Author: Charl Barkhuizen

Today, I’m a TKGi platform developer and for the most part I develop Concourse CI pipelines. Specifically, I build and maintain pipelines that build foundations that other pipelines use to build custom Kubernetes clusters!

For a while now, I’ve been meaning to blog a bit about my own personal “digital transformation”. I went from a highly sought after Red Hat Certified Architect to a mere sysadmin seemingly overnight. Why? Because DevOps! It was all the IT job market wanted!

I’d been hearing about this DevOps thing for a while and like most people didn’t quite understand it. Then I got to know the theory but hadn’t actually experienced it. I was going for interviews and one technical interview stood out. I was given a laptop with VS code and Ansible plugin and had to deploy a whole lot of infrastructure!! In previous interviews, I’d happily been able to get away with using Vim but it was clear that Vim, on its own, just wouldn’t scale for a massive Git repo full of Infrastructure-as-Code. It was then I realised I had to escape Vim and get with it!

Before I knew it my contract was up and I had to act fast! Luckily there was a Pivotal PKS (Vmware TKGi) opportunity waiting for me. I had no idea what I was getting into but wanted to learn DevOps and Kubernetes so leapt right in.

Pivotal held a 3 month Dojo engagement where myself and the team were transformed into Agile/XP DevOps ninjas. I’d read about the DevOps culture but, like the Matrix, I couldn’t understand it until I experienced it for myself. I was thrown into the deep end of Agile/XP DevOps culture, GitOps, Platform and Cloud Native spaces (all of it “DevOps” for short). It’s a vast myriad of software and soft skills to boot. For those destined for digital transformation: Buckle up! It’s no wonder you need an LSD solution! 😉

Now that I’m in the TKGi DevOps space I don’t worry about anything at OS level anymore AT ALL!! VMware Tanzu OpsManager (BOSH under the hood) plays a big part in simplifying automation because it manages your servers for you. You never have to worry about server inconsistencies or patching, just roll out a new stemcell (a packaged OS “base”) using BOSH and a few coffees later… Presto! All your workloads are rebuilt to spec and running on a new OS with zero workload downtime! We don’t even have user accounts on servers, temporary accounts are supplied by BOSH and they automatically self-destruct on exit. I very rarely have to log into servers these days because BOSH is in control.

TKGi and Concourse CI loaded with Platform Automation Toolkit plus Terraform play a large part in rolling out your VMs and supporting infrastructure too. Everything including deployment of infrastructure, servers and Kubernetes clusters is automated through Concourse pipelines. Configuration files and manifests (like Helm values and tfvars) are all template-driven and are interpolated by Concourse (with secrets and vars) on build containers before being deployed to foundations and clusters.

Sandbox is the most important environment because that’s where all the work is done before getting automatically promoted to other environments. All the code starts on the Sandbox foundation and gets promoted through environments to the Production foundation by Git. There is no code variance between foundations or clusters except the ones we know about!

Honourable mentions: Helm, Carvel KApp and ArgoCD combined with TKGi and Concourse pipelines make for a formidable Kubernetes deployment technique indeed! I can’t stress it enough EVERYTHING IS AUTOMATED! This is GitOps and Infrastructure-as-Code to the max!

BUT (that’s a big BUT)…

I’d be remiss not to mention that it’s really the DevOps/XP/Agile culture that makes it easy to progress steadily through iterations. This DevOps culture requires a certain commitment to a way of work. Commitment to automation, participating in regular ceremonies (standup, pre-IPM, IPM and retro) and commitment to pair programming which makes the platform rock-solid-stable.

So yeah, now I’m a Platform DevOps Engineer doing development and operations on a “platform as a product” that can deploy “clusters as a product” to be consumed en masse.

It’s been awesome to see the platform grow steadily over time and nothing beats that feeling of good cadence! It was a necessary move into the DevOps space but a welcome one. I can see why DevOps is the future and I’m happy to be living the dream of a completely automated cloud native GitOps platform to deploy Kubernetes clusters on! An amazing journey indeed! Now I’m busy looking into TKG which essentially replaces BOSH with Cluster API. Watch this space.

I hope that something from this post will help nudge DevOps-wary sysadmins a little into the future!

IMAGINE A HOUSE

This is your house and you have many different rooms in your house.  You have your room which you are most familiar with.  You know what is in there, you know where to find stuff, you know where you might have hidden stuff that you don’t want anyone else to know about or find.  You may even be so comfortable and familiar in your room that you have stopped noticing some of the things around you.  You feel safe in your room and things are pretty predictable in there.

