I’m in all kinds of debt. Health debt, tech debt, financial debt and slowly but surely, I’m paying them off. financially I owe 42k (down from 57) , health debt I’m 40 kilos overweight and tech debt, well I’m coming from an SAP Architect background where all this new fandangled devops things are still a mystery.

            Again, with my top three:

1)    Cut off the bleeding (making sure the problem doesn’t get worst)

The first place to paying off debt is to make sure the problem doesn’t get worst. Check your spending, cut down on unhealthy food, embrace new computing models. I started tracking every single pound I spend and cut down on the unnecessary purchases. This is rather difficult as I’m a creature of comfort and unfortunately comfort costs money. But that’s the problem with debt isn’t it? Paying up the past. So today you has to suffer the consequences, which segways nicely into the second point.  

2)    It’s not the end of the world

Paying up debt is difficult and requires effort but there is a goal and that goal is to not let it happen again. Because it’s a sustained effort it starts taking over everything. Slowly at first but then you get a sinking feeling every time you try to relax, this nagging at the back of your mind, like there is something left undone, a spectre that looms, grows, lurking in the dark getting bigger and bigger until it takes over. It’s your job not to let it! as long as you are taking steps in the right direction, you are doing you’re your job, as long as the debt is going down, don’t worry. Learn to relax, don’t let it take over, carry on and live your life on day at a time. As a wise man once said: “if you are going through hell, keep going”

3)    There is an end!

 The good think about debt is that it ends. If you take your job one day at a time and keep up the effort, you will get over it. then, it’s a new lifestyle. A road to better improvement, a continuous cycle constant change. Peter Senge’s  Fifth Discipline is a great inspiration for this phase.

Personally, I’m focusing on paying off tech debt this will lead to paying off the financial debt once I have spare money, I’ll focus on health… this is a risky strategy since I have a history of heart disease in the family, but I feel it’s what I need to do.

KR,

Guy

Writers block. To be or not to be, that is the question, where is the will to write when you don’t feel like writing; this is my problem.

Whenever I have a writing assignment, my mind goes blank. I don’t know where to start nor how to continue. Hence this challenge (which I’ve failed over and over again) but we shall continue and endure.

To paraphrase “it’s not inspiration, it’s endurance” meaning you don’t wait for inspiration to hit, you write, write, write, write and write until it starts making sense (this strategy explains the above two paragraph).

I guess my difficulty in writing is the rigidity, like structure, style, rhythm and content; it’s the same issue I have with baking. I like improvisation, I like to change things up and go with the flow; The Tao that can be spoken is not the Tao.

I guess, I’m just a jazzman and not a classical penis…erm I mean pianist.

So the show must go on, and I’ll write more and we’ll evolve jazz into Rock and Roll!

Pardon the Hiatus, last week has been hectic. I’m getting on an 8 hour flight tomorrow and hope to make up fork the slack.

7 posts should be coming up on Wednesday

KR,

Guy

I’m currently reading(Listening in Audible) the Marie Kondo book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying: A simple, effective way to banish clutter forever

And it's been helping me quite a lot , I donated 36 shirts (including 7 that I had never worn) and 3 suits. I’m feeling a lot better about my life and my house but work goes on; I’ve started thinking about applying the KonMari method to my digital life as well.

I’m not a hoarder but I do have a healthy history of digital files. Files of which I’ve never even looked at. So I have to ask myself, do these files spark joy? Honestly! I have files in there going back to 1998, old Project work, old reference documents, things I never and will never use . so I’ll delete them. Photos, archives , documents and backups all of it.

I highly recommend not only the Netflix series but the book as well, It truly is life changing.

Alright, a short one today. GG let’s see how tomorrow goes.

Nothing serious today, I did sleep well so the whole day was kind of weird and I’m not really feeling it. I’ve been doing Kubernetes training today and I will point out. Style is as important as content in web training. I’ve had this problems with courses from Udemy in the past but this current course is awful, it physically hurts to listen to is for too long. Because the quality is so bad, I’m thinking of ditching Udemy all together. I never had this problem with Lynda and I’m really thinking about getting a Linux Academy subscription.

So I’ll compile my top three tips for a great web training:

1. Audio is the most important thing to think about! It doesn't matter how smart you are or how good your content is, if people can't focus on what you are saying, your message  won't get across. Most of us are headset users , so having poor quality audio beamed directly into your ears is an awful awful experience and will for sure cause a lot of dropouts.

2. Don’t assume experience, the more you handhold your student, the better . don’t assume everyone just knows what to do, really take it step by step. Your more advanced students can skip and go directly to the interesting bits

3. EDIT YOU STUFF! If you make a mistake, don't just fix it and move on, go back, re-record and then continue. Before you publish the course, go trough it yourself, check the end product. If its don’t long , have somebody do that for you.

I think these three tips should be a great start for churning out great web training. Hopefully this oneday will be useful for someone.

(This is my whiteboarding Script)

As an industry we are going thru a transition from traditional Static infrastructure to a new(ish) style of computing which is much more dynamic and distributed infrastructure across various providers , leveraging the best of each (on premise, AWS,Azure, GCP, Alibaba e etc).

This transition into multi-cloud is happening because the cloud enables “on demand” usage of infrastructure, using more than one infrastructure provider gives us greater resiliency and efficiency.

The cloud is much more of a new operating model(it's not just someone else’s computer) than just an infrastructure provider change, this new Cloud Operation Model requires some mind shift.

We will still have the 4 main actors in IT  but their activities will change.

In a Static world:

• static IPs

• strong perimeters(a gate and moat)

• static applications

• and a much more defined environment.

