene through the magic of containers & autoscaling, Amazon & others are able to provision in milliseconds.

Join 32,000 others and follow Sean Hull on twitter @hullsean.

Pretty cool. Yes even as it outsources the operations role to invisible teams behind Amazon Lambda, Google Cloud Functions or Webtask it’s also making companies more agile, and allowing startup innovation to happen even faster.

Believe it or not I’m a fan too.

That said I thought it would be fun to poke a hole in the bubble, and throw some criticisms at the technology. I mean going serverless today is still bleeding edge, and everyone isn’t cut out to be a pioneer!

With that, here’s 30 questions to throw on the serverless fanboys (and ladies!)…

1. Security

o Are you comfortable removing the barrier around your database?
o With more services, there is more surface area. How do you prevent malicious code?
o How do you know your vendor is doing security right?
o How transparent is your vendor about vulnerabilities?

Also: Myth of five nines – Why high availability is overrated

2. Testing

o How do you do integration testing with multiple vendor service components?
o How do you test your API Gateway configurations?
o Is there a way to version control changes to API Gateway configs?
o Can Terraform or CloudFormation help with this?
o How do you do load testing with a third party db backend?
o Are your QA tests hitting the prod backend db?
o Can you easily create & destroy test dbs?

3. Management

o How do you do zero downtime deployments with Lambda?
o Is there a way to deploy functions in groups, all at once?
o How do you manage vendor lock-in at the monitoring & tools level but also code & services?
o How do you mitigate your vendors maintenance? Downtime? Upgrades?
o How do you plan for move to alternate vendor? Database import & export may not be ideal, plus code & infrastructure would need to be duplicated.
o How do you manage a third party service for authentication? What are the pros & cons there?
o What are the pros & cons of using a service-based backend database?
o How do you manage redundancy of code when every client needs to talk to backend db?

Read: Why were dev & ops siloed job roles?

4. Monitoring & debugging

o How do you build a third-party monitoring tool? Where are the APIs?
o When you’re down, is it your app or a system-wide problem?
o Where is the New Relic for Lambda?
o How do you degrade gracefully when using multiple vendors?
o How do you monitor execution duration so your function doesn’t fail unexpectedly?
o How do you monitor your account wide limits so dev deploy doesn’t take down production?

Also: Are SQL databases dead?

5. Performance

o How do you handle startup latency?
o How do you optimize code for mobile?
o Does battery life preclude a large codebase on client?
o How do you do caching on server when each invocation resets everything?
o How do you do database connection pooling?

Also: Is Amazon too big to fail?

Get more. Grab our exclusive monthly Scalable Startups. We share tips and special content. Our latest Why I don’t work with recruiters

Tags automation, cloud, devops, faas, lambda, operations, serverless, software