[cs615asa] Meetup Summary

Rahul Yadav ryadav3 at stevens.edu
Tue Apr 3 15:08:06 EDT 2018


Meetup Date: March 20th, 2018

Name: DevOps for K8S + Operational Excellence in Apr Fools Pranks

More Info: https://www.meetup.com/nycdevops/events/246346445/



I had attended the same meetups as other did. Many meetups keep taking
place around in NYC.

I had chosen this as it aligned by our course of CS615 and Professor Jan
agreed it around SysAdmin profiles.

As, we all have come to know the is no fixed description of SysAdmin
profile, they have to be diverse.

Similarly most attendees had work profile either as DevOps, SysAdmins,
SREs, etc.

Meetup itself had diverse profile speakers:

A DevOps (Paul Czakowski),

and, a SRE (Tom Limoncelli)

in their day time jobs as per position names provided by organization.


The First talk was regarding Kubernetes by Paul Czakowski,

what it is, how to deploy and scale their pods (instances I related it as
AWS).

As, any new technology comes they bring their own naming conventions to
look cool.

Eventually you can relate them with each others it helps you remember
multiple systems together.

I have had experience in creating and deploy some WebApps till now on
various systems,

most of them were VMs provided by SysAdmin of company I used to work with.

Now, during talk speaker also pointed out same point as our Prof. Jan;

DevOps, SysAdmin or SREs don’t have any fixed Job description and overlap
each other.

Then, he started pointing out merits of Kubernetes.

Which is, it reduces deployment bugs and crashes, as you are able to deploy
near-live.

Kubernetes has been build up over Dockers, which are Linux Containers.

Which are light-weight VMs hence, need less resources and faster to deploy.

They are easily shareable using their images, which are mostly kept in
public repos.

You can build your own Repo and Kubernetes environment also; but it is
advisable not to do so.

Main reason for that advise was given that, most people are not able to
configure correctly;

Hence leave them out vulnerable.

Kubernetes consist of three main components:

Pods (a computation object; similar to AWS instance)

Service (a networking component; it connects the Pods with other pods or
exposes them to public network)

Volumes (a storage component; independent of other components;

                 some of them are tightly coupled with Pod life cycle)

Additionally, you can insert ConfigMaps/Secrets (these are key-value pairs
for environment)

Whole, kubernetes is deployed in YAML which are quite easy to read and
edit; you can use JSON too.

Slides for same are at :
https://www.slideshare.net/PaulCzarkowski/a-devops-guide-to-kubernetes


The second talk was regarding deployment of features successfully on April
fools by Tom Limoncelli.

He is currently a SRE at stack overflow and co-organizer of meetup.

This talk was meant for his preparation for SREcon talk he was to present.

https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon18americas/presentation/limoncelli

He started of by telling about books he has written related to SysAdmins.

Then he jumped with introduction of April Pranks over web and what issues
are faced.

Clearly, when you are deploying a April Fool’s or any new feature to your
existing infrastructure;

You cannot know how much traffic you are going to face and what other bugs
might come up.

For which he recommended to hide features with a flag; which will help you
to turn on or off them immediately.

He explained about scenarios he faced at stack overflow and google while
deploying few systems.

It is always good to launch new features in dark, wherein you make features
live but not visible to users.

Thus, you can load test your systems and be ready for full launch in ideal
conditions.

He even emphasized that when ever you are deploying anything new,

it should known to all current system supports too.

It should never come to them as surprise, even it is some surprise feature.


These talks provided me few new points to keep in mind whenever deciding
some new projects.

They consist of method that could not only reduce load from SysAdmins but
developers too.


These talks were part of nycdevops meetup that takes place monthly;

https://www.meetup.com/nycdevops/

where most devops come together and discuss new features they have
encountered.

Next meetup is on April 17;
https://www.meetup.com/nycdevops/events/fmgjmnyxgbwb/


There are many useful talks from various conferences which are well to
watch I believe:

https://www.youtube.com/user/USENIXAssociation

-- 
Thanks and Regards,
Rahul Yadav
lunarantic.com <https://www.lunarantic.com>
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