This week Gerhard is chatting with Romano Roth, Head of DevOps at Zühlke, a company founded by Gerhard Zühlke in 1968. Nowadays they help companies all over the world build, ship and run anything from factory robots, to AI assistants in complex regulatory environments, and even medical devices that perform autonomous robotic surgery.

When Romano is not leading a team of 30 software engineers that specialise in operations, infrastructure and cloud, he is one of the organisers of DevOps Days Zürich, and also the DevOps Meetup group, which is how Gerhard and Romano met in 2019.

Having started his career as a .Net developer back in 2002, Romano had his fair share of dev and ops challenges, and he always enjoys seeing real business value delivered continuously in an automated way. In recent years, Romano’s perspective broadened, and now he sees DevOps realities across many companies. If you are curious about what good DevOps looks like, and what are the real challenges, then Romano has some good insights for you.

In 2014 Gerhard joined CloudCredo, a startup co-founded by Colin Humphreys, Paula Kennedy & Chris Hedley. They stuck together through two acquisitions: Pivotal & VMware. This year, Colin, Paula & Chris co-founded Syntasso, the Platform-as-a-Product startup.

Today they all get together to talk about about what it takes to build a platform team, why Team Topologies is a good conversation starter and why a curated blend of off-the-shelf, composed, and self-created services are required in any organisation operating at scale.

Your hunch is right, all of them used to share the same Pivotal London office with Tammer Saleh, our guest from episode 31. Chris used to win all table tennis matches without even breaking a sweat, and today Gerhard gets his comeback. Touché!

Gerhard loves simple ideas executed well, which is why he is excited to be speaking today with Ildar Iskhakov & Matvey Kukuy about their startup Amixr, a.k.a. Grafana OnCall.

Ildar & Matvey started with a simple idea and a simple stack - Django, Celery, RabbitMQ & MySQL - all running on Kubernetes. Because they kept their main thing their main thing, and kept improving it every day for a couple of years, now your on-call can be simple too.

This is another Big Tent philosophy story with a Black Swan moment towards the end.

This is our 9th Kaizen with Adam & Jerod. We start today’s conversation with the most important thing: embracing change. For Gerhard, this means putting Ship It on hold after this episode. It also means making more time to experiment, maybe try a few of those small bets that we recently talked about with Daniel. Kaizen will continue, we are thinking on the Changelog. Stick around to hear the rest.

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 🙂

Tim McNamara is known as New Zealand’s Rust guy. He is the author of Rust in Action, and also a Senior Software Engineer at AWS, where he helps other builders with all things Rust.

The main reason why Gerhard is intrigued by Rust is the incredible resource frugality. Fewer CPUs means less energy used, which is good for the planet, and good for the monthly bill. This becomes most noticeable at Amazon’s scale, when S3, Lambda, CloudFront and other services start adding Rust components.

What if your infrastructure diagram was responsible for the actual infrastructure?! John Watson & Scott Prutton from System Initiative join Justin & Autumn to discuss.

Tim Banks joins Justin and Autumn — there’s nothing quite like being punched in the face by Zookeeper or being taken down by a “hot” shard.

Silvia Botros joins Justin & Autumn for a phenomenal conversation about databases, her career path & the ins/outs of writing High Performance MySQL.

Justin & Autumn get together one last time for a retro: favorite episodes, lessons learned, biggest surprises & what’s next.

Michael Gat joins us for a look back on mainframes & why sometimes deploying on a Friday IS the right thing to do.

Deploying new applications can be tough. Deploying configuration management safely at scale with stores around the world is different. Martin Jackson joins us to discuss.

In today’s episode, Gerhard is talking to Mauricio Salatino (@salaboy) about the Continuous Delivery for Kubernetes book that he is currently writing.

Mauricio is a Staff Engineer at VMware where he spends most of his time contributing to Knative, an open source platform for running serverless workloads on Kubernetes. Gerhard & Mauricio spent a few months in 2021 working on Knative Eventing, and they both appreciate shipping great software continuously. Mauricio helped ship Knative 1.0.

The from-monolith-to-k8s application used throughout this book has been a few years in the making. It doubles-up as a workshop-style guide for rearchitecting a Java monolith to a Cloud Native architecture running in Kubernetes.

Justin & Autumn are joined by Steven Wu from Scanner. Scanner built logging infrastructure focused on security teams and occasional querying. We dive deep into how architectural decisions affect your business.

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.

Dave Eddy has learned systems programming the traditional way with books and man pages. Now he’s sharing what he’s learned, starting with bash.

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…

Last September, at the 🇨🇭 Swiss Cloud Native Day, Florian Forster, co-founder & CEO of ZITADEL, talked about why they switched to serverless containers. ZITADEL has a really interesting workload that is both CPU intensive and latency sensitive. On top of this, their users are global, and traffic is bursty. Florian talks about how they evaluated AWS, GCP & Azure before they settled on the platform that met their requirements.

Marcos Nils has been into platform engineering for the best part of the last decade. He helped architect & build developer platforms using VMs & OpenStack, containers with Docker, and even Kubernetes. He did this at startups with 10 people, as well as large, publicly traded companies with 1000+ software engineers.

Today we talk with Marcos about the hard parts of platform engineering.

