DevOps in Real Life - what an Experienced Architect Looks for

[@GrumpierByTheDay]

Wow. This is incredible content. Put so many things into context for me. Thank you 1000x for putting this together.

[@JulieNgTech]

Thanks for the feedback Nate. Glad to hear it was helpful. Are there other topics where you think this type of "connecting the dots" videos would be useful?

[@LisandroBeltramino]

The best content ever on these topics! Keep it up!

[@JulieNgTech]

Thanks Lisandro! I'll continue to make and post more videos :)

[@henryng5047]

This is a great video! I am a new Devops enginee, was confused in my position sometimes due to the wide range of tasks, from VM administration, identity management, and release deployment.... more and more.... After watching your videos, I know the success criteria as a Devops engineer, helping me set up the goals for studies and work quality improvement.

[@JulieNgTech]

Thanks Henry! I'm glad that the videos are helping. And really cool that we have the same last name 😄

[@henryng5047]

@@JulieNgTech Yeah ! We have the same last name :D Long working hours in front of a computer can bring us lot of health issues, it's always suggested doing relaxing exerises e.g. Yoga or even physiotherapy exercises everyday or every few hours , take care.

[@falanges5301]

You're amazing Julie! thanks so much for all your sharings!

[@JulieNgTech]

thanks falanges!

[@DD-ds7ui]

best channel. thank you KZbin algorithm :)

[@alexacevedo9789]

Hi Julie , great content .... more please

[@JulieNgTech]

Thanks for the feedback :) I have some things on a backlog. Anything in particular you liked?

[@alexacevedo9789]

Hi @@JulieNgTech Thanks for asking, very kind => Terraform IaC & Blue Green Deployments on Azure

[@iamdedlok]

This was an amazing video. I was looking for guidance on DevOps, and this video just clued me into what are the gaps in my knowledge, and what I should be paying more attention to. Thanks, Julie, subbed! I am going to share this with my colleagues, and I will have to go through individual sections of this video again. Well done and salute!

[@JulieNgTech]

Awesome Rahul, thanks for the great video. Actually out of all the videos I've made, this one is one of my favorites because it's what I do in real life with Azure customers. I actually want to do more "reviews" and "in real life" videos with cloud engineering. Do you have any specific questions?

[@bradley5com]

What skills would you prioritise learning to be a Devops engineer coming from a non technical background

[@tomazstih5382]

Julie, you're worth your weight in gold. Thank you for your videos.

[@doctordorkmeister5330]

Git is the home for cyber ethics. A postmodern cathedral of morality

[@SamuelCharlesInnes]

Just discovered your work on blog and videos, super helpful. Thanks very much for taking the time to do this.

[@JulieNgTech]

You're very welcome!

[@Octavian82]

Hey Julie, great video! Learned a few new things despite doing it for years. Keep it up!

[@JulieNgTech]

That's a real compliment. You're one of the first people who taught me git. I still remember the first time I had a git error and I think it was either you or Max who came over and said sorry I don't understand the GUI, I need to fix this in the command line - which is totally my line now 😅 hope you're doing well!

[@ToksNation]

This is gold

[@ICEFIR3]

Thanks for sharing your experience and insights! :)

[@JulieNgTech]

Thanks Ken!

[@sixdonuts]

Thank you for this video and I hope your hand gets better.

[@MrVanAnderson]

Liking the channel and content! Subscribed!

[@user779hjg45]

Hi Julie. First of all thank you for this great video. By the way, It looks like the standard-version is deprecated. What are you using now?

[@AungBaw]

Amazing experience, feels like cold shower 🚿

[@JulieNgTech]

That's one way to describe it 😅 thanks for the feedback!

[@lukevandam7610]

this video........ This video turns me OWN!!!!!1

[@ynuxtechblog5373]

Just watched this twice, i wished you could have a look at our project. These are exactly the topics that we are struggling with, and exactly the right questions to ask. Are you still open to discussions? Is this a valid environment / release / branching strategy: docker based; dev - int - prod environments, feature branches + main. Build and unit tests on dev. At merge request to main -> push to registry, pull and deploy to integration, do the tests with mock data (or anonymised prod data). At git tag -> pull and deploy to production.

