Practical Operations Podcast Episode Feed

Episode 137 - Amin Astaneh Jun 28, 2023

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

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Episode 135 - Resisting Automation Mar 27, 2023

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

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Links for Episode 135:

XKCD 1205: Is it worth the time

Episode 134 - ChatGPT Mar 13, 2023

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

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Episode 133 - Shadow IT Jul 25, 2022

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.

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Episode 132 - HollywoodOS - The Net Apr 18, 2022

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 so many things are just… wrong.

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Links for Episode 132:

The Net (1995 film)

Episode 131 - COVID, Burnout, And The Great Resignation Mar 08, 2022

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

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Links for Episode 131:

The Great Resignation
[What is ‘The Great Resignation’](https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/11/what-is-the-great-resignation-and-what-can-we-learn-from-it/ http://www.example.com)
Tech Workers Try a Great Reconsideration Instead
Why the great resignation is hitting the tech industry hard

Episode 130 - VSCode and Cloud IDEs Feb 22, 2022

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 Jan 24, 2022

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

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Links for Episode 129:

Episode 128 - 2021 How We Haven't Missed Ya Dec 31, 2021

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

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Episode 127 - Scaling Humans Dec 12, 2021

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

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Links for Episode 127:

Hyrum’s Law

Episode 126 - SRE Doesn't Scale Nov 29, 2021

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

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Episode 125 - Observability Defined Nov 15, 2021

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.

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Episode 124 - Enforcing Structure On Production Oct 22, 2021

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

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Links for Episode 124:

Gruntwork

Episode 123 - Outsourcing and Insourcing Oct 05, 2021

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 Sep 20, 2021

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 Aug 23, 2021

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.

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Episode 120 - Building Teams with Jim Browne Aug 09, 2021

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

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Links for Episode 120:

The Last Starfighter

Episode 119 - Conducting Interviews Jul 26, 2021

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

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Episode 118 - Imposter Syndrome Jul 12, 2021

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

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Episode 117 - Human Input and Output Jun 04, 2021

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 episode, please look at the shownotes!

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Episode 116 - How The Fundamental Constants of The Universe Hate Us And Want Us To Fail May 21, 2021

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, and organizational behavior.

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Episode 115 - Your Employer Isn't Your Family May 07, 2021

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 Apr 23, 2021

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? Control Tower?

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Episode 113 - Licensing Apr 09, 2021

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 important, folks, choose them well and with purpose, ideally with a laywer in the room.

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Episode 112 - Large Scale Networking With Brian Miller Mar 27, 2021

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

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Episode 111 - Host Your Own Code Mar 12, 2021

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

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Episode 110 - Planning For Failure, or a Failure To Plan Feb 26, 2021

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.

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Episode 109 - Deplatforming Feb 12, 2021

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

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Episode 108 - Kubernetes with Seth McCombs Jan 29, 2021

Where we discuss the state of the Kubernetes project with someone who knows a lot about it - Seth McCombs. Seth, a Cloud Orchestration Software Engineer at Workday, is member of Kubernetes SIG-Release and SIG-Docs. The conversation covers the qualities of building communities, the road ahead, and the things he likes the most about the project.

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Episode 107 - New Opportunities Jan 15, 2021

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.

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Links for Episode 107:

Imposter Syndrome

Episode 106 - The Ending Of The Year Jan 01, 2021

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.

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Episode 105 - Modern TLS Dec 18, 2020

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 all advice - especially security related advice - please stay current!

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Links for Episode 105:

42 Lines, Inc — **Episode 104 - Bootstrapping a Career with Evan Bloom** Dec 04, 2020
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 look at the careers we talk about on this podcast.

Comments for the episode are welcome - at the bottom of the show notes for the episode there is a Disqus setup, or you can email us at feedback@operations.fm.

Sponsors for Episode 104:

42 Lines is a DevOps consulting firm specializing in Observability, Cloud Migration, Cost Control, Security Practices, and Team Mentoring.

