Podcasts by Practical Operations Podcast Episode Feed

Episode 8 - Working From Home from 2023-12-12T19:02:34.594194

Where we discuss working from home.

Comments for the episode are welcome - at the bottom of the show notes for the episode there is a Disqus setup, or you can e...

Episode 23 - Programming Languages from 2023-12-12T19:02:34.569971

Where we come back to sanity from last episode’s departure into Solaris runtimes and instead talk about operations support of programming languages. Go, Python, Ruby and others are discus...

Episode 25 - Chat Tools from 2023-12-12T19:02:34.563154

Where we discuss the history and use of chat tools.

Comments for the episode are welcome - at the bottom of the show notes for the episode there is a Disqus se...

Episode 26 - You Are Not Paid To Build Systems from 2023-12-12T19:02:34.559837

Where we discuss the tendency of Operations and DevOps folks to build complex systems, and the fact that we aren’t paid to build systems. We’re paid to produce value to the organizat...

Episode 34 - Modern Filesystems from 2023-12-12T19:02:34.541276

Where we discuss the evolution of modern filesystems.

Comments for the episode are welcome - at the bottom of the show notes for the episode there is a Disqus ...

Episode 37 - Repeatability and Reliability from 2023-12-12T19:02:34.516783

Where we discuss repeatability and reliability in systems design, why it’s important and what it means for your job.

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Episode 38 - Scripted Installs vs Golden Images from 2023-12-12T19:02:34.514714

Where we discuss scripted installs vs golden images vs immutable infrastructure via containers.

Comments for the episode are welcome - at the bottom of the show no...

Episode 39 - Is Nagios Viable? from 2023-12-12T19:02:34.511971

Where we discuss the Nagios monitoring project, and how relevant it is in this day and age. (Hint: we think the answer is YES)

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Episode 41 - Get Up And Speak Already! from 2023-12-12T19:02:34.506974

Where we discuss the importance of being able to give short (or long) presentations, and some practical advice for getting started.

Comments for the episode are welcome - at the bottom of...

Episode 43 - Revisiting Backups from 2023-12-12T19:02:34.502286

Where we discuss backups for contractors and small businesses in wake of the Crashplan For Home product exiting the market.

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Episode 45 - Social and Technical Contracts For Teams from 2023-12-12T19:02:34.496368

Where we discuss the social and technical contracts that should be considered when setting up a working group, both long-standing and ad-hoc.

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Episode 50 - You Have Too Many Alerts from 2023-12-12T19:02:34.485596

Where we discuss how we’re all buried in alerts, but we don’t need that many.

Comments for the episode are welcome - at the bottom of the show notes fo...

Episode 55 - End User Security from 2023-12-12T19:02:34.474266

Where we talk about the basics of end-user security best practices, mostly focused on passwords, MFA tokens and computer hygiene.

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Episode 56 - Sysadmin And Small Office Security from 2023-12-12T19:02:34.469535

Where we discuss security again, moving up to more sensitive users and begin the discussion of implementing a Single Sign On solution for users.

Comments for the episode are welcome - at ...

Episode 59 - Cheap Kubernetes For Everyone from 2023-12-12T19:02:34.459936

Where we talk about Caleb Doxseys article titled Kubernetes: The Surprisingly Affordable Platform for Personal Projects.

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Episode 75 - Single Board Computers from 2023-12-12T19:02:34.407953

Where we discuss single board linux computers with special guest Ken Mink.

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Episode 82 - Analog Tools For a Digital World from 2023-12-12T19:02:34.390270

Where we discuss analog tools for an on-the-go digital world. Everyday Carry Bags, the contents of said bags, and our preferences for notebooks and writing implements.

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Episode 83 - Analog Tools For a Digital World - Part 2 from 2023-12-12T19:02:34.384565

Where we discuss analog tools for an work-from-home digital world. Desk ergonomics, common utility items, and other considerations to make life easier.

Comments for the episode are welcom...

Episode 93 - Linux On The Desktop from 2023-12-12T19:02:34.339061

Where we talk about building a modern linux desktop, for both personal and professional use. There’s some talk about Intel vs AMD, Apple and ARM, and video cards… all in good fun.<...

