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There are a dozen new technologies being introduced every day that never amount to anything, while others move on to create completely new methodologies for how we interact with IT. Just like virtualization changed the way data centers operate, containers are changing how we interact with our applications and Kubernetes (K8s in short hand) seems to be a front runner in this space. However, with any new technology hitting the market, there is a bit of a lag before it takes off. People have to understand why it’s needed, who’s got the best solution, and how you can make it work with your own environment. Heptio is a startup company focusing on helping enterprises embrace Kubernetes through their open source tools and professional services. I’ve been hearing great things about Heptio, but when my good friend, Tim Carr, decided to go work for there, I decided that I better look into who they are, and figure out what he sees in their little startup. ...

I took last week off from work to spend some time with my family and just relax. I’d never been to Disney World and have a six year old who is seriously into Star Wars, so this sounded like a great way to take a relaxing week off. During this vacation I found that it took several days before I even started to unwind. I ended the work week on a Friday and still felt the work stress through the weekend and into Monday. Maybe it’s a normal thing to still feel the stress through the weekend, but I had expected to feel an immediate release of tension when I was done with work on Friday when my vacation began. But all weekend I kept noticing that I couldn’t forget about work. In fact, I felt pretty sick one day and believe it was stress related. After a few days I started to pay attention to the activities of the day and didn’t pay as much attention, but it made me think that those two day weekends and how they certainly weren’t recharging me to be prepared for the next week of stress. ...

Passwords are a necessary evil to keep bandits from running away with your confidential data. We’ve come up with various strategies to manage these secrets, such as: Using one password for all of your stuff so you don’t forget it. Use a password vault to store a unique password for each of your logins. Use a few passwords in a pattern you can remember. Write down your password on a sticky note and attach it to your monitor. Now, not all of these practices are good but you get the idea. ...

Locking down an AWS environment isn’t really that if you know what threats you’re protecting against. You have services such as the Web Application Firewall, Security Groups, Network Access Control Lists, Bucket Policies and the list goes on. But many times you encounter threats from malicious attackers just trying to probe which vulnerabilities might exist in your cloud. AWS has built a service, called Amazon GuardDuty, to help monitor and protect your environment that is based on AWS machine learning tools and threat intelligence feeds. GuardDuty currently reads VPC Flow Logs (used for network traffic analysis) and CloudTrail Logs (used for control plane access analysis) along with DNS log data to protect an AWS environment. GuardDuty will use threat intelligence feeds to alert you when your workloads may be communicating with known to be malicious IP Addresses and can alert you when privileged escalation occurs as part of its machine learning about suspicious patterns. ...

Information Technology is a very difficult field to keep up with. Not only does computing power increase year after year, making the number of things we can do with computers increase, but drastic transformations always plague this industry. Complete paradigm shifts are a major part of our recent past such as mainframes, to client/server, to virtualization to cloud computing. In addition to these changes there are also silos of technologies we might want to focus on such as database design, programming, infrastructure or cloud computing. Inside each of these categories there are different platforms to learn, such as if you are a programmer, do you know C++, Java, Python or Cobol? ...

Age discrimination can be an issue in any industry, but this issue is something members of the information technology (IT) industry can specifically identify with. My goal for this post is just to shine some light on the topic and discuss whether or not there is an injustice happening in IT when you reach a certain age, or if there is some less heinous reason why we see so many younger people in tech. I want to make it crystal clear that this is just an off the cuff discussion and not based on any discrimination that I’ve been witness to from my employer or anywhere else. Ageism has been a bit of the elephant in the room where I don’t see many people discussing it publicly, but it’s in the back of people’s mind. It does seem that there are many more young people in the technology industry than older people, but this also may just be a perception and not reality. ...

There is news in the backup world today. Rubrik has acquired startup company Datos IO. Who is Datos IO? Datos IO was founded in 2014 and focuses on copy data management of distributed scale out databases purpose built for the cloud. The reason Datos IO is different from the common backup solutions we’re accustomed to seeing (Commvault, DataDomain, etc) is that they are building a solution from the ground up that tackles the problems of geo-dispersed scale out database which are becoming commonplace in the cloud world. Think about databases that scale multiple continents, and multiple clouds even. ...

Over recent years, Infrastructure as Code (IaC) has become sort of a utopian goal of many organizations looking to modernize their infrastructure. The benefits to IaC have been covered many times so I won’t go into too much detail, but the highlights include: Reproducibility of an environment Reduction in deployment time Linking infrastructure deployments with application deployments Source control for infrastructure items Reduction of misconfiguration The reasoning behind storing all of your infrastructure as code is valid and a worthy goal. The agility, stability, and deployment speeds achieved through IaC can prove to have substantial benefits to the business as a whole. ...

It’s the beginning of a whole new year. Hopefully you’ve gotten some time off recently to recharge your batteries a bit, before heading back to the grind. While you’re getting back into the ol’ routine, maybe this is a good time to consider whether or not that routine is still worthwhile? Are you Happy With Your Job? I t’s easy to get into a funk where you roll out of bed each day to do the same task or face the same challenges over and over again. Maybe there are things in your day to day grind that you hate, but do them anyway, because it’s part of your job. No big deal, everyone has these sorts of chores. I’m sure that nobody loves every single part of their job. But if you’ve gotten a break from work and you can’t bear to think about going back to that routine, maybe that should tell you something about your job. Are you really happy doing what you’re doing, or are you doing it because it’s a steady paycheck? Are you doing it because it’s what you know, and change is hard? Are you doing it because you feel like you have no other choice? ...

Today at AWS re:INVENT, Amazon had several new product announcements which is not uncommon for the company but one in-particular raised several eyebrows. Amazon has been working very hard to make machine learning much easier for people to use. Typically, understanding machine learning has taken great expertise and a relatively small number of people even attempted to learn these concepts just because of the complexity. That is all changing thanks to some of Amazon’s more recently announced services such as Amazon Sage Maker. ...