Maybe Jira for your kids’ chores is a good idea… Probably not.

Render founder/CEO Anurag Goel joins us for a look behind their platform. An application native hosting option that hides the lower levels still requires a LOT of infrastructure.

This is our third Kaizen episode in which Adam, Jerod & Gerhard talk about GitOps the wrong way, ask questions with Honeycomb and realise that they must be holding the CDN wrong, and the effort that has been going into moving all changelog.com static files from regular volumes to an S3-like object store. If you like a good yak shake, listening to this one is a lot more fun than doing it.

Gerhard is most excited about the Ship It Christmas gifts that we have been preparing for you. While GitHub Codespaces is not going to be part of the upcoming Christmas special episode, today’s talk covers why investing in a Codespaces integration is worth it.
Changelog #459 and Backstage #20 are related to this topic.

Justin & Autumn take you with them to the 2024 SoCal Linux Expo where they asked six fellow attendees about their favorite open source projects and their least favorite commands.

In today’s episode, Gerhard is talking to Sam Alba, Docker’s first employee, and Solomon Hykes, the Docker co-founder. Together with Andrea Luzzardi, they are the creators of Dagger, a universal deployment engine that trades YAML for CUE, and uses Buildkit as the runtime.

Why? Because we should stop rewriting the same application deployment logic in scripts, makefiles or continuous delivery configuration. That’s right, this is the YAML vaccine that we have all been waiting for.

Gerhard believes that one day, Dagger will become just as meaningful for application delivery, as Docker is today for application code.

Zac Smith, managing director Equinix Metal, is sharing how Equinix Metal runs the best hardware and networking in the industry, why pairing magical software with the right hardware is the future, and what Open19 means for sustainability in the data centre. Think modular components that slot in (including CPUs), liquid cooling that converts heat into energy, and a few other solutions that minimise the impact on the environment.

But first, Zac tells us about the transition from Packet to Equinix Metal, his reasons for doing what he does, as well as the things that he is really passionate about, such as the most efficient data centres in the world and building for the love of it.

This is a great follow-up to episode 18 because it goes deeper into the reasons that make Gerhard excited about the work that Equinix Metal is doing. This conversation with Zac puts it all into perspective.

By the way, did you know that Equinix stands for Equality in the Internet Exchange?

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 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.

Gina Häußge is here to tell us about the infra behind the OctoPrint project, which tests and releases new versions that work on multiple different printers and gets deployed hundreds of thousands of times.

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.

Devyn Cairns & Jakub Žádník join Justin & Autumn to talk about building a new kind of cross-platform shell that provides easy extensions with traditional command compatibility. That’s no easy feat!

In this episode, Gerhard is joined by Cyrille Le Clerc, Product Manager Lead on Observability at Elastic, and Oleg Nenashev, Principal Engineer at CloudBees.

It all started with Oleg’s tweet back in July, in which he was promoting Akihiro Kiuchi’s work on Jenkins monitoring with OpenTelemetry. This was done in the context of Google’s Summer of Code - a link to Akihiro’s demo is in the show notes.

As you may remember from episode 20, instrumenting our changelog.com pipeline is on Gerhard’s mind, and this conversation helped him clarify a few things. If you are thinking of instrumenting your CI/CD pipeline with OpenTelemetry, this episode is for you.

I’m Gerhard Lazu, host of Ship It! A show with weekly episodes about getting your best ideas into the world and seeing what happens. We talk about code, ops, infrastructure, and the people that make it happen.

Like Charity Majors from Honeycomb… clip from episode #11

And Dave Farley, one of the founders of Continuous Delivery… clip from episode #5

We even experiment on our own open source podcasting platform so that you can see how we implement specific tools and services within changelog.com.

What works and what fails… clip from episode #10

Listen to an episode that seems interesting or helpful and if you like it, subscribe today. We’d love to have you with us.

This week Gerhard is joined by Justin Searls, Test Double co-founder and CTO. Also a 🐞 magnet. They talk about how to deal with the pressure of shipping faster, why you should optimize for smoothness not speed, and why focusing on consistency is key. Understanding the real why behind what you do is also important. There’s a lot more to it, as its a nuanced and complex discussion, and well worth your time.