Episode 96 - ARM and the Future of Computing from 2023-12-12T19:02:34.325993

Where we discuss the possible rise of ARM on the desktop as a replacement or challenge to the supremecy of Intel’s venerable x86_64 instruction set.

Comments for the episode are wel...

Episode 127 - Scaling Humans from 2023-12-12T19:02:34.206710

Where we discuss how to scale things when the human element is the limited capacity.

Comments for the episode are welcome - at the bottom of the show notes for th...

Episode 128 - 2021 How We Haven't Missed Ya from 2023-12-12T19:02:34.200218

Where we discuss the end of 2021 and what we expect in 2022.

Comments for the episode are welcome - at the bottom of the show notes for the episode there is a...

Episode 131 - COVID, Burnout, And The Great Resignation from 2023-12-12T19:02:34.186932

Where we discuss the longer term effects of Covid, burnout, and The Great Resignation.

Comments for the episode are welcome - at the bottom of the show notes for ...

Episode 137 - Amin Astaneh from 2023-06-28T09:00

Where we have Amin Astaneh on as a guest to discuss DevOps transitions, culture, consultancies and how to move forward in this career.

Comments for ...

Episode 135 - Resisting Automation from 2023-03-27T09:00

Where we discuss people’s tendencies to resist automation of tasks, for whatever reason.

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Episode 134 - ChatGPT from 2023-03-13T09:00

Where we ChatGPT, Large Language Models and the dangers of trusting AI tools to be correct.

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Episode 133 - Shadow IT from 2022-07-25T09:00

Where we discuss how damaging Shadow IT can be, how to identify it, how to think about it, and some strategies for getting rid of it.

Comments for the episode are welcome - at the bottom ...

Episode 132 - HollywoodOS - The Net from 2022-04-18T00:09

Where look at Hollywood’s inability to get technology in movies even remotely correct… this time, we’re talking about “The Net”, a 1995 Sandra Bullock movie, where...

Episode 130 - VSCode and Cloud IDEs from 2022-02-22T08:00

Where we discuss another thing that is eating the world - Visual Studio Code. We also talk about IDEs in general.

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Episode 129 - BeyondCorp from 2022-01-24T09:00

Where we discuss setting up a zero-trust network access policy - what Google referrs to as “BeyondCorp”.

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Episode 126 - SRE Doesn't Scale from 2021-11-29T09:00

Where we discuss Tyler Treat’s essay about how the paradigm of SRE doesn’t scale.

Comments for the episode are welcome - at the bottom of the show not...

Episode 125 - Observability Defined from 2021-11-15T09:00

Where we discuss observability, prompted by a post on The New Stack by Charity Majors, looking at the current state of observability in the industry.

Comments for the episode are welcome ...

Episode 124 - Enforcing Structure On Production from 2021-10-22T09:00

Where we discuss grappling with getting structure into our production lives; be it terraform, Active Directory or AWS accounts.

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Episode 123 - Outsourcing and Insourcing from 2021-10-05T09:00

Where we discuss outsourcing and insourcing - when to buy a product, when to staff a team, and when to do it all yourself.

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Episode 122 - Cloudstations and Remote Graphical Workstations from 2021-09-20T09:00

Where we discuss the use of AWS Cloudstations and graphical remote desktop environments to get $work done.

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Episode 121 - Personal Workstations Away From The Home Office from 2021-08-23T09:00

Where we discuss how we get personal things done away from our work from home workstations, while whishcasting about tech that we think should exist.

Comments for the episode are welcome ...

Episode 120 - Building Teams with Jim Browne from 2021-08-09T09:00

Where we discuss building, managing and fostering healthy team dynamics, with a special guest, Jim Browne.

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Episode 119 - Conducting Interviews from 2021-07-26T09:00

Where we discuss interviewing - good versus bad questions, cultural issues, and how to avoid common pitfalls, bias and other things that are problematic.

Comments for the episode are welc...

Episode 118 - Imposter Syndrome from 2021-07-12T09:00

Where we discuss imposter syndrome and how it changes work dynamics for the worse.

Comments for the episode are welcome - at the bottom of the show notes for the ...

Episode 117 - Human Input and Output from 2021-06-04T00:00

Where we discuss human input and output. Who are we kidding? We talked about mechanical keyboards, with very mild diversions into trackballs, trackpads and monitors. This is a notes-heavy episod...

