The Ops Community ⚙️: Ella (she/her/elle)

Announcing some changes and saying goodbye ✌

Ella (she/her/elle) — Wed, 01 Mar 2023 19:39:37 +0000

First, an announcement:

Friends, as February draws to a close it's time to announce my departure from the Ops Community moderator team and I want to take this opportunity to thank you all.

Ever since I officially joined the team last summer, I've enjoyed getting to know our regular contributors through your content and comments - and in the process I've learned so much more about DevOps than I ever thought I could!

Thanks for welcoming me into the space, showing up to share your experiences, and answering my questions (or bearing with my DevOps ignorance!). I've had so much fun watching this community evolve as you help each other, gain new skills of your own, and build your own followings. Every moment has been a privilege.

We'd love your help!

That's right! You can help this community enter a new chapter:

Frequent readers will have observed that the Weekly Achievements series posts have grown longer as more posts are being published each week (which has given me so much more material to explore and digest, so thanks again!), and those of you who have been around for some time will have noticed the badges popping up in your profiles for reaching follower and publishing milestones. The time and attention that this growing community deserves is expanding with its readership.

This is the ideal time for you to take up the Tag Moderator or Trusted User role you've been thinking about!

We want to continue to celebrate excellent content, and to do that we need your expert opinions on the accuracy and validity of the content that is being shared. If you're a specialist in Azure, Pulumi, tutorials, observability, etc., or just want to help keep this community healthy, we would love to hear from you!

Drop the team a note at socials@ops.io or leave a comment below.

What do you hope to achieve this week?

Ella (she/her/elle) — Mon, 27 Feb 2023 20:43:10 +0000

Congrats on the launch of the new Blink website, @patrick_londa and @johnson_brad - it's such a fresh new look! What's next for y'all?

I'm wrapping up a few things ahead of a trip out to East Asia next week, so let's keep this week's round-up short and sweet 🍯

A warm welcome 👋

... to @rafaelonline and all our new members this week!

👉 If you're new here and would like some suggestions for people to follow who share your interests, we welcome you to share a bit about what you're working on and what you're like to learn and share! Drop your intro in our Welcome post here

ICYMI

Bonus points if you can pick up on a solid theme from the past week 🕵

@danielepolencic was all about the Kubernetes containers ✨
@eriklz separated out the Kubernetes (IaC) from the containers (Docker) ⚡
and @eyalestrin asked if we're ready for IPv6 then gave an answer involving Kubernetes and containers (sorry, no spoilers here - you'll have to read it for yourself!) 🔥

I swear, you can't make this up!

What are you planning for the week ahead?

👉 Let me and the community know by commenting below.

What do you hope to achieve this week?

Ella (she/her/elle) — Mon, 20 Feb 2023 20:17:33 +0000

If you've ever had any doubts about sharing your knowledge with this community or any other, @eyalestrin has something to say to you!

As a community mod, this post on why you should share your knowledge is one of my favorite posts of the year so far, because of all the reasons Eyal lists: I believe it to be true, that sharing your knowledge is an act of giving and receiving without ever having to take anything from anyone else.

Join our incredible community members listed below and try it for yourself - you may even end up in next week's community check-in post!

A warm welcome 👋 to all our new members!

@bernardo joined us this week and immediately made the Ops Community feel like their home-away-from-home with a trio of posts! Welcome, Luiz, and thank you for making your presence felt with your contributions - if you haven't already met @eyalestrin I think you're going to get along!

