What I Learned This Week (March 16, 2018)

#discuss #devops

One of the things I value highly where I work is that, each week, our Director emails out a "What I Learned This Week". It got me thinking that a good way for me to reflect on what I have learned would be for me to publish the same thing each Friday.

So without further delay, I present to you the things that I learned this week:

Common Themes

We recently started our DevOps committee where I work, and we have been discussing what our current direction will be for the next six months. With that in mind, I have personally been reviewing the following technologies for possible recommendation as things we can look into:

Kubernetes via Minikube

Last time I looked into learning Kubernetes (affectionately abbreviated as k8s by the community), it was prohibitively difficult to get into and learn due to having to spin up a small cluster sandbox merely to experiment with. Imagine my excitement at learning that a tool, minikube, exists that allows you to play with Kubernetes locally on your development machine! Seriously, go install it and start playing with Kubernetes.

HashiCorp

HashiCorp is famous for developing the amazing tool, Vagrant. Well, it turns out that they have a ton of other awesome projects:

Terraform - represent your infrastructure as code
Nomad - a deployment tool that is awesome
Vault - secret management tool

The major win with these tools is they are modular and modularly adopt-able. That is also their weakness, however: there is more to set up in order to play with them.

Ansible

This week I also rediscovered Ansible. By rediscovered, I mean I delved more into how it works and fell in love with it all over again. We are already using this tool at my job, but up until now, it has mostly had major wins on our Systems Support team. This week, it finally "clicked" how Ansible configuration works, and it is now no longer such a (great) mystery. I will definitely be integrating this into more of my workflows more often.