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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Today we are talking with Maikel Vlasman, technical lead for a large Dutch machine construction company, and a cloud engineer by heart. We cover self-updating GitLab & ArgoCD, Maikel’s thinking behind dev environment setup and a Kubernetes workshop that he is preparing for his team. The goal is to function as a true DevOps team with shared responsibilities.

This conversation started as a thread in our community Slack - link in the show notes. Thank you Maikel for being a long-time Changelog listener and for reaching out to us - we enjoyed telling this story.

Today we are talking how to optimise sociotechnical systems with Ben Ford, founder & CEO of Mission Control. The correct order is: people, process & technology. The tools are important, and we talk about specific ones in the second half of this episode, but there are rules and principles that govern how people interact, and we need to start there.

This is the post-KubeCon CloudNativeCon EU 2022 week. Gerhard is talking to Matt Moore, founder & CTO of Chainguard about all things Knative and Sigstore.

The most important topic is swag, because none has better stickers than Chainguard.

The other topic is the equivalent of Let’s Encrypt for securing software.

Today we are at KubeCon CloudNativeCon EU 2022, talking to Adolfo García Veytia about securing Kubernetes releases. Adolfo is a Staff Software Engineer at Chainguard, and one of the technical leads for SIG release, meaning that he helps ship Kubernetes. You most likely know him as Puerco, and have seen first-hand his passion for securing software via SBOMs, cosign and SLSA. Puerco’s love for bikes and Chainguard are a great match 🚴‍♂️

Today we talk to Priyanka Sharma (E.D. at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation) about all things KubeCon Europe 2022. We start with Gerhard’s favourite subject - Priyanka’s Happy Hour - and then we switch focus to the conference.

For many, this will be the first in-person KubeCon since 2019. As for Gerhard, he is not sure that he remember how airports work. If he succeeds, he looks forward to meeting some of you in Valencia. If not, send help.

Today we talk to Mark Ericksen about all the things that we could be doing on the new platform - this is a follow-up to episode 50.

Mark specialises in Elixir, he hosts the Thinking Elixir podcast, and he also helps make Fly.io the best place to run Phoenix apps, such as changelog.com. In the interest of holding our new platform right, we thought that it would be a great idea to talk to someone that does this all day, every day, for many years now.

We touch up on how to run database migrations safely, and how to upgrade our application config to the latest Phoenix version. We also talked about some of the more advanced platform features that we may want to start leveraging, like the multi-region PostgreSQL.

This is our 5th Kaizen where we talk about the next improvement to changelog.com: we are now running on Fly.io and our PostgreSQL is managed. This is a migration that many were curious about, including Simmy de Klerk, the person that requested this episode.

After migrating all our media files to AWS S3 (check episode 40), we thought that this part was going to be easy. Plan met reality. Pull request 407 has all the details.

We want to emphasise the type of partner relationships that we seek at Changelog & why they are important to us, as well as to our listeners. Honeycomb & Fly embody the principles that we care about, and Gerhard thinks that we are currently missing a Kubernetes partner.

Alex Sims, a Senior Software Engineer at James & James, an eCommerce fulfilment company, reached out to us about the Kaizen story of the third-party logistics (3PL) platform that he has been involved with for several years now.

The system delivered 16 millions of orders in 10 years, and 4.5 million in the last year alone. All the numbers are going up, and there is only so much that a single PHP monolith deployed as VM images can handle. So how do you even start thinking about the architectural improvements, and inspire everyone involved to move towards better?

We encourage you to look at the architectural diagrams in the show notes, especially the 10 year roadmap, and ask Alex for a blog post follow-up. While today’s episode was a good conversation starter, there is a lot that we did not have time to cover.

In this episode we talk about launching Dagger with all four founders: Andrea, Eric, Sam & Solomon.

While you may remember Sam & Solomon from episode 23, this time we assembled all four superheroes in this story and went deeper, covering nearly three years of refinements, the launch, as well as the world-class team & community that is coming together to solve the next problem of shipping software. Container images and Kubernetes are great steps in the right direction, but now it’s time for the next leap into the future.

You can use Dagger to run your CI/CD pipelines locally, without needing to commit and push. You can also use Dagger as a Makefile alternative, which resonates with Gerhard, but go further and your perspective on documentation & automation may start shifting.

Gerhard believes that this is the Docker moment of CI/CD.

This episode was requested by Tyler Smith who feels that he may not need Kubernetes just yet. Tyler has a few questions about Docker & Docker Swarm, so Andrea Luzzardi, former Docker Swarm Lead, joins us today to answer them.

We talk about Docker Swarm beginnings, some of the challenges that it faced, and what Andrea’s recommendation is for Tyler’s journey with Docker Swarm.

After dedicating four years of his professional career to Docker Swarm, Andrea is the best person that Gerhard knows to talk about this subject. And guess what, the same thing happened now as it did at KubeCon 2015: Sam pointed to Andrea. It will all make sense in the first five minutes. This one is going to be fun!

Nabeel Sulieman, Senior Software Engineer at Vercel, talks about KCert, a simpler alternative to cert-manager that he built. Gerhard tried it out, and he thinks that Nabeel is onto something. If you want to see the video that they recorded, ping us on Twitter or Slack.

We love this story, especially the long-term approach of working on something that one truly believes in, and the only reason is because it’s fun. The world needs more people like Nabeel, and we hope that this episode inspires you to go all out, and do just that.

Pia Wiedermayer, Lead QA at Zühlke, is talking with Gerhard today about software quality. If the name sounds familiar, check out episode 28. Thank you Romano for the introduction 👋🏻

Do you remember the last time that you used an app, whether it was in the browser or on your mobile, and everything just worked? What about that intuitive feel, snappiness and you achieving the task that you intended to without feeling that you are fighting tech? Experiences like those take a lot of effort across multiple disciplines. They are designed, built and maintained over long periods of time. It all starts with people like Pia that really care about quality. It’s so much more than just automated testing…

Today’s conversation with Kelsey Hightower showed Gerhard what he was missing in his quest for automation and Kubernetes. The fundamentals that Kelsey shares will most certainly help you level up your game.

This is a follow-up to the last 45 seconds of the Kubernetes documentary.

Oh, and we finally cleared where we should run our changelog.com PostgreSQL database 🙂

In this week’s episode Cameron Dutro, a software engineer at GitHub, Ship It listener and someone with an extraordinary attention to detail, joins us to talk about Kuby, a convention-over-configuration approach to deploying Rails apps.

The question that we will be trying to answer is what happened to Rails Active Deployment. The path to that promise land is paved with good intentions, but it’s complicated.