Expect a decade of learnings compressed into one hour, as well as disagreements on some ops and infrastructure topics — all good fun. In the show notes, you will find Gerhard’s favorite conference talks Justin gave a few years back.

No interview this week! Instead, Justin & Autumn sit down to talk about what they’ve been learning recently.

Today we have a very special episode, where Gerhard gets to share his favourite learnings from Steve Jobs. If it wasn’t for his determination to build a better personal computer, Gerhard would have most likely continued with a career in physics.

We know what you’re thinking: it’s crazy and impossible to interview Steve Jobs, but on his 10th memorial anniversary, Gerhard was determined to combine the things that Steve said with his passion for computers, automation, and infrastructure.

Live your life and ship your best stuff because there’s nothing like the present.

Thank you, Steve.

In this episode, Gerhard talks to David and Marques from Equinix Metal about the importance of bare metal for steady workloads. Terraform, Kubernetes and Tinkerbell come up, as does Crossplane - this conversation is a partial follow-up to episode 15.

David Flanagan, a.k.a. Rawkode, needs no introduction. Some of you may remember Marques Johansson from The new changelog.com setup for 2019. Marques was behind the Linode Terraforming that we used at the time, and our infrastructure was simpler because of it!

This is not just a great conversation about bare metal and Kubernetes, there is also a Rawkode Live following up: Live Debugging Changelog’s Production Kubernetes 🙌🏻

Preston Doster joins the show to tell us what it takes to run a Mastodon server with 55,000 accounts and 11,000 monthly active users.

This week Emile Vauge, founder & CEO of Traefik, joins Gerhard to share a story that started as a solution to a 2000 microservices challenge, the real-world implications of shipping many times a day for years, and the difficulties of sustaining an inclusive and healthy open-source community while building a product company.

Working every day on keeping the open-source community in sync with the core team was an important lesson. The second learning was around big changes between major versions.

The journey from Travis CI to Circle CI, then to Semaphore CI and eventually GitHub Actions is an interesting one. The automation tools inspired by the Mymirca ant colony is a fascinating idea, executed well. There is more to discover in the episode.

On this week’s episode, Gerhard is joined by Kathy Korevec, former Senior Director of Product at GitHub, and now Vercel’s Head of Product. Docs play an essential role in GitHub Actions, and Gerhard’s experience has proven that. Building, testing, and shipping code with GitHub Actions works better because of their excellent docs. However, the docs that Kathy pictures are not what you are imagining. She explains it best in her post, Maybe it’s time we re-think docs, which is what started this whole conversation.

The bottom line is, just as you wouldn’t ship untested code, shipping code without documentation is not optional. Today’s conversation with Kathy explains why.

This week on Ship It! Gerhard talks with Lars Wikman (independent Elixir/BEAM software consultant) why sometimes a monolith running on a single host with continuous backups and a built-in self-restore capability is everything that a small team of developers needs. That’s right, no Kubernetes or microservices. After 2 years of running changelog.com, a Phoenix monolith, on Kubernetes, what do I think? Join our discuss and find out!

This week Gerhard is talking with Arnaud Porterie, founder of EchoesHQ, a new utility that measures and communicates engineering activity.

They start by re-creating the 60 seconds Y Combinator pitch, and then shift focus to what it was like to get EchoesHQ off the ground. Next, they tackle something which is always on Gerhard’s mind: Why is it important to connect our daily engineering activity to intent?

Before EchoesHQ, Arnaud used to run the core team and the open source project at Docker, and combined with other engineering leadership roles that he held for over a decade, he kept encountering misalignment that was preventing organisations from making meaningful progress. Let’s hear why EchoesHQ might just be a great way of addressing this.

Things go wrong all the time. We all make mistakes. And that is okay. What is not okay, is to think that it won’t happen, or that there will be someone else around when it does. In that moment, it doesn’t matter who wrote that module, package or microservice. But there is a better way to think about this, and there is an approach that makes people actually look forward to incidents.

It all starts with thinking of incidents as opportunities to learn, and then share those learnings with everyone, so that you can all improve. In this episode, Gerhard is joined by Stephen Whitworth and Chris Evans, incident.io co-founders, and former Staff Engineers at Monzo.

