The Ops Community ⚙️: Brad Johnson

WEBINAR: 2023 CloudOps and Cybersecurity Predictions

Brad Johnson — Thu, 12 Jan 2023 00:17:10 +0000

Join the Blink team, cofounder and CTO (and Ops Community member!) @haviv, along with special guest Sarbjeet Johal for a webinar focused on cybersecurity and cloud recommended practices.

Learn bold predictions about trends in cybersecurity automation and cloud operations for 2023 from leading cloud executives. Blink’s CTO, Haviv Rosh, will be joined by cloud economist, Sarbjeet Johal, and other special guests to discuss the news and technologies that will matter most to enterprise leaders like CISOs, CTOs, and CEOs this year.

Get insights from our panel of technology executives who have led technology strategy for teams at companies like ServiceNow, Oracle, Palo Alto Networks to help you prepare for a secure and resilient New Year.

Why it’s hard connecting different cloud tools

Brad Johnson — Thu, 23 Jun 2022 14:40:05 +0000

This post was originally published to blinkops.com by Ops Community members @haviv and @johnson_brad.

Serverless, microservices, and containerized architectures unlock flexibility for cloud engineering teams. By adopting a serverless approach, cloud engineers have the freedom to deploy different tools each in order to solve specific use cases in the most effective way.

But using a myriad of different cloud tools creates a logistical nightmare for the DevOps and SRE teams managing all those different applications. In practice, this looks like DevOps and SREs logging in and out of different cloud platforms, searching through platform documentation, and troubleshooting API connections just to create an integration between two different services. Then, rinse and repeat for every additional integration project that comes down the pipeline.

This post will seek to highlight some of the challenges and pitfalls of building integrations between cloud tools.

Where did all these API integration projects come from?

In the most basic terms, modern DevOps and SRE teams need to write integrations to perform their everyday work duties. Whether it’s adding a new cloud tool to the development toolbox, improving observability into cloud architecture, or enabling a new application feature, cloud engineers are constantly wiring different cloud tools and APIs together.

DevOps workflows also involve multiple cloud tools. In the course of a single day, a DevOps practitioner or SRE might expect to log in to:

Monitoring tools (DataDog, New Relic, etc…)
Cloud and infrastructure tools (AWS, GCP, K8s, etc..)
Communication tools (Slack, Discord, etc…)
Project management tools (JIRA, Asana, etc..)
On-call tools (PagerDuty, etc..)

As DevOps and SREs become increasingly embedded on product and project development teams, this means individual cloud engineers are often left becoming the sole experts for numerous platforms. Their daily experience involves context-switching between cloud platforms. Factor in the intricacies of different platforms’s APIs and terminology, and integrations projects become a recipe for complexity and inefficiency.

Lots of daily DevOps tasks require custom integrations work

There are many daily DevOps and SecOps tasks that require custom integrations work. Whether you’re trying to get log data from a cloud platform into an observability tool or automate an on-call response workflow, eventually you’ll need to connect tools together. Many platforms offer native integrations, but for more complex use cases, cloud-native DevOps and developers will most likely find themselves building a custom integration using scripts and APIs.

Let’s explore some examples where cloud engineer might need to build a custom integration:

Troubleshooting

Suppose you want to expose a webhook that receives an alert from your monitoring tool and automatically kickstarts an on-call process. Once an alert is received, you want to perform the following steps in order:

Create a new Slack channel
Open an on-call bridge (Zoom)
Invite relevant team members to the Slack channel
Enrich the alert with relevant data from different systems (run kubectl commands, fetch logs, fetch status page data, fetch latest GitHub PRs, etc)

It’s unlikely there’s a native integration capable of supporting such an involved workflow. Instead, to enable this workflow, a custom integration is going to be required.

Scheduling Day-2 Operations tasks

There are some processes that DevOps and SREs must run occasionally, for example daily or weekly, that require custom integrations in order to perform the required task.

