category
Operations
- #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.
- #103 10 min
Cloud without Kubernetes
I think it’s safe to say Kubernetes has “won” the cloud mindshare game. If you look at the CNCF Cloud Native landscape (and manage to not go cross eyed), it seems like most of the projects are somehow related to Kubernetes. KubeCon is one of the fastest-growing industry events. Companies we talk to at Real Kinetic who are either preparing for or currently executing migrations to the cloud are centering their strategies around Kubernetes. Those already in the cloud are investing heavily in platform-izing their Kubernetes environment. Kubernetes competitors like Nomad, Pivotal Cloud Foundry, OpenShift, and Rancher have sort of just faded to the background (or simply pivoted to Kubernetes). In many ways, “cloud native” seems to be equated with “Kubernetes”.
- #101 7 min
SRE Doesn’t Scale
We encounter a lot of organizations talking about or attempting to implement SRE as part of our consulting at Real Kinetic. We’ve even discussed and debated ourselves, ad nauseam, how we can apply it at our own product company, Witful. There’s a brief, unassuming section in the SRE book tucked away towards the tail end of chapter 32, “The Evolving SRE Engagement Model.” Between the SLIs and SLOs, the error budgets, alerting, and strategies for handling change management, it’s probably one of the most overlooked parts of the book. It’s also, in my opinion, one of the most important.
- #100 12 min
Structuring a Cloud Infrastructure Organization
Real Kinetic often works with companies just beginning their cloud journey. Many come from a conventional on-prem IT organization, which typically looks like separate development and IT operations groups. One of the main challenges we help these clients with is how to structure their engineering organizations effectively as they make this transition. While we approach this problem holistically, it can generally be looked at as two components: product development and infrastructure. One might wonder if this is still the case with the shift to DevOps and cloud, but as we’ll see, these two groups still play important and distinct roles.