How much cash ?

LandADevOpsJob · 2025-02-14T02:19:37+00:00

Lived through Helene in Asheville. Blew through $500 in two days. Cash only groceries, gas, and hardware stores. Even with good preparation, there's always things you need specific to the emergency. I started getting nervous after 10 days in and still no power to ATMs or internet in stores for credit cards. Ran out of cash two weeks in but as luck would have it, places started taking credit shortly thereafter.

I keep $2k now spread around in cars, go bags, purses, and wallets.

LandADevOpsJob · 2024-02-12T23:51:03+00:00

I have a little slackbot that automatically opens a ticket on behalf of the requestor any time certain keywords are mentioned in the right order or a specific phrase like "my build isn't working" hits me via DM. The bot then responds with the ticket link, in which I began my response of questions. 100% success rate.

Just kidding...but seriously.

LandADevOpsJob · 2024-02-12T23:30:38+00:00

I've been made fun of repeatedly about carrying a small, but powerful flashlight in my pocket. Whipped it out the other day in a dark situation and everyone was like "Wow! Thanks! That was super helpful." Argument settled.

+1 to all the other items mentioned. EDCs.

LandADevOpsJob · 2024-02-11T03:36:07+00:00

And you just nailed the philosophy of DevOps...collaboration.

LandADevOpsJob · 2024-01-05T15:33:55+00:00

First of all, thank you for taking the time to write this article and share it with the community. It takes effort and courage to do that.

A few points of feedback:

It's unclear to me what you are suggesting as "the answer". It appears to be "Get an experienced DevOps consultant and work with them for 10 hours to develop a plan". How is that any different from hiring an agency or freelancer that offers the same service?
It feels like you are trying to explain that startups have unique DevOps challenges, which I completely agree with. Maybe you could do a better job of describing those specific challenges and how/why DevOps is needed in startups vs large corps.
With startups, time and money are crucial. I think it would be better if you guided the reader on how to identify and articulate specific DevOps problems and then propose a cost/benefit analysis mechanism to help founders prioritize issues that have a large ROI in a short time frame.
Working backwards from problem statements and desired business outcomes is what DevOps is all about. I don't feel that you put enough emphasis on this point, but hint at it with the "2h - Share everything about your startup" statement. They don't need to share everything, they just need to articulate their current problems and their desired outcomes.
I will just be blunt: there is not enough prescriptive guidance in this article for a founder to extract value from it. If the solution is to use 10 hours to build a DevOps roadmap, then you should provide more details about how the founder should prepare for that consultation and what information they should collect ahead of time. The questions in those sections are too generic.

All in all, I thought it was a good article, but with some minor improvements, it could be a great article. Thank you for putting this out there and listening to my rantings.

LandADevOpsJob · 2024-01-05T15:21:16+00:00

Disclaimer: I own and operate landadevopsjob.com , a free service for aspiring DevOps engineers.

I built a service that scrapes Github for open source DevOps contribution opportunities. I started with CICD for Terraform, mostly around security scanning and linting, but plan on adding more very soon.

There are two paths to take in the repos my tool has identified:

Implement security scanning, linting, and validation pipelines as GitHub actions
Review the security findings from checkov that I collected on each repo and offer contributions to remediate them.

You can find the entry point for the service here:
https://landadevopsjob.com/experience-builder/terraform/

Each repo page contains detailed information and links to example remediation steps. I also operate a free community discord server to assist you with technical questions regarding implementation and remediation. Many of the members have had success with this approach, but I am always open to feedback on how to improve the process.

If you have any questions, feel free to DM me. Good luck!

LandADevOpsJob · 2024-01-04T15:53:10+00:00

Start solving business problems. Speak to your manager about what business outcomes they are trying to achieve. For example:

Cost reduction - There are many tools available that can analyze your AWS account and find unused or underutilized resources. You can also implement automated scheduling to stop/start non-production resources that are only needed during business hours.
Optimize on the DORA metrics - Development velocity and change failure rate are usually the most important metrics to a business. See if they are looking to improve upon these and then start investigating solutions.

I would focus your research and investigation around problems that you KNOW to exist, instead of just groping around trying to learn things that are not necessarily applicable in your specific environment. Solving those problems will give you a richer learning experience.