For example, consider these workflows:

Checking that all employees have appropriate Auth and SSO tools installed‍
Suppose that at the end of every day, you needed to validate that all employees registered in Okta have an instance of JumpCloud installed, then send a report by email with a list of any offenders without the appropriate tools installed. If you want to coordinate across all these tools, you’ll need a custom integration.
‍
Finding Kubernetes orphaned resources
It’s hard enough finding orphaned resources, but how do you notify the appropriate teams who can remediate any issues. You’ll need to build a custom integration to find orphaned Kubernetes resources and send a notification to the relevant team for approval before deletion.

Event-based tasks (IFTTT scenarios)

Sometimes an event is the trigger for a DevOps process. This may require the creation of a custom integration in order to:

Define a condition, like when a certain cloud resource is created (new AWS EC2 instance is created, new S3 bucket is created, etc)
Perform checks against certain resources (for example, the existence of tags, TTL, etc..)

Self-service or on-demand tasks

In order to enable coworkers to run a workflow on their own, you may need to create a custom integration and expose it as a self-service workflow. Self-service workflows can enable other developers to run purpose-built tasks such as:

Scaling up or down Kubernetes HPA
Running whitelisted kubectl commands agains your production services

Building a new integration is deceptively complex

So what about building application integrations is so difficult? Aren’t APIs designed for the explicit purpose of connecting to another application? The reality is that integrations are rarely so straightforward, and require a fair amount of upfront consideration to implement successfully.

Here are some of the common pitfalls and gotchas that developers sometimes forgot to think about when building an integration:

Connections/Authentication: How will you establish credentials and verify identity between different tools? There are so many ways to do authentications: OAuth, Basic Auth, API keys, Bearer tokens. And this isn’t even mentioning a process for refreshing tokens and storing credentials and access information.
Retries: When there are failures, how you are going to detect them? Once an error is detected, for which errors will you retry sending the request? For example, if you are getting 400 or similar error, there is no point in retrying since there are likely Authentication-related issues, but if you get a 429 error (too many requests) or 503 error (service unavailable), it makes sense to retry.
Rate limits: How do u plan to recover from rate limits errors? Will your integration simply fail?
Testing: How do you keep your integration functioning at all times? How are you going to test your integration’s performance and security over time?
Error handling: When an error occurs with your integration, what steps will you take to troubleshoot it? How will you know what is wrong?
Performance: How will you monitor integration performance? How will you no if the integration is behaving as expected or incorrectly?
Platform: What platform will run the integration code (Lambda, microservices, host it on prem)?
CI/CD: How will you deploy your integration code? Does your CI/CD platform support using this cloud tool?
Observability: How will you make sure the above solutions are always up and running? How do you get visibility into the overall status of executions?

And this is hardly a comprehensive list, the are countless other variable to consider depending on your particular integration use case.

Advantages of using a no-code automation platform

No-code automation platforms like Blink benefit from pre-existing integrations with cloud and SaaS tools, offloading the burden of repetitive integration efforts from your DevOps teams, so you can focus on creating the workflow you desire. By adopting a no-code automation platform for your cloud operations, you can eliminate the development effort required for creating custom cloud integrations, thereby:

Reducing time to ship
Improving the quality of your workflows (more reliable, resilient, auditable)
Decreasing maintenance effort
Solving all the integration complexities listed above

Want to start building DevOps and SecOps workflows faster today? Sign up for Blink early access to take advantage of hundreds of automations purpose-built for solving common cloud operations challenges.

🏅New Ops Community Badges: Here's How to Earn Them

Brad Johnson — Sat, 18 Jun 2022 00:20:22 +0000

Earlier this week in our first-ever Ops Community update, I dropped a teaser that there would be ✨new Ops Community badges✨ announced soon.

I'm super excited to share these new badges with you, and can't wait to hear what you think about them in the comments. 💬

In case you missed it, here's my earlier writeup on the original Ops Community badges and how you can earn them. It's a good place to start if you're not sure what badges are available on The Ops Community.

Meet your new Ops Community badges 💫

First though, some news! We've officially reached 1000 Ops Community Founding Member badges awarded. To the lucky 1000 recipients of the Founding Member badge, display it proudly. We're not giving any more away!

