Chase Hulderman

The Quagmire: DevOps and Word Soup

Chase Hulderman — Sun, 18 Sep 2016 20:10:52 GMT

EDIT: Added a bit more information, and additional tools. (09/29/16)

For those of you who've read a bit about me, you'll know that I am continually working toward a deeper understanding of the modern technological landscape. Cloud has, of course, been a buzzword for a bit now. Adoption of virtualization and modern DevOps technologies and workflows is still slow going especially at more established and monolithic organisations.

To get acquainted with the landscape, I've done quite a bit of research and started to do some practical hands-on experimentation. However, I quickly realized that there is still a lot of confusion and no real clear canonically accepted workflow or class of tool, technology, or product. There is considerable overlap and considerable diversity of maturity. The rapid pace of change makes it incredibly difficult to follow for a newcomer. I'd imagine even more difficult for an engineer to identify how their organisation might grow and pivot toward the future.

What is DevOps?

This post will be published before my review of the book The Pheonix Project (which is phenomenal) on DevOps and how it looks in practice. There's quite a lot written about it out there, but for the purposes of this post a quick summary is probably necessary.

DevOps as far as I can understand it is the integration of the operations and development endeavors of any business. It is the automation of development, integration, and delivery. The overall purpose is short, rapid cycles of development to enable fail fast innovation and fast time to value. A DevOps operation is more nimble and spends most of its time moving forward rather than merely supporting current operations.

To enable this a wide array of tools and technologies have been created to enable this end. The list is staggering and something like The Periodic Table of DevOps Tools.

The Thicket

This leads me to the word soup in the title. The more that I'm learning about the different tools and use cases for each of these, the more complicated I'm seeing this becoming.

Just for container orchestration (itself a very loaded term) there are an absurd number of tools:

Rancher
Kubernetes
Fleet
Mesos
Nomad
Helios
Marathon
Tectonic
and others...

However, except they're not drop-in replacements for each other and aren't even necessarily peers. For example, Fleet is CoreOS' low-level systemd abstraction for clusters and needs other tools to handle higher level tasks that Kubernetes has built-in. Others are just rebranding of existing tools -- Tectonic, for example, is an enterprise-grade implementation of Kubernetes.

Each of these has a different scope, limitations, and use cases. There are situations where 2-3 of these separate tools could be used in coordination, but not necessarily. It's somewhat absurd, and it certainly can be overwhelming.

Then there is the fact that each of these tools have a surrounding ecosystem of services and tools that enable their operation within a full 'stack'.

So what? Who cares?

For someone trying to get an understanding of the landscape and a read of future trends, it's incredibly important to understand the high-level problems that are being solved here.

Starting with the history and original use cases for each, I will be attempting to get an understanding of the landscape, environment, and ecosystems. It's not a small task, but I'm hopeful it'll be a fruitful endeavour.

It's my hope, then, that this will be the first post in a series on some of these tools as this amateur sees it. Stay tuned.

Moto 360 and Me

Chase Hulderman — Sat, 23 Jul 2016 17:18:36 GMT

Prelude

The Apple Watch came out a year ago and gave mainstream credibility to smart watches. It was supposed to transform health and how we access technology, but just recently IDC reported that Apple Watch sales are down 55% since release.

At the start of the summer, I saw the Moto 360 1st Gen on sale for $70. I had been considering getting a smartwatch for awhile, but I wasn't sure that I could stomach the cost for the new technology. I also wasn't sure that I liked a lot of what I had seen. Many of the watches that I had seen were either too focused on being just a wearable (eg. Fitbit) or far too technical looking (eg. Samsung Gear, Apple Watch, etc). I wanted something that would look good, but still offer the utility that a smartwatch was supposed to have.

Finally, there were those nagging questions:

Would it last the day without a charge?
Would it actually be valuable?
Would I use it?

Some of that was answered for me already. I had watched (heh) my friend Dan use his Moto 360 at school the previous year and I really liked the unobtrusive access to notifications, text messages, and it just looked good.

So, I picked up the watch.

The Experience

Aesthetics

I got the Moto 360 1st Gen with the same grey leather band as pictured above, though that is a 2nd Gen with the different button and strap mounting locations. Though I had wanted the brown leather band, I appreciated the bargain and grew to like it. It worked surprisingly well with casual and business looks, though it still has an air of technical to it. Despite how it looks above, it's a screen on your wrist and it lacks the elegance and construction that a proper watch might have.