Episode 116 - How The Fundamental Constants of The Universe Hate Us And Want Us To Fail from 2021-05-21T09:00

Where we discuss one of the fundamental physical constants that is always trying to bring us down - the speed of light - and how latency for round trip times impacts programming, systems design,...

Episode 115 - Your Employer Isn't Your Family from 2021-05-07T09:00

Where we discuss the seperation of work and personal life, and why such a seperation is both crucial and hard to do.

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Episode 114 - Terraforming Existing Clouds from 2021-04-23T00:09

Where we discuss getting control of an existing, organically built cloud environment, and how to structure said control. Monolitic terraform? Hundreds of terraform projects? CloudFormations? Con...

Episode 113 - Licensing from 2021-04-09T09:00

Where we discuss licensing and how it intersects with everything we do - from Elastic adopting Mongo’s SSPL to the mess that was made public with Wireguard, PFSense and BSD. Licenses are i...

Episode 112 - Large Scale Networking With Brian Miller from 2021-03-27T12:00:05

Where we talk with Brian Miller about running large scale networks for a major university and his adventures in Internet2, IPv6 and wire...

Episode 111 - Host Your Own Code from 2021-03-12T09:00

Where we discuss the risks you take using package managers and code you do not host yourself.

Comments for the episode are welcome - at the bottom of the show not...

Episode 110 - Planning For Failure, or a Failure To Plan from 2021-02-26T09:00

Where we discuss the failure of the Texas energy grid and how it relates to a failure to plan ahead. We look at active/active, n+1 and other cases where redundancy sneaks away from you.

C...

Episode 109 - Deplatforming from 2021-02-12T09:00

Where we discuss deplatforming, through the lens of what happened to social media sites after the political upheaval in early January.

Comments for the episode are welcome - at the bottom...

Episode 108 - Kubernetes with Seth McCombs from 2021-01-29T09:00

Where we discuss the state of the Kubernetes project with someone who knows a lot about it - Seth McCombs. Seth, a Cloud Orchestration Software Eng...

Episode 107 - New Opportunities from 2021-01-15T09:00

Where we discuss how to handle opportunities - ones at your current job, how to approach new jobs, and tackling some of the personal sides of things.

Comments for the episode are welcome ...

Episode 106 - The Ending Of The Year from 2021-01-01T09:00

Where we discuss the year this was, what we thought it was going to be, and how wrong we really were. We also discuss the future a little bit, and try to find patterns in this chaos.

Comm...

Episode 105 - Modern TLS from 2020-12-18T09:00

Where we talk with Darren Fallis about some of the reasons you should really upgrade to a modern TLS version, and what that means in practical terms. At the moment, this is TLS 1.3, but as with ...

Episode 104 - Bootstrapping a Career with Evan Bloom from 2020-12-04T09:00

Where we talk with Evan Bloom about getting started in this industry, coming from a very different world of music. This includes where to get started with linux, programming and generally how to...

Episode 103 - Pet Peeves from 2020-11-20T09:00

Where we talk about our pet peeves - technical red flags that tell you something about an environment isn’t right.

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Episode 102 - The Lies We Tell Ourselves from 2020-11-06T09:00

Where we talk about the many lies we tell ourselves, even when we know better.

Comments for the episode are welcome - at the bottom of the show notes for the epis...

Episode 101 - Long Term Configuration Management from 2020-10-23T09:00

Where we talk about some mergers and aquisitions in the configuration management space and discuss somewhat about where the industry is headed.

Comments for the episode are welcome - at t...

Episode 100 - DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering, Revisited from 2020-10-09T09:00

Where we revisit our first episode, The Culture of DevOps, and talk about what’s changed in the last 5 years, including the growth of the Site Reliability Engineering movement to implement...

Episode 99 - Elasticsearch Distributions from 2020-09-25T09:00

Where we discuss Elasticsearch’s X-Pack as compared to the OpenDistro For Elasticsearch, and talk a little bit about being a good citizen for open source projects.

Comments for the ...

Episode 98 - Histograms and Service Level Objectives from 2020-09-11T09:00

Where we talk about what Service Level Objectives actually are and why they are so important in the field of Site Reliability Engineering. We cover the definition of an SLO, how they relate to ...

