The Fantastic Tale of an Italian Giant — You may know the name, but you may not know the story. This almost incredible tale starts in 19th-century Italy in the small city of Chiaravalle. A story told many times, familiar to the people of Italy and many working in education circles. It covers three centuries, four continents, world…

But first, we need to go back to the source. — Software development is a continuous process of creating abstract new worlds, a topic I covered in “What Is the Hardest Thing in Software Development?” With so much of that process’ success hinging on the ability to construct knowledge from sensory information — learn — and share that knowledge with others…

Naming, but not in the way you think. — Phil Karlton once said, “there are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.” One is a real problem; the other is a problem of defining reality. A misbehaving cache algorithm compromises the system’s integrity. Inadequate names can compromise the system’s entire existence. On the surface…

First awareness. Then productivity. — Jeff Foster wrote a great story on the origins of the expression “10x developer,” contrasting the value of outsized code-writing skills against the ability to focus on the product. From a DevOps perspective, its all-inclusive reach from development to operations demands collaboration. Focusing on the product trumps coding skills every…

Make your travel preparation list for the long journey ahead. — Cloud spending is always an exciting topic, and I mean exciting in the wrong way. Money is a sensitive subject. People get understandably nervous when they feel they may lose their grip on the budget. …

Capacity when you need it, minimal costs when you don’t. — (I originally published this story in my technical blog.) This article is a technical exploration of several technologies to reduce the cost of running workloads in Kubernetes. The exploration goes into how the characteristics of each of these technologies favor certain types of workloads and ultimately combines all these components…

Look ready, and stay alive. — (I originally published this story in my technical blog*) Keeping containers alive in a Kubernetes cluster can feel more like art than science. In this article, I dive into the sea of madness awaiting those responsible for authoring container probes, with particular attention to the relatively new addition of startup…

Or why staying away from unused CPU may be good for your containers — I wrote this article as a counterpoint to “For the love of god, stop using CPU limits on Kubernetes.” I like that article and consider it a great read. I agree with its recommendations about setting container memory requests and limits and the recommendation always to set CPU requests. My…

Probably, yes. — Anyone running a fleet of Kubernetes clusters knows it takes sustained investment in hardware and operations personnel to keep everything online. That level of investment keeps Kubernetes in a rarefied layer of architecture diagrams reserved for companies managing large environments, often in regulated industries that need to run them on-premises. …