Without further ado, allow me to unveil the latest Ops Community badges...drumroll please... 🥁🥁🥁

1. Ops Scholar

Our first new badge is the Ops Scholar badge. You can earn the Ops Scholar badge just by following other members on The Ops Community. When you find an article you like, make sure to show the author your appreciation by visiting their Ops Community profile page and clicking the "Follow" button. Once you've followed 50 or more authors, we'll reward you with a shiny new Ops Scholar badge!

2. Ops Builder

The Ops Builder badge is awarded to members who are followed by 50 or more of their Ops Community peers. We believe that Ops Community members are the best indication of who is publishing the most valuable, informative CloudOps content. The Ops Builder badge is our small way of thanking the members who create Ops Community posts that members want to read.

3. Ops Champion

Do you have a competitive streak? The Ops Champion badge is awarded to members who are followed by 100 Ops Community members. We think it's pretty impressive to be followed by 100 cloud engineers. That's why we're going to publish an interview Q&A with our first few Ops Champion badge winners. If you're looking to promote a new project or want to grow your following, start connecting with your fellow Ops Community peers!

4. Bronze Badges

Introducing three new Bronze badges for Docker, Jenkins, and Terraform. When you publish 5 posts related to any of these tools, you'll be on your way to sporting a handsome new Bronze badge on your Ops Community profile.

5. Silver Badges

We're also adding three new Silver badges for Docker, Jenkins, and Terraform. Publish 10 posts all related to a single one of these topics to The Ops Community and you'll be able to brag at the office lunch table about your rare new silver prize.

6. Gold Badges

You can now earn a Gold badge for Docker, Jenkins, and Terraform when you write 25(!!) posts about one of these topics. Your reward for diligently crafting 25 DevOps articles will be a profile that shimmers in gilded splendor, because you'll be the proud owner of a rare and prestigious Ops Community Gold badge.

Where's my Ops badge, bro? 🤷🏽‍♀️

Think you've earned a badge, but you haven't received it yet? That's probably our fault! Many Ops Community badges are manually awarded, so please gently nudge your friendly Ops Moderator on Twitter or here in the comments and we'll get your issues resolved ASAP.

⚙️ The Ops Community: 1000 Founding Members, New Badges, and More!

Brad Johnson — Thu, 16 Jun 2022 02:35:36 +0000

👋 Hey everyone, it's Ops Moderator @johnson_brad here.

You haven't heard from me in a while, but we've been working on some improvements for The Ops Community that I wanted to share with you.

First... Some big news!

The Ops Community is now 1000+ cloud engineers strong! 💪

In under three weeks we've grown from two moderators to a vibrant community of 1000+ cloud engineers sharing their insights and knowledge with other DevOps practitioners around the world. Thank you all for truly being the Founding Members of this new cloud engineering community.

🗺 Community roadmap

The Ops Community is growing faster than we'd ever anticipated, and we need your help to make it better. @patrick_londa and I are currently in the process of preparing a public roadmap for The Ops Community to share with you all, so we can work together to build our community into an inclusive and accessible forum for everyone.

Do you have ideas about improving The Ops Community? Let us know in the comments.

☁️ Meet new #aws moderator @cloudyadvice!

Speaking of making The Ops Community better, I wanted to share some more exciting news.

Introducing our first new tag moderator, Ops Community member @cloudyadvice! Everybody thank Mike Graff for volunteering to steward our burgeoning #aws tag community.

Here's a bit about Mike in his own words:

Based in the Silicon Valley, I have over 25 years experience working in IT. Over my career I’ve had the great fortune to work on a lot of leading edge technology early on such as backup to disk, virtualization, and now cloud. I’ve been working with AWS since late 2015, and currently hold multiple AWS Certifications including Solutions Architect – Professional and the Advanced Networking Speciality.

Make sure to welcome Mike with your comments and check out some of his recent posts on The Ops Community or on his personal blog. You can also tag @cloudyadvice with questions about #aws or to notify Mike about posts that need attention with the #aws tag.

And we need your help! Are you interested in becoming an Ops Community tag moderator? Email us at social@ops.io with info about your relevant experience and what #tags you're interested in moderating.

🏅 New badges!

Later this week, we'll be dropping 6 new sets of Ops Community badges for you to earn and bling out your Ops Community profile.