Episode 97 - Threat Modeling with Greg Harris from 2020-08-28T09:00

Where we interview Greg Harris, Principal Security Engineer at Fitbit. We cover security issues around BeyondCorp, VPNs, Docker, and vulnerability scanning. With Greg we learn how to stop react...

Episode 95 - Being Cloud Agnostic from 2020-07-31T09:00

Where we talk about being multi-cloud, along with the reasons and challenges of doing so, and talk about if it is really worth it.

Comments for the episode are welcome - at the bottom of ...

Episode 94 - Findability With JP Sherman from 2020-07-17T09:00

Where we discuss findability and search with a special guest - JP Sherman, the Manager of Search and Findability at Red Hat.

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Episode 92 - CloudTruth and Configuration Management from 2020-06-19T09:00

Where we talk to CloudTruth’s Matt Conway and Greg Arnette about why they are configuration management geeks, and some of the realities of looking at problems with configuration management...

Episode 91 - Is DevNetOps a Thing? With Brandon Peskin from 2020-06-05T09:00

Where we talk at length with Brandon Peskin, a Sysadmin turned Network Engineer, who has pretty much seen and done it all - from microwav...

Episode 90 - Practice from 2020-05-22T09:00

Where we discuss practice, and how it makes everything easier - for both personal and professional things.

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Episode 89 - Simple Systems Are More Available from 2020-05-08T09:00

Where we discuss Greg Kogan’s Article, “Simple Systems Have Less Downtime” and rant about simplicity and how to choose what things to spend time running.

Comments for th...

Special Episode - Considerations For Moving An Engineering Organization Fully Remote from 2020-04-24T09:00

Where we invite Ashi Sheth, the Senior Manager of Global End User Services at LinkedIn, to talk about the logistical and personal considerations of moving a 20,000 user organization to full-time...

Episode 88 - Experimenting With Kubernetes On ARM from 2020-04-10T09:00

Where we talk to Ken Mink about his trials and tribulations setting up a Raspberry Pi/Rock64 Kubernetes cluster.

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Episode 87 - You Don't (Always) Need Kubernetes from 2020-03-27T08:00

Where we discuss the fact that for many environments, Kubernetes may be overkill. That said, it still has an important role to play.

Comments for the episode are welcome - at the bottom o...

Special Episode - Preparing For Pandemic Triggered Remote Work from 2020-03-16T09:00

Where we discuss the mass migration of the tech community to remote work due to the COVID-19 pandemic, even if only on a temporary basis.

Comments for the episode are welcome - at the bot...

Episode 86 - Moving Back To The Monolith from 2020-03-13T08:00

Where we discuss the future of microservices… is it the monolith?

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Episode 85 - Concurrency vs Parallelism in Systems Design from 2020-02-28T09:00

Where we discuss concurrency and parallelism in systems design, and touch on programming languages and challenges a little bit.

Comments for the episode are welcome - at the bottom of the...

Episode 84 - Observability Best Practices from 2020-02-14T09:00

Where we discuss best practices around selecting technologies and strategies for building an observability stack.

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Episode 81 - The End Of The Year from 2020-01-03T10:00

Where we talk about evens in 2019 and expectations of 2020.

Comments for the episode are welcome - at the bottom of the show notes for the episode there is a D...

Episode 80 - Revisiting Immutable Infrastructure from 2019-12-20T10:00

Where we talk (again) about immutable infrastructure, especially now that Kubernetes has a mature way to handle state, the statefulset.

Comments for the episode are welcome - at the botto...

Episode 79 - Professional Certifications and Exams from 2019-12-06T12:00

Where we discuss professional certifications, exams and some of the pitfalls and caveats that go along with them.

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Episode 78 - Retractions and Reactions from 2019-11-22T09:00

Where we talk about the tendancy the internet at large has to overract to things, including two examples of this. The GitLab User Tracking terms of service and subsequent rollback, and the Terra...

Episode 77 - Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery from 2019-11-05T14:00

Where we discuss continuous integration and continuous delivery including some of the tools and strategies.

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Episode 76 - Signposts of Scalable Systems from 2019-10-18T12:00

Where we discuss the signposts of scalable systems. How to evaluate application state, inputs, and outputs help judge if it can handle scaling up.

Comments for the episode are welcome - a...

