Ship It! Cloud, SRE, Platform Engineering

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...

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 repli...

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 Thom...

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;...

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...

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...

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 mee...

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 th...

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 reque...

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 mo...

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....

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...

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 b...

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...

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 com...

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...

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 t...

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 Kaiz...

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...

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...

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 deplo...

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...