🗓️ What's new this week
BIG SHOW THIS WEEK: Future of Containers with Brendan Burns (Ep 221)
Join us live Thursday, June 15, for special guest Brendan Burns, CVP Azure Cloud Native & Resource Management and also a founding member of the Kubernetes project. Bring your questions!
👨💻 What I'm working on
GitHub Actions workflow and job design
GitHub Actions (GHA) is my favorite automation engine. CI and CD are part of that automation. I’ve now used GHA for many Docker and Kubernetes projects in the last three years. A common question from my clients and students is how to design their workflows.
Here’s some of my advice:
👉 When you’re starting, create one workflow per purpose. For example, build and test a Docker image, lint code, and deployment would all be separate workflow files.
👌 Most of your Workflows will only have one Job in them. That’s OK.
😍 I love Reusable Workflows, and I like to break up big Jobs into purpose-fit smaller Workflows with Inputs that let them work across multiple repos and uses. Start using these when you think you’ll want to “do that thing” in multiple repos. It’ll take practice to make them work well together, so start designing Reusable Workflows early in your GHA journey.
🥳 You can now store Reusable Workflows in a central repo, then call those from other repos, even private ones. You can also set Workflows to be mandatory from the org central settings. There’s now a range of features for keeping things D.R.Y. So, I recommend skimming most of the GHA Docs (I think they are good!) to know your options.
❓What questions do you have about GitHub Actions workflow design? Respond in this LinkedIn post.
🐦 Tweet of the week
I've picked up two new books this year: Outlive, the Science & Art of Longevity by my favorite health/medical podcast, Peter Attia's The Drive, and The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin.
I've listed to Dr. Peter Attia for many years on health, fitness, diet, and longevity. He has fantastic guests, is a man of science, and walks the walk. I recommend everything he does. His video podcast is a tome of fantastic info from the world's leaders in medicine and health.
You may not know of Rick Rubin, but you've heard his work. He's helped produce and inspire some of the world's biggest hit music. He's been called "the most important producer of the last 20 years" by MTY and was named on Time's list of the "100 Most Influential People in the World". Watch his recent 60 Minutes interview.
👀 In case you missed it
(headlines from the last newsletter that you can skip if you already read it)
🔴 Live Q&A: Learning Docker and Kubernetes (Ep 220), June 8, 2023
100% Q&A focused on my Udemy and Maven course content and all things Kubernetes, Docker, GitOps, GitHub Actions, and DevOps-related.😉
🎧 Podcast
Ep 133: Falco Logs Suspicious Events on Your K8s and Servers
Last Friday (Jun 2), I released a podcast where Matt and I were joined by Jason Dellaluce and Luca Guerra from Sysdig to talk about Falco, a tool I recommend for production clusters and knowing about any bad behavior on your servers.
Falco is a security tool I've mentioned multiple times on this show, because I mostly think that a low-level security-focused logging product is something that every production server needs. The ability to log unexpected events and behaviors on your Linux host is powerful and necessary to be able to audit what's really happening on your infrastructure outside of your app itself. Enjoy!
🔴 Kubernetes Backup and Restores with Kasten (Ep 219), June 1, 2023
On our Live show last week, Matt and I were joined by Michael Cade of Veeam Kasten to talk about the important topic of Kubernetes backup, restore, disaster recovery, ransomware, and more. Disaster recovery is a topic and effort that companies just don't give enough attention to, and they should. Enjoy the show.