Links for Episode 104:

Linux 101 edX

Reddit Linux Upskill Challenge

PiHole

Deviant Olliam I’ll Let Myself In

Python The Hard Way

EVE Online Python

Gentoo Wiki

Arch Linux Wiki Pages

Episode 86 - Moving Back To The Monolith Mar 13, 2020

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

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Episode 85 - Concurrency vs Parallelism in Systems Design Feb 28, 2020

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

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Episode 84 - Observability Best Practices Feb 14, 2020

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

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Episode 83 - Analog Tools For a Digital World - Part 2 Jan 31, 2020

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

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Episode 82 - Analog Tools For a Digital World Jan 21, 2020

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 81 - The End Of The Year Jan 03, 2020

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

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Episode 80 - Revisiting Immutable Infrastructure Dec 20, 2019

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

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Episode 79 - Professional Certifications and Exams Dec 06, 2019

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 Nov 22, 2019

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 Terraform Azure provider id issue.

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Episode 77 - Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery Nov 05, 2019

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 Oct 18, 2019

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

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Episode 75 - Single Board Computers Sep 03, 2019

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

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Episode 74 - Small Office/Home Office Networking Jul 25, 2019

Where we discuss small office and home office networking gear.

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Episode 73 - Conference Calls Jul 19, 2019

Where we discuss conference calls and microphone etiquette.

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Episode 72 - A Tale of Three Postmortems Jul 12, 2019

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 Jul 05, 2019

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

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Links for Episode 71:

TSDB List

Episode 70 - Monitorama 2019 PDX Recap Jun 27, 2019

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

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Episode 69 - Neat Prometheus Tricks Jun 12, 2019

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

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Episode 68 - Monitorama PDX 2019 May 28, 2019

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

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Episode 67 - Not Invented Here May 20, 2019

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 Apr 23, 2019

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

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Episode 65: Troubleshooting Mar 14, 2019

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

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Episode 64: Resumes and Interviews Feb 01, 2019

Where we discuss resumes and interviews.

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Episode 63 - The Turning Of The Year Jan 10, 2019

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

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Episode 62 - Immutable Infrastructure Nov 26, 2018

Where we discuss the pros and cons of immutable infrastructure.

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Episode 61: Tech Mergers And Acquisitions - RedHat and IBM Nov 15, 2018

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 Nov 05, 2018

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

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Links for Episode 60:

Borg: The Predecessor to Kubernetes

Episode 59 - Cheap Kubernetes For Everyone Oct 29, 2018

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

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Episode 58 - The Sandboxing Cycle Oct 18, 2018

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 Oct 05, 2018

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

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Episode 56 - Sysadmin And Small Office Security Sep 07, 2018

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

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Episode 55 - End User Security Aug 25, 2018

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 54 - How To Have An Outage (Part 1) Aug 03, 2018

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 Jul 20, 2018

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 Jul 11, 2018

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 Jul 04, 2018

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

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Episode 50 - You Have Too Many Alerts Jun 28, 2018

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

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Links for Episode 50:

My Philosophy On Alerting

Episode 49 - Monitorama 2018 Recap Jun 20, 2018

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

Additionally, apologies for Breandan’s audio. Something was off in his recording setup and this is the best audio we could get out of it. Comments for the episode are welcome - at the bottom of the show notes for the episode there is a Disqus setup, or you can email us at feedback@operations.fm

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Episode 48: The Year Ahead (and Behind) Dec 31, 2017

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

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Episode 47 - Efficient Meetings Dec 04, 2017

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 Nov 26, 2017

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

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Episode 45 - Social and Technical Contracts For Teams Nov 06, 2017

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 44 - Onboarding Oct 06, 2017

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

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Episode 43 - Revisiting Backups Sep 06, 2017

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 42 - Choosing A License Aug 17, 2017

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

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Episode 41 - Get Up And Speak Already! Jul 24, 2017

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

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Episode 40 - Conway's Law and Confirmation Bias Jul 11, 2017

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 Dunning Kruger effect, which blinds people to new ways to escape from the traps they set for themselves.