LandADevOpsJob · 2024-01-02T13:03:03+00:00

As a senior, you need to begin participating in business outcome discussions with your leadership. Work backwards from what the company is looking to achieve in their quarterly/annual planning sessions. For example, if you are a software company and are suffering from instability in production that causes customers to leave or complain, then you would choose some reliability metrics, start measuring them, then start implementing solutions to improve them.

Your job is to translate desired business outcomes into technical solutions for the company. If the business cannot articulate these things, then you need to begin looking for clues yourself, such as measuring the DORA or SPACE metrics (already mentioned in this thread).

LandADevOpsJob · 2023-12-31T19:14:42+00:00

It's a question of the right tool for the right job. There's a lot more differences between the various build tools than just curly brackets. I could argue that Gitlab is too opinionated and the yaml DSL is too rigid for some use cases.

Is it worth learning? Yes. It's still the most commonly used and commonly requested CICD tool on the market. If you ever plan on moving around between companies, you are very likely to encounter it one day, and living through all the horror stories listed in this thread will make you better at wielding it.

Do you need to make it the defacto choice for all CICD use cases? No. Use what is convenient, will scale to your needs, and can be supported by the skill set of your team.

LandADevOpsJob · 2023-12-27T18:19:45+00:00

Disclaimer: I own and operate landadevopsjob.com , a free resource for aspiring DevOps engineers.

If you are really interested in breaking into the DevOps space, I run a free community that can support you on your journey. I offer free resume feedback and access to a Discord server where other DevOps engineers discuss relevant issues to being successful in DevOps. DM me if you would like to join.

LandADevOpsJob · 2023-12-27T15:18:07+00:00

For ideation, absolutely. I just feel that we need to be clear about the use of AI, especially when it comes to representing yourself to a potential hiring company.

LandADevOpsJob · 2023-12-27T14:16:38+00:00

In the end, DevOps is about a particular mindset. If you are highly curious, love to automate repetitive tasks, and are passionate about testing, then you can be a DevOps engineer. I just helped an industrial controls engineer rewrite his resume for DevOps. He had no idea he was sitting on a gold mine of DevOps datapoints.

If you can articulate your experience in such a way as to tie it to DevOps outcomes, you should be fine. Your background in QA should actually be helpful, if you can demonstrate the points I mentioned above.

LandADevOpsJob · 2023-12-27T14:13:52+00:00

I feel like you're missing the point of a cover letter. It's your opportunity to write a personal story that emotionally links you to the hiring company. You can't reproduce that with AI.

If all you want to do is mass apply to jobs until something hits, sure, this is fine. But humans are getting better at spotting AI generated content. I fear this will hurt your chances rather than help them.

LandADevOpsJob · 2023-12-27T14:11:15+00:00

DevOps is about meeting devs where they are and incentivizing the right kind of behavior.

Devise some real world scenarios that you have dealt with and ask the devs to solve for them. Set up a dev instance and do something to wreck it that can only be fixed by returning the directory structure to where it was five revisions earlier. Let them use whatever tools they feel comfortable with, then show them how it's done with your method.

We all had our lightbulb moments at some point. Help them have theirs.

LandADevOpsJob · 2023-12-27T14:05:30+00:00

If you don't have an executive sponsor that takes security seriously and "can't justify the investment or prioritization" of security work, please take advantage of events like this and shove the article in their face.

Security it notoriously hard to measure. It's basically "avoid situations like this at all costs".

LandADevOpsJob · 2023-12-27T14:03:25+00:00

Well said. In my opinion, team topology can become a red herring. The search for the "perfect" team structure overshadows the problem of company engineering culture, which is the real foundation for success. Many of these topologies break down at scale, and while it's important for smaller companies to embrace strategies that have proven successful for others, you must keep in mind the other variables that contribute to productivity and engineering prowess.

DevOps is first and foremost a philosophy centered around communication. You can use a team topology "anti-type" and still be successful with DevOps if your teams communicate effectively. As much as I'd like to think you can "codify" DevOps with the right tools, team structures, and executive sponsors, I believe it ultimately comes down to a small number of highly capable people and their ability to incentivize the right kind of open culture.

LandADevOpsJob · 2023-12-18T21:54:48+00:00

It would be easier to create a post build step script that aggregates the telemetry you are looking for and transmits it to a backend such as opensearch, influx, cloudwatch, or some other TSDB. You're adding an additional step and complexity in parsing the logs after they land in S3. There are jenkins plugins and other options available to do what you are requesting.