ICYMI

Luiz wasn't the only person delivering three posts this week. In fact, we had three people with three posts (hold on while I go buy a lottery ticket 🍀):

@oleonardorodrigues was on a posting roll this week with not one, not two, but three posts! 💪
@argonaut also delivered a trinity of posts with two primers: one on GitOps and the other on secret management, with a more detailed guide to managing Kubernetes Secrets with Hashicorp Vault 🤫

Meanwhile, away from the three-of-threes, it was business as usual:

@techielass kept the #azure content rolling with this summary explainer on Azure savings plans for compute, 💸
@danielepolencic guided us through shutting down pods in Kubernetes - I love the use of "gracefully" in tech, don't you? 💃
@devinterrupted talked with Steve Pereira about value stream management in DevOps

If you're planning to leave the house in 2023, then you'd better start signing up for some of these free events:

This week, @alvaradodaniel3 dropped New Relic's blog summary for January and there are some gems to check out in there, but if you want to hear from the New Relic team in person then opportunities are coming soon! Tomorrow, Tuesday 21 February at 5:30 PM ET, the team will be running a workshop in at the New Relic HQ in ATL. If you'd like to learn how to create an app with React Native and meet some devs in your neighborhood, you can sign up here. If Atlanta's a little too far north for you, O11y Day: Miami is taking place on Thursday 23 February - and if that's still too far north then maybe FutureStack São Paulo is closer to home on Wednesday 8 March. Is West the best for you? Then join FutureStack San Francisco on Wednesday 15 March.
For those of y'all who are nowhere near any of those stunning locations I just listed, the PagerDuty Community Team have got you covered with their virtual meetup: the Quarterly Terraform Roundtable. Join @lnxchk and the team to talk all things #PagerDuty and #Terraform! Date and time is Tuesday, February 21 at 10am PST, 1pm EST, 6pm UTC. Sign ups and all the info can be found here✨

What are you planning for the week ahead?

Did anyone else feel like last week somehow crept by in a weird way? I've spoken to a couple of people who had a similar experience as me: I felt like I was working at a good pace on things and making progress on my to-do list, but all of a sudden it was Friday and I wasn't finished!

👉 Let me know in the comments below:

Did the weekend take you by surprise?
Or you were fully ready for it with task list completed?
What is on next week's task list?
If you're planning to join New Relic or PagerDuty at one of the events above, which one do you have in mind?

What do you hope to achieve this week?

Ella (she/her/elle) — Mon, 13 Feb 2023 20:52:22 +0000

It's a new week, which means: however the last week ended we get a fresh start to all our plans and dreams. Because sometimes, you just gotta hit restart and try again.

What will inspire you to such great heights this week? I can't wait to find out!

A warm welcome 👋 to all our new members!

Thank you for stopping by to say hello @solomedianet! If you're an SRE in our community, please feel free to let Solomon know in the comment thread here 🤗

ICYMI

@oleonardorodrigues returned with 2 fresh posts! Find out how to use terraform-docs to create automatic docs for your Terraform modules and how Leonardo uses Dependabot to update dependencies in GitHub 💪
@bhushan_pathak took us on a trip through the CKA exam experience with plenty helpful tips if you're planning to take yours anytime soon. (Just a reminder, it's ok if you're not) 🍀
@eriklz reviewed TidyCloud's predictions for 2022 and updates their podcast recommendations https://community.ops.io/eriklz/tidy-cloud-aws-issue-41-buildpacks-media-recommendations-2022-review-1hmo 🔮
@dejanualex showcased the security of Platform One's Iron Bank 🔐
Meanwhile, conference season is in full force for the PD team. Good luck with the jet lag, y'all! You are tougher humans than me, that's for sure 😰
DevInterrupted shared their latest podcast episode with an invitation to LinearB's event on Wednesday 15 February: Scaling Developer Efficiency in 2023
Using metrics & automation to execute your R&D strategy in a down market!
Speaking of events, New Relic's show is on the road. Meet the New Relic team at FutureStack San Francisco on Wednesday 15 March.

If you're nowhere near the Bay Area, maybe O11y Day: Miami on 23 February and FutureStack São Paulo on 8 March are closer to your doorstep?

What are you planning for the week ahead?

👉 Let me and the community know by commenting below. I'll be checking back with you next week to see how it went!

What do you hope to achieve this week?

Ella (she/her/elle) — Mon, 06 Feb 2023 19:16:29 +0000

A warm welcome 👋 to all our new members!