Episode 74 - Small Office/Home Office Networking from 2019-07-25T14:00

Where we discuss small office and home office networking gear.

Comments for the episode are welcome - at the bottom of the show notes for the episode there is ...

Episode 73 - Conference Calls from 2019-07-19T09:00

Where we discuss conference calls and microphone etiquette.

Comments for the episode are welcome - at the bottom of the show notes for the episode there is a D...

Episode 72 - A Tale of Three Postmortems from 2019-07-12T17:00

Where we discuss three incident postmortems; two written by CloudFlare and one by AWS.

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Episode 71 - Long Term Prometheus Metrics Storage from 2019-07-05T14:00

Where we discuss long term metrics storage, primarily for Prometheus.

Comments for the episode are welcome - at the bottom of the show notes for the episode th...

Episode 70 - Monitorama 2019 PDX Recap from 2019-06-27T14:00

Where we recap Monitorama PDX 2019 and talk about our favorite talks and events.

Comments for the episode are welcome - at the bottom of the show notes for the epi...

Episode 69 - Neat Prometheus Tricks from 2019-06-12T09:15

Where we discuss Jack Neely’s Monitorama 2019 PDX lighting talk - 5 Neat Prometheus Tricks.

Comments for the episode are welcome - at the bottom of the show ...

Episode 68 - Monitorama PDX 2019 from 2019-05-28T14:00

Where we discuss our plans for Monitorama, one of our favorite conferences.

Comments for the episode are welcome - at the bottom of the show notes for the episode<...

Episode 67 - Not Invented Here from 2019-05-20T09:00

Where we discuss Not Invented Here, or the tendency in technology companies to needlessly reinvent the wheel.

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Episode 66: Diminishing Returns from 2019-04-23T09:00

Where we discuss the Nintey-Nintey Rule and overall the idea of diminishing returns.

Comments for the episode are welcome - at the bottom of the show notes for the...

Episode 65: Troubleshooting from 2019-03-14T09:00

Where we discuss one of the core skills - troubleshooting. Stay alert. Keep your laser handy.

Comments for the episode are welcome - at the bottom of the show not...

Episode 64: Resumes and Interviews from 2019-02-01T09:00

Where we discuss resumes and interviews.

Comments for the episode are welcome - at the bottom of the show notes for the episode there is a Disqus setup, or you...

Episode 63 - The Turning Of The Year from 2019-01-10T09:00

Where we discuss the end of 2018 and what we see coming in 2019, including things we missed in 2018’s predictions show.

Comments for the episode are welcome - at the bottom of the <...

Episode 62 - Immutable Infrastructure from 2018-11-26T22:00:50

Where we discuss the pros and cons of immutable infrastructure.

Comments for the episode are welcome - at the bottom of the show notes for the episode there is...

Episode 61: Tech Mergers And Acquisitions - RedHat and IBM from 2018-11-15T12:00

Where we talk about IBMs purchase of RedHat, and some of the past implications of tech tech mergers and acquisitions.

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Episode 60: Deeper Into Kubernetes from 2018-11-05T14:00

Where we talk more about Kubernetes and dig a little deeper into why it has become so popular.

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Episode 58 - The Sandboxing Cycle from 2018-10-18T12:00

Where we talk about XKCD #2044, The Sandboxing Cycle. It’s pervasive in all things we do, and it can really limit how we operate.

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Episode 57 - Rolling Out MFA from 2018-10-05T09:00

Where we discuss rolling out multi factor authentication with Darren Fallis.

Comments for the episode are welcome - at the bottom of the show notes for the episode...

Episode 54 - How To Have An Outage (Part 1) from 2018-08-03T17:00

Where we discuss the initial phases of preparing for a planned outage and reacting to an unplanned one.

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Episode 53: When We Are The Problem from 2018-07-20T14:00

Where we discuss that old interview chestnut: Tell me about a time you’ve broken something.

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Episode 52 - Technical Solutions for Social Problems from 2018-07-11T12:00

Where we discuss why using technical solutions rarely solve social problems, or solve them very poorly.

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Episode 51 - Divide and Conquer from 2018-07-04T12:00:50

Where we discuss the relative merits of splitting large, monolithic multi-tenant applications into smaller single tenant ones.

Comments for the episode are welcome - at the bottom of the ...