Here's a teaser of the new Ops Community Scholar badge! Want to learn how to win this badge? Make sure to follow me @johnson_brad and stay tuned for my future post!

@LearnAboutOps on Twitter

You may have noticed that The Ops Community also has a Twitter account @LearnAboutOps, where we promote high quality posts from our members. Do you want to be featured on @LearnAboutOps? Let us know in the comments! Just make sure you already have a Twitter account, so we can tag you as the author.

Here's an example from Ops member @priyanshisharma:

The Ops Community ⚙️

@learnaboutops

Observability, Monitoring, Alerting & Tracing Lineage in Microservices

Scaling and managing cloud apps is easier, but what's the deal with #observability and #monitoring for these complex distributed systems?

{ author: @TechWriterr } #LearnAboutOps

community.ops.io/priyanshisharm…

15:07 PM - 01 Jun 2022

Plagiarism policy

Lastly, I wanted to comment on an important topic: Plagiarism.

According to The Ops Community Terms of Use:

Users agree and certify that they have rights to share all content that they post on The Ops Community — including, but not limited to, information posted in articles, discussions, and comments. This rule applies to prose, code snippets, collections of links, etc. Regardless of citation, users may not post copy and pasted content that does not belong to them. Users assume all risk for the content they post, including someone else's reliance on its accuracy, claims relating to intellectual property, or other legal rights. If you believe that a user has plagiarized content, misrepresented their identity, misappropriated work, or otherwise run afoul of DMCA regulations, please email social@ops.io. The Ops Community may remove any content users post for any reason.

Please do not copy or post content you do not own without the explicit permission of the owner. If you're unclear about plagiarism or ways to avoid plagiarizing content, I recommend checking out this awesome post about how to avoid plagiarism from the moderators over at DEV. If you post content that is suspected to have been plagiarized, Ops Community moderators will remove your post and may suspend or ban you from posting.

If you suspect a member has published plagiarized content, please do not call out that user directly, and instead notify and Ops Community moderator for us to review. Some cultures have differing perspectives with regards to the attribution of content. In order to be respectful to all out Ops Community members, we'll do our best to resolve any issues kindly and in a timely manner.

NEW: "The Cloud Pod" added to #Podcasts

Brad Johnson — Fri, 03 Jun 2022 19:02:35 +0000

Thanks to a suggestion from Ops member @cloudyadvice, we've added a new podcast to the #podcast page!

You'll now find The Cloud Pod listed among the different DevOps and CloudOps productions that our moderators curate on the #podcasts page. The Cloud Pod is hosted by Justin Brodley (@jbrodley), Jonathan Baker (@cloudkickoff), Peter Roosakos (@FoghornCTO), and Ryan Lucas (@ryron01).

Spotify | 167: The Cloud Pod Gets Sucked In by the Graviton3

open.spotify.com

P.S. New podcast episodes get posted all the time, and there's a good chance The Ops Community will know before our moderators. If there's a listed podcast that's out of date, or if you discover a new podcast, video, or other relevant material that you think we should feature in the community, just let your moderators @patrick_londa or @johnson_brad know!

How to Earn Different Ops Community Badges 🏅

Brad Johnson — Mon, 30 May 2022 20:59:34 +0000

👋 Hi everyone, I'm @johnson_brad, one of your Ops Community Moderators.

I'm here to say a giant THANK YOU to all the cloud engineers who joined The Ops Community over the last few days. Your contributed posts, comments, positive feedback, and overall good vibes have been ✨A-MAZ-ING✨ and we can't wait to #LearnAboutOps with each of you.

Get to know your Ops Community Badges 🏅

You may have gotten an email with a shiny new badge from The Ops Community and wondered to yourself:

🤔 "...hmmm, how many badges are there in The Ops Community?"

Well, I'm not going to spoil all the fun and publish a comprehensive list of Ops Community badges. But, I thought it might be helpful to introduce you to some of the more common badges you might earn or encounter as a member of The Ops Community.

1. Founding Member

We're awarding Founding Member badges to the first 1000 members who sign up to join The Ops Community. We've already given out almost 900 of them, so tell your friends to sign up soon. When they're gone, they're gone!