@jgaskins published their first post detailing how they used cert-manager to configure the CA certificates for Mutating Webhooks 🥳

From our Welcome post, please take a moment to say hello to @nicedamsel25 (thread here), @aerosouund (thread here), and @bmayhew (thread here) - we're delighted to meet you all! 🤗

ICYMI

@the_cozma troubleshooted a pod stuck in CreateContainerConfigError in Kubernetes and took time to show us how it works,
@techielass showed us how to deploy an Azure Resource Group with Terraform,
@lnxchk was busy with a tutorial on using PagerDuty's App Event Transformer for GitHub repo alerts and made sure to deliver PD's trusty weekly update post 💪
I would be remiss if I didn't highlight and celebrate @techwatching's first non-Pulumi post!! ✨
@alvaradodaniel3 shared the announcement that New Relic Vulnerability Management is now generally available with an early-adopter rate - now's a great time to check it out!

Finally, I want to take a moment to thank @tylerauerbeck for looking out for this community by quietly reporting spam content. Thanks, Tyler, for being proactive and consistent. 🙏

What are you planning for the week ahead?

👉 Let me and the community know by commenting below. I'll be checking back with you next week to see how it went!

What do you hope to achieve this week?

Ella (she/her/elle) — Mon, 30 Jan 2023 19:59:00 +0000

I realized today that I ask y'all every week what your goals are, and never really share mine. Part of that's because the glamorous life of a community moderator is kinda-sorta like your friendly neighbourhood janitor (either/or neighbourhood street signs 😅).

I say that to say, if there's anything you're curious about here, you can always ask a mod. Questions that might come to mind are,

"How do I get a badge?",
"Where did the unicorn emoji go?",
"How do I schedule a post?",
"Why aren't my gifs displaying as expected?". As @techwatching has discovered: sometimes we have answers, sometimes we don't, but we will always try to help you find understanding!

So, don't be shy! Ask a mod a question today!

A warm welcome 👋 all our new members!

ICYMI

@patrick_londa outlined the steps to migrate from AWS EC2 launch configurations to launch templates
@eriklz went KonMari on devops, which resulted in more focus on Pulumi ✨
@techwatching showed us how to provision an Azure SQL Database with Active Directory authentication, using Pulumi whilst keeping the heat on Terraform (and staying true to the position Alexandre first announced to us in this post 🌶
@alvaradodaniel3 shared the latest New Relic news](https://community.ops.io/newrelic/solve-problems-faster-communicate-alongside-your-telemetry-data-with-slack-17o4)
@expoverse took it back to basics with a tutorial for a simple webpage + CI/CD pipeline 🎉
@eyalestrin continued the Cloud Native Applications series with this overview for securing cloud-native applications 🔐
@techielass created this guide to using GitHub Actions Secrets to securely store repository/environment/organization secrets and use workflows to call them for Azure deployment🤫
and where do I even begin with @danielepolencic's Learn Kubernetes Digest? It is absolutely crammed full of articles, tools, tutorials, calls for papers, events, jobs, and more! 🔥

What are you planning for the week ahead?

👉 Let me and the community know by commenting below. I'll be checking back with you next week to see how it went!

What do you hope to achieve this week?

Ella (she/her/elle) — Mon, 23 Jan 2023 21:00:18 +0000

Welcome back to everyone returning after the holidays and Happy Lunar New Year to everyone who was celebrating over the weekend 🐇

We had a lot of fresh content posted last week, so I'll do my best to pick out some themes, but please forgive any oversight on my part!

A warm welcome 👋

to @devinterrupted and @jit_mvs who joined us recently 🤗 - we encourage you to share a bit more about yourself in the Welcome Thread when you get a chance.

ICYMI

Final call for the webinar on CloudOps and Cybersecurity Predictions for 2023 tomorrow, 24 January 24 at 10AM PST, with @haviv and special guest Sarbjeet Johal.

Register on the BlinkOps website here. This event will be hosted by the Blink team, and they're available to answer any questions you may have in the comments below.

