The Ship Show

The DevOps community has long resisted a push to define the movement via instruments like cookbooks or manifestos, creating an interesting thread of "lack-of-definition" when describing DevOps and DevOps practices. This issue has come to a head in 2015, as some proponents think we're long overdue to provide a stronger framework around what DevOps actually means in practice. For episode 59, we sit down with the creator of the DevOps Checklist, Steve Pereira, to talk through the items on the checklist, whether or not it's a good idea to even have a checklist, and debate the finer points of what could become: The DevOps Checklist Manifesto.

Back in 2013, Pager Duty's Ranjib Dey surmised that it would take ages for traditional operations teams to learn and adopt mainstream development technologies. The opinion sparked quite a lively discussion around what those mainstream development technologies are, what hurdles exist for operations team to adopt them, and whether it all would be as glacial as Dey guessed. For Episode 58, we welcome Ranjib to the show for a panel discussion to revisit the tweet and look to see if anything has improved in the last 2 years. Join the panel as we parse through the puzzle of: We May Have DevOps, But Does Ops Have the Dev?

So many of the companies who build the tools we use daily take special care to cultivate and nurture a community of users. But that doesn't just happen magically. For episode 57, we sit down with community managers from Chef, Perforce, and VictorOps to talk to them about their experiences building community, the difficulties with community engagement, getting the business to see the value, and what community is really made of. Join us as we talk to the folks responsible for Managing the CommunityOps

If DevOps is CAMS--culture, automation, metrics, and sharing--then it makes sense there'd be a conference on monitoring and metrics...and there is: Monitorama! In episode 56, the crew gets together with Jason Dixon, aka obfuscurity, the founder of Monitorama to talk about the fourth incarnation of the conference. We do a deep dive into what all is encompassed when we say "monitoring," why monitoring really isn't about CPU load and memory, other things you can monitor, and why Paul was stupid for not coming to Monitorama earlier; join us, the crew as: We Monitor the Monitorama

Do you test? Do you want to test? For many operations and build/release engineers (and even some developers!), testing can be a bit of a foreign concept. It's hard to pay attention to getting to 100% code coverage on your unit tests for your inrastructure cookbooks and manifests when the infrastructure is on fire! But... maybe that's why it's on fire? For this episode, Mike McGarr walks us through the nuts and bolts of testing, so we can all become better testers, and start integrating testing into our workflows, even if we're not developers. Join us for: I Don't Always Test, But When I Do...

It's a part of software developers hate writing and operations teams hate dealing with: packaging, installers, and upgrade scenarios. In Episode 54, the team looks at the fundamentals of packaging, tools that make the job both harder and easier, installer horror stories, and some good practices to make sure your packages don't make others want to rip their hair out. Join the crew as we provide some tips for: Packaging Your Software for Maximum Freshness.

It's been awhile, but we're finally back, and special guest Katherine Daniels (aka @beerops) is with us to talk over career development in a DevOps context! We discuss All The Things related to leveling up your career, including specialization vs. generalists, training and learning (especially if you don't have a degree in computer sciency things), and some techniques you can employ to make sure your career doesn't stagnate! Join us as we delve into: Developing CareerOps

When looking at all the organizations that are doing interesting technological, cultural, and scaling things in the DevOps space, one of the common architectural patterns is the use of microservices. For episode 52, the panel sits down to talk a bit about microservices: what they are, the benefits they provide, the costs, the issues around releasing, deploying, and operating microservices-based applications, in an attempt to figure out whether they're the future or a fad and what, exactly, should make you pay attention and start investigating whether that old monolithic application should be sliced and diced into a microservice-utopia. Join us as we talk through: Managing the Magic of Microservices

As tech companies implement all sorts of ways to increase their output, the often-undiscussed tradeoff is how it impacts employees. Most tech workers have struggled with burnout in a role, at a company, or even in the area of tech they've focused their career; some of us have even suffered through burnout without noticing it: we only became aware when friends and family intervened to let us know how off-the-rails our work/life balance had become. In episode 43, we take a look at the signs, symptoms, causes, and strategies for: Extinguishing Burnout

For episode 42, listeners might be hoping that we'd delve into the meaning of life, the universe, and everything... and if your universe consists of deploying and managing applications on Windows, that's exactly what we'll be doing! The panel sits down with Steven Murawski, site reliability engineer with the venerable Stack Exchange and Microsoft community MVP to discuss the goings on at Tech Ed last week, Microsoft's recent open source offerings, new Azure features that are facing down Amazon, and with DSC and Server Core, why it seems Microsoft is really changing the way they develop their server products. Join us as we explore: The State of DevOps Life in the Windows World

Bring up the topic of tech industry recruiting with any developer and you're likely to get an ear-full: stories of recruiters treating candidates disrespectful, clueless recruiters who don't know any of the acronyms, recruiters continuing to talk to you even after you've asked them to stop... the list goes on and on. In fact, it's so prevalent, Twitter and Tumblr accounts have popped up just to make fun of recruiters. But why is recruiting so broken in our industry? Are all recruiters like that? And is there anything all of us--companies, recruiters, and candidates--can do to make the experience a bit better (and more efficient!) for everyone? Join us as we put recruiter Sam Whooley through the gauntlet for: Your Profile Tells Me You're Perfect for this Amazing Podcast Opportunity.

It's time again for all the Chefs to get together in the kitchen in San Francisco and look at all of the developments in the last year, plus look forward to the next year in the configuration management space, industry trends in DevOps and, of course, Chef! We grab a bottle of bourbon, some bacon, and sit down to discuss all of the "shenanigans" at ChefConf 2014, as well as look back at the keynotes, our favorite talks, hallway track conversations with old friends and new, plus reveal this year's Awesome Community Chefs. Join the panel, plus a couple of very special surprise guests, as we go: Delving Into the Delight of ChefConf 2014

Creating that initial environment for your application to run in is a solved problem. Or is it? On the market today, there are a seemingly ever-increasing number of tools to facilitate that process: CFEngine, Puppet, Chef, Vagrant, Packer, Ansible, Salt Stack, Rundeck... the list goes on. In episode 39, the panel takes a closer look at one of these new tools: Docker. The panel is joined once again by Atlassian's James Dumay, since the discussion was prompted by a question he tweeted: "[S]omeone thinks Docker can replace Chef/Puppet. I believe they are at least complementary." Are they? And what workflows make sense for Docker? Join the panel as we try: Deciphering the "Docker Lifestyle"

At some point in every discussion of DevOps or organizational transformations, The Phoenix Project, the seminal book by Kevin Behr, Gene Kim, and George Spafford comes up. More than just "A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win," it's become a "water cooler" book for everyone from sysadmins in the basement to CxOs in the boardroom. Released in January 2013, we sit down with Gene Kim to look at how The Phoenix Project has influenced our industry over the past year, plus ask Gene questions we've always had about the characters and the story. Plus, we find out what Gene's been working on since Phoenix shipped. Join us for: A Year of The Phoenix Project with Gene Kim.

Our topic for Episode 37 was originally on scaling self-service of configuration management (the source code kind, not the infrastructure kind!) good practices, but quickly morphed into a discussion of what organizations need to pay attention and foster to support their tools teams in their often-cited mission of creating a self-service culture and self-service infrastructure. Paul and Sascha square off over the notions of traditional "service" teams and the newer notion of integrated "tools" ("DevOps?") teams. We also touch on warning signs for automating self-service processes, including in the CM space, really examining how and why you convert which processes into self-service, ways to get teams to buy into your self-service initiatives, and what's in the best interests of the entire system that is your software development organization. Join us as we discuss the finer points of: Scaling Your Self-Service as a Service.