Devops Needs Sushi
Last year in San Diego I was invited to join the CD Foundation Ambassador program Once you get involved in this kind of community you start to realize how much work there is left to be done for organisations to really start doing Continuous Delivery.
I was however quite surprised to actually be nominated for the 2026 Top Ambassador, (thnx to Yair Etziony for nominating me., and therefore even more surprised to learn that I actually won the 2026 Top Ambassador Award.
6 years ago I wrote my my last blog post here. I had my Drupal running in a container and generated static content that was published here.
I had some ideas on blogging left and right .. but most of my content was presented as a talk at a conference. I struggled with the decline of RSS and the downfall of most other Social platforms , I didn’t want to post my content on one of the proprietary walled gardens.
Every day we get emails from recruiters who are looking for a devops engineer to help their customer.
When we ask them if they are looking for a developer or an operations person they have no clue what to answer. Because a devops engineer doesn’t exist.
DevOps Engineer is not a title
The DevOps community has a long time ago established that DevOps is not a job title, it’s not a Java developer running production, and it’s not an Ops girl patching java code. Neither is it the person in charge of tooling. And it certainly isn’t an engineer working in a DevOps team.
Each time someone talks about the 12 Factor Application a weird feeling overcomes me .. Because I like the concept .. but it feels awkward .. it feels as if someone with 0 operational experience wrote it. And this devil is in a really small detail.
And that is Part III. Config … For me (and a lot of other folks I’ve talked to about this topic) , using environment variables (as in real environment variables) are just one of the worst ideas ever. Environment variables are typically set manually , or from a script that is being executed and there’s little or trace to see fast how a specific config is set.
If you are looking at this blog post right now… my live Drupal site has finally been decommissioned.. or not .. well these pages are served statically but the content is still generated by an ancient aging Drupal 6, which is hiding somewhere in a container that I only start when I need it.
Given my current low blog volume .. and the lack of time to actually migrate all the content to something like Jekyll or Webby I took the middle road and pulled the internet facing Drupal offline. My main concern was that I want to keep a number of articles that people frequently point to in the exact same location as before. So that was my main requirement, but with no more public facing drupal I have no more worrying about the fact that it really needed updating, no more worrying about potential issues on wednesday evenings etc
and if so why haven’t they done so yet ?
Unlike many people think, containers are not new, they have been around for more than a decade, they however just became popular for a larger part of our ecosystem. Some people think containers will eventually take over.
Imvho It is all about application workloads, when 8 years ago I wrote about a decade of open source virtualization, we looked at containers as the solution for running a large number of isolated instances of something on a machine. And with large we meant hundreds or more instances of apache, this was one of the example use cases for an ISP that wanted to give a secure but isolated platform to his users. One container per user.
I`m working on getting even more moving parts automated, those who use Jenkins frequently probably also have Love - Hate relationship with it.
The love coming from the flexibility , stability and the power you get from it, the hate from it’s UI. If you’ve ever had to create a new Jenkins job or even pipeline based on one that already existed you’ve gone trough the horror of click and paste errors , and you know where the hate breeds.
Back in 2006 I wrote a blog post about linux troubleshoooting. Bert Van Vreckem pointed out that it might be time for an update ..
There’s not that much that has changed .. however :)
Everything is a DNS Problem
Everything is a Fscking DNS Problem
No really, Everything is a Fscking DNS Problem
If it’s not a fucking DNS Problem ..
It’s a Full Filesystem Problem
If your filesystem isn’t full
It is a SELinux problem
If you have SELinux disabled
It might be an ntp problem
If it’s not an ntp problem
It’s an arp problem
If it’s not an arp problem…
It is a Java Garbage Collection problem
If you ain’t running Java
It’s a natting problem
If you are already on IPv6
It’s a Spanning Tree problem
If it’s not a spanning Tree problem…
It’s a USB problem
If it’s not a USB Problem
It’s a sharing IRQ Problem
If it’s not a sharing IRQ Problem
But most often .. its a Freaking Dns Problem !
We’re increasingly using Docker to build packages, a fresh chroot in which we prepare a number of packages, builds typically for ruby (rvm) , or python (virtualenv) or node stuf where the language ecosystem fails on us … and fpm the whole tree as a working artifact.
An example of such a build is my work on packaging Dashing. https://github.com/KrisBuytaert/build-dashing
Now part of that build is running the actual build script in docker with a local volume mounted inside the container This is your typical -v=/home/src/dashing-docker/package-scripts:/scripts param.
A child balloon
you inflate it, play with it for a while, then it explodes, you throw it away you inflate another one, maybe even a different color. the kid plays with it .. till it breaks, then you throw it away…
An inflatable castle.
you inflate it, play with it for a while, deflate it, move it around, inflate it again, if it has a hole in it, you patch the hole.