DEV Community: Tristan Pollock

Serverless Kubernetes

Tristan Pollock — Wed, 17 Feb 2021 19:12:58 +0000

I'm a big fan of the Dev.to community, so I wanted to share this recent release by CTO.ai directly on here. If you are curious about how to leverage Kubernetes in a more efficient manner to support your engineering team, read on...

In short: the new CTO.ai platform simplifies the way developers deploy and manage their cloud native apps.

In long: CTO.ai, a provider of developer workflow and automation tools, today announced the launch of its serverless Kubernetes platform that makes it easy for developers to deploy and manage their cloud-native applications. This powerful, yet easy-to-use, platform makes product delivery teams more efficient and eliminates the complexity experienced by developers when applications are deployed on top of a self-managed Kubernetes cluster. The CTO.ai platform was created to address the estimated $300 billion* lost in developer productivity every year, much of which comes from complex modern cloud tooling.

Software teams typically spend inordinate amounts of time and money creating their own custom workflow tools or must buy several specialized tools that need to be integrated to make managing Kubernetes easier for their developers. The CTO.ai platform eliminates this issue by enabling software developers to easily adopt Kubernetes at any stage of development, without the exponential cost of retraining, hiring, or manually building the developer workflows needed to operate Kubernetes efficiently. Startups can use the platform to host a monolith or microservice-based application; enterprises can layer the platform into their own private cloud cluster using a service mesh.

“Our platform is the first in the Kubernetes market to go to this length in prioritizing a complete and intuitive experience for developers that allows operations teams to still harness the full capabilities of Kubernetes. We created it so that developers can focus on actually developing applications, not operations,” said Kyle Campbell, founder, and CEO of CTO.ai. “We love Kubernetes, but anyone with experience knows that it can be complex to manage and scale. Our platform addresses this by providing software teams of any size with an unmatched “PaaS-like” developer experience for their cloud-native application development workflows.”

The CTO.ai platform enables developers to easily manage all of their CI/CD, staging, and production systems on top of a shared Kubernetes cluster, without forcing them to manage Kubernetes directly. As deployments scale, companies have the option to offload their cost of computing to public cloud providers like AWS via the CTO.ai service mesh, which enables them to bring down their cost to scale and internalize their infrastructure operations directly. The platform also monitors delivery workflows and provides stakeholders with delivery insights so they can better understand their operational cadence for estimation or planning. Insights are calculated in real-time from events that happen across their workflow systems and this enables teams to measure important metrics like deployment status, velocity, and stability.

The CTO.ai mission is to simplify the adoption of Kubernetes for developers, enabling them to make use of world-class tooling but without being forced to compete for scarce DevOps talent to do so. From startups to enterprises, development teams at all levels can benefit from the efficiencies delivered by the CTO.ai platform. It enables a consolidated strategy for delivery systems and provides data-driven insights into delivery cadence. Optimized for fast-paced product delivery, the CTO.ai platform helps startups speed time-to-market since it doesn’t require the support of hard-to-hire DevOps engineers. Enterprises can accelerate their digital transformation and lower their cost of digital teams by consolidating their delivery systems and adopting a data-driven approach to development.

CTO.ai has been developing this unique platform over the past three years with support and input from the DevOps teams at venture-funded startups such as Axial, TrueBill, Cedar, YellowDig, and Remine, as well as others in the DevOps community.

“Having this technology available is going to make it easier to develop dev operations around new systems, and it’s definitely going to be a big advantage for us going forward,” said Zack Weheim, director of engineering at Axial. “Without CTO.ai, we would have to adopt the bare minimum tooling. Anything new would have to be written in a language our team was familiar with and we’d be running scripts manually.”

Pricing and Availability
Deploying the first application using the CTO.ai platform is free and includes hosting for the CI/CD pipeline, as well as GitOps and ChatOps workflows. As deployments scale, services for managed application deployments are $19 per service per month; pipelines to build, test, and release with CI/CD are $14 per service per month; and custom GitOp and SlackOps workflows are $7 per service per month. Data insights to measure delivery across all tools is $99 per team per month. Free support is available via Slack and email. The growing CTO.ai Slack community has more than 700 developers.