Episode 49 - Monitorama 2018 Recap from 2018-06-20T20:18

Where we discuss Monitorama 2018 (PDX), and the return of a reasonable publication schedule.

Additionally, apologies for Breandan’s audio. Somet...

Episode 48: The Year Ahead (and Behind) from 2017-12-31T12:00

Where we discuss tech trends in 2017 and what we’re looking forward to in 2018.

Comments for the episode are welcome - at the bottom of the show notes for th...

Episode 47 - Efficient Meetings from 2017-12-04T10:00

Where we discuss the reasons to have meetings, and some gudielines on making them less awful for everyone involved.

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Episode 46 - Service Design Documentation from 2017-11-26T19:12

Where we discuss guidelines for documenting, designing and deploying services.

Comments for the episode are welcome - at the bottom of the show notes for the episo...

Episode 44 - Onboarding from 2017-10-06T12:00:05

Where we discuss onboarding new employees - both as a new hire and as a team bringing someone on.

Comments for the episode are welcome - at the bottom of the show ...

Episode 42 - Choosing A License from 2017-08-17T09:00

Where we discuss available software licensing, both for code you have written and code you are thinking of adopting into your projects.

Comments for the episode are welcome - at the botto...

Episode 40 - Conway's Law and Confirmation Bias from 2017-07-11T14:00

Where we discuss Conway’s Law. which is the tendency of teams to build software that reflects the communication patterns of the larger organization, as well as confirmation biases and the ...

Episode 36 - The Tenents of Microservice Monitoring from 2017-06-02T09:00

Where we discuss pratical guidelines for expanding your monitoring platform to cover the new and challenging world of Microservice (and Service Oriented Architecture) monitoring, with brief side...

Episode 35 - Scaling Metric Delivery Pipelines from 2017-05-20T23:00

Where we discuss how to run statsd and metrics pipelines at a scale of over 750,000 packets per second.

Comments for the episode are welcome - at the bottom of the ...

Episode 33 - Considering Elasticsearch as a Time Series Database from 2017-05-08T08:00

Where we discuss using Elasticsearch (along with Kibana, Timelion and Kafka) as a Timeseries Database (TSDB). It has several drawbacks over traditional timeseries storage engines, mostly in stor...

Episode 32 - The Trouble With Histograms from 2017-04-19T14:00

Where we discuss histograms as the best data type ever, and the complexities of actually using them in Prometheus. For the most part, this is Jack Neely’s domain of expertise, so he does m...

Episode 31 - Finding Privacy On The Internet from 2017-04-10T21:00

Where we discuss how to find privacy on the internet, both for yourself at home and for users of your services.

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Episode 30 - The S3 Outage from 2017-03-27T09:00

Where we discuss the AWS S3 outage on February the 28th, which was due to an operations error, and relevant discussions about outages and how to learn from mistakes.

Comments for the epis...

Episode 29 - Multi Factor Authentication from 2017-03-02T09:00

Where we discuss multifactor authentication (MFA), often called Two Factor Authentication (2FA). We talk a little bit about the history and then the practical implications of hardware tokens to ...

Episode 28 - The Year Ahead and Behind from 2017-01-21T18:00

Where we discuss highlights of the last year and things we’re looking forward to in 2017. Comments for the episode are welcome - at the bottom of the show notes for...

Episode 27: Bitterness Is The Death Of Culture from 2017-01-05T21:00:52

Where we discuss how bitterness can be the worst aspect of a job and some helpful advice to avoid it.

Comments for the episode are welcome - at the bottom of the s...

Episode 24 - Side Projects from 2016-11-04T09:17

Where we discuss side projects. Not consulting or side work, but projects that let us scratch itches we get at work but aren’t officially sanctioned.

Comments for the episode are we...

Episode 22 - Non-Linux Distributions from 2016-10-14T20:00

Where we discuss operating systems outside the traditional Linux fare. OpenSolaris, SolarisNext, Illumos, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, oh my! Comments for the episode are welcome - at the bottom of the Listen

Episode 21 - Internet Criticism from 2016-09-15T20:00

Where we discuss the often savage and insensitive nature of dealing with other people on the internet and some gentle advice on how to make everyone’s life a little less awful. Having an ...

