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Gerhard Lazu

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105 episodes

Ship It! Ship It! #75

How vex.dev runs on AWS, Fly.io & GCP

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2022-10-19T18:15:00Z #ops +3 🎧 7,557

Few genuinely need a multi-cloud setup. There is plenty of advice out there which mostly boils down to don’t do it, you will be worse off. Vex.dev is a startup that provides APIs for video and audio streaming. The hard part is real-time combined with massive scale - think hundreds of thousands of concurrent connections. They achieve this by using a combination of Fly.io, AWS and GCP. Jason Carter, founder of Vex Communications, is joining us today to talk about the multi-cloud setup that vex.dev runs.

Ship It! Ship It! #74

Vorsprung durch Technik

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2022-10-12T21:20:00Z #ops +2 🎧 6,887

I don’t think that you can imagine just how excited Gerhard was to find out that Audi, his favourite car company, has a Kubernetes competence centre. We have Sebastian Kister joining us today to tell us why people, followed by tech make the process.

The right thing to focus on is the genuine smiles that people give in response to something we do or say. That is an important SLI & SLO for reducing friction between silos.

How does this impact the flow of artefacts into production systems that design & build cars?

Ship It! Ship It! #73

A modern bank infrastructure

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2022-10-06T14:40:00Z #ops +4 🎧 8,507

Matias Pan is a Staff Software Engineer at Lemon Cash, a crypto startup based in Argentina. Lemon infrastructure runs digital wallets & physical cards, which technically makes them a bank. How does Matias & his team think about enabling developers get code from their workstations into production? Remember, we are talking about a bank - a bad deploy is a big deal. And when a bad database migration goes out, what happens then?

Ship It! Ship It! #72

Klustered & Rawkode Academy

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2022-09-29T13:20:00Z #ops +2 🎧 6,921

One of our listeners, Andrew Welker, suggested that we talk about Klustered, so a few hours before David Flanagan was about to do his workshop at Container Days, we recorded this episode. We talked about all the weird and wonderful Kubernetes debugging sessions on Klustered, a YouTube playlist with 43 videos and counting.

We then talked about Rawkode Academy, and we finished with conferences. Good thing we did, because David almost forgot about KubeHuddle, the conference that he is co-organising next week. Gerhard is looking forward to talking at it! No, seriously, check it out at kubehuddle.com.

Ship It! Ship It! #71

Modern Software Engineering

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2022-09-21T17:45:00Z #ops +2 🎧 9,288

Dave Farley, co-author of Continuous Delivery, is back to talk about his latest book, Modern Software Engineering, a Top 3 Software Engineering best seller on Amazon UK this September. Shipping good software starts with you giving yourself permission to do a good job. It continues with a healthy curiosity, admitting that you don’t know, and running many experiments, safely, without blowing everything up. And then there is scope creep…

Ship It! Ship It! #70

Kaizen! Four PRs, one big feature

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2022-09-14T18:20:00Z #ops +3 🎧 7,875

In today’s Kaizen episode, we talk about shipping Adam’s Christmas present: chapter support for all Changelog episodes that we now publish. This feature was hard because there are many subtle differences in how the ID3 spec is implemented. Of course, once the PR shipped, there were other issues to solve, including an upgrade the world kind of scenario. Since Lars Wikman did all the heavy ID3 lifting, he joins us in this episode.

Ship It! Ship It! #69

The cloud native ecosystem

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2022-09-08T14:00:00Z #ops +3 🎧 7,680

Maybe it’s the Californian sun. Or perhaps it’s the time spent at Disney Studios, the home of the best stories. One thing is for sure: Taylor Dolezal is one of the happiest cloud native people that Gerhard knows.

As a former Lead SRE for Disney Studios, Taylor has significant hands-on experience running cloud native technologies in a large company. After a few years as a HashiCorp Developer Advocate, Taylor is now Head of End User Ecosystem at CNCF. In his current role, he is helping enable cloud native success for end-users like Boeing, Mercedes Benz & many others.

