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 🙂

MLOps is an increasingly popular topic that is no longer just a subset of DevOps. Go is a great choice for infrastructure. What role does Go play in MLOps?

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.

This week Adam is joined by Zac Smith, Co-Founder of Packet and now running Equinix Metal. They talk about the early days of the internet infrastructure space, the beginnings of Packet, the “why” of bare metal, transitioning Packet from startup to global company overnight when they were acquired by Equinix, and how all this for Zac is 20 years in the making.

KBall catches up with Chris Ferdinandi about the trends in modern web development towards smaller libraries, pre-compilation, and applications at the edge.

This is our second Kaizen episode, where Adam, Jerod & Gerhard talk about changelog.com improvements since episode 10. OK, so Gerhard deleted the DNS API token. Not only did he take the time to understand how that happened, so that he could actually learn from his mistake, but now we have a system in place so that we can share learnings from incidents. By the way, these are publicly available in our #incidents Slack channel.

A great & unexpected thing that happened since we recorded this episode, is Jerod fixing 99% of all the errors that were happening in prod. The top error was the broken Twitter auth - sorry Matt - which was a result of us upgrading to OTP 24 a few months back. Episode 3 show notes include a YouTube stream which captures it all.

We wrap up this episode by each of us sharing the improvements that we would like to do until our next Kaizen. You heard it from Adam first: Ship It Driven Development

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.

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 🙌🏻

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’re sharing a special episode of our new podcast called Ship It. This episode is our Kaizen-style episode where we point our lens inward to Changelog.com to see what we should improve next. The plan is do this episode style every 10 episodes.

Gerhard, Adam, and Jerod talk about the things that we want to improve in our setup over the next few months. We talk about how the June Fastly outage affected changelog.com, how we responded that day, and what we could do better. We discuss multi-cloud, multi-CDN, and the next sensible and obvious improvements for our app.

Kaizen means “change for the better”, continuous improvement in this context. Failure is essential to learning, but how do we learn as a team? The simplest thing is to regularly dedicate time for taking a step back, talking about what works & what doesn’t, maybe writing some of it down, and eventually deciding what we should improve next. I intend to make every 10th Ship It! episode a Kaizen one.

This is the first one when we talk with Adam and Jerod about the things that we want to improve in our setup over the next few months. We talk about how the June Fastly outage affected changelog.com, how we responded that day, and what we could do better. We discuss multi-cloud, multi-CDN, and the next sensible and obvious improvements for our app. Let us know via Slack or Twitter what learnings are valuable to you so that we can produce the best content for you.

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.