The other rooms in your house vary from known and familiar to completely unknown and maybe even unopened.  Rooms that you have never ventured into or even tried to unlock.  You may have a fear of entering some of these rooms, maybe you have tried once before but it felt too scary and uncertain to hang around in there.  You may be completely disinterested in some of the rooms and there is nothing that stimulates an intrigue about unlocking and entering that door.  And there are other rooms that are fascinating and you are drawn to spending more time in there, exploring and finding little treasures that belong to you, for the first time in your life.

THIS IS LIKE THE ENNEAGRAM

The Enneagram is a personality profiling tool which is used as an assessment of personality.  It can tell you many things about yourself and the people around you.  It is multidimensional and fluid in its expression. What I love about the Enneagram is that it does not put you in a box but it does show you the box that you are already in and it shows you how you can get out of it. Amongst other things it gives you an indicator of what motivates you, what you might think, act and feel like in stress and it offers you a pathway for growth. According to the Enneagram there are 9 different personality types and each of us will default to one of those types.  However, as we grow in self-awareness we discover that we are all flavored a little differently, and as we get to know ourselves and understand the other types we can become more compassionate and embracing  towards the responses and reactions of others.

So back to our imagination journey in your house and why I said that it’s like the Enneagram.

Your room that you are most comfortable in and most familiar with is your default personality type. This is the part of your personality that you will understand the most.  More than likely it is the part of your personality that others will observe and know to be YOU.  The “above the surface” part of you that you present to the world.  The part of you that you are unconsciously living out.

But as we all know self-awareness is of massive importance.  Especially so within a work context.  This is where we spend the majority of our waking hours and this is where we can become tired and stressed and triggered by our colleagues.  The more we understand ourselves, the better we are able to perform at work, the better we are able to get along with our team members.  Ironically the more we understand ourselves the more we begin to understand other people and the more we grow in empathy and compassion for those we live and work with.

In the last couple of years LSD has been using the Enneagram, an archetypal framework that gives insight into individuals and their personalities. It resonates the most with us as a team, because it doesn’t just put a label on someone and that is how they are classified for their entire tenure here. Let me explain what it is and why we love it:

IMAGINE A HOUSE

This is your house and you have many different rooms in your house.  You have your room which you are most familiar with.  You know what is in there, you know where to find stuff, you know where you might have hidden stuff that you don’t want anyone else to know about or find.  You may even be so comfortable and familiar in your room that you have stopped noticing some of the things around you.  You feel safe in your room and things are pretty predictable in there.

The other rooms in your house vary from known and familiar to completely unknown and maybe even unopened.  Rooms that you have never ventured into or even tried to unlock.  You may have a fear of entering some of these rooms, maybe you have tried once before but it felt too scary and uncertain to hang around in there.  You may be completely disinterested in some of the rooms and there is nothing that stimulates an intrigue about unlocking and entering that door.  And there are other rooms that are fascinating and you are drawn to spending more time in there, exploring and finding little treasures that belong to you, for the first time in your life.

THIS IS LIKE THE ENNEAGRAM

The Enneagram is a personality profiling tool which is used as an assessment of personality.  It can tell you many things about yourself and the people around you.  It is multidimensional and fluid in its expression. What I love about the Enneagram is that it does not put you in a box but it does show you the box that you are already in and it shows you how you can get out of it. Amongst other things it gives you an indicator of what motivates you, what you might think, act and feel like in stress and it offers you a pathway for growth. According to the Enneagram there are 9 different personality types and each of us will default to one of those types.  However, as we grow in self-awareness we discover that we are all flavored a little differently, and as we get to know ourselves and understand the other types we can become more compassionate and embracing  towards the responses and reactions of others.

So back to our imagination journey in your house and why I said that it’s like the Enneagram.

Your room that you are most comfortable in and most familiar with is your default personality type. This is the part of your personality that you will understand the most.  More than likely it is the part of your personality that others will observe and know to be YOU.  The “above the surface” part of you that you present to the world.  The part of you that you are unconsciously living out.

But as we all know self-awareness is of massive importance.  Especially so within a work context.  This is where we spend the majority of our waking hours and this is where we can become tired and stressed and triggered by our colleagues.  The more we understand ourselves, the better we are able to perform at work, the better we are able to get along with our team members.  Ironically the more we understand ourselves the more we begin to understand other people and the more we grow in empathy and compassion for those we live and work with.

It’s been a year!

We hope that you’re doing okay and keeping safe and that there’s some time off on the cards for you over the festive season. Before you unplug and go off the grid, we’d like to take a moment to look back at LSD’s year with you.