About CTO.ai
CTO.ai is a provider of developer workflow and automation tools. Founded in 2017, the company is headquartered in Vancouver, BC. Investors include Tiger Global Management and Slack Fund. More information can be found at CTO.ai.

Try out the platform here

Celebrities Explain DevOps

Tristan Pollock — Tue, 06 Oct 2020 19:08:51 +0000

For everyone who is new to DevOps or interested in celebrities (or both), or just want to see David Hasselhoff, Flavor Flav, and Carole Baskin explain AWS, Kubernetes, and Docker, this is for you. Enjoy:

Backstory: https://cto.ai/blog/celebrities-explain-devops/

SlackOps: 14 Ideas for Developer Workflows in Slack

Tristan Pollock — Tue, 25 Aug 2020 15:25:55 +0000

Increasingly companies are bringing their entire workflows and data streams into Slack via apps, integrations, and APIs. Slack is currently reporting over 135,000 active companies and that’s just the beginning amid a global rise of remote-first work.

Why this move to Slack? For millions of users, Slack is THE place for communication and collaboration. Slack is not just an email killer because it’s a novel form of communication. We already had SMS and WhatsApp. What Slack brings to the table is deeper-seated in company transparency and velocity.

Slack is seamlessly synchronous and asynchronous. It allows you to reduce context switching by creating a space for both short-form communication and long-form with a sprinkle of emoji-led authentic conversations and interactions. It also is beautifully designed.

Most importantly though, Slack brings in streams of information out of the countless siloed data sources in your consoles and Chrome browser tabs. It surfaces real-time and important metrics, queries, customer support tickets, PagerDuty downtime pings, and so much more. It’s become your dashboard for your company, team, and everything in between.

The average company loses more than 20% of its productive power to organizational drag. Put Slack in the picture though and development teams using Slack deliver 5% more output overall, with 23% faster time to market, 27% less time needed to test and iterate, and faster identification and resolution of engineering-related bugs, according to IDC research.

Here at CTO.ai, we use a plethora of Slackbots and SlackOps to run our company. From our Slack-first DevOps workflow automation platform to Geekbot for company standups to the Jira chatbot for our product roadmap to Greetbot to welcome new members of our Slack developer community, we are believers that Slack is the key to fluid, meshed flow states that increase productivity and observability.

To say the least, we are big fans of Slack, but don’t take our word for it. Below are some Slack hacks, tips and tricks for developers and engineering teams of all ilks to get the most out of Slack. In no particular order, here are what DevOps and engineering workflows technical leaders are using in Slack:

#1 Send Delayed Messages
Lizzie Sigal, Developer Evangelist, Twilio
“The Gator Slack app lets you send delayed messages at 9am in the recipient's time zone so as to not notify them if they've logged off for the day. Convenient, more thoughtful, simple.”

#2 Team Celebrations
Fletcher Richman, Co-Founder/CEO Halp; Senior Product Manager, Atlassian
“Every time a new customer signs up for Halp via Stripe, we post a gif to #halp-wins.”

Atlassian also has Statuspage, a chatbot with a full Slack integration that allows updating and maintaining your status page directly inside your ops chatroom.

#3 Infrastructure Tooling
Daniel Hochman, Platform Engineer, Lyft
“Clutch ships with authentication and authorization components. OpenID Connect (OIDC) authentication flows for single-sign on, resource-level role-based access control (RBAC) via static mapping, and automatic auditing of all actions with the ability to run additional sinks for output, e.g., a Slackbot.”

#4 Reminders
Don Burks, Technical Lead, Sphere
“/remind is one of the biggest ones. Instead of having to break flow from my keyboard and write something down, I can get Slack to remind me.”

(I personally enjoy CMD K for quick searching and /collapse for minimizing all those extra pop-ups from Slack integrations.)