In a Dynamic world:

• the operations team provision infrastructure on demand so the way we provision infrastructure needs to change

• this infrastructure has no (or low perimeter) so the way we think about networking needs to change

• the applications running on these are ephemeral need to change as well and due to this dynamic nature of the infrastructure

• the way we think about security has to change from a host based to identity based.

 
These changes bring with them a series of challenges we need to think about :

• Scale: how do we go from provisioning 50 Servers in a year to 50000 as needed

• Variety: how do we deal with the different demands, not only from the different providers but from different programming languages and resource models

• Managing Dependencies: how do we ensure our resources have the dependencies they need: networking (VPCs, Subnets), Secrets, Services e etc

• Access Management: how do we enable our ephemeral applications to have the access they need in a secure way and still prevent secret sprawl

• Low Trust Networks: how do we manage identity and who our trusted providers are
  Secrets Management: how to we ensure our applications have access to the secrets they need, prevent secrets sprawl and centrally manage different authentication and access types.

• Scheduled Workloads: how do we schedule workloads as needed , how we distribute our workload throughout our available infrastructure.

• Bin Packing: how to we ensure our resources are being use to their full potential and we are reducing waste.

• Resource Registry: how do find available services and the nodes they are on.

• Service Mesh: how do we connect and manage our services with each others.

• Collaboration: how do we get all of the actors to collaborate on the above points together.
  
  
  

If we map these to Hashicorp’s tools we come up with the following:

• Terraform: handles the provisioning of different infrastructure as code, it help us deals with the Scale, Variety and their dependencies.

• Vault: handles the secret management aspect. Who are our trusted providers, how do we manage  their authentication and what secrets they have access to.

• Nomad: handles the Job Scheduling and Bin Packing it ensures jobs can be distributed and executed throughout the available environment as needed

• Consul: Handles the Service mesh and central resource registry it allows services to find each other and knows which services are deployed on which nodes.
  
  

Now, which one would you like to talk about first ?

Welp, Chrome just crashed and I lost a cool little article I was writing, this was a learning opportunities. I’ve been writing these blogs directly on SquareSpace’s blog feature. which is a WYSIWYG editor but doesn’t have an auto save feature. so going forward , I’ll be writing these in Google docs and just Ctrl-cing it over.

The next two weeks are going to be busy, time will be scarce and mental capability will be drained so dont except any great works of literature. this is about consistency and not necessarily quality.

(This is going to be uninspired )

The demostack is a “Hashistack the hard way” project, it sets up Consul, Vault and Nomad with a variable amount of Servers and Workers . we also have a Load Balanced front end for Vault and a Load Balanced front end for Fabio (Consul Load Balancer).

this is set up only using Terraform and Cloud Init scripts; Not only is this the hard way, it is also the wrong way. If doing this in production , Packer and optionally an orchestrator should be used.

Architecture overview:

<Insert here a cool picture of the architecture>

Consul:

Consul is installed and configured on all the servers and workers using cloud auto connect. It is also configured as DNS using DNSMAQ for any request going to port 8500 or *.consul

Vault:

Vault is configured on the servers and the vault binaries are installed on the workers. Vault is set up using the Clouds Auto Unseal, set up an initial KV secret and a PKI secret for NGINX .

Nomad

Nomad is Installed and configured on all the servers and workers. Fabio and Hashi-ui (I like it ) are set up automatically, nomad also starts a couple of jobs from this repo: https://github.com/GuyBarros/nomad_jobs

Variables:

(thats enought for today )

One day into this challenge and I’ve already failed. There is no point in beating myself up for failing, just learn from my mistakes and continue. so what are the top three Lessons I take from this failure?

Lesson 1 ) Timing - don’t start time consumptive tasks when you are time constrained. Yesterday was Valentines day and My pregnant wife and I where taking take of our son and one of his friends (that slept over so her parents could enjoy Valentines day) . As a lot of people know taking care of two toddlers isn’t exactly easy, I was going to write this more or less at this time , but by the time 9 o clock rolled around I just didn’t have the mental capacity do write anything .( the computer was off and I promptly feel asleep)

Lesson 2) Do the job that’s in front of you- I had a busy day, every day is a busy day but there is always the opportunity to procrastinate a little here and there. procrastinate is the wrong word; there is always an opportunity to take a breather , re-energise and continue to work. during one of these breaks, I could have written something , even an outline or a paragraph. anything is better than nothing. no journey starts at the destination.

Lesson 3) Don’t give up! - it’s very easy to get discouraged when suffering a set back right at the beginning of anything. I will admit to waking up feeling down on myself for not writing yesterday , I wanted to give up o this whole challenge thing (since I already failed, whats the point?) . So I spent some introspective moments dusting myself off and remembering why I’m doing this in the first place, I’m not doing this to win a prize, I’m not doing this as penance for something, I’m not doing this to challenge myself to achieve new heights; I’m doing this to practise writing, I need to become better, the only way to do it , is to write more.

Welp, that’s it for today, tomorrow I’ll probably draft some technical documentation which I’ve been running away from for a couple of months now. so I wrote this in about 45 minutes and spent zero time editing (besides right-clicking to fix some words) .

Up and at them,

Guy!

Welcome to 2019. as we plan the year ahead I’m looking into how to improve myself this year; the improvement point I’m going to focus on is writing. as such, I’m going to take the 30 days challenge. one blog post a day, for 30 days and then we will take a health check and see where we go from there.

wish me luck.

Day 0 , hour 0

I finally bucked up and got my own domain. I wont really use it for much. to be honest, all I want to do is to create subdomains for demos and CA Certs. spread it around a couple of clouds, but we’ll see how it goes. for now, if you are here and not by mistake, welcome.