[@JulieNgTech]

Hey, it's a great question but not one that's possible to answer in a comment thread. A good answer takes the people, their business scenario and existing experience level into account. Are you an Azure customer and you qualify, you can apply to FastTrack for Azure program, which I am a part of. Engineers like myself do 1:1 reviews with customers. But you have to qualify... if you do, feel free to mention my name. That would support my time and effort on this channel :)

[@TheRandymanhansen]

I love this video! I'm currently changing my career to DevOps :)

[@JulieNgTech]

Glad it was helpful! Good luck with the career change. DevOps is quite fun :)

[@TheRandymanhansen]

@@JulieNgTech thank you so much :)

[@aldodfm]

Really enjoy the video! I was missing something about Testing on DevOps on Real life, do you have some recommendations? like maybe have testing on CI part and Testing on CD part? Make sense to avoid "Forks" on Innner Source approach ?

[@julieng252]

Thanks for the feedback Aldo :) No, forks are generally good! In the Jenkins Pipeline Library example, looking back, I think one of the biggest mistakes we made was not having a release management and versioning concept to begin with *and* communicating it to teams. We just gave them a library, which they integrated by referencing the git repository - and the default branch was not stable. We should have had a stable branch, or better yet, versioning from the start. Because we broke many peoples' builds, we lost their trust. So they just developed their own forks. We also never really explained how contributing back should work because we didn't have a concept. We were also just learning :) like I said in the video. Looking back, the developers were shipping and that's most important. What kind of recommendations were you looking for? Unit tests are the most straight-forward and a must. My other hands-on experience was with end to end testing and I want to do an article and video about that. But it's a lot of work because of the infrastructure needed to deploy a bunch of build runners with Selenium.

[@aldodfm]

@@julieng252 thx for the answers. Really appreciate. I'm always looking for recommendations, experience, etc. Right now I'm thinking in a collaborative way of sharing and contributing in Azure resource templates. As you say the best way is communicate properly before doing anything.

[@JulieNgTech]

Sharing ARM Templates is much more challenging 😓 because ARM has the concept of "linked" templates that have to be available via a URI, which is why you see lots of blob storage links with SAS tokens 😒 But I think we've learned from others and you should check out Bicep, which has the concept of modules, which can be referenced as local files. This means you can share them via git as submodules. Far from ideal because submodules point to specific commits, not tags. But it would work until Microsoft releases a way to do proper module sharing via publishing or a registry. github.com/Azure/bicep

[@nomadic_shrek]

We need more videos on governance :)

[@JulieNgTech]

Agreed. I'm trying to convince work to let me record one for them. It would be a walkthrough of this doc I wrote docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cloud-adoption-framework/secure/best-practices/secure-devops Is that helpful?

[@owenzmortgage8273]

What happened to her left eye when she talking. Great videos thanks for sharing

[@JulieNgTech]

LOL 😂 probably lighting? There wasn't anything wrong with my eye. But glad you liked the video :)

[@aymanpatel5862]

For DB migration, would it be more beneficial to use SQL queries or migration tools such as flyway or liquibase?

[@JulieNgTech]

Personally I prefer tools or code because they help me write or even provide the "down" version of the migration as well, in case it fails. Other people can probably write the down SQL too. But I can't 🙃

[@engineeringoyster6243]

ADO has such a confusing and counter-intuitive user interface. The documentation is terrible and is not focused on "worker-bees." Out of all the types of users who use ADO, developers who only write User Stories, participate in Daily Scrums and Demonstrations and Retrospectives for each Sprint. Yet, there is minimal documentation on how to operate the ADO software for these narrow actions. Last week I had 4 User Stories to enter by Friday. I started on Tuesday and spent 10 hours thru Thursday. Yet I still required an additional hour of one-on-one turoring from my lead. And still, on Monday, I still found some errors in the User Stories, requiring rework. Every little thing that you do in ADO is complex and cumbersome. An effective work around might be to have a template Excel spread sheet with the few required blocks of data and then have a translator /importer that could harvest the User Story data from Excel and import it into ADO. One graphic impediment of ADO is that the boundaries and boarders between elements shown on the screen are visually difficult to see. Further, each "sub-window" shown on the screen contains far more data than can be shown. So, the excess data are just hidden, beyond the sub-window borders. So, if the sub-window has 20 words of text, only 3 or so will be displayed. Rendering the information mostly unusable. I've occasionally worked with software architects over the past 15 years or so. I've repeatedly asked them to describe their function. They never can provide an answer. I sincerely do not see any value for their participation. I could understand if their answer was that they do the preliminary design of the software. But, they have been clear that that is not their job.