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Episode 39 - Is Nagios Viable? Jun 30, 2017

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 38 - Scripted Installs vs Golden Images Jun 24, 2017

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

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Episode 37 - Repeatability and Reliability Jun 13, 2017

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 36 - The Tenents of Microservice Monitoring Jun 02, 2017

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 trips into log tracing and fostering healthy culture.

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Links for Episode 36:

[Don’t Read Your Logs ] (https://medium.com/@chimeracoder/dont-read-your-logs-13586c790202)
OpenTracing
ZipKin
Google Dapper Paper
Standard Sensor Format
Tenents Of Microservice Monitoring

Episode 35 - Scaling Metric Delivery Pipelines May 20, 2017

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

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Episode 34 - Modern Filesystems May 15, 2017

Where we discuss the evolution of modern filesystems.

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Episode 33 - Considering Elasticsearch as a Time Series Database May 08, 2017

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 storage efficiency, but has other unique attributes that may overcome these drawbacks in the right use case.

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Episode 32 - The Trouble With Histograms Apr 19, 2017

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 most of the talking in this episode.

Comments for the episode are welcome - at the bottom of the show notes for the episode there is a Disqus setup, or you can email us at feedback@operations.fm

Links for Episode 32:

Episode 31 - Finding Privacy On The Internet Apr 10, 2017

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

Comments for the episode are welcome - at the bottom of the show notes for the episode there is a Disqus setup, or you can email us at feedback@operations.fm

Links for Episode 31:

Episode 30 - The S3 Outage Mar 27, 2017

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 episode are welcome - at the bottom of the show notes for the episode there is a Disqus setup, or you can email us at feedback@operations.fm

Links for Episode 30:

Episode 29 - Multi Factor Authentication Mar 02, 2017

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 assist with this security best practice.

Comments for the episode are welcome - at the bottom of the show notes for the episode there is a Disqus setup, or you can email us at feedback@operations.fm

Links for Episode 29:

Episode 28 - The Year Ahead and Behind Jan 21, 2017

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 the episode there is a Disqus setup, or you can email us at feedback@operations.fm

Episode 27: Bitterness Is The Death Of Culture Jan 05, 2017

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 show notes for the episode there is a Disqus setup, or you can email us at feedback@operations.fm

Episode 26 - You Are Not Paid To Build Systems Dec 08, 2016

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 organization. This episode was kicked off by BraveNewGeek’s post, You Are Not Paid To Write Code.

Comments for the episode are welcome - at the bottom of the show notes for the episode there is a Disqus setup, or you can email us at feedback@operations.fm

Links for Episode 26:

Episode 25 - Chat Tools Nov 30, 2016

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 setup, or you can email us at feedback@operations.fm

Links for Episode 25:

IRSSI

Episode 24 - Side Projects Nov 04, 2016

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 welcome - at the bottom of the show notes for the episode there is a Disqus setup, or you can email us at feedback@operations.fm

Links for Episode 24:

Episode 23 - Programming Languages Oct 26, 2016

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 discussed as well as test driven development. Comments for the episode are welcome - at the bottom of the show notes for the episode there is a Disqus setup, or you can email us at feedback@operations.fm

Links for Episode 23:

Episode 22 - Non-Linux Distributions Oct 14, 2016

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 show notes for the episode there is a Disqus setup, or you can email us at feedback@operations.fm

Links for Episode 22:

Episode 21 - Internet Criticism Sep 15, 2016

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 opinion on the internet means you need a thick skin.

Comments for the episode are welcome - at the bottom of the show notes for the episode there is a Disqus setup, or you can email us at feedback@operations.fm

Links for Episode 21:

Episode 20 - ScrumOps with Special Guest Judson Drennan Sep 09, 2016

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.

Comments for the episode are welcome - at the bottom of the show notes for the episode there is a Disqus setup, or you can email us at feedback@operations.fm

Links for Episode 20:

Episode 19 - When Things Break Sep 01, 2016

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 the bottom of the show notes for the episode there is a Disqus setup, or you can email us at feedback@operations.fm

Links for Episode 19:

Episode 18 - Infrastructure for Small Shops Aug 24, 2016

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 services - networking, directory services and deployment decisions can stick with a team long after the people doing the implementation have left.

