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What I will be using this year
Outdoorsman | Networking | SRE | Chaos & Platform Engineering | DevOps @toyotaracing | former @aws @splunk @verizon @gm | Thoughts are my own
Personal: Husband | GirldadX3 | BBQ | Outdoors | Nascar | Baseball | Triathlons
How to scale, modernize, and mature your observability practice
Part 1 of a 2 part series
A Guide for Software Architects
Introduction In the rapidly evolving world of software development, Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD) have become cornerstone practices that ensure software quality and agility. CI/CD pipelines serve as the backbone of modern...
Introduction In software development, documentation is the spinach of coding—vital yet often sidelined. It's the unsung hero, the nutrient-rich foundation that sustains projects and teams. Imagine each software project accompanied by a precise recipe...
On this page
Every craftsman/woman have a toolbox, today I want to talk about mine as a DevOps, Devsecops, Platform, Whatever the next trendy title will be job. Here are some of the tools that I'll be using this year both in production and for R & D.
GitLab is a web-based DevOps platform that helps teams collaborate on code, track projects, and build, deploy, and monitor applications. Gitlab also offers an integrated CI/CD pipeline, integrated security scanning, and code review features. You can assign issues/tickets to specific projects or repos and integrate grafana dashboards for monitoring. This tool has been a go to for a few years now in the devops space and I'll continue to rock it daily.
Terraform is an open-source infrastructure as code tool that allows developers to define, provision, and manage cloud infrastructure using configuration files. Terraform can be used to manage cloud resources on popular cloud providers such as AWS, GCP, and Azure. The biggest thing I like to leverage terraform for is the Remote state component so that I can always have one source of truth for my IaC. Getting this setup can be a little tricky, State file recoveries are a big PITA so do it right.
Docker is a containerization platform that allows developers to package applications in isolated environments, allowing them to be easily deployed and managed on any platform. Docker also provides a registry for sharing and distributing applications. Containerization makes things more portable from a software standpoint and so long are the days where you have 19 differnt dependencies to track down, manage and install. Docker is cool
Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration platform that allows developers to deploy and manage containerized applications at scale. Kubernetes provides advanced features such as automated deployments, scaling, and service discovery. Theres alot that goes on in the sausage factory for K8s, Ill talk about that sometime later, overall though K8s is the future and everything eventually needs to go there from a management perspective. It is hard to learn all of the components, but in a nutshell think of K8s as the cranes that pickup and put down the containers at a shipyard.
Grafana Loki is an open-source log aggregation system that allows developers to monitor and analyze log data in real-time. It is designed to be easy to set up and scale, and provides a query language for exploring log data. Coined the Prometheus of Logging, it indexes metadata stored as labels vs indexing the log message itself which provides much better performance. The LGTM stack is my prefered for observability and I plan on putting out content on this matter both here and my youtube channel. So far it's been pretty easy to roll out and setup, Ill have a more in depth review here in about a year after I put it to the chaoskyle tests.
Snyk is a open source security tool that allows developers to identify and fix security vulnerabilities in their applications. Snyk offers both open source and commercial solutions for scanning and fixing vulnerabilities. It integrates easily into gitlab which makes my life easier and is helping the shift left movement which culturally makes me happy. Helping devs catch bugs or security vulnerabilities early on in the SFDC is crucial for fast software delivery. “If you aint first, your last.” Ricky Bobby. Pronounced Sneak like QB sneak and stands for So No You Know. (learned that at re:invent this year)
Harness is a new Software delivery platform that I have been following closely since they acquired chaosnative (creators of litmus chaos). Ill be prototyping some things on the delivery and testing front and am pretty curious about their AI and security testing orchestration. This blog they posted in November shows some very interesting info on kafka, zookeeper. and rocketmqpipeline speeds between Harness, A Very Popular CI lol {gitlab?}, and github actions. This year I am looking to dive deeper with this tool and focus on getting faster builds.
These will be the primary software tools that I use/develop/manage throughout 2023. I'll end with a dad joke: Why was the computer cold? Because it left all its windows open LOL