Du’An Lightfoot, dev advocate at AWS, joins Justin & Autumn to discuss networking, a knowledge gap people many people have. You can ignore the things you don’t understand or you can invest time to learn it.

Merry Shipmas! This is our special Christmas episode which sums up two months of very early mornings and a few late nights. After many twists and turns, stuff which didn’t work out, as well as pleasant surprises, this is what we ended up with:

• 🎁 PR #395 - CI/CD Lego set with Guillaume de Rouville & Joel Longtine
• 🎁 PR #396 - Continuous CPU profiling with Frederic Branczyk
• 🎁 PR #399 - Auto-restoring Kubernetes clusters with Dan Mangum & Muvaffak Onuş

While we initially intended to have five Christmas presents in total, only three got delivered in time. We planned, worked hard and eventually shipped the best we could just in time for this special Christmas episode. Our hope is that the latest additions to our changelog.com GitHub repository will help you just as much as they will help our 2022 setup.

🎄Merry Shipmas everyone! 🎄

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!

In our ops & infra world, we learn to optimise for redundancy, for mean time to recovery and for graceful degradation. We instinctively recognise single points of failure, and try to mitigate the risks associated with them.

For some years now, Daniel Vassallo has been doing the same, but in the context of life & work. Daniel talks about the role of randomness, about learning from small wins & about optimising for a lifestyle that matches your true preferences. Apparently, ideas too should be treated like cattle, not pets.

In our first 2022 episode, Alexis Richardson, co-founder and CEO of Weaveworks, is talking to Gerhard about going fully remote, what a great team looks like, and GitOps. While you may have heard of GitOps, now is a good time to check out opengitops.dev.

The most interesting part of today’s conversation is the missing cloud native App Store. While Apple revolutionised the world with the App Store and the iPhone, we don’t yet have something similar for cloud native apps. You may be thinking “But what about OperatorHub?”, or all the Helm registries out there? The registry fragmentation, operator deprecations and lack of curation are not what people have in mind when they think App Store. But there is more to it, so let’s hear how Alexis thinks about this.

Tammer Saleh, founder of SuperOrbital and former VP of Engineering at Pivotal, is joining Gerhard to talk about table tennis, remote work, and challenges that teams have with K8s.

Some years ago, both Tammer & Gerhard used to work in the same London office on CloudFoundry, and nowadays they are both into Kubernetes. Tammer and the SuperOrbital team are deeply experienced in this topic, and they help teams at companies like Bloomberg, Shopify, and federal U.S. agencies tackle hard Kubernetes and DevOps problems through engineering and training.

Why do companies need Kubernetes in the first place? Which are the right reasons for choosing it? Is Kubernetes a platform? Gerhard’s favourite: we are doing Kubernetes wrong, but it works better than when we were doing it right, so what’s up with that? This last one was a lot of fun, and we left the entire minute of laughter in at your request. Enjoy!

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.

We finally did it! All our static files are served from AWS S3. This is the most significant improvement to our app’s architecture in years, and now we have unlocked the next level: multi-cloud. We talk about that at length, and how it fits in our 2022 setup. The TL;DR is that changelog.com will fly, both literally and figuratively.

We also address Steve’s comment that he left on our previous Kaizen episode - thanks Steve!

Towards the end, we talk about Gerhard’s new beginnings at Dagger, where he gets to work with a world-class team and build the next-gen CI/CD. That’s right, Gerhard is now walking the Ship It talk all day, every day. If you want to watch him code live, you can do so every Thursday, in our weekly community session.

Kaizen!

Today Gerhard shares the entire story behind his lost packets. He is talking with Drew Marshall, director at Trunk Networks and No One Internet, a Cloud Services Provider & ISP based in Sussex, UK.

Gerhard’s Vodafone ISP gateway was losing packets, and recording some of the previous episodes used to be challenging as his internet connection would cut out up to 10 seconds at a time, multiple times per recording session. He was convinced that his Unifi Dream Machine Pro was not the issue. Drew helped Gerhard realise that it actually was. Not only has Gerhard’s DNS latency improved by 3x, but he can now fail-over between two WAN connections. And because nothing beats a real-world experiment, you can guess what is coming in this episode 😉

You will find latency & packet loss graphs, speed test runs, and a few other interestings in the show notes. We hope that they inspire you to setup a better home network. Most importantly, may you find your humble & brilliant Drew.

15 years ago, Gerhard discovered magic in the form of Ruby on Rails. It was intuitive and it just worked. That is the context in which Gerhard fell in love with infrastructure and operations.

Today, for special episode 77, we start at Seven Shipping Principles, and, in the true spirit of Ship It, we’ll see what happens next.

Our guest is David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails, co-founder of Basecamp & HEY, and a lot more - check out dhh.dk.

Vincent Ambo –the person behind nixery.dev, tvl.fyi, and a former Google engineer– shares his take on monorepos, Nix, and fully declarative systems without any Flux, Argo or Kubernetes.

While the tooling is impressive, it’s the principles behind it that captivated Gerhard’s imagination. Vincent has a rather interesting take on the monorepository idea, including one change - one version - one deploy. There are a lot of interesting links in the show notes, including all the code that Vincent uses to manage infrastructure.

As a result of this conversation, Gerhard is running Nix on one of his Macs, and also started experimenting with his first NixOS production instance.