All Episodes

Gerhard talks with Charity Majors, ops engineer and accidental startup founder at honeycomb.io about high-performing teams, why “15 minutes or bust,” and how we should start using Honeycomb in our own monolithic Phoenix app that runs changelog.com. There is just one step, and it’s actually really simple! They also talk about how Honeycomb uses Honeycomb to learn about Honeycomb, which is one of Gerhard’s favorite questions. As for key take-aways, deploying straight into production is really important, but not as important as optimising for humans - which are not replaceable cogs, that learn and share their learnings continuously. That is the secret to making things easy and happy for everyone. Join the discussion Changelog++ members save 5 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today! Sponsors: Fly – Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs. Armory – Empower your development teams to deploy code with increased safety, resilience, velocity, and compliance – to any production target on prem or in the cloud using Armory’s enterprise-grade distribution of Spinnaker. Learn more at armory.io/shipit LaunchDarkly – Ship fast. Rest easy. Deploy code at any time, even if a feature isn’t ready to be released to your users. Wrap code in feature flags to get the safety to test new features and infrastructure in prod without impacting the wrong end users. Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com. Featuring: Charity Majors – Website, GitHub, X Gerhard Lazu – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X Show Notes: 📚 Observability Engineering (Early Release) - Free download 🎬 The State of Observability 2021: Mature Teams Ship Better Code Faster and You Can Too What is Observability? Define SLOs Kubernetes is complicated rubygems.org Fastly logs in Honeycomb RDS Performance Degradation – Postmortem 2018 o11ycon 2021 videos hnycon 2021 keynote Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Kaizen means “change for the better”, continuous improvement in this context. Failure is essential to learning, but how do we learn as a team? The simplest thing is to regularly dedicate time for taking a step back, talking about what works & what doesn’t, maybe writing some of it down, and eventually deciding what we should improve next. I intend to make every 10th Ship It! episode a Kaizen one. This is the first one when we talk with Adam and Jerod about the things that we want to improve in our setup over the next few months. We talk about how the June Fastly outage affected changelog.com, how we responded that day, and what we could do better. We discuss multi-cloud, multi-CDN, and the next sensible and obvious improvements for our app. Let us know via Slack or Twitter what learnings are valuable to you so that we can produce the best content for you. Join the discussion Changelog++ members get a bonus 2 minutes at the end of this episode and zero ads. Join today! Sponsors: Fly – Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs. Teleport – Teleport Access Plane lets you access any computing resource anywhere. Engineers and security teams can unify access to SSH servers, Kubernetes clusters, web applications, and databases across all environments. Try Teleport today in the cloud, self-hosted, or open source at goteleport.com Linode – Get $100 in free credit to get started on Linode – Linode is our cloud of choice and the home of Changelog.com. Head to linode.com/changelog OR text CHANGELOG to 474747 to get instant access to that $100 in free credit. Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com. Featuring: Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X Jerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X Gerhard Lazu – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X Show Notes: What does Kaizen mean? (Wikipedia) Fastly 8th of June outage took offline The Guardian, CNN, New York Times, BBC and Changelog. Slack, Amazon, Stackoverflow and many others were also affected This is how it all started @danhett becomes famous on Twitter because of this tweet WIRED: What really went down when the internet went down BLOOMBERG: What Is Fastly and Why a Slew of Websites Went Offline Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

This week we talk with Jean-Sébastien Pedron, RabbitMQ and FreeBSD contributor, about the importance of good release engineering for core infrastructure. Both Jean-Sébastien and I have been part of the Core RabbitMQ team for many years now. We have built some of the biggest CI/CD pipelines (check the show notes for one example), wrote and shipped some great code together, while breaking and fixing many things in the process. We have been wrestling with today’s topic since 2016. Jean-Sébastien has some great FreeBSD stories to share, as well as an interesting perspective on shipping graphic card drivers. Oh, and by the way, it’s probably our fault why your remote car key stopped working that afternoon. It will all make sense after you listen to this episode. Join the discussion Changelog++ members get a bonus 2 minutes at the end of this episode and zero ads. Join today! Sponsors: Fly – Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs. Teleport – Teleport Access Plane lets you access any computing resource anywhere. Engineers and security teams can unify access to SSH servers, Kubernetes clusters, web applications, and databases across all environments. Try Teleport today in the cloud, self-hosted, or open source at goteleport.com Linode – Get $100 in free credit to get started on Linode – Linode is our cloud of choice and the home of Changelog.com. Head to linode.com/changelog OR text CHANGELOG to 474747 to get instant access to that $100 in free credit. LaunchDarkly – Ship fast. Rest easy. Deploy code at any time, even if a feature isn’t ready to be released to your users. Wrap code in feature flags to get the safety to test new features and infrastructure in prod without impacting the wrong end users. Featuring: Jean-Sébastien Pedron – GitHub Gerhard Lazu – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X Show Notes: FreeBSD release engineering Netflix and FreeBSD: Using open source to deliver streaming video List of products based on FreeBSD Darktable Mesa Erlang hot code reloading: Appup cookbook Target system principles RabbitMQ v3.8 CI/CD pipeline in 2020 - each square is either a test suite, build or publish step Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Why Cloud Native? What are the guiding principles that you should keep in mind as you are choosing a project from the Cloud Native Landscape? How do you build & ship an app in a Cloud Native way? Katie Gamanji, Ecosystem Advocate @ CNCF and former cloud engineer for American