The face is also lit, so I leave the watch off usually. While it lights up when I lift my wrist, it doesn't always catch my gestures and so from time to time I find myself flicking my wrist or gesticulating more aggressively to get it to listen. This brings much amusement to my friends, but I'm living in the future -- gotta pay the price.

Feel

Despite all the technology, the battery, and the added construction it is not too heavy. It feels good, the 46mm watch face is a good fit for my smaller-than-average wrist and my only frustration is that the watch is somewhat thick compared to its less smart peers.

Value

This is the meat of this post/review/drivel. Did I find it valuable? Do I use it?

Yes and no. It is great to have instant access to notifications. Changing music while running from your wrist is incredibly easy and cool. Being able to dictate to my watch a text message while driving is great, and allows me to focus on the road while still being connected. Also while driving, it will give me instant access to driving directions so my phone can be in my pocket and I can get quick directional cues.

The battery lasts all day and the wireless charger does allow the watch to double as a color customized alarm clock sort of device... if that's your thing. It charges quickly, and I only need to charge when I would normally not wear my watch anyway.

It's also NOT more polite to use this than taking out your phone. I've found most people feel put off by my checking my watch when I get a notification. Because the watch is typically used to tell time, people feel like I'm getting impatient or maybe I'm not as interested in their conversation. Whereas if I quickly take out my phone, people realize I'm triaging a notification -- still rude, but understandable.

It does not pair as well with looks. I find when I want to really look professional I'll leave it at home and put on a proper, traditional watch. That might be just be, and I do enjoy the fact that the circular watch face tries to look more mainstream, but it's just not the same thing.

As far as health tracking, I don't really use it much for that. The refurbished watch has trouble reading my HR sometimes so it's not very reliable for tracking my HR across the day. I also don't wear it when I go to the gym as the leather does not take well to copious sweat. If you want something for your workouts too, get a sport band... but then don't expect to pair it with fancier looks. Turns out you can't do both (at least I can't).

Conclusion

After 3 months, I am glad that I made the purchase. For what I paid, I feel like I have gotten the value out of it. It lengthens my phone's battery life, it makes life a bit more convenient, and I feel like I'm living in the future. Is it worth $300... I don't think so... not for me.

I'm interested to see where wearables go, but the overall verdict -- We're still figuring it out.

Public Wifi: Are You Safe?

Chase Hulderman — Wed, 22 Jul 2015 18:06:44 GMT

The Problem

Many businesses advertise offer free, public WiFi for you to use while enjoying their services. Companies, Universities, and other organisations offer WiFi. Chances are you have a long, long list of saved hotspots in your phone, tablet, or laptop.

You have many different devices with you, probably, even now. You have your mobile phone, but you also might have your tablet and laptop. Most people put little thought into vetting the identity of the WiFi they're connecting to. If it is free, and offers a connection to the internet most connect without a thought.

Smart phones constantly reaching out to the internet and they're broadcasting: where they are, what they're doing, who their owner is, and this often includes personal information. You might use a hotspots to access your online banking, your social media presence, or any other of a long list of accounts that we all keep.

How do you know if your data is safe? By the very nature of wireless, you broadcast every action you take indiscriminately. We already know not even HTTPS is completely safe.

So what can steps can you take to secure your data?

The Solution

Fortunately, there are many ways out there already available to you to protect your information. Here are a few solutions for you to consider.

Use encryption whenever you can. Many website offer https versions. This includes facebook.
Avoid doing anything on public hotspots that you wouldn't wish for anyone to read, see, or access.
Get a VPN; I recommend PrivateInternetAccess.
Don't use your ISP's DNS servers. Set your own. For starters, try Google or OpenDNS!

Welcome: A prologue

Chase Hulderman — Mon, 16 Mar 2015 18:15:13 GMT

Welcome!

For those of you who have come to hulderman.com, this is the temporary landing page. Eventually, I anticipate having a nice landing page that should contain a directory of personally branded content. For example, you can find the permanent location of this website at http://chase.hulderman.com.

If you are or know a hulderman that would like access to this domain, please contact webmaster[at]hulderman.com.

I've created this website in an attempt at personal branding as well as creating a place to exhibit my thoughts, opinions, and portfolio. This was done together with my attempt to create personally branded emails (again available on request).

I have done a bit of experimentation with a few blogging platforms as well as a few content management systems (CMS). I've chosen the Ghost platform because of its ease of use and simplicity. There are certainly other options out there, and you should definitely try them.

For those of you who know me, I like to use Facebook as my personal blog as it were. This is a great way to 'reach' my 'followers', but it also is not well matched to what that platform is best at. That said, I hope that this place can be a good home for both my personal and professional interests.