StarSight by Brandon Sanderson

Meh.  Sanderson is a lazy writer and keeps morphing his magic system to account for a plot element he wants to add, 2/5 stars.  Don't start reading this series.

Aliens, Travelers, and other Strangers by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky

Great science fiction from the Strugatsky brothers that we missed because of 20th century politics. 4/5 stars.

Another Open Policy Agent application for k8s

Preflight is another kubernetes configuration checker that uses open policy agent.  The libraries included are a great set of policy checks for your YAML.

DevOps Days in NY is March 3-4

DevOpsDays in New York on March 3-4 has a great set of talks in the program.

Google Go Language advantages for cloud

Another Go evangelist explains some of the powerful features and reasons Go is a good choice for cloud development, especially for cloud infrastructure code.

Infrastructure code (Terraform) is still code and needs code maintenance

Just as you must refactor and maintain your application code, so too should you carefully refactor your terraform code.

Migrating from Jenkins to Concourse

There are too many lighter-weight, container-oriented continuous integration and continuous delivery tools to count and they are exploding.  This story about adopting concourse and replacing Jenkins is a great example.  The nice part about concourse is that it can be plugged in to many, smaller developer testing tasks such as git merges.

Naming Things

Mitch is reading this book about code craftsmanship.  Recommended.

New Salt release

There are some folks who still use Ansible, Chef, Puppet, or Saltstack as part of managing their configurations, deployments or infrastructure in some way. One of the most vital, growing, and well-maintained tool in this family is Salt (part of Salt stack) that just released a new version this month. The release notes are comprehensive with many motivating examples.

monitoring changes in kubernetes by persisting kubernetes audit logs

If you are using a reliable public cloud kubernetes (k8s) infrastructure you probably should persist, monitor, and possibly alert security about certain kubernetes changes. The k8s audit logs can also help developers understand what happens when deployments or other changes occur to help them diagnose or prevent issues.  Unfortunately in my case, the subset of k8s infrastructure available is so woefully unreliable and has so few features of real k8s, the logs would not be useful to our teams, even if they were made available.