Are your IAM policies overly permissive? Will future data centers be under water? Does the mythical DevOps Engineer really exist? We cover those questions and many other key developments in this issue of DevOps Industry Updates:

In this IaC-packed issue of DevOps Industry Updates, we discuss the importance of the 1x Engineer, GitHub’s new Container Registry (TL;DR: it could be the new DockerHub) and a whole lot of recent developments in the Terraform community. Grab your coffee, we have some great nuggets to cover:

It’s been a busy couple of weeks in Containerland! The remote edition of KubeCon Europe was a smashing success, AWS released Controllers for Kubernetes, Kubernetes v1.19 is hot off the presses and Docker Hub surprised us with new rate limits for free users. Grab your coffee, issue #9 of DevOps Industry Updates is here:

Welcome to the 8th edition of DevOps Industry Updates! Just like always, I’ve been consuming the fire hose of text that we call the media, filtering out the fake news and marketing ploys, leaving only the finest news nuggets. I hope you have your coffee handy, we have a lot to get caught up on:

Did somebody say “auto-remediation of configuration drift”? Read all about that and other hot topics (like the miracles of GPT-3 and the woes of DoH) in the 7th issue of DevOps Industry Updates:

Houston, we have production problems! It’s been a busy week in Cloud Operations Land - GitHub went down (again), Twitter experienced a massive security breach of their internal tools and Cloudflare had a 27 minute outage, causing issues for millions of users worldwide. Get your coffee ready, issue #6 of DevOps Industry Updates is here!

Time flies! It’s already been a week since my last newsletter and like always, I’ve been searching the jungles of the internet gathering only the juiciest newsfruit which I’ve blended together here into what is issue #5 of DevOps Industry Updates:

Grab your coffee: the 4th edition of DevOps Industry Updates is here! As always, I’ve been tracking the latest and greatest developments in DevOps and big software and we have some great nuggets to cover:

Hi everyone! Since the last issue, I’ve had my ear to the ground, listening to the latest news, forum posts and mailing lists for the hottest advancements in DevOps and software engineering. Then, I take that firehose of information, filter it just right and distill it into a single, easy-to-consume page that is my DevOps Industry Updates newsletter. Enjoy!

Hi everyone, welcome to the 2nd issue of my DevOps Industry Updates newsletter. While there is a lot of turbulence in our world right now, one thing that I think will continue to unite us is our shared passion to build great things.

It’s been only two weeks since the last issue and there’s already so much to cover! Besides the usual tech updates, we’ve seen some increased M&A activity and a growing trend of companies doubling-down/going all-in on their remote working cultures. Without a doubt, our industry is currently undergoing a major transformation and I personally can’t wait to see what type of efficiencies can be enacted with the new societal norms that form.

Welcome to the 4th edition of my DevOps newsletter! You may be wondering why this is issue #0 - I’ve decided to ditch the monthly format in favor of numbered issues instead. And looking around at other tech newsletters, this seems to be the defacto standard. Under this new numerated format, I’m hoping to publish smaller newsletters, more often.

The COVID-19 outbreak is now a global pandemic and many of us are now in work from home (WFH) mode. While we learn what it’s really like to be a remote member on our team, DevOps continues to move forward at lightning speeds. Here are some of the most recent updates, perfect reading for taking breaks while WFH:

About a month ago, the engineering managers at GumGum were tasked with coming up with ways to visualize our Jira sprint data to answer questions related to things like development velocity and defect rates over time. It soon became obvious that Jira’s built-in tools wouldn’t cut it and some managers opted to integrate external tools like Looker and Redash. While those tools do have their merits (like user familiarity and beautiful UIs), I wanted a solution that was simpler and free.

It’s only been a month but we have so many exciting updates to cover:

The year is 2020 and we’re still forgetting to renew our SSL certificates. Just last week, Microsoft’s failure to renew a SSL certificate caused 3 hours of downtime for their Teams and Hotmail applications, an oversight that affected 20 million users.

Last night I had the pleasure of hosting the 5th installment of West LA DevOps at GumGum HQ in beautiful Santa Monica, CA. Semantic Versioning (v2.0.0, to be specific) was the hot topic and Julian Gindi (Senior DevOps Engineer @ GumGum) did an excellent job articulating why sane versioning is vital for long-term system stability, agility and security. Julian also demoed his recently open-sourced tool auto-semver which makes auto-versioning of artifacts in CI environments a breeze to implement. Check it out!

Welcome to 2020! Here are some of the latest industry rumblings:

As DevOps Engineers, it’s absolutely vital that we understand the perspective of the developers we support and the technology they use to implement business solutions. To accomplish things like improved monitoring or finely-tuned auto-scaling, we need to discern the limits and trade-offs of different technologies and the best way to do that, in my opinion, is to build something with them. And that is precisely why I built “Corey’s Image Classifier”. This project utilizes a wide variety of technology that we use at GumGum that I personally wanted to gain more hands-on experience with. And today, I am happy to announce that I have open-sourced it!

A couple weeks ago my wife asked me “how can I get notified of my Leaf games before they start, without installing an app?” Like most Software Engineers, my brain immediately started thinking of different solutions and the end result was my latest project: the NHL Game Notifier. This was an especially fun project for me as it combined three of my favourite things in life: hockey (Go Red Wings!), programming and putting a smile on my wife’s face.

Last night Brian Tai and I had the pleasure of hosting HashiCorp at our 4th installment of West LA DevOps hosted at GumGum HQ. We had two speakers from HashiCorp, including our first female speaker Jasmine Dahilig (Software Engineer)! Jasmine’s talk was entitled “Dancing with Data and Distributed Systems” and Jake Lundberg (Staff Solutions Engineer) also spoke about creating service meshes using Consul.

Tonight Brian Tai and I continued our new “Industry Updates” segment where we provided a concise overview of some of the major happenings in DevOps and software in general. Check out our slides below for our most recent updates!

Brian Tai and I hosted the 2nd installment of West LA DevOps Meetup tonight where we introduced a new segment called “Industry Updates”. In this experiment, we update our attendees on what happened in the world of DevOps since the last time we met.

I had the pleasure of speaking with Greg Chu today at the Los Angeles Computer Vision Meetup hosted at GumGum HQ in Santa Monica. We had a great turn-out and I really enjoyed explaining how GumGum auto-scales our CV ML inference systems.

I’m happy to announce that I have open-sourced my tool for building idempotent AMIs in a CI setting. TL;DR: Packer + checksums = 👍