Explore every episode of the podcast Ship It! Cloud, SRE, Platform Engineering

Du'An Lightfoot, dev advocate at AWS, joins Justin & Autumn to discuss networking, a knowledge gap people many people have. You can ignore the things you don't understand or you can invest time to learn it.

What if your infrastructure diagram was responsible for the actual infrastructure?! John Watson & Scott Prutton from System Initiative join Justin & Autumn to discuss.

Bailey Hayes & Taylor Thomas from Cosmonic join the show for a look at WebAssembly Standard Interfaces (WASI) and trade-offs for portable interfaces.

This is our second Kaizen episode, where Adam, Jerod & Gerhard talk about changelog.com improvements since episode 10. OK, so Gerhard deleted the DNS API token. Not only did he take the time to understand how that happened, so that he could actually learn from his mistake, but now we have a system in place so that we can share learnings from incidents. By the way, these are publicly available in our #incidents Slack channel. A great & unexpected thing that happened since we recorded this episode, is Jerod fixing 99% of all the errors that were happening in prod. The top error was the broken Twitter auth - sorry Matt - which was a result of us upgrading to OTP 24 a few months back. Episode 3 show notes include a YouTube stream which captures it all. We wrap up this episode by each of us sharing the improvements that we would like to do until our next Kaizen. You heard it from Adam first: **Ship It Driven Development**

This week Emile Vauge, founder & CEO of Traefik, joins Gerhard to share a story that started as a solution to a 2000 microservices challenge, the real-world implications of shipping many times a day for years, and the difficulties of sustaining an inclusive and healthy open-source community while building a product company. Working every day on keeping the open-source community in sync with the core team was an important lesson. The second learning was around big changes between major versions. The journey from Travis CI to Circle CI, then to Semaphore CI and eventually GitHub Actions is an interesting one. The automation tools inspired by the Mymirca ant colony is a fascinating idea, executed well. There is more to discover in the episode.

In this episode, Gerhard talks to David and Marques from Equinix Metal about the importance of bare metal for steady workloads. Terraform, Kubernetes and Tinkerbell come up, as does Crossplane - this conversation is a partial follow-up to episode 15. David Flanagan, a.k.a. Rawkode, needs no introduction. Some of you may remember Marques Johansson from The new changelog.com setup for 2019. Marques was behind the Linode Terraforming that we used at the time, and our infrastructure was simpler because of it! This is not just a great conversation about bare metal and Kubernetes, there is also a Rawkode Live following up: Live Debugging Changelog's Production Kubernetes 🙌🏻

I'm Gerhard Lazu, host of Ship It! A show with weekly episodes about getting your best ideas into the world and seeing what happens. We talk about code, ops, infrastructure, and the people that make it happen. Like Charity Majors from Honeycomb... clip from episode #11 And Dave Farley, one of the founders of Continuous Delivery... clip from episode #5 We even experiment on our own open source podcasting platform so that you can see how we implement specific tools and services within changelog.com. What works and what fails... clip from episode #10 Listen to an episode that seems interesting or helpful and if you like it, subscribe today. We'd love to have you with us.

On this week's episode, Gerhard is joined by Kathy Korevec, former Senior Director of Product at GitHub, and now Vercel's Head of Product. Docs play an essential role in GitHub Actions, and Gerhard's experience has proven that. Building, testing, and shipping code with GitHub Actions works better because of their excellent docs. However, the docs that Kathy pictures are not what you are imagining. She explains it best in her post, **Maybe it’s time we re-think docs**, which is what started this whole conversation. The bottom line is, just as you wouldn’t ship untested code, shipping code without documentation is not optional. Today's conversation with Kathy explains why.

This week Gerhard is joined by Justin Searls, Test Double co-founder and CTO. Also a 🐞 magnet. They talk about how to deal with the pressure of shipping faster, why you should optimize for smoothness not speed, and why focusing on consistency is key. Understanding the real why behind what you do is also important. There's a lot more to it, as its a nuanced and complex discussion, and well worth your time. **Expect a decade of learnings compressed into one hour**, as well as disagreements on some ops and infrastructure topics — all good fun. In the show notes, you will find Gerhard's favorite conference talks Justin gave a few years back.

