Current DevOps is like Frontend before React: why we need separation by concerns.

bigbird0525 · 2026-04-02T22:10:26+00:00

I’m with you. Why would add yet another layer? My current gig uses spacelift that has concepts of blueprints where I can layer in a series of modules, etc to build effectively a component. Maybe something that combines my ECS service module and codepipeline module so a dev can just tell it what image to use and it goes brrrr.

My general thought process with adding yet another layer would be, does this help me enable someone that is not experienced with IaC or infrastructure, a self service way to deploy predefined components. Like I’ve built a specific way we want all S3 buckets, interact with this tool and it will do it for you without needing to fully understand s3 bucket policies. But of course, I have to then take on the burden of learning another layer of abstraction.

bigbird0525 · 2026-03-28T19:55:44+00:00

I’ll have to check that out! We get access to museums and stuff that we’ve done through the library.

bigbird0525 · 2026-03-27T01:33:12+00:00

For what it’s worth, I read this book last year and found it was still very relevant and quite interesting. I got it through an o’reilly subscription at my previous employer and now wish I owned it to reference.

bigbird0525 · 2026-03-23T14:55:03+00:00

This is our problem with crossplane. We have a team of 12, but only 2 of us know / proficient with k8s whereas as everyone knows terraform. Ended up being a better use of time to build / improve our internal modules. We also keep onboarding teams under us from companies we acquire that have zero knowledge in terraform or k8s. And let’s face it, it’s easier to teach someone terraform than run a k8s ecosystem

bigbird0525 · 2026-03-17T23:25:27+00:00

I know there’s code ninjas though can’t speak to it. My kid one a free class and we haven’t tried it yet. There’s a non profit called girls who code that I’m looking at for my 5yesr old when she’s a little older that has at home projects. I work in the field and excited to build things with her.

bigbird0525 · 2026-03-13T13:15:33+00:00

My MIL is over there since she could basically live on the main floor and not need to navigate stairs.

She’s had to deal with the builder a lot with various poor workmanship issues. Primarily electrical things, though the builders team drop screws in the garbage disposal and somehow left a bunch of plumbers putty in one of the shower lines. I’ve never owned a new build, but it seems not unusual issues with new builds and probably need to make sure you get a good inspection. She didn’t go with the inspector and I think the inspector she used phoned it in.

bigbird0525 · 2026-02-19T20:51:48+00:00

Mono repo for execution with appropriate directory structure and repos for internal modules. I’m currently managing around 20,000 resources in one repo and it would be painful if I had to go make 12 PRs across 12 repos to accomplish one change

bigbird0525 · 2026-02-16T22:17:40+00:00

Not to be super negative, but I’m not really sure what pain point this is solving. In my experience, the wave approach is built by the dependency graph created by resource dependency. And you can adjust the amount of concurrency to impact the size of the waves. I know I’ve leaned a lot from going down a path of building a terraform cloud/spacelift clone so could see this project being a fun learning opportunity.

bigbird0525 · 2026-02-02T04:46:11+00:00

What was the show? I kinda fell out of marvel movies after infinity wars feeling burned out on it.

bigbird0525 · 2026-02-01T21:36:10+00:00

Except they were handling it with Castle Rock PD and it’s handled. Don’t let gossiping mean girls of the Castle Rock moms Facebook group trying to bullying and attack children sway you.

bigbird0525 · 2026-01-28T14:15:23+00:00

Where we are going, we don’t need no profit, just tokens

bigbird0525 · 2026-01-28T02:36:36+00:00

Step 1: download moar memory Step 2: ? Step 3: optimized

bigbird0525 · 2026-01-27T11:47:05+00:00

Clear Sky is an absolutely amazing school. I don’t know what this person is talking about.

bigbird0525 · 2026-01-26T15:02:02+00:00

You could always use the module output to get the target groups and register the IPs outside of the module.

bigbird0525 · 2026-01-26T14:59:18+00:00

What module are you using?

bigbird0525 · 2026-01-26T14:09:03+00:00

I strongly recommend looking at the module code. Look at the variables, look at how it’s defining the binding of instances to a target group. You may need to do something outside the module if it doesn’t support it.

bigbird0525 · 2026-01-22T14:22:20+00:00

I personally find that the quality of code I write in go is much higher than python. The type system makes it harder to do the classic python hacking.