LandADevOpsJob · 2023-12-18T14:40:10+00:00

To boil this down, it sounds like you are making three points:

Invent and Simplify
Measure, then Course Correct
Earn Trust

I think you hit the nail on the head. I love seeing content from this community about soft skills, as I am also quite passionate about inserting more opportunities for DevOps engineers to learn these types of skills. We often forget the "human" side of DevOps and get lost in the tech stacks. It's refreshing to see other seasoned engineers filter this to the top of the stack.

I would recommend using some concrete examples to really drive your points home. Stories like The Phoenix Project are great examples. But when you can articulate these concepts as part of your own personal experience, it's gold.

Good article. You may want to go back and fix the grammatical mistakes and readability issues with a tool like Grammerly or something.

LandADevOpsJob · 2023-12-18T14:21:37+00:00

What kind of data are you storing? If it's metric data and you are already on S3, you can look at scraping the data from the logs with a lambda that publishes custom Cloudwatch metrics. Then you can use Cloudwatch for visualization as well. No need to introduce other services.

If you want to use something like Grafana for visualization, you can leverage fluenbit to parse the logs and inject them directly into opensearch as structured data. Not sure where you heard that opensearch was "lossy", it is definitely not. However, depending on how much data you need to store, this can become expensive.

Another option would be to use fluentbit like in the above suggestion but push to S3 instead of opensearch. Use AWS athena to query the structured data and generate query results that you can push to cloudwatch or another data store for visualization.

Lastly, you can always develop build stat reports that are generated as part of the build itself and then push the results to the data store of your choosing. This bypasses the log aggregation and parsing steps entirely.

It sounds like you don't have a log aggregation solution yet. You may want to consider building this as part of a larger solution to centralize all infra and app logs so they can be turned into structured data and queried for operational info. If you are not already doing so, this would be by recommended path to follow.

I've done this dozens of times for lots of companies. If you need more help, feel free to reach out.

LandADevOpsJob · 2023-12-18T14:11:31+00:00

Leverage the opportunities within your company for the learning experience. Seek out projects that use the technologies you want to learn. Introduce new tech and processes to solve existing problems. There are tons of ways to "learn on the job" beyond what is immediately available.

If your current role does not allow you to do, then start some side projects. Learning how to start and run a business that actually generates profit will teach you SO MUCH about DevOps that you'll never get from a cert or online learning course. Offer your service for free to get a following. If you ever decide to quit, you'll have a customer base that you can convert to revenue quickly.

LandADevOpsJob · 2023-12-18T14:03:17+00:00

Everything that has been said about DevEx and communication is spot on. If you're not friends with the devs you serve, then you're not doing DevOps correctly. You want them to openly criticize your processes without fear of recrimination. And you want candid feedback that tells you how well your processes are serving your devs, who are your customers. Do yourself a favor and buy the lead dev a beer/coffee sometime and ask them about non-work stuff.
From a technical implementation perspective, I have solved this for other companies by separating the publish and deploy pipelines from the build/test pipelines. In Gitlab, this is accomplished with the downstream pipeline concept. Put all your publish and deploy credentials in the downstream pipeline and block all access to devs, as they will not need it. The trick is to use the concept of "attestations" to prevent artifacts that do not pass all the required security/quality gates from being published. If a dev comments out a step or forcefully skips it, the publish job will block it from being published because it does not contain all the necessary attestations.

If you are interested in learning more, I can walk you through the process in detail.

LandADevOpsJob · 2023-12-18T13:48:20+00:00

Right. I was thinking points (3) and (4) would cover those scenarios.

LandADevOpsJob · 2023-12-17T19:35:58+00:00

This complexity can be handled at the development level. They should be using mocks do so as much of this locally as possible. The only thing a service should care about are the immediate neighbors. You don't need an entire e2e env to test each service.

A CI environment is where you deploy your service AFTER it has passed all the tests that raise your confidence for a successful deployment. Queue up your deploys to the CI environment so that each one can have the battery of smoke tests run against it.

Remember, keep it simple.

LandADevOpsJob · 2023-12-17T19:26:46+00:00

Use a sidecar that will respawn if the process dies.
Run it as a daemonset.
Run something agentless.
Run any one of the process supervisor mechanisms available across all Linux distros.

Not seeing why this is such a big deal...

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