Episode 20 - ScrumOps with Special Guest Judson Drennan from 2016-09-09T23:00

Where we discuss Kanban, Agile and Scrum with special guest, Judson Drennan. Judson is a Product Owner at VitalSource Technologies, and has done a lot of management of complex technology teams.<...

Episode 19 - When Things Break from 2016-09-01T23:00

Where we discuss incident management practices, and walk through some of the important things to do during a service outage or degradation event.

Comments for the episode are welcome - at...

Episode 18 - Infrastructure for Small Shops from 2016-08-24T12:00

Where we discuss the avoidable pitfalls of infrastructure decisions early in an organization’s life. Most of these can be avoided with some extra thought up front when setting up core serv...

Episode 17 - Log Aggregation, Metrics and Data Analysis from 2016-08-17T09:15

Where we discuss the differences between logs and metrics, and some of the pratical applications there of. Also, discussions of the pitfalls of percentiles (why averaging percentiles yields wors...

Episode 16 - Personal Work Environments from 2016-08-05T22:00

Where we discuss our personal work environments, both digital and physical. Comments for the episode are welcome - at the bottom of the show notes for the episode th...

Episode 15 - Using The Cloud from 2016-06-05T22:00

Where we discuss why the cloud is useful and when it can be risky, depending on your models. Comments for the episode are welcome - at the bottom of the show notes for t...

Episode 14 - Planning For Failure from 2016-05-04T12:00

Where we discuss failure. It happens to everyone, and it will happen to you. We cover some of the general cases to consider, and talk a little about backups and the cloud.

Comments for th...

Episode 13 - Systems Design from 2016-04-26T12:00

Where we discuss the human side of systems design. Comments for the episode are welcome - at the bottom of the show notes for the episode there is a Disqus setup, or ...

Episode 12 - Loadbalancers from 2016-03-23T12:00

Where we discuss the relative merits of software loadbalancers we’ve used and loved, and share our general distain for proprietary hardware based offerings. Comments for the episode are we...

Episode 11 - Job Transitions from 2016-03-18T12:00

Where we discuss leaving and starting new jobs.

Comments for the episode are welcome - at the bottom of the show notes for the episode there is a Disqus setup,...

Episode 10 - Configuration Management from 2016-02-25T12:00

Where we discuss various merits of configuration management systems, notably the relative use cases for Puppet and Ansible, and some of the finer points of using both.

Comments for the ep...

Episode 9 - Init Systems from 2016-02-17T12:00

Where we discuss the downfalls of modern init systems.

Comments for the episode are welcome - at the bottom of the show notes for the episode there is a Disqus ...

Episode 7 - Breaking Up The Lumbering Monolith from 2016-01-20T12:00

Where we discuss why to break large monolith applications into smaller pieces, and Breandan goes on for far too long about the ELK stack and Jack can’t stop talking about Graphite Storage....

Episode 6 - Looking Ahead from 2016-01-04T12:00

Where we discuss technologies in 2015 that we have come to appreciate, and our realistic hopes for 2016. Kafka, Prometheus, Elixr are mentioned, and we have the usual grumblings about databases....

Episode 5 - Data Storage from 2015-12-22T09:00

Where we discuss the merits and use cases for Relational Data Bases, Document Storage and touch on key-value stores for time series work. Jarod discusses the reasons you should never ever use My...

Episode 4 - Systems Programing Languages and Packaging from 2015-12-17T09:00

Where we discuss the relative merits of Perl, Python, Ruby, and Go. We also touch upon Rust and Swift. There are also discussions about code hygiene, notably in the preferred indentation: Jarod ...

Episode 3 - Advanced Metrics and Monitoring from 2015-12-03T09:00

Episode 3 of the Practical Operations Podcast, where we talk about how more advanced use cased for metrics based monitoring and the relative pros and cons of different time series databases.

Episode 2 - How To Stop The Bleeding from 2015-11-30T09:00

Episode 2 of the Practical Operations Podcast, where we talk about how to get your monitoring systems under control and stop the bleeding - getting rid of the unacknowledged wall of critical ale...

Episode 1 - Introduction and The Culture of DevOps from 2015-11-18T08:00

The initial episode of the Practical Operations Podcast, where we introduce ourselves (poorly) and talk about the culture that surrounds DevOps, and why it is more than just a job description.