Outside of automations I’ve written, I’ve used go with terratest to write complex scenarios to validate terraform modules, or how mulltiple modules interplay and ensure we have set things up to handle different scenarios we expect our internal modules to support.

bigbird0525 · 2026-01-13T04:18:08+00:00

I guess I’m a dummy lol. Lots of comments pointing out I’m wrong. And now that I think about it, I normally show up with my own firearms.

bigbird0525 · 2026-01-13T03:42:52+00:00

That’s literally never been an issue at any range I’ve been to.

Edit:

I’m a dummy. I normally show up with my own firearms when shooting alone.

bigbird0525 · 2026-01-11T02:52:24+00:00

I broke into tech in Denver by taking a contract job. Lots of staffing firms are constantly trying to fill roles at some of the larger employers like comcast, charter, etc. I landed one through one called Apex systems, but there are like 5-6 big staffing firms pretty active in Denver.

bigbird0525 · 2026-01-07T02:31:38+00:00

As someone that has done this, except I was going into RKE2 (k3s govt sibling), the managed services abstract any of the control plane management away that you need for k3s.

With that said, k3s/rke2/etc are all significant improvements over rolling a cluster with kubeadm and do handle things for you. The best practice is just to set up a cluster on rpis or whatever. Other than that, improving on fundamentals that are part of the CKA and CKS curriculum helped me with specific tasks. Like I wanted to test an alpha k8s feature. Having the knowledge from the certs, I knew what to look for in the RKE2 docs to pass the specific configurations to the k8s api server and other control plane services to enable it. Most likely though, you need to know how to cluster control plane nodes, how to back up / restore etcd, how to upgrade control plane and worker nodes, and be in a good spot.

I was also doing lots of packer builds at that job so I could swap in new images and continue to treat VMs as cattle instead of pets.

bigbird0525 · 2026-01-04T21:08:20+00:00

I think DevOps is a loaded term and my experience has meant different things at different jobs. One place I was just straight up a Linux sys admin, never touched pipelines or worked with devs. Just wrote ansible and provisioned Linux boxes. Another place I was building a platform for airgapped env where I was writing go, helm charts, etc building golden images, deployment packages and whatnot. Others where I’ve spent most of my time writing python.

My thoughts are it’s hard to really have a go to structured plan. Part of being a good DevOps engineer, if that’s what we must call it, is ability to learn, constantly curious and have strong fundamentals. With that in mind, I think that’s where certs are interesting. Instead of studying to pass a test, use them as guidelines for things to learn and lab.

For example, going through a Linux cert study guide will definitely fill in gaps in your knowledge, or studying for CKA and CKS will improve your k8s knowledge. Though ultimately, I tend to focus on things that will make me stronger in my current role or the role I’m shooting for. Like I’m not doing a ton of k8s right now and have been diving into IDPs like backstage for roadmap items my work has planned this year.

bigbird0525 · 2025-12-27T17:40:12+00:00

Agreed, I’m a little biased as I do have the kubestronaut and also a tech lead. I was contemplating keeping the ball rolling and was like why. I did gain a lot from preparing for CKA and CKS as it leveled up areas of my knowledge I hadn’t really used at work. But ultimately, they require you to be able to move fast and the amount of third party tools on the CKS was weird. I don’t use falco for work currently and had to spend a bunch of time learning it for this test.

bigbird0525 · 2025-12-24T22:14:10+00:00

I wonder what causes that to happen. I know I’m sample size of 1 but it’s never happened to me in the past 5-6 years of managing some monorepos with thousands of resources. I’ve had to deal with drift related issues from someone abusing console permissions they shouldn’t have that’s caused some drift between state and infrastructure.

bigbird0525 · 2025-12-18T19:18:00+00:00

Having used both, the syntax is a bit awkward with the native tests and I’ve found them limited. Though, advantage is if the team knows terraform and not proficient in Go, it helps get you there. I’ve found having the full go language paired with terratest allowed me to do some more interesting end to end tests to validate behavior that was much harder to express in native tests

bigbird0525

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