09-08-2021

Welcome back! It’s already been nearly 10 weeks since the last edition. As it turns out, having a baby is pretty demanding time-wise, but in between all the play times and diaper changes came this beautiful part of the day called naps. That’s when I would catch-up on tech, and I’m glad to present to you a special edition of DevOps Industry Updates that I’ve been curating. It includes just the most important updates from Q3, so grab your coffee, we have a lot of big hits to cover:

06-29-2021

Welcome back! Since the last issue, there has been a major development in my personal life. I inherited a new, highly-complex distributed system that’s under active development and needs constant attention. In other words, I became a Dad! To make sure I can dedicate the time needed to be the best co-parent possible, I am pausing DevOps Industry Updates for a little while. Stay tuned though, I will be back, and with more original content!

06-07-2021

Depending where in the world you might be, a return to the office might be right around the corner. Here in Southern California, tech companies are welcoming employees back Labor Day or sooner, which means I have about 3 months to figure out how to fit back into my signature Levi chinos. Do they make shoehorns for pants? I’m starting to sound like my Product team!

05-23-2021

25 issues just like that! What started as an update segment at my Meetup has turned into something bigger. Thanks to all my loyal readers out there, I’ve heard you loud and clear: you love the rich technical content and lack of vendor spam. True to that brand, issue #25 is loaded with only the most impactful stories and has a theme of debugging systems at scale, including gPRC, JVM and PostgreSQL. Ready to open a bunch of new tabs? Here we go:

05-08-2021

Welcome back! It’s been a whole Jira sprint since the last newsletter and Mother’s Day is right around the corner (this Sunday). If you still haven’t obtained anything for your Mom, you can always consider getting her what I got my mom this year: a Unix Magic Poster (flowers could work, too). In what might be our most process focused issue yet, we look at release testing, SLIs vs. SLAs vs SLOs, how to ship code faster with feature flags and much more. So grab a seat and get ready to open a bunch of new tabs, it’s all here:

04-26-2021

In this article, I'm going to walk you through my experience managing AWS costs at GumGum. It has three distinct stages: tracking and understanding costs, using those insights to reduce costs and the risk of making cost-saving changes, and then integrating these cost insights into our processes. I've spent nearly two years developing this process, and it has lead to savings in the millions of dollars per year.

04-22-2021

It has already been three weeks since the last issue and a lot has happened! Good news for you, I have been tuned in and I’ve curated the greatest hits into this, issue #23 of DevOps Industry Updates. Get ready to groove, this one’s got bop after bop:

04-01-2021

Welcome back! The world echoed a sigh of relief this week as the Suez Canal was finally unblocked, which I can only imagine feels like purging a thousand message queues at once. With that crisis over, we move on to the next - whether it be upgrading to Kubernetes 1.21 (yay pod affinities) or patching your git packages against remote code execution. We have those worries and more - it’s all right here in DevOps Industry Updates #22:

03-11-2021

Welcome back! If your week has been anything like mine, you’ve been a little busier than usual and you probably didn’t have a lot of time to read the latest DevOps news. Well fear not, DevOps Industry Updates has you covered! Standouts in this issue include GKE who launched two impressive new features (AutoPilot and Multidimensional Pod Autoscaler aka MPA) and some stellar essays on system design. Player ready? Let’s go:

02-19-2021

In this linux-heavy edition of DevOps Industry Updates, we visit some more advanced git features, SSH tunnels, a 24 year old kernel bug and, and on a non-linux note, the earth-shattering emergence of Databricks. It’s been an especially busy couple of weeks in the wonderful world of DevOps, but lucky for you, I have all of the best parts right here:

02-04-2021

Welcome back! Much like your favorite memestock, the world of DevOps has been moving at breakneck speeds. While the InfoSec community is still realizing the true depths of the SolarWinds hack, a new vulnerability with a different attack vector appears: NAT slipstreaming 2.0. We cover those hot topics and other key developments right here in DevOps Industry Updates - all you need to do is scroll ⬇️

01-21-2021

It’s been a busy couple of weeks in DevOps Land! Elastic announced that Elasticsearch and Kibana will be dropping the Apache v2 license, HashiCorp unveiled CDK for Terraform 0.1 (which adds Java and C# support) and LinkedIn showed us just how insane their developer tool metrics are. Great news for you: it’s all right here in issue #18 of DevOps Industry Updates:

01-05-2021

Welcome back everyone! After a brief holiday break, DevOps Industry Updates is hot off the presses with yet another action-packed issue. From AWS managed Prometheus & Grafana to what is becoming one of the largest security breaches in history (#solarwinds123), be sure to read this one until the end!

12-04-2020

AWS re:Invent 2020 is officially underway and we’ve already seen some alluring new products like Mac EC2 instances, gp3 EBS volumes, public ECR Docker registries (sorry, DockerHub) and a crazy database translation layer called BabelFish.

11-17-2020

The future is here! Apple’s new M1 SoC outperforms everything in its class with half the power, Alibaba’s robots can replace faulty hard drives in 4 minutes and Amazon has finally released their long-awaited RabbitMQ service. So sit back and get scrolling, DevOps Industry Updates #15 is here:

11-02-2020

Grab your concentrated cold brew, DevOps Industry Updates #14 is here! As always, I’ve been scouring the internet for the finest DevOps news which I then filter, brew and deliver right to your inbox. In this week’s blend: re:Invent 2020 goes virtual, Microsoft expands Azure into space and if you’re reading this, then DockerHub’s new rate-limits are already in effect. Take a sip, sit back and enjoy the scroll:

10-19-2020

Welcome back to DevOps Industry updates! WFH remains a hot topic in big tech and for the first time in 5 years, HashiCorp introduces not one but two new open-source projects: Boundary and Waypoint. Amazon also released their new time-series database called Timestream and most importantly, we finally now have a way to kill Kubernetes pods with a Doom-like interface. It’s all right here in issue #13:

10-05-2020

Kubernetes adds structured logs, GCP introduces an ordered message queue (woot) and HashiCorp releases an official Homebrew Tap. The world of DevOps continues to deliver! It has barely been 10 days since the last issue, and we have many new developments to cover:

09-23-2020

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:

09-08-2020

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:

08-25-2020

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:

08-10-2020

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:

07-28-2020

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:

07-20-2020

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!

07-13-2020

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:

07-06-2020

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:

06-22-2020

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!

06-09-2020

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.

05-24-2020

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.

05-07-2020

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.

03-23-2020

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:

03-08-2020

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.

02-29-2020

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

02-08-2020

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.

01-31-2020

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!

01-31-2020

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

10-30-2019

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!

10-27-2019

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.

10-25-2019

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.

08-29-2019

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!

06-13-2019

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.

05-28-2019

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.

04-25-2019

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