tag
Devops
- #112 6 min
Platform Engineering as a Service
Like most industry jargon, “DevOps” means a lot of things to a lot of different people. While many folks view it as specific to certain tooling or practices, such as CI/CD or Infrastructure as Code (IaC), I’ve always viewed it as an organizational model for how software is built and delivered. In particular, my interpretation is that DevOps is about shifting more responsibilities “left” onto developers, moving away from the more traditional “throw it over the wall” approach to IT operations. No doubt this encompasses tooling or practices like CI/CD and IaC, which are responsibilities that developers now shoulder, perhaps with the support of dev tools, productivity, or enablement teams—some companies just call this the “DevOps” team.
- #111 9 min
Deployment-Driven Development
Most people use “DDD” to refer to Domain-Driven Design, which is a useful tool for thinking about API boundaries and system architecture. It provides a way to map a business problem into software. At Real Kinetic, we regularly help our clients utilize Domain-Driven Design as well as other strategies to architect their systems, avoid some of the pitfalls of DDD, and build an effective foundation for designing software. But this DDD only speaks to one small aspect of building and shipping software.
- #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.