2020.10.01.md

CoffeeOps 10/01/2020

All Topics

• Managing dashboard and alert sprawl
• Home-assistant.io - what automations do you have setup for your smart home?
• Successful virtual team events
• Meeting free days
• Openstack and other cloud abstraction tools
• Cloud inventory management solutions
• Service catalogs
• TraefikEE & Maesh
• What is GitOps and how do I use it?
• How to beat procrastination?
• Ageism in tech. How has it affected you (or someone you know)?
• What’s your favorite tech slang?
• What is compliance as code?
• CloudOps (and its subspecializations)
• When should you use kubernetes?
• What tech opinion you go that results in this: https://twitter.com/tlakomy/status/1310467434520940544

Epiphanies

• teambuilding.com
• Teambuilding tips:
  • Games
    • Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes
    • Among Us
  • Break off to small groups - come back and report
  • Games: Among us, Keep talking and everyone explodes
  • Rent a llama
• Goat to meeting
• https://github.com/bitnami-labs/sealed-secrets
• "Activation Energy"
• Re: procrastination: "What is stopping me from doing this right now?"

Successful virtual team events

• Team building maybe more important now than ever, but hard to do
• Had some zoom events, but they were mostly weird and awkward
• Hired teambuilding.com and they hosted a historical murder mystery thing. Would recommend
• Among us (https://store.steampowered.com/app/945360/Among_Us/)
• Jackbox.tv
• https://kahoot.com/
• Large scale happy hour does not seem to ever go well

What is GitOps and how do I use it?

• https://www.gitops.tech/
• What is GitOps?
  • Thought it was the process of having all aspects of your application and infrastructure stored in code
  • Thought it was having the state of production match what’s in your repo
• Production matches your repo
• “Versioned CI/CD on top of declarative infrastructure” - Kelsey Hightower
• Isn’t just the same thing that we’ve always done if you used version control?
  • Mostly the same, but not everybody does this, and not everybody uses git
  • Kinda nice to put a buzzword term on it so that everybody gels around a single pattern

How to beat procrastination?

• Find a way to just get started, even if its the smallest little thing, which might help you get over the inertia
• anti-Anxiety medication
• Build up a routine
• “To Done list”, or a list of things you’ve gotten done so you can see what you’ve accomplished

Meeting free days

• Does it help as a manager when meetings are your job?
• Needs company buy-in
• People ignore "please review this"; at meetings people suddenly have opinions
• Useful meetings require an agenda and goal. Make the meetings you do have to have useful
  • If it isn't done, cancel or postpone the meeting
• Standups as social interaction
• Lower the social cost of canceling recurring meetings. Play defense on recurring meetings.

What tech opinion you got the results in this: https://twitter.com/tlakomy/status/1310467434520940544

• Literally any change
  • Python 2 -> 3
  • OS's: CentOS 6, Ubuntu 16.04
• Why does this happen more at bigger companies?
  • People don't want to learn how new things work
  • Resume driven development
  • Harder to complete a thing
  • It's not in the plan; it's too damn much work
  • Incentive is on points and velocity
    • The thing thats measured is the thing people optimize on

Compliance as code

• Sentinel in Hashicorp
  • Complicance automation
    • Twistlock: uses GUI - so not code, so forces containers to comply with definitions
    • Sysdig/Falco: FOSS project. Like Twistlock. Provides a security perimeter around you containers.
    • Digs into process namespace. Runs as a privileged container.
• But WHAT IS IT?
  • Defining your compliance requirements in a human- and machine-readable language. OPA/Sentinel/etc
• Better than throwing lots of manpower at the problem!