VMware on stigterhq.nl

Why (stateful) serverless matters for server admins

Tue, 21 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In the session I went over why serverless is important to our industry, why server admins (which I then rephrased to SREs) are so important to our serverless success, and why stateless isn’t the answer for everything. Technology wise I’ll be “all over the map” talking about things like Knative and the VMware Event Broker Appliance, AWS Lambda, Akka Serverless

Deploying your first app on the Kubernetes based Knative platform

Thu, 13 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

As developers, we all want to be more productive. Knative, a Kubernetes based platform to deploy and manage modern serverless works, helps to do just that. The idea behind Knative is to abstract away the complexity of building apps on top of Kubernetes as much as possible. How can you get Knative running on your local machine to try a few things out or even develop your apps? In this session, we ’ll look at setting up a Kubernetes cluster, installing Knative, and building an app.

Data Driven Decisions in DevOps @ MyDevSecOps

Thu, 02 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

With everything going on in DevOps, I think we can safely say that building pipelines is the way to deploy your applications to production. But knowing what you deploy to production and whether it is actually okay needs more data, like security checks, performance checks, and budget checks. We’ve come up with a process for that, which we call Continuous Verification “A process of querying external systems and using information from the response to make decisions to improve the development and deployment process.” In this session, we’ll look at extending an existing CI/CD pipeline with checks for security, performance, and cost to make a decision on whether we want to deploy our app or not.

Automated DevOps for the Serverless Fitness Shop

Thu, 25 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In a nutshell, Continuous Verification is about putting as many automated checks as possible into your CI/CD pipelines. These checks call out to external systems to validate performance, security, and cost — without asking your engineers to do that manually. The same systems that decide whether a deployment goes to production can also help engineers understand where the bottlenecks are. More checks in the pipeline means fewer manual tasks, less overhead, and better decisions about what actually ships. And yeah, maybe a bit more time at the beach.

Continuous Verification In A Serverless World @ Open Source Community Day

Thu, 30 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

At VMware we define Continuous Verification as:

“A process of querying external systems and using information from the response to make decisions to improve the development and deployment process.”

At #OSSDay, I got a chance to not only talk about what that means for serverless apps and how you can build it into your existing pipelines using tools like GitLab, CloudHealth, Wavefront and Gotling.

Building a Serverless Fitness Shop - Observability

Wed, 15 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

If you’ve read the blog posts on CloudJourney.io before, you’ve likely come across the term “Continuous Verification”. If not, no worries. There’s a solid article from Dan Illson and Bill Shetti on The New Stack that explains it in detail. The short version: Continuous Verification means putting as many automated checks as possible into your CI/CD pipelines. More checks, fewer manual tasks, more data to smooth out and improve your development and deployment process.

So far we covered the tools and technologies, Continuous Integration, and Infrastructure as Code aspects of the ACME Serverless Fitness Shop. This post is about observability.

Building a Serverless Fitness Shop - Infrastructure as Code

Wed, 08 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In part one we covered the tools and technologies and in part two we covered the Continuous Integration aspect of the ACME Serverless Fitness Shop. This post is about Infrastructure as Code.

Building a Serverless Fitness Shop - Continuous Anything

Wed, 01 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Building a Serverless Fitness Shop - Tools and Tech

Mon, 23 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

If you’ve read the blog posts on CloudJourney.io before, you’ve likely come across the term “Continuous Verification”. If you haven’t, no worries. There’s a solid article from Dan Illson and Bill Shetti on The New Stack that explains it in detail. The short version: Continuous Verification is “A process of querying external system(s) and using information from the response to make decision(s) to improve the development and deployment process.”

Continuous Verification In A Serverless World @ Serverless Nashville

Thu, 27 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

At VMware we define Continuous Verification as:

“A process of querying external systems and using information from the response to make decisions to improve the development and deployment process.”

At Serverless Nashville, I got a chance to not only talk about what that means for serverless apps but also how we use serverless in some of the business units at VMware.

Hybrid Security - From On-Prem to Serverless

Mon, 24 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

DevOps, as a practice to build and deliver software, has been around for over a decade. What about adding security to that, though? After all, security is one of the cornerstones of today’s information technology. As it turns out, one of the first mentions of adding security was a Gartner blog post in 2012. Neil MacDonald wrote,

“DevOps must evolve to a new vision of DevOpsSec that balances the need for speed and agility of enterprise IT capabilities (…)”.

Cost Matters! The Serverless Edition

Mon, 09 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

As a trend cloud vendors tend to use the word serverless quite loosely. While serverless comes in a lot of shapes and sizes and as long as the characteristics fit within the four categories from my last blog, it is a serverless service. To make sure that we’re all on the same page, I’ll use the following definition for serverless:

“Serverless is a development model where developers focus on a single unit of work and can deploy to a platform that automatically scales, without developer intervention.”

In this blog post, we’ll look at how that model works on AWS Fargate, which allows you to run containers without having to manage servers or clusters.

Serverless - From Microservice to Functions

Mon, 09 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Using serverless requires us to change our mindset on how we build apps and requires us to unlearn things we learned building apps in the past. At AWS re:Invent I got a chance to do a VMware Code session and talk about how we took part of our ACME Fitness Shop and transformed it into serverless functions with AWS Lambda.

Serverless - The Wrath of Containers

Mon, 09 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Containers were this awesome technology that ushered in the Cloud era and with a lot of new FaaS tools coming along, companies are wondering if they should jump the container ship altogether. As it turns out, containers definitely have value in Serverless. In this session we will take an existing containerized app and move it into AWS Fargate, look at the cost of running it, and how we can monitor it.

Why Serverless Architectures Matter

Mon, 04 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

There are many predictions from market analyst firms on the size of the global serverless architecture market and how fast it will grow. The numbers range from $18B](https://industrynewsreports.us/8860/serverless-architecture-market-set-for-rapid-growth-to-reach-around-18-04-billion-globally-by-2024-2/) to [$21.99B in the next few years with the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) in the double digits. But is serverless only a fancy name for products like AWS Lambda and Azure Functions?

Event-Driven Architectures - Putting Jazz Into Apps

Fri, 11 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The CTO of a company I have worked for used to say that services should be loosely coupled but tightly integrated. I didn’t realize until a lot later how true that statement is as you’re building out microservices. How those microservices communicate with each other has also changed quite a bit. More often than not, they send messages using asynchronous protocols. As an industry, we decided that this new way of building apps should be called “Event-Driven Architecture (EDA).”

Trusting Your Ingredients @DevOpsDays Columbus

Mon, 23 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

As a developer, I always thought that security, like documentation, would be done by someone else. While that might have been true in the past, in today’s world that model no longer works. As a developer you’re responsible for the security of your app. Security in this case should be seen in the broadest sense of the word, ranging from licenses to software packages. A chef creating cheesecake has similar challenges. The ingredients of a cheesecake are similar to the software packages a developer uses. The preparation is similar to the DevOps pipeline, and recipe is similar to the licenses for developers. Messing up any of those means you have a messy kitchen, or a data breach!

How to send CloudFormation events to Wavefront using AWS Lambda

Fri, 20 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Imagine this, it’s 5pm on a Friday afternoon and while you really want to go enjoy the weekend, you also need to deploy a new version of your app to production. Using AWS CloudFormation (CF), you add a new instance to your fleet of EC2 instances to run your app.