Rules for SysAdmins - Keep Systems and Monitoring Seperate

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There are a number of good practices to follow when setting up and maintaining systems. Some of these rules are obvious and some not so obvious. One of these rules is to make sure your monitoring tools have no dependency on the thing being monitored. While this may seem obvious, lots of organizations still make this mistake. Sometimes it’s not even clear to them that they’ve created such a dependency. Microsoft ran into this very issue last week during an Azure outage situation. As Mary Jo Foley reported in her All About Microsoft Column, the dashboards used by Microsoft to alert customers about the outage were behind the same authentication system that was having issues. If a company with the size and resources of Microsoft can miss this, then so can the average operations, DevOps, and SRE Teams supporting applications.

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Transitioning to Video in the Time of Covid

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During the pandemic a lot about our lives have changed, especially in how we work and communicate with our peers. I’ve especially noticed a rise in the use of video. It is more a part of our work than ever before. Customers too, have asked for more communication via video. This could be due to the fact that we’re all doing zoom / teams or similar such apps. But I’ve also noticed this impacting documentation. There seems to be an appetite for documentation to either be in the form of video or incorporate video in some way. Because of the desire to see more video documentation, I’ve had to expand my skillset beyond MS office apps like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. I’m trying to improve my proficiency in iMovie, SnagIt, and OBS.

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Appearance - Gestalt IT at CFD6

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Cloud Field Day 6 took place a few weeks ago now, but I’m still thinking about those events. One of the interactions was with Dell where a few us delegates were able to speak to Nick Brackney. The three part series discusses some of the of more interesting aspects of cloud today. I invite everyone to check out the videos, and follow the links back to the articles.

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Podcast Appearance - Day 2 Cloud: Building Your First CI/CD Pipeline

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I had the great pleasure to appear on episode 19 of the Day 2 Cloud Podcast. This was special to me as I remember when this podcast started. I remember thinking how much I enjoyed the concept. Being a guest on it is still kind of surreal.

I encourage you to give this episode a listen. But even better, check out other episodes as well, as there are lots of super talented folks talking about what it’s like using tech in the real world.

The episode can be found here https://packetpushers.net/podcast/day-two-cloud-019-building-your-first-ci-cd-pipeline/

I really had a blast talking to Ned Bellavance . In addition to being deeply knowledgeable on tech, he’s an all around good guy. He also a Pluralsight author, so you can check out his work there as well.

Security Wasn't Always My Day Job

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Microsegmentation has changed my view of who should be on a security team. Security isn’t my day job.  Well, that’s what I used to think before this week.  After seeing many, many examples of security issues that can cripple a network or even leak data, my position as they say, has evolved. As a Solutions Architect, I need to find new ways to secure systems I design and products that I recommend.

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