Learn about the unintended environmental impact and cost of the proliferation of cloud services, frameworks, and "throw an other service at it" development.
Phew! A group of Chronospherians attended Monitorama back in person in Portland and we had a whistlestop (partial) week meeting customers and observability enthusiasts. I had a talk which sparked a lot of interesting discussion, we hosted a very successful whisk(e)y tasting, and all in all, had a great time.
Yes, KubeCon returned with vengeance to Europe, and over 7000 cloud native hungry folks made their way to Valencia to see what was new in the world of Kubernetes and cloud computing. There was a lot that happened, and for more detail, read our wrap up post, the rest of this newsletter summarizes some of the most relevant topics.
Observability is fast changing from a practice that those close to engineering knew was useful, to a practice that everyone knows is useful for technical and business reasons.
A handful of posts from April highlighted this, and none more than a post from the pragmatic programmer by Gergely Orosz.The post digs into what happened to cause Atlassian’s recent week-long outage that hit their SLA promises hard, at over 15% below their target. I’m sure Atlassian has an observability solution, but as t...
Many years ago, I took over a small publishing company, that's an
entirely different story, and not relevant now, but as part of it, I
acquired a Google Apps for business account. For years, I had access to
"business" Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Hangouts/Meet, and more. Slowly,
Google chipped away at what they gave you for free, which made perfect
sense, but I knew the time would come when I would need to move on.
[That time came this year (2022)](https://support.google.com/a/answer/60217?hl=en-GB) and it was time to figure out what I
could replace th...
The sun is rearing its sleepy head across much of the northern hemisphere, making news a little quiet this month. But we have a few choice items for you, and with the first in-person conference seasons in a while on the horizon, there’s plenty more to come!
Over the past months, I've been slowly assembling a suite of self-hosted tools and services on a shiny new RaspberryPi 400, and finally, I think I am finished and ready to write up my experiences. At the least, it will help remind me what I have, but I hope it might also help others taking similar journeys.
_Updated on 20th February 2022 to include changes I added to the setup._
## Disclaimer
Blogs take time to write, and I hope this helps you. Some of the products here are affiliate links, bu...
There are many services and tools to help manage microservices. This post looks at some options to highlight the similarities, differences, and when or why to use one.
I was a happy, loyal, and paying
[Evernote](https://evernote.com/)customer for ten years. I loved the integrated toolchain it provided,
with the ability to draw, annotate, tag, OCR, and much, much more. It
did everything I needed in a note-taking application, and more besides,
such as basic task management and a dumping ground for miscellaneous
ideas.
And then came version 10. I have not made a secret of my dislike of
poorly implemented cross-platform applications that serve business
interests far more than customer i...
There are many services and tools to help manage microservices. This post looks at some options to highlight the similarities, differences, and when or why to use one.
Docs as code is an increasingly popular approach for tech writers that follows similar principles for writing that developers follow for writing code. Docs as code typically means writing in markup languages such as markdown, asciidoc, or restructured text. The tools for writing in these markup languages are different from the specialized technical writing tools you might have used before, and again, are often designed for coding or general writing. This post looks at some of the best you can t...
2021 was a difficult year for many. That's not to say that 2020 was any
better, but for some reason, perhaps due to the "naivety" of the whole
situation, it felt... "different". I certainly felt more prepared and
willing to face new challenges and to learn how to adapt.
Either way, I spent a long period of the 2020/2021 winter lockdowns
trying to be as supportive and as positive to those around me as
possible. I was active in online communities, helped friends and others
out, supported them th...
The discussions on what represents negative, biased, and diverse language continue in many open source communities, often sparking heated and strongly opinionated debate. Setting those discussions aside, say you have decided what language you want to increase, decrease, or change in your community. How do you enforce and track those changes?
“DevOps” merges Development and Operations team functions through practices and tooling, all the while making continuous improvements to applications. Teams that adopt DevOps tools, culture and practices perform better and build faster. Let’s walk through each stage of DevOps and the popular DevOps tools you may want to consider in 2022.
I am one of those rare and crazy people that owned the one and only
[Essential phone](https://www.gsmarena.com/_essential_ph_1-8710.php). And I loved it. It was just the right
size for me, devoid of excessive branding, almost pure Android, and a
conversation starter as most people wondered what it was. But I am an
unashamed nerd and didn't like having a phone that was no longer
supported, and despite my best efforts, I couldn't get
[LineageOS](https://lineageos.org/) to
work. I bought a [OnePlus Nord](https://www.gsmarena.com/oneplus_nord-10289.php) and donated the Essential phone to my
partner, who gets most of my techni...
This Weekend I have been thinking about excellence, or what does it mean
to be truly an expert in something? Someone that others witness at their
craft and think...
> "Wow, they really know what they're doing!"
As big Kubernetes users ourselves, we know that one of the best ways to run Kubernetes is to use Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). Earlier this year, Google Cloud announced a new mode for running GKE called Autopilot. Google Cloud designed Autopilot to reduce the operational cost of managing clusters, optimize clusters for production, and yield higher workload availability. Autopilot takes a lot of the legwork and complexity out of managing Kubernetes clusters, saving you time and money. But, lik...
I have been trialing a handful of tools and processes recently building
towards helping with this and now I have a shiny new M1 Pro laptop it
seemed a perfect time to see how useful they were.
Here's what I wanted to test and how the process went.
You want to migrate data to a new Mac but are also interested in using a clean install instead of restoring from a backup to remove any of that unnecessary crud that gathers, especially when you someone like me who constantly installs and uninstalls applications and tools. I have been trialing a handful of tools and processes recently building towards helping with this and now I have a shiny new M1 Pro laptop it seemed a perfect time to see how useful they were. Here’s what I wanted to test and...
For Nanowrimo (national novel writing month) 2021 I continued my novel from last year. To remind anyone who hasn’t followed my sparse updates on the novel, the novel is a speculative fiction set after a global zombie and human conflict where the two (let’s call them) species coexist in a tense harmony. For Nanowrimo this year, I set myself two targets.
That Sounds Interesting podcast features interviews, discussions, comments on the past and present, and short stories on topics which are unusual, but relevant in the current world.
One of the most important capabilities of an observability platform is alerting. How quickly can you know when something is wrong, so you can rapidly triage and remediate that problem? Chronosphere recently released a new approach to defining alerts called “Monitors,” which gives users more flexibility with alerts and makes them easier to create and manage.
An alert is only useful if it’s seen quickly and by the right on-call team, and that’s where PagerDuty comes in. Many of our customers use...
As conference season slowly draws to a close, and we fill that few months between the end of summer and the start of the seemingly never-ending holiday season (hemisphere and region-dependent naturally), there has been a flurry of activity in the observability ecosystem, so it’s time to, err, cast an eye over it 😬.
Humanitec provides an API-first way to build your Internal Developer Platform to enable developer environment self-service. This post shows how to use that API with Postman collections to make creating environments even easier.
I endlessly discover cool digital tools, apps, and websites for enhancing board games and roleplay games and needed an excuse to try them. So I wrote a blogpost!
I am aware that some tools overlap categories, and in those cases, I have tried to put them in a category that makes the most sense.
## A living guide
- I am fully aware that I will continuously discover more and more tools I can add to this list. So check back regularly for updates.
- I will also attempt to convert this list to oth...