Without SRECon happening this year and the world turned upside down from COVID-19, we set out to hold a virtual event to bring SREs together to share their experiences of what has changed. Last week’s SRE from Home was exactly that. With 1900 registrants, 20 lively Slack channels, six illuminating and entertaining talks from a diverse range of experts in the field and our #askanSRE panel answering attendees’ questions with a candid generosity, it was an amazing, jam-packed day.

Ever watch news coverage of an incoming hurricane? You’ve got those correspondents out there in the elements, wearing their yellow rain ponchos, fighting the wind, and describing the scene to an audience watching at home. That situation reminds me of life as an engineer managing a large-scale IT infrastructure. Although I’m no longer a sysadmin there were certainly days where I had to put on my metaphorical poncho and weather an incoming storm.

Deploying a new feature to production is a momentous occasion. It's important to ensure that everything goes properly at this stage, as deployments tend to be error-prone when not handled correctly. To examine why this is and how you can avoid it, let's take a look at the different types of deployments available and where some of them fall short.

Kubernetes is the most popular Open Source technology of the last five years. It was created by Google to allow companies to use container (Docker) applications in production. Today, Kubernetes is the new standard for running applications in the Cloud or on its servers (on-premise). I even heard from a Cloud architect from Azure: "our customers no longer come to us to do Cloud, but to do Kubernetes". That's to say how much a utility software* upsets a whole ecosystem.

Many of Spot’s AWS customers are using Kubernetes Operations (kops) to self-manage their Kubernetes clusters. The tool significantly simplifies cluster set up, lifecycle management via instance groups, Kubernetes Day 2 operations and generates Terraform configurations, making it a popular tool for deploying production-grade k8s clusters.