Since our departure from EOH last year, we’ve been spending a lot of time working on who we are as a company and where LSD wants to be in the future. Our team grew to 40 amazingly talented people, a record number for us. We doubled down on Kubernetes and launched our own fully managed Kubernetes platform as a service, which has been really well received by our clients.

Deciding on Kubernetes and cloud native was an easy choice based on the team’s skillset and our history with open source technologies. To grow a step further in that direction, we decided to buff our skills even further in the field by encouraging multiple team members to successfully achieve Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) and Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) status. Together, they enabled LSD to become a Kubernetes Certified Services Provider (KCSP) and a silver member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

We are also part of a wider cloud native ecosystem and placed focus on growing key relationships here with partners that have been there from the start, and some new ones that we met along the way. This year was a monumental year for partnerships – from achieving our Red Hat Certified Cloud and Services Provider (CCSP), GitLab Select and Managed Services Partner and SUSE Managed Services Partner statuses – to growing fresh relationships with partners like Snyk.

LSD also made a splash in the news with some of our dealings in cryptocurrency earlier this year, where we brought Bitcoin onto our books as a store of value and rolled out the LSD Stimulus Package, an initiative to start our team members off with an investment into a managed cryptocurrency account through BitFund.

This year also saw the launch of AHOY, an LSD-developed open source release manager for Kubernetes, based on Argo and Helm. It’s something that we’re really proud of and can’t wait to see people solving problems with it. Next year, we are planning on adding even more features to the tool and showing it off on some bigger platforms to spread awareness.

Right at the end of the year, LSD struck another highlight by winning the Red Hat Hackfest, an international competition where teams create end-to-end solutions over a four week period. Team LSD, consisting of Seagyn Davis who bravely led the team through uncharted waters, Julian Gericke and other highly skilled LSDians, wowed the judges with their amazing skills and bagged the number one spot. We are very proud of you!

As you can see, it was a big year from a work point of view, but we also had a lot of fun along the way and expect to do even more cool things next year. Thank you for your role in making LSD what it is today, we couldn’t have done it without you. We look forward to doing even bigger things and building more meaningful relationships together next year. Enjoy your festive season break, take care of yourselves and stay safe.

See you in 2022,

The LSD Team

As a DevOps engineer,  I find myself far more comfortable iterating over lists or writing conditional statements than finding fancy words to document my code. Since Ansible is designed to be easy to read and understand, you can almost get away without documenting anything…except ‘Variables’.

As with any code, there are best practices that make it easier for teams to collaborate on the same code like keeping your playbooks readable and following conventions for naming variables.  One thing that I see skipped over all too often is documenting your variables so that the next person that wants to use them understands what is going on.

Ansible has a staggering amount of places where you can define variables, each having its own precedence rules over the other. If another DevOps engineer has to inherit your plays and roles, it can be time-consuming to find and figure out all the variables.

In an effort to help you to properly document variables, I personally recommend three things:

1. CREATE A ‘README.MD’ FILE THAT EXPLAINS NOT ONLY HOW TO USE THE PLAY OR ROLE, BUT ALSO EVERY SINGLE VARIABLE USED, THEIR LOCATION, PURPOSE AND WHETHER I CAN EXPECT TO HAVE THE VARIABLE VALUE OVERWRITTEN.

Vars:
Name: “{{ home_address }}”
Location: ./roles/defaults/main.yml
Overwrite: true
Purpose: used in the jinja2 template, customer_info.j2
This is a default variable with a low precedence designed to be
overwritten by variables defined in your playbook.

2. ADD COMMENTS IN YOUR PLAYS AND ROLES WHEREVER YOU DECLARE A VARIABLE.

# file: group_vars/all
# For data synchronisation from the server to localhost
local_source_folder: /users/sitedev
remote_production_folder: /home/site/prod
# app name to look for in the local registry
app_name: dingbat
# image name to search for in the local image registry
image_name: “wingman/{{ app_name }}”
# version to search for in the local image registry
version: 4

3. FINALLY, TRY TO MINIMIZE WHERE YOU DECLARE YOUR VARIABLES.

The fewer places they are declared in, the easier it will be for the next person to find and keep track of them. These are some easy ways to document your variables and solves a pet peeve of mine. Do you have any documentation tips? Please share them with me in the comments below!

LSD OPEN was recently featured in a TechCentral piece written by editor Duncan McLeod, on leadership’s decision to bring Bitcoin onto our books. Duncan takes a look at the decision and writes about the process that the company undertook to invest using BitFund.

Read the full article on the TechCentral website