#5 Wins, Failure Alerts, Retros, Standups
Brice Pollock, Senior iOS Engineer, BetterUp

Looking for a way to get sales organizations more visibility to product teams: Salesforce integration for closed opportunities in #general.

Looking for a way to get more insight into build failures: CircleCI integration to a channel that reports build failures.

Looking for a way to get more insight into runtime failures: Firebase integration into a channel that reports changes in thresholds for fatals and non-fatals.

Looking for a way to help with Team Retros: Pin a poll to the channel and use a reminder to get the team to enter responses prior to retro.

Looking for a way to automate standup: Integration of JIRA and Confluence so s new standup doc is generated every day with a random ice breaker question, randomized standup order.

Looking for a way to highlight SWAT or blocking issues: Created a macro that like reminders will print all blockers right before standup and anyone on the team can add a blocker or discussion topic.

Want the rest of the Slack Hacks for engineers? Head on over to the CTO.ai blog.

13 Ways to Simplify Your DevOps Workflows

Tristan Pollock — Mon, 17 Aug 2020 18:46:18 +0000

When we interviewed Chuka Ofili — Google Developer Expert, Certified Cloud Architect, and Full Stack Gigster Engineer — for The Ops Show recently, I was more than impressed. It wasn’t just his incredible video call setup (see it here) and animated, positive outlook on life, but the way he designed his DevOps workflows into their purest forms.

Chuka takes steps to make sure his developer workflows were simple yet robust, powerful yet cloud-centric, and easily automated. “If I do something one, two, or three times, I will automate,” Chuka explained on The Ops Show.

He found the right Lean DevOps tools and tricks to do just that out of the broad landscape of possibilities. And it is big. The Cloud Native Foundation tracks around 1,425 technologies alone and the microservices landscape is even larger.

So, in order to bring some simplicity and clarity to the DevOps world, here are a few of Chuka’s DevOps workflow hacks ranging from Slack to Kubernetes to GitOps to open source cloud configurations.

His DevOps workflows stack and his fully cloud-integrated pipeline:

1. Skaffold — helps developers do everything locally even if your laptop doesn’t have the processing power. “Skaffold is powerful. It’s the only thing I build with on my CI server,” Chuka says, “It’s the only thing I run and you can literally use a Chromebook with low computing power for your Ops.”

2. Kustomize — Maintaining multiple environments and configurations becomes so much easier: Write your Kubernetes YAML files once for development, and reuse for staging, production without using template substitution!

3. Docker — Using Docker as his containerization tool, packaging applications with all the parts that it needs to run makes it easy to build once and run anywhere.

4. CircleCI — Chuka uses CircleCI combined with Skaffold to build and push his Docker images to the Google Container Registry.

5. Flux — Chuka used to use CircleCI Orbs but now uses Flux for as his GitOps operator for Kubernetes clusters.

6. Kubernetes — The final orchestrator! Automating deployment, scaling, and management of his containerized applications.

Read the rest of his workflow hacks and tricks on the CTO.ai blog

Simplifying DevOps: Live Stream Happening Now

Tristan Pollock — Wed, 12 Aug 2020 17:43:12 +0000

There's a live premiere happening now about simplifying your DevOps with Chuka Ofili, a Google Developer Expert + Gigster Full Stack Engineer + Cloud Architect, who is discussing how to simplify your DevOps stack with skaffold, flux, k8s, docker, github, gitops, slack, and more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdPOI09polo&feature=em-lsp

Who do you look up to in tech?

Tristan Pollock — Tue, 28 Jul 2020 16:36:28 +0000

Today, I'm looking for the best voices in technology to bring on to The Ops Show, a weekly video show and podcast we've been doing during COVID. We cover everything that intersects with the developer journey.

We've brought on developers, CTOs, startup founders, and technical leaders of all types.

We've covered everything from DevOps to ethics to imposter syndrome, technical debt, and automation.

Taking guest recommendations on ProductHunt today: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/the-ops-show