2. Founding Author

Even more exclusive than the Founding Member badge, we're only awarding Founding Author badges to the first 100 authors who publish an article on The Ops Community. This is another badge that's only available for a limited time.

3. First Post

Every member receives the First Post badge when you publish your first post to The Ops Community for the first time. Thanks for contributing!

4. Pioneer

Have you seen a community member with the Pioneer badge? The Pioneer badge is a bit rarer and requires a little bit of luck to earn, as well. Members with the Pioneer badge were the first to publish a post for a moderated tag on The Ops Community, like #AWS, #Kubernetes, or #CICD. There are still a few moderated tags that have not yet received a post. Will you be the next Ops Pioneer?

5. Generalist

The Generalist badge signifies to The Ops Community that you're a member who know their way around a CI/CD pipeline, and have yelled at a cloud or two already. To earn the Generalist badge, you must publish posts about 5 or more different moderated Ops tags establishing competence in a variety of different CloudOps focuses.

6. Bronze Badges

Are you an expert on a particular platform? Publish 5 posts related to a single tool and you'll earn your Bronze badge. Today, there are Bronze badges for AWS, Azure, GCP, and Kubernetes.

7. Silver Badges

Set yourself apart from other authors by publishing 10 or more posts related to a single tool. Like the Bronze badge, today there are Silver badges for AWS, Azure, GCP, and Kubernetes.

8. Gold Badges

Will you be the first Ops Community member to win a Gold badge? This prestigious profile bling is only awarded to Ops Community members who publish 25 (!!) posts all related to a single tool. Similar to Bronze and Silver badges, today there are Gold badges for AWS, Azure, GCP, and Kubernetes.

9. DevOps Legend

The DevOps Legend badge is an exclusive designation, reserved only for DevOps industry leaders handpicked by The Ops Community moderators. When you meet a DevOps Legend, you can trust that this person has significant DevOps experience, knowledge, and has made an outsized contribution to the DevOps profession.

10. InfoSec Legend

The InfoSec Legend badge is another exclusive designation, reserved only for cybersecurity and SecOps industry leaders handpicked by The Ops Community moderators. When you meet an InfoSec Legend, you can trust that this person has significant cybersecurity or SecOps experience and knowledge, and has made an outsized contribution to the InfoSec profession.

Have an idea for a new badge or questions? Let us know in the comments below!

P.S. Think you've earned a badge, but you haven't received it yet? That's probably our fault! Many Ops Community badges are manually awarded, so please gently nudge your friendly Ops Moderator and we'll get your issues resolved ASAP.

What is The Ops Community?

Brad Johnson — Wed, 18 May 2022 15:32:37 +0000

Whoa! The Ops Community is finally live. ✨ 🥳 ✨

Welcome to our community for cloud engineers to share tips & tricks, tutorials, and career insights. Most importantly, The Ops Community is a place for cloud engineers to share knowledge with each other and build up our community of technology professionals and aspiring cloud professionals.

We've all been given an amazing opportunity to share our knowledge and experience with others, in order to help them along on their DevOps and SecOps journeys. If you haven't already, sign up and consider sharing to The Ops Community!

P.S. Don't forget to follow @LearnAboutOps on Twitter!

⚙️ Get to know the Ops Moderators

The Ops Community is sponsored by the awesome teams at Blink, Forem, and Drop. We created The Ops Community because there wasn't a dedicated place for cloud engineers, a growing community of DevOps, SecOps, IT Managers, SREs, and other cloud-native professionals, to talk about their jobs, tools, problems faced, and gained experiences. We built Ops to make finding information about DevOps and SecOps topics, for all platforms, a little more fun, accessible, and user-friendly.

Our moderators in The Ops Community (so far...) are Brad and Patrick. At Blink, we're both on the marketing team, where we spend our days thinking about cloud operations and no-code automation. But we're also going to be publishing cloud-native and Ops Community content, and here to make your Ops Community experience the best it can possibly be! 🌱

👷🏽 Get involved!

We need your help making The Ops Community better! Let us know if you're interested in becoming a moderator for a particular topic or becoming an Ops Community sponsor. Here's our contact info if you want to connect!