In this episode, Gerhard follows up on The Changelog #375, which is the last time that he spoke Crossplane with Dan and Jared. Many things changed since then, such as abstractions and compositions, as well as using Crossplane to build platforms, which were mostly ideas. Fast forward 18 months, 2k changes, as well as a major version, and Crossplane is now an easy choice - some would say the best choice - for platform teams to declare what infrastructure means to them. You can now use Crossplane to define your infrastructure abstractions across multiple vendors, including AWS, GCP & Equinix Metal. The crazy ideas from 2019 are now bold and within reach. Gerhard also has an idea for the changelog.com 2022 setup. Listen to what Jared & Dan think, and then let us know your thoughts too.

In today's episode, Gerhard is joined by Uma, CEO and co-founder of ChaosNative, as well as Karthik, CTO and also a ChaosNative co-founder. They talk Chaos Engineering and Litmus. Chaos Engineering is not just for super SREs. It is not meant to prevent outages. And, it is not just about hardware. Chaos Engineering is about testing how reliable your systems are. It’s meant to show you how things fail, including when other dependent systems fail - think cascading failures. This is a good way to discover inconvenient truths about that beautiful code that you wrote. Everything fails, and great insights are to be found when it does.

In this episode, Gerhard talks to his Skyhook Adventure friends: Alan Cooney, Saul Cullen & Wycliffe Maina. They are the ones that introduced Gerhard to the world of serverless in the context of Amazon Web Services. Gerhard shared his experience with remote work, how to ship software with confidence and consistency, and what to look for in infrastructure as code. At the heart of Skyhook Adventure are adventure trips, and 2020 was not a good one for this business. As you can already tell, code and infrastructure was not the biggest challenge for this team. Having said that, serverless, microservices, a monorepo and the event-based architecture played a big part in successfully navigating the challenges. This is a story about what happens when a good team allows itself to be guided by solid experience and keeps doing the right thing, long-term. It's fun, real, and it applies to many.

Gerhard talks to Tom Wilkie, VP of Product for Grafana Labs. They talk about Loki, Tempo, and how can Grafana Cloud offer such a generous free tier. The solution is in the Cortex architecture, which was used in Loki and in Tempo too. Yes, Tom is the Cortex co-author. We recommend that you listen to this episode in combination with episodes 3 and 11. That's the best way to get a more complete picture of the topics that we discuss today. Lastly, would you like to watch Gerhard & Tom pair-up and build Grafana dashboards like pros? Tom has this really interesting approach that Gerhard would like to learn too. We can either have a live YouTube stream, or record and then publish the video. Let us know your preference via our Changelog Slack, or just plain Twitter.

Devyn Cairns & Jakub Žádník join Justin & Autumn to talk about building a new kind of cross-platform shell that provides easy extensions with traditional command compatibility. That's no easy feat!

Gerhard talks with Charity Majors, ops engineer and accidental startup founder at honeycomb.io about high-performing teams, why "15 minutes or bust," and how we should start using Honeycomb in our own monolithic Phoenix app that runs changelog.com. There is just one step, and it's actually really simple! They also talk about how Honeycomb uses Honeycomb to learn about Honeycomb, which is one of Gerhard's favorite questions. As for key take-aways, deploying straight into production is really important, but not as important as optimising for humans - which are not replaceable cogs, that learn and share their learnings continuously. That is the secret to making things easy and happy for everyone.

Kaizen means "change for the better", continuous improvement in this context. Failure is essential to learning, but how do we learn as a team? The simplest thing is to regularly dedicate time for taking a step back, talking about what works & what doesn't, maybe writing some of it down, and eventually deciding what we should improve next. I intend to make every 10th Ship It! episode a Kaizen one. This is the first one when we talk with Adam and Jerod about the things that we want to improve in our setup over the next few months. We talk about how the June Fastly outage affected changelog.com, how we responded that day, and what we could do better. We discuss multi-cloud, multi-CDN, and the next sensible and obvious improvements for our app. Let us know via Slack or Twitter what learnings are valuable to you so that we can produce the best content for you.

This week we talk with Jean-Sébastien Pedron, RabbitMQ and FreeBSD contributor, about the importance of good release engineering for core infrastructure. Both Jean-Sébastien and I have been part of the Core RabbitMQ team for many years now. We have built some of the biggest CI/CD pipelines (check the show notes for one example), wrote and shipped some great code together, while breaking and fixing many things in the process. We have been wrestling with today's topic since 2016. Jean-Sébastien has some great FreeBSD stories to share, as well as an interesting perspective on shipping graphic card drivers. Oh, and by the way, it's probably our fault why your remote car key stopped working that afternoon. It will all make sense after you listen to this episode.