Let's kick off this week's round-up with a review of the wealth of Kubernetes content our community has blessed us with:

@danielepolencic shared not one, but two K8s guides: this hands-on tutorial for building an ingress controller in bash and an explainer on why you can't ping a Kubernetes service 😎
Meanwhile, @argonaut's double-headliner included a primer on Managing Kubernetes Secrets,
and @the_cozma is back with this breakdown of a couple of security benchmark monitoring tools for Kubernetes 🥳

We also gorged on AWS and AWS-adjacent content:

courtesy of our new friends @jit_io, who shared this runthrough of how they fixed their InvalidIdentityToken error 💊
@eyalestrin outlined strategies to mitigate being caught out by a lack of cloud resources , and followed this up with the first part of a new series on cloud native apps.
@techielass rounded it out with a tutorial on installing Terraform in the AWS CloudShell ✨

Phew! And there was so much more, ops friends...

Another post from @techielass reviewed six common CI/CD tools - your preferred tool didn't make the cut? Join the discussion in the comments on Sarah's post!
@techwatching is really leaning on us for that Pulumi badge with this consistent content! This week, Alexandre walked us through using Pulumi Watch for hot reload 💫
and @lnxchk introduced us to chaos engineering practices while sharing the PagerDuty team's Rundeck Community Survey with the promise of prizes 🎊

What are you planning for the week ahead?

👉 Let me and the community know by commenting below. I'll be checking back with you next week to see how it went!

What do you hope to achieve this week?

Ella (she/her/elle) — Mon, 16 Jan 2023 20:02:53 +0000

One of the things I really appreciate about this community is the varied levels of the content and discussions that take place.

We have community members across all stages of their careers who are sharing articles and guides for readers at all levels. It makes for a thrilling blend of content that informs and inspires!

Thank you to everyone who shares their insights and high-level ideas, or takes the time to write up tutorials and overviews of concepts that they found useful when they were starting out.

I want to give a special thanks to the people asking questions and those taking the time to answer them:
A welcoming community for DevOps practitioners of all levels needs us to ask the questions we don't yet know the answers to - and to explain how we learned to answer the ones we do.

A warm welcome 👋

to @bhausabp who stopped by with an introduction in the Welcome Thread. Please join me in greeting Bhausab 😊

ICYMI

On 24 January 24 at 10AM PST, the Blink team will be presenting a webinar on CloudOps and Cybersecurity Predictions for 2023 with @haviv and special guest Sarbjeet Johal.

Register on the BlinkOps website here, and drop a comment for @johnson_brad with any questions you may have.

This week has eased us into the new year with plenty of beginner-friendly content:

@jatin published a beginner's guide to build tools,
and @priyanshisharma shared a DevOps career roadmap,
while @techielass put together this intro to Terraform 😎
Meanwhile @techwatching is conspiring with @eriklz to persuade us to create a Pulumi badge with yet more Pulumi content, this time in tandem with Azure - let me know what you think about the Pulumi badge below 😉
speaking of Erik, we started a fun discussion about the origins of industry reports on this latest Tidy Cloud bulletin and would love to hear your thoughts! 🤔
@lnxchk followed up this post on service objects with a follow-on on splitting escalation policies. Mandi and the PD team are also back on the road, so follow their brand page to get updates on where they'll be heading next! ✈
The New Relic team reminded us about an upcoming update to their TLS requirements for all inbound connections and introduced us to their partner, Hack the Hood.

What are you planning for the week ahead?

👉 Let me and the community know by commenting below. I'll be checking back with you next week to see how it went!

What do you hope to achieve this week?

Ella (she/her/elle) — Mon, 09 Jan 2023 18:51:50 +0000

We are already in Week 2 of 2023. What changes have you already noticed - whether in your own mindset, your team dynamics at work, the news cycle, or right here in The Ops Community?

