The Problem

git-crypt is pretty awesome, but I've managed to do enough evil things to bork the decryption keys. Here's how to fix it.

This has been invisible to most people, but we're now in what I call the "2nd Crypto Wars”. This is important, and your world will be impacted by it.

The current battleground is that the Government wants the ability to see your banking communication, your chats, your Alexa snippets... They won’t do that, of course. They’ll only use it on the bad guys, they promise. You should be happy that they can see everything because they’ll protect you from [insert boogie-man du jour].

Infrastructure as Code is all the rage, but suffers the same problems as any other code: it can easily become an unmanageable plate of spaghetti. Organizing your IaC is critical but the methods are different than traditional program code. We present an organizational pattern for IaC that has proven itself across multiple technologies in multiple cloud systems to allow isolation of concerns, stability, and controlled rollouts and maintain your sanity while doing so.

Google thinks about networking in a way that is truly revolutionary.

Instead of their network models having physical representation it appears to be more like a compiler: a process assembles the networking implementation and pushes it as far down the stack as possible.

TL;DR: Workspaces and branches serve different purposes. An SCM branch is an alternet set of code. A Terraform workspace is an alternate location to apply code.

You should use the difference to...

Description of a successfully implemented, fairly light-weight SCRUM process.

A list of guidelines for good DevOps, presented in the spirit of Shuhari

Write your success criteria first. That way you know when you're done. If you can't write it down then you don't really know what you're doing.

Make a computer do the work. ...

I gave my "Herding Cats..." talk at the 2017 New England VTUG Winter Warmer.

The talk covers technical, social and organizational issues for fast, agile development at large scale (~1k machines, 10ks of TPS, ~500TB transfer) in a cloud environment.

See the slides on SlideShare.net.

In conjunction with this talk I was interviewed by Silicon Angle for theCube. See the segment here.

Makessl is a Makefile for GNU make that assists you in generating SSL keys, certificate requests, and (optionally) certificates.

Using it is as simple as:

 git clone https://github.com/deweysasser/makessl
 cd makessl
 vi ssl-data.txt # set the certificate data to your own information
 mkdir -p hosts/www.example.com
 make

The result is that an RSA key and certificate request will be left in that subdirectory. If, instead of 'make', you use:

Announcing availability of a simple program to backup the output of commands to Amazon S3 storage.