Why Cloud Native? What are the guiding principles that you should keep in mind as you are choosing a project from the Cloud Native Landscape? How do you build & ship an app in a Cloud Native way? Katie Gamanji, Ecosystem Advocate @ CNCF and former cloud engineer for American Express, Condé Nast and Microsoft, joins Gerhard to cover these topics in the context of the Cloud Native Fundamentals course that she developed. 15,000 students have already enrolled, and the initial feedback has been great. Tune in if you want to know why you should too, how to do it and when the course will become available for free.

This week on Ship It! Gerhard talks with Lars Wikman (independent Elixir/BEAM software consultant) why sometimes a monolith running on a single host with continuous backups and a built-in self-restore capability is everything that a small team of developers needs. That's right, no Kubernetes or microservices. After 2 years of running changelog.com, a Phoenix monolith, on Kubernetes, what do I think? Join our discuss and find out!

This week on Ship It! Gerhard talks with Ian Miell, author of Docker in Practice as well as Learn Git, Bash, and Terraform the Hard Way. They talk about being comfortable with the uncomfortable, focusing on the tech while keeping a holistic view of the business. Following the money flows is key. Ian explains this concept really well, and Gerhard feels fairly confident you will be better off if you pay attention. Let us know in the comments!

This week on Ship It! Gerhard talks with Dave Farley, co-author of Continuous Delivery and the inventor of the Deployment Pipeline. Today, most of us ship code the way we do because 25 years ago, Dave cared enough to drive the change that we now call CI/CD. He is one of the great software engineers: opinionated, perseverant & focused since the heydays of the internet. Dave continues inspiring and teaching us all via his newly launched YouTube channel, courses and recent books. The apprentice finally meets the master 🙇‍♂️🙇‍♀️

This week on Ship It! Gerhard talks with Ben Ford, former Royal Marine and founder of Commando Development, about the OODA loop (observe, orient, decide, act). Shipping is just a small part of it. The OODA loop that you know is probably the wrong one. We explore Mission & Command, Situational Awareness and a few other practices that will help you deal with complexity as you code and ship. As a former Royal Marine Commando, Ben learned these skills the hard way, and then refined them over many years as a software engineer. Check out the diagrams in the show notes - they are a work of art and precision.

This week on Ship It! Gerhard talks with Alex Koutmos about Elixir observability using PromEx. Why do we need to understand how our setup behaves? What is PromEx and where does PromEx fit in changelog.com? **Bonus!** Tune in to our LIVE Friday evening deploy 😱 of Erlang 24 for changelog.com. Check the show notes for a link on YouTube. 🍿

This week on Ship It! Gerhard is joined by Constance Caramanolis, Principal Engineer at Splunk and former maintainer of Envoy Proxy, and Stephen Augustus, Head of Open Source at Cisco & self-proclaimed Caesar of Systems. Constance and Stephen are the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon co-chairs. Join us to find out what happens before and after KubeCon gets shipped.

Render founder/CEO Anurag Goel joins us for a look behind their platform. An application native hosting option that hides the lower levels still requires a LOT of infrastructure.

Welcome to Ship It! This is a new show from Changelog about shipping software - and all the details, challenges, and problems that surface. Changelog SRE Gerhard Lazu is taking us on a journey into the world of shipping code, infrastructure, ops, and the people making it happen. Shipping is near and dear to every developers' heart. We do it every day. It's the essential first step. You have to ship it to share your ideas with the world. New episodes ship weekly.

Gina Häußge is here to tell us about the infra behind the OctoPrint project, which tests and releases new versions that work on multiple different printers and gets deployed hundreds of thousands of times.

Danielle Lancashire is here to tell us how Fermyon cloud is built on top of nomad and EC2 and how they put it in a box with Kubernetes and WebAssembly.

Jon "gzip enthusiast" Johnson joins us for a history lesson on compression & how it impacts everything from containers to Alpine.

Andrew Atkinson joins Autumn & Justin to tell them why folks should (and are) picking PostgreSQL as their database in 2024 and how to scale it.

All of the health anxiety of early internet adopters traced back to WebMD's self diagnosis. Some sysadmin's on-call nightmares came from a different part of the site.