No prizes for noticing the unicorn reaction is missing, but notable mention to @eriklz for reading my post about it (thanks for noticing, Erik!) 😂

A warm welcome 👋

to @iswazilamanyamande, @uchelouis45, and @abhinavd26, who all introduced themselves in the Welcome Thread. Stop by to say "hello" back to them if you find a moment 😊

ICYMI

We welcomed @galco and the Firefly team to The Ops Community with this post about their event-driven architecture involving DynamoDB and Terraform 🙌
If you're trying to decide between Pulumi or Terraform for your next IaC solution, @techwatching has written the in-depth breakdown you're looking for, and would love to know what you decide!
@briancaffey adds CDK to the comparison table in this experiment, deploying the same web app in 3 different libraries - join the rest of the conversation here 🤩
@danielepolencic is back with more K8s tips, this time on debugging a pod in production. Check out the debugging flowchart for help with more Kubernetes troubleshooting 😎
@aowendev is keeping up the content cadence with this guide to manually migrating from Forestry to its newest incarnation: TinaCMS - thanks for sharing your migration process with us, Andrew! 🦙
@jatin is back with the latest instalment of the Build Better CI CD Pipelines series; this tutorial explores AWS CodePipeline by building a CD pipeline with s3 - let Jatin know how you get on!
Our friends at PagerDuty shared their first weekly update of 2023 and guess who's in it? That'll be us! 🥳

I joined @johnson_brad to chat with @lnxchk for the latest episode of Page It To The Limit, and had a great time talking about all y'all!

What are you planning for the week ahead?

👉 Let me and the community know by commenting below. I'll be checking back with you next week to see how it went!

Feature update: Retiring the unicorn reaction 🦄

Ella (she/her/elle) — Tue, 03 Jan 2023 20:17:31 +0000

New year, new reaction buttons - or at least, that's what we're hoping for!

We have decided to follow in the footsteps of DEV, by giving the unicorn reaction button a well-deserved rest. RIP 🦄 friend.

This was in part guided by the Forem team's awareness that users have to scroll through the entire post to reach the comments section, and in part because people have been confused about the unicorn reaction since time immemorial. They resolved both issues by replacing the unicorn for a jump-to-comments button, as you can see in the sidebar of this post and in the screenshots below.

Before:

After:

Note how the new reaction buttons have a comments button in place of the unicorn, which will jump you directly to the comment section. 🗨

As explained in the DEV post, there will eventually be more reaction buttons to replace the unicorn, but for the time being we are moving into 2023 with the comments button...

What do you think?

🦄 Will you miss the unicorn?
🗨 Will this will make it easier to comment on posts?
🗨🦄 Why not both?

What do you hope to achieve this year? (feat. 2022 community round-up)

Ella (she/her/elle) — Sun, 01 Jan 2023 15:00:00 +0000

Happy new year to everyone in The Ops Community! 🎉

Although the past year has been an absolute rollercoaster for many of us, we have a whole lot to celebrate.

2022 in numbers:

1620 members joined
1340 badges awarded
850 comments made
800 posts published
130 tags with >1 post
24 organizations created

2022 was the year we launched The Ops Community, and we quite literally wouldn't be where we are right now without all of you, so we begin the new year with thanks! 🙏

Thank you to every single one of you for:

showing up with open minds,
being willing to teach and learn,
sharing your tutorials and inspiration, and
building a place you want to belong to.

May we continue to build, learn, share, and grow together in 2023 ✨

Share your goals for 2023

Whatever note you ended 2022 on, we are in a new year with new possibilities.

What is on your heart, friends? What are your wildest dreams for 2023? Share them in the comments below so we can cheer each other on as we work towards them!

Ops Community Welcome Thread v3

Ella (she/her/elle) — Sat, 31 Dec 2022 23:00:00 +0000

Hello and welcome!

👋 The Ops Community is a place to share tips & tricks, tutorials, and career insights about everything DevOps. Now you're here, we encourage you to say hello.

Leave a comment below to introduce yourself! Tell us:
- 😎 what you'd like us to call you (including your preferred pronouns if you want),
- 😍 what you've been currently or recently working on that you really enjoy,
- 🤩 something you're hoping to learn from the community.
Reply to someone's comment, either with a question or just to say hello!
Check out some popular tags (like the ones linked above), and some popular authors like @nurulramadhona, @the_cozma, @cloudyadvice, @techielass, or @drewkhoury.
Last but not least, don't forget to follow @LearnAboutOps on Twitter!

Over to you! 🙌