SweetOps Town Hall Meeting

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Today we had our first “Town Hall” meeting where members of our SweetOps community (slack.cloudposse.com) got together on a Zoom conference call to talk shop.

Remember to vote when we should have our next call.

Discussion Points

  • GitOps – CI/CD Automation of Terraform
  • Git ChatOps
  • OAuth2 Proxy
  • Govcloud

Pain Points

There were a few shared pain points by members.

  • Keeping modules up to date is tedious, especially in busy environments where modules are released frequently. We wish there was a way to identify out of date modules and easily update those module references. Erik mentioned that he submitted a “Feature Request” for Dependabot to support HCL. Please ? if you think this would be awesome!
  • Loren mentioned that using Open Source in Govcloud is difficult because Govcloud lags way behind the commercial AWS cloud in features. For example, EC2 instance tags cannot be set on launch. Other times, API endpoint URLs just don't work because they've been hardcoded to the ones used by the commercial cloud offering.
  • Erik mentioned that OAuth2 Proxy appears to be an abandoned project. With over 90+ open pull requests, broken OpenID Connect support and no new releases in over a year, maybe it's time for a new maintainer. Apparently, others have suggested this too.

Technologies

A number of technologies came up in our discussions

Services

Other Links

Attendees

Resolutions

  • Hold these “Town Hall” meetings more often (perhaps weekly)  and at different times so that we can include members in all geographies and time zones.
  • Ensure we record and publish the next call

Geodesic Logo!

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We've finally settled on a logo for Geodesic, our solution for implementing rock-solid cloud architectures.

In mathematics, a geodesic line is the shortest distance between two points on a sphere. It's also a solid structure composed of geometric shapes such as hexagons.

 

We like to think of geodesic as the shortest path to a rock-solid cloud infrastructure. The geodesic logo is a hexagon with a cube suspended at its center. The cube represents this geodesic container, which is central to everything and at the same time is what ties everything together.

 

But look a little closer and you’ll notice there’s much more to it. It's also an isometric shape of a cube with a missing piece. This represents its pluggable design, which lets anyone extend it to suit their vision.

Top 5 DevOps Bad Habbits

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Recently, we were asked to name our top (5) DevOps “Worst Practices” (or anti-patterns). Here's what we came up with…

#1. Not looking outside the organization to see how others are solving the problem—always building new things rather than looking for readymade solutions (open source, SaaS, or enterprise offerings) which leads to piles of technical debt & inevitable snowflake infrastructures.

#2. Not building easy tools that the rest of the company can use. We must never forget who we are serving. Developers are our customers too.

#3. Not treating DevOps as a shared responsibility. It needs to be embedded into the engineering organization, not relegated to a select few individuals. “DevOps” is more of a philosophy than a job title.

#4. Not treating Infrastructure as Code. We call this new paradigm GitOps, where Git system of record for all infrastructure and CI/CD is our delivery mechanism.

#5. Never commit to `main`. We don't do it in regular software projects, we shouldn't do it for ops. Everyone should follow the standard Git Workflow on their Infrastructure Code (Feature Branching, Pull Requests, Code Reviews, CI/CD). This increases transparency and helps the rest of the team stay up-to-date with everything going on.

Unlimited Staging Environments

adminDevOps, Release Engineering & CI/CD, SlidesLeave a Comment

How to run complete, disposable apps on Kubernetes for Staging and Development

What if you could rapidly spin up new environments in a matter of minutes entirely from scratch, triggered simply by the push of a button or automatically for every Pull Request or Branch. Would that be cool?

That’s what we thought too! Companies running complex microservices architectures need a better way to do QA, prototype new features & discuss changes. We want to show that there’s a simpler way to collaborate and it’s available today if you’re running Kubernetes.

Tune in to learn how you can assemble 100% Open Source components with a CodeFresh CI/CD Pipeline to deploy your full stack for any branch and expose it on a unique URL that you can share. Not only that, we ensure that it’s fully integrated with CI/CD so console expertise is not required to push updates. Empower designers and front-end developers to push code freely. Hand it over to your sales team so they can demo upcoming features for customers! The possibilities are unlimited. =)

Slides

Quip Plugin for WordPress

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We just published our New WordPress Plugin for @quip. Easily embed quip documents in any #wordpress post or page. Check it out here!

WordPress Plugin Directory: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-quip/

GitHub: https://github.com/cloudposse/wp-quip

Screenshot 1: Example Usage

Screenshot 2: Admin UI

Summary

To embed the content of a Quip document into a WordPress page or blog post, install the plugin and then use the quip shortcode.

quip shortcode accepts two attributes and has the following format:

[prismatic_encoded]JiM5MTtxdWlwIGlkPSJtV25uQXN6cmUzTVciIHR0bD03MjAwJiM5MzsgDQo=[/prismatic_encoded]

where
  • id (Required) – The ID of the Quip document (e.g. https://cloudposse.quip.com/mWnnAszre3MW)
  • ttl (Optional) – Time-To-Live in seconds. After the first request to the Quip API, the plugin caches the content of the document (HTML and images) for the specified amount of time (seconds). All consecutive requests to the same page or blog post will not call the Quip API again but instead will retrieve the document from the internal cache, making the pages faster. After the ttl expires, the plugin will call the Quip API and cache the result again. If the ttl attribute is not provided, the default value of 7200 seconds (2 hours) is used. You can change the default value in Quip Settings (menu Settings/WP Quip). If ttl is set to 0, the plugin will not cache the Quip API responses, and every request to the WordPress page or blog post will call the Quip API.