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.

This week we have the pleasure of Rich Burroughs, Senior Developer Advocate at Loft Labs and host of the Kube Cuddle podcast.

We talk about multitenancy in Kubernetes and how to run Kubernetes in Kubernetes with vcluster. If you are using KiND, you will find this episode interesting, and maybe even helpful.

We also talk about the role that Kelsey Hightower played in Rich joining the CNCF ecosystem. The key take-away is that people make all the difference.

ADHD is something that Rich thinks about often. Gerhard was curious about the difference between ADHD and burnout, as well as this Twitter thread on re-reading sent emails.

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.

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!

This week we are talking to Robin Morero, the person behind fabled.se, a DevOps consultancy from Gothenburg, Sweden. Their motto is “move faster and prosper”, which Gerhard prefers to the initial “move fast and break things”.

Fabled works with startups primarily, and after 26 years, Robin has a few interesting insights to share. What do you think, are haunted codebases real? At what point do pull requests become harmful? What about k3s running on KVM as a simple starting point for production? If this reminds you of #7, and the follow-up YouTube stream with Lars, it’s no coincidence.

Gunnar Holwerda (Engineering Manager) and Tom Pansino (DevOps Team Lead) share with us a few stories about how the teams at opensesame.com manage AWS operational complexity. The first link in the episode show notes are the slides that Tom & Gunnar prepared for this conversation. Check them out as you hear us speak about the Inverse Conway Manoeuvre, and why you should always go for the bananas.

If you like this episode, and have a similar story to share, please reach out to us. We all love real-world stories that we can learn from, and perhaps contribute to.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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! 🎄

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!

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!