Comments for the episode are welcome - at the bottom of the show notes for the episode there is a Disqus setup, or you can email us at feedback@operations.fm

Links for Episode 18:

Episode 17 - Log Aggregation, Metrics and Data Analysis Aug 17, 2016

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 worse than useless data).

Comments for the episode are welcome - at the bottom of the show notes for the episode there is a Disqus setup, or you can email us at feedback@operations.fm

Links for Episode 17:

Episode 16 - Personal Work Environments Aug 05, 2016

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 there is a Disqus setup, or you can email us at feedback@operations.fm

Links for Episode 16:

Episode 15 - Using The Cloud Jun 05, 2016

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 the episode there is a Disqus setup, or you can email us at feedback@operations.fm

Links for Episode 15:

Episode 14 - Planning For Failure May 04, 2016

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 the episode are welcome - at the bottom of the show notes for the episode there is a Disqus setup, or you can email us at feedback@operations.fm

Episode 13 - Systems Design Apr 26, 2016

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 you can email us at feedback@operations.fm

Episode 12 - Loadbalancers Mar 23, 2016

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 welcome - at the bottom of the show notes for the episode there is a Disqus setup, or you can email us at feedback@operations.fm

Links for Episode 12:

Episode 11 - Job Transitions Mar 18, 2016

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, or you can email us at feedback@operations.fm

Episode 10 - Configuration Management Feb 25, 2016

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 episode are welcome - at the bottom of the show notes for the episode there is a Disqus setup, or you can email us at feedback@operations.fm

Links for Episode 10:

Episode 9 - Init Systems Feb 17, 2016

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 setup, or you can email us at feedback@operations.fm

Links for Episode 9:

SystemD Will Eat Everything GIF

Episode 8 - Working From Home Feb 05, 2016

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 email us at feedback@operations.fm

Links for Episode 8:

Episode 7 - Breaking Up The Lumbering Monolith Jan 20, 2016

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. Jarod speaks to the frustrations of being an Operations Engineer supporting an application that can’t be broken up any time soon, and talks about realistic load balancing options.

Comments for the episode are welcome - at the bottom of the show notes for the episode there is a Disqus setup, or you can email us at feedback@operations.fm. Apologies for the heavy-handed and sometimes inexplicable editing - we all were recovering from various illnesses and travel. Additionally, we didn’t have followup organized into notes.

Links for Episode 7:

Episode 6 - Looking Ahead Jan 04, 2016

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.

Comments for the episode are welcome - at the bottom of the show notes for the episode there is a Disqus setup, or you can email us at feedback@operations.fm

Followup on Episode 5:

Links for Episode 6:

Episode 5 - Data Storage Dec 22, 2015

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 MySQL (and use postgres instead), Breandan talks to Elasticsearch and Jack dives a bit into columnar datastores.

Links for Episode 5:

Episode 4 - Systems Programing Languages and Packaging Dec 17, 2015

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 is a 2-space man, Jack prefers 4, and Breandan sits firmly in the tab-as-indent camp. There are mentions of Rust, Swift, Scala, Akka and the pitfalls of Java and the JVM. Finally, we discuss how to package languages and libraries for use on platforms we deploy software to - with a bonus conversation about Docker as a packaging format, relative done-ness and using it in production.

Followup on Episode 3:

Links for Episode 4:

Episode 3 - Advanced Metrics and Monitoring Dec 03, 2015

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.

Links to some of the things discussed: * Graphite vs Statsd * Kafka prioritizes in crash recovery * What Are Holt Winters Predictions? * Elasticsearch as a Timeseries Database

Episode 2 - How To Stop The Bleeding Nov 30, 2015

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 alerts in the system. This is important to tackle, because without it, you can not understand what is actually happening in your environment.

Episode 1 - Introduction and The Culture of DevOps Nov 18, 2015

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.

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