category
DevOps
- #108 7 min
No assembly required: the benefits of an opinionated platform
When you talk to a doctor about a medical issue they will often present you with all of the options but shy away from providing an unambiguous recommendation. When you talk to a lawyer about a legal matter they frequently do the same. While it’s important to understand your options and their trade-offs or associated risks, when you go to these specialists you are likely seeking the counsel of an experienced and knowledgeable expert in their field who can help you make an informed decision. What most people are probably looking for is the answer to “what would you, someone who knows a lot about this stuff, do if you were in this situation?” After all, many of us are probably capable of finding the options ourselves, but the difficult part is determining what the right course of action is for a particular situation.
- #107 17 min
How Konfig provides an enterprise platform with GitLab and Google Cloud
In a previous post, I explained the fundamental competing priorities that companies have when building software: security and governance, maintainability, and speed to production. These three concerns are all in constant tension with each other. For companies either migrating to the cloud or beginning a modernization effort, addressing them can be a major challenge. When you’re unfamiliar with the cloud, building systems that are both secure and maintainable is difficult because you’re not in a position to make decisions that have long-lasting and significant impact—you just don’t know what you don’t know. One small misstep can result in a major security incident. A bad decision can take years to manifest a problem. As a result, these migration and modernization efforts often stall out as analysis paralysis takes hold.
- #106 10 min
Security, Maintainability, Velocity: Choose One
There are three competing priorities that companies have as it relates to software development: security, maintainability, and velocity. I’ll elaborate on what I mean by each of these in just a bit. When I originally started thinking about this, I thought of it in the context of the “good, fast, cheap: choose two” project management triangle. But after thinking about it for more than a couple minutes, and as I related it to my own experience and observations at other companies, I realized that in practice it’s much worse. For most organizations building software, it’s more like security, maintainability, velocity: choose one.
- #105 10 min
Introducing Konfig: GitLab and Google Cloud preconfigured for startups and enterprises
Real Kinetic helps businesses transform how they build and deliver software in the cloud. This encompasses legacy migrations, app modernization, and greenfield development. We work with companies ranging from startups to Fortune 500s and everything in between. Most recently, we finished helping Panera Bread migrate their e-commerce platform to Google Cloud from on-prem and led their transition to GitLab. In doing this type of work over the years, we’ve noticed a problem organizations consistently hit that causes them to stumble with these cloud transformations. Products like GCP, GitLab, and Terraform are quite flexible and capable, but they are sort of like the piles of Legos below.
- #104 9 min
Choosing Good SLIs
Transitioning from an on-prem environment to a cloud environment involves a lot of major shifts for organizations. One of those shifts is often around how we monitor the overall health of systems. The typical way to measure things like the availability, reliability, and performance of systems is with SLIs or Service Level Indicators. SLIs are a valuable tool both on-prem and in the cloud, but when it comes to the latter, I often see organizations carrying over some operational anti-patterns from their data center environment.