Anita Zhang is here to tell us how Meta manages millions of bare metal Linux hosts and containers. We also discuss the Twine white paper and how AI is changing their requirements.

In this episode Justin and Autumn are joined by Mandi Walls to take you back to a time before the cloud. Before Kubernetes. When a/s/l was common and servers were made of metal. Back to the days of AOL to discuss how chat rooms worked.

Silvia Botros joins Justin & Autumn for a phenomenal conversation about databases, her career path & the ins/outs of writing _High Performance MySQL_.

Paul Frazee joins the show to tell us all about how Bluesky builds, tests, and deploys mobile and web applications from the same code base.

Why would you want to switch your developer environments from containers to nix? Ádám from LastPass has a few reasons.

Verónica López, Kubernetes SIG Release tech lead & distributed systems engineer, joins Justin & Autumn to share her experiences deploying services at scale.

Justin & Autumn take you with them to the 2024 SoCal Linux Expo where they asked six fellow attendees about their favorite open source projects and their least favorite commands.

What's the difference between productivity engineering and platform engineering? How can you continue to re-platform with a moving target? On this episode, we're joined by Andy Glover, who spent ten years productivity engineering at Netflix, to discuss.

Kyle Quest joins the show to tell Autumn & Justin all about the evolution of DockerSlim & minimal container images. Why are small container images important? What are different strategies to make containers smaller? Let's find out!

Autumn and Justin are joined by Chris Swan to discuss tech industry trends like AI and sustainability, gamifying the software development process and motivating devs to write more secure code, OpenSSF Scorecards and how they offer a way to measure and improve the security and compliance of GitHub repos, the scoring system, and the security posture of a repository.

Wanny Morellato & Deepak Mohandas from Kong join Justin & Autumn to discuss building, testing & running a load balancer that can run anywhere.

What do you do when your infrastructure runs 1000 miles away and you only have access every 90 minutes? Find out from Andrew Guenther from Orbital Sidekick.

We're back! Jason Hall joins the show to tell Justin & Autumn all about how Chainguard builds hundreds of containers without a single Dockerfile.

Justin & Autumn are joined by Steven Wu from Scanner. Scanner built logging infrastructure focused on security teams and occasional querying. We dive deep into how architectural decisions affect your business.

This is our 9th Kaizen with Adam & Jerod. We start today's conversation with the most important thing: embracing change. For Gerhard, this means putting Ship It on hold after this episode. It also means making more time to experiment, maybe try a few of those small bets that we recently talked about with Daniel. Kaizen will continue, we are thinking on the Changelog. Stick around to hear the rest.

Tim McNamara is known as New Zealand's Rust guy. He is the author of Rust in Action, and also a Senior Software Engineer at AWS, where he helps other builders with all things Rust. The main reason why Gerhard is intrigued by Rust is the incredible resource frugality. Fewer CPUs means less energy used, which is good for the planet, and good for the monthly bill. This becomes most noticeable at Amazon's scale, when S3, Lambda, CloudFront and other services start adding Rust components.

In our ops & infra world, we learn to optimise for redundancy, for mean time to recovery and for graceful degradation. We instinctively recognise single points of failure, and try to mitigate the risks associated with them. For some years now, Daniel Vassallo has been doing the same, but in the context of life & work. Daniel talks about the role of randomness, about learning from small wins & about optimising for a lifestyle that matches your true preferences,. Apparently, ideas too should be treated like cattle, not pets.

Last September, at the 🇨🇭 Swiss Cloud Native Day, Florian Forster, co-founder & CEO of ZITADEL, talked about why they switched to serverless containers. ZITADEL has a really interesting workload that is both CPU intensive and latency sensitive. On top of this, their users are global, and traffic is bursty. Florian talks about how they evaluated AWS, GCP & Azure before they settled on the platform that met their requirements.

Lars is big on Elixir. Think apps that scale really well, tend to be monolithic, and have one of the most mature deployment models: self-contained releases & built-in hot code reloading. In episode 7, Gerhard talked to Lars about "Why Kubernetes". There is a follow-up YouTube stream that showed how to automate deploys for an Elixir app using K3s & ArgoCD. More than a year later, how does Lars think about running applications in production? What does simple & straightforward mean to him? Gerhard's favourite: what is "human scale deployments"?