So its Saturday and we kicked the day off with football practice, not for me! for my son!, followed by a few hours grabbing the last bits of school uniform my my 3 kids. Like many of us, as much as we are keen to learn and develop our skill sets, we also have work, family, hobbies and other interests as well as just grabbing some chill time, this all competes for our time which of course is finite.

Of course I wouldn’t have it any other way, but it is a juggle and its so easy to understand why learning can take a back seat at times. For me, part of doing the #100DaysOfCloud Challenge would be to do my utmost to learn something everyday I can and do my best to keep in a process. I know I don’t need to write everyday, ad truth be told, I’m sure I wont manage to learn and post every day.

So as the afternoon went on and into the evening I managed to grab a hour or so to read another chapter of DevOps for Dummies, and also have a little plan around my Terraform learnings.

DevOps for Dummies (Emily Freeman) – Chapters 5.

What have I learned?

Chapter 5 – Measuring Your Organisation

This chapter is all about understanding that you need to baseline where your organisation from a few viewpoints. Not for any personal performace review, but to utilise carefully selected metrics that can act over time as a monitor to know if your small but often changes are working to continually improve your organisation, or not.

Some of the key points I have taken from this chapter are:

• Measuring Your Progress; this isn’t always in a neat left to right gradual incline, one step forward to take two back is the norm, in fact that saying may be a conservative estimate on progress. The point is measuring for progress is the only way to detect that you are progressing.
• Peter Drucker – ‘What can’t be measured can’t be managed’
• Quantifying DevOps
  • People – Satisfaction, Average meeting cost, customer usage, customer satisfaction, customer issues
  • Process – Frequency of Deployment, Size of Deployment, Length of Deployment, Defect escape rate, Reoccurring failures, Lead times, Mean time to Detection (MTTD), Mean time to Recovery (MTTR)
  • Technology – Automated Testing Coverage, Availability, Failed Deploys, Error rates, App usage and traffic
• Collecting the data, automate as much as possible and you don’t need to collect every metric. Aim for a minimum set of metrics that will aid your progress mapping.
• Majority of businesses don’t accurately capture the above metrics, most businesses struggle to answer how or what they even are. SO don’t worry if you are in this boat…… that’s the average! But you don’t want to be average do you?
• Develop Internal Case Studies, use this to track progress and sell to the wider organisation on the successes.

Between this chapter and my previous post, this covers off the first Part of 6 of the book – Part 1 Demystifying DevOps – Done!

Looking forward to Part 2 – Establishing a pipeline

Hashicorp – Terraform – My Plan to Learn

I mentioned the desire to get back on track with the learning of Terraform, so I thought I would use a bit of time to make some plans.

I first looked through these articles a few months back as we are starting to use Terraform more and more for infrastructure deployment across multi cloud in my workplace. I’m going to take this opportunity to start from the basics again and work my way through the following articles to just cement the basic concepts, and also look at setting up my VSCode environment with some good plugins to make the use of Terraform and the writing of code neat and hopefully a comfortable process.

First Stop, is Hashicorp Learn and the Getting Started for Azure Guide: https://learn.hashicorp.com/collections/terraform/azure-get-started

As we are starting to use Terraform Cloud I will check out this module: https://learn.hashicorp.com/collections/terraform/cloud-get-started

Whilst I am at it, Ill take a gander at the Exam Prep as well: https://learn.hashicorp.com/collections/terraform/certification

There are a few nice guides on the Hashicorp website on Automating Terraform as well as using Python and Typescript, I might also look at the Policy enforcement with Hashicorp Sentinel.

Anyway, this should give me something to divert off onto in the next couple of weeks, I think I will look at formulating a plan once I have identified all the component parts and learnings I would like to get through.

Azure Certification

Another thing I have been thinking about over the last few days is the Azure Certification, and clearly my current design on learning more around DevOps will undoubtedly mean the Developer and DevOps exams will be on my radar, in fact, I think there are currently 12 (don’t quote me) roles based Azure badges you can obtain, and I think I currently hold 5, there is an outstanding Associate exam I really should have done a while back and with the 2 for Developer and DevOps that only leaves a few Azure exams outstanding. So tempting as a goal!!! We will see! Anyhow, I am a firm believer in not being a ‘Know it all’, but instead be a ‘Learn it all’!!

Anyhow, been an interesting few hours this evening! Lets see how we get on tomorrow!

100DaysOfCloud Overview

My Main ReadMe Page is all set up with a bit about me!

The guys at 100DaysofCloud have set up the GitHub repo to be cloned and also have a great repo containing ideas and areas to collaborate on: https://github.com/100DaysOfCloud/100DaysOfCloudIdeas

My Github Journey tracker can be found here: https://github.com/jonnychipz/100DaysOfCloud

Please Watch/Star my repo and feel free to comment of contribute to anything I push! I really look forward to hearing from anyone who is going to jump on the journey around the same time as me! Lets see where I get to in 100 days!

I would encourage others to jump on this journey, I’m not sure that I will be able to commit every day for 100 days, but as long as I can complete 100 days that will be great!