Ship It! Ship It! #68

Behind the scenes at Microsoft Azure

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2022-08-31T21:15:00Z #ops +3 🎧 8,740

Most of you already know what it’s like to work in a startup or a small company. A few of you have been asking us for conversations with engineers that work for big companies, the kind that run everything from big title games to banking, and even critical national infrastructure.

In today’s episode, we talk to Ganeshkumar, a Software Engineer in the Azure Kubernetes Service team, who works on Node Lifecycle and Kubernetes Versioning, and Brendan, Kubernetes project co-founder and engineering Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Azure OSS and Cloud-native Compute. We talk about what it’s like to work for Microsoft, how mentoring works in practice, and what Kubernetes, Omega, & Borg have to do with it all.

Ship It! Ship It! #67

All your network are belong to eBPF

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2022-08-25T16:00:00Z #ops +1 🎧 7,114

A few weeks ago, Jerod spoke with Liz Rice about the power of eBPF on The Changelog. Today, we have the pleasure of both Liz Rice, Chief Open Source Office at Isovalent & Thomas Graf, CTO & co-founder at Isovalent, the creators of Cilium.

Around 2014, Facebook achieved a 10x performance improvement by replacing their traditional load balancers with eBPF. In 2017, every single packet that went to Facebook was processed by eBPF. Nowadays, every Android phone is using it. Truth be told, if it’s network-related and it matters, eBPF is most likely a part of it.

Ship It! Ship It! #66

Do the right thing. Do what works. Be kind.

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2022-08-18T13:45:00Z #ops +2 🎧 8,879

Why are the right values important for a company that changed the way the world builds software? How does pair programming help scale & maintain the company culture? What is it like to grow a company to 3000 employees over 30 years?

Today we have the privilege of Rob Mee, former CEO of Pivotal, the real home of Cloud Foundry and Concourse CI. Rob is now the CEO of Geometer.io, an incubator where Elixir is behind many great ideas executed well, including the US COVID response programme.

Ship It! Ship It! #65

Two thumbs up for the Cool Wall

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2022-08-10T17:15:00Z #kubernetes +2 🎧 7,192

Tammer Saleh, founder of Super Orbital, a tiny team of exceptional Kubernetes engineers and teachers, is joining us today to talk about what is cool in the Cloud Native world. Yes, it’s the same Tammer that we had the pleasure of on shipit.show/31 - Is Kubernetes a platform?

In today’s episode, we also cover two great blog posts:

  1. Zero to GitOps: Terraform and the AWS EKS Blueprints project by Sean Kane
  2. Hunting Down an Intermittent Failure in Cilium by James McShane

We wrap up with ✨ The Cool Wall of Cloud Native ✨

Ship It! Ship It! #64

Bass: the beat drop after Concourse

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2022-08-04T17:20:00Z #cicd 🎧 7,175

Our today’s guest spent 4 days building a feature for his side project so that we could ship it together on Ship It!, while recording. The feature is called rave mode, and the context is Bass, an interpreted functional scripting language written in Go, riffing on the ideas of Kernel & Clojure. When the local build runs, you can now press r to synchronise the beats of your currently playing Spotify track with the build output. For a demo, see bass v0.9.0 release.

Please welcome Alex Suraci, a.k.a. vito, the creator of Concourse CI and Bass.


This episode is dedicated to the late John Shutt, the creator of Kernel.

Your ideas continue in Bass.

Thank you for getting them out into the world.


Ship It! Ship It! #63

KubeVelo 2022

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2022-07-27T21:00:00Z #ops +2 🎧 5,573

We know that many of you listen to this podcast while running 🏃‍♀️ or cycling 🚴‍♂️ Hey Dan!

How many of you cycled to a conference? Gerhard knows a single person that cycled 764 miles for 8 days straight from Switzerland to Spain for this year’s KubeCon EU. His name is Johann Gyger, a CNCF ambassador & a cloud consultant at Peak Scale. Johann is a cloud engineer at heart that is all in on sustainability. He is the main reason why Gerhard is super excited to talk about electric cars & Dagger at the Swiss Cloud Native Day this September.