[@JulieNgTech]

I'm sorry you feel that way. But I can understand it's frustrating. I personally don't use any of the repo or user story functionality (I prefer GitHub). And because I don't work on the product, I can't comment

[@engineeringoyster6243]

@@JulieNgTech Thanks forvreplying. It is astounding to read that you don't have any familiarity with the core functionality of ADO. So where does a sincere, novice user go to find assistance? More importantly, if you don't use ADO like this, why does anyone use ADO? Who are the intended users of ADO? How does ADO bring value?

[@DallasFort1857]

should I start as a developer and then make my way towards devops engineering? or can I become a devops engineer without going the full stack developer route?

[@JulieNgTech]

You can definitely become a DevOps engineer without going the full stack developer route. If you have developer experience, DevOps becomes easier to understand and apply. But you can achieve the same result by working well with developers. In terms of how you should start your career, what do you enjoy? If you don't know, dip your toes in your options until you can decide which one to go deeper in. And be open that you might choose a bad fit on the first try. But know you can always switch. When Microsoft recruited me from my old job, they convinced me to specialize in AI and Data Science because they were upcoming industries. Looking bad that was a bad idea for me because I was already invested in AppDev and DevOps and could contribute more by leveraging existing strengths which I enjoy. Hope that helps!

[@RaviSingh-ix3nr]

Watching this I think 10th time. Taking notes each time and working on those pieces, however, I'm not feeling confident about it. As I told you before, I started DevOps this year only. Learned Git, Docker, Jenkins, Ansible, Kubernetes (CKA Certified), created 1 AWS Code Pipeline. Terraform is next on my list. What kind of project should I do? What programming language is must for DevOps? If you get time, please let me know how can I improve in DevOps? What areas should I focus more? Thanks in advance.

[@JulieNgTech]

Hey Ravi, like most things in life, when you want to improve, you have to go out there and put in the hours. Find a project, even if it's just a hobby project and go work on it. Some developers who are learning on the side will over-engineer their personal blogs - easiest learning opportunity for everyone. If you can learn during work hours, that's even better! Try putting al those tools together. You could try for example running your own Jenkins cluster on Kubernetes. And CI/CD the hell out of all of it, e.g. dev vs prod, etc. That's a kind of "putting it altogether" project that may be helpful for you.

[@RaviSingh-ix3nr]

@@JulieNgTech Thanks a ton :)

[@sergei5879]

Hi Julie, I saw you quite open to questions, I have one. terraform destroy - we had issues with destroying while it has to destroy KeyVault with secrets in it. So now for a destroy we have to run it in pipe (using azure devops) wait for it fails, delete manually KV from TF state and then rerun destroy. Quite a painful process - but we haven't been able to find a way, considering we need to destroy KV, not just secrets. Many thanks in advance for any tips.

[@JulieNgTech]

Hi Sergei, what's your key vault purge settings per registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/azurerm/latest/docs/resources/key_vault ?

[@JulieNgTech]

I actually was working on a demo of created service principals and saving their credentials in Key Vault. See github.com/julie-ng/terraform-keyvault-demo I ran it a few times during meetings and it worked *most* of the time. Sometimes Terraform got stock removing the Key Vault Access Policy. But I am not sure if that is an ARM API issue. I couldn't get it consistently to fail though. Have you double checked your Key Vault purge and delete settings?

[@raghavgupta1157]

Idk any of the answers :p.

[@JulieNgTech]

That's also good! It means you have a good opportunity to learn something new and/or refresh what you already know. I ask myself many of these questions al the time and often they change per project - or just me getting older ;-)

[@mhalton]

List problems with no solutions.

[@JulieNgTech]

There is no one size fits all solution if that's what you're looking for. There's different solutions for everyone because we all have different scenarios, requirements and experience levels. This video is about how to approach finding YOUR solution.

[@ER-zj3jv]

this is free?

[@JulieNgTech]

Yes, I am giving away my knowledge and experience completely for free :) I did not study IT and learned it all on my own via the internet. So now it's time for me to give back.

[@ER-zj3jv]

@@JulieNgTech Thanks Julie. Your content is very helpful.