They get it, we get it, and now you can get it too.

In this episode, Gerhard talks to his Skyhook Adventure friends: Alan Cooney, Saul Cullen & Wycliffe Maina. They are the ones that introduced Gerhard to the world of serverless in the context of Amazon Web Services. Gerhard shared his experience with remote work, how to ship software with confidence and consistency, and what to look for in infrastructure as code.

At the heart of Skyhook Adventure are adventure trips, and 2020 was not a good one for this business. As you can already tell, code and infrastructure was not the biggest challenge for this team. Having said that, serverless, microservices, a monorepo and the event-based architecture played a big part in successfully navigating the challenges.

This is a story about what happens when a good team allows itself to be guided by solid experience and keeps doing the right thing, long-term. It’s fun, real, and it applies to many.

This is Gerhard’s first set of interviews from KubeCon North America 2021.

William Morgan shares with us some of the finer Linkerd details, such as the underlying security theme, why native Kubernetes objects are preferable to more CRDs, and the joy of meeting team members in person.

Frederic Branczyk speaks about Parca, a new continuous system profiling tool that uses eBPF to help you understand what is happening on your hosts.

Andrew Rynhard gives us a great Talos OS and Kubespan perspective, and shares some really good follow-up videos on these topics.

The last conversation is with David Flanagan - you know him as Rawkode - about new beginnings. It’s only been less than two months since we’ve had him in episode 18, and he kept really busy. Caleb, his 3 weeks old baby boy, was the youngest attendee at this conference, and some talks made him sleepy, so good job everyone.

Gerhard talks to Tom Wilkie, VP of Product for Grafana Labs. They talk about Loki, Tempo, and how can Grafana Cloud offer such a generous free tier. The solution is in the Cortex architecture, which was used in Loki and in Tempo too. Yes, Tom is the Cortex co-author. We recommend that you listen to this episode in combination with episodes 3 and 11. That’s the best way to get a more complete picture of the topics that we discuss today.

Lastly, would you like to watch Gerhard & Tom pair-up and build Grafana dashboards like pros? Tom has this really interesting approach that Gerhard would like to learn too. We can either have a live YouTube stream, or record and then publish the video. Let us know your preference via our Changelog Slack, or just plain Twitter.

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.

Gerhard talks with Charity Majors, ops engineer and accidental startup founder at honeycomb.io about high-performing teams, why “15 minutes or bust,” and how we should start using Honeycomb in our own monolithic Phoenix app that runs changelog.com. There is just one step, and it’s actually really simple!

They also talk about how Honeycomb uses Honeycomb to learn about Honeycomb, which is one of Gerhard’s favorite questions. As for key take-aways, deploying straight into production is really important, but not as important as optimising for humans - which are not replaceable cogs, that learn and share their learnings continuously. That is the secret to making things easy and happy for everyone.

In this episode, Gerhard follows up on The Changelog #375, which is the last time that he spoke Crossplane with Dan and Jared. Many things changed since then, such as abstractions and compositions, as well as using Crossplane to build platforms, which were mostly ideas.

Fast forward 18 months, 2k changes, as well as a major version, and Crossplane is now an easy choice - some would say the best choice - for platform teams to declare what infrastructure means to them. You can now use Crossplane to define your infrastructure abstractions across multiple vendors, including AWS, GCP & Equinix Metal. The crazy ideas from 2019 are now bold and within reach. Gerhard also has an idea for the changelog.com 2022 setup. Listen to what Jared & Dan think, and then let us know your thoughts too.

This week we talk with Jean-Sébastien Pedron, RabbitMQ and FreeBSD contributor, about the importance of good release engineering for core infrastructure. Both Jean-Sébastien and I have been part of the Core RabbitMQ team for many years now. We have built some of the biggest CI/CD pipelines (check the show notes for one example), wrote and shipped some great code together, while breaking and fixing many things in the process.

We have been wrestling with today’s topic since 2016. Jean-Sébastien has some great FreeBSD stories to share, as well as an interesting perspective on shipping graphic card drivers. Oh, and by the way, it’s probably our fault why your remote car key stopped working that afternoon. It will all make sense after you listen to this episode.