Ship It! Ship It! #62

Operational simplicity is a gift to you

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2022-07-20T16:35:00Z #ops +2 🎧 9,274

Gerhard’s transition to a senior engineer started 10 years ago, when he embraced the vim mindset, functional core & imperative shell, and was inspired to seek simplicity in his code & infrastructure. Most of it can be traced back to one person: Gary Bernhardt, the creator of Execute Program, Destroy all Software and the now famous Wat idea.

Few stick around long enough to understand the long-term impact of their decisions on production systems. Even fewer are able to talk about them as well as Gary does.

Ship It! Ship It! #61

The ops & infra behind Transistor.fm

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2022-07-13T22:20:00Z #ops +3 🎧 6,980

Today we talk with two lovely folks from Transistor.fm: Jason Pearl, Senior Software Developer & Jon Buda, co-founder. Gerhard was curious to find out about their setup & how did it change with the launch of the new podcast website builder. After all, you have been hearing us talk about our setup for years, so it was high-time to challenge some assumptions and learn how another team is solving similar problems.

TL;DL: keeping it simple is at the root of smooth operations & stable systems.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #496

Oxide builds servers (as they should be)

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2022-07-08T19:40:00Z #oss +1 🎧 39,043

Today we have a special treat: Bryan Cantrill, co-founder and CTO of Oxide Computer! You may know Bryan from his work on DTrace. He worked at Sun for many years, then Oracle, and finally Joyent before starting Oxide.

We dig deep into their company’s mission/principles/values, hear how it it all started with a VC’s blank check that turned out to be anything but, and learn how Oxide’s integrated approach to hardware & software sets them up to compete with the established players by building servers as they should be.

Ship It! Ship It! #60

Kaizen! Post-migration cleanup

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2022-07-08T11:00:00Z #ops +4 🎧 6,979

In our 6th Kaizen, we talk with Jerod about all the things that we cleaned up after migrating changelog.com from a managed Kubernetes to Fly.io. We deleted the K8s cluster and moved wildcard cert management to Fastly & all our vanity domain certs to Fly.io. We migrated the Docker Engine that our GitHub Actions is using - PR #416 has all the details. We did a few other things in preparation for our secrets plan. Thank you Maikel Vlasman, James Harr, Adrian Mester, Omri Gabay & Owen Valentine for kicking it off in our Slack #shipit channel.

Gerhard’s favourite improvement: the new shipit.show domain.

Ship It! Ship It! #59

Postgres vs SQLite with Litestream

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2022-06-29T21:00:00Z #ops +2 🎧 8,675

Ben Johnson, the creator of Litestream, joined Fly.io a few weeks after we migrated changelog.com - episode 50 has all the details. That was pure coincidence. What was not a coincidence, is Gerhard jumping at the opportunity to talk to Ben about Postgres vs SQLite with Litestream.

The prospect of running a cluster of our app instances spread across all regions, with local SQLite & Litestream replication, is mind boggling. Let’s find out from Ben what will it take to get there. Thanks Kürt for kicking off this dream.

Ship It! Ship It! #58

How to keep a secret

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2022-06-22T20:20:00Z #ops +2 🎧 7,805

Rob Barnes (a.k.a. Devops Rob) and Rosemary Wang (author of Infrastructure as Code - Patterns & Practices) are joining us today to talk about infrastructure secrets.

What do Rosemary and Rob think about committing encrypted secrets into a repository? How do they suggest that we improve on storing secrets in LastPass? And if we were to choose HashiCorp Vault, what do we need to know?

Thank you Thomas Eckert for the intro. Thank you Nabeel Sulieman (ep. 46) & Kelsey Hightower (ep. 44) for your gentle nudges towards improving our infra secrets management.

Ship It! Ship It! #57

What do oranges & flame graphs have in common?

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2022-06-17T18:45:00Z #ops +1 🎧 7,156

Today we are talking with Frederic Branczyk, founder of Polar Signals & Prometheus maintainer. You may remember Frederic from episode 33 when we introduced Parca.dev.

This time, we talk about a database built for observability: FrostDB, formerly known as ArcticDB. eBPF generates a lot of high cardinality data, which requires a new approach to writing, persisting & then reading back this state.

TL;DR FrostDB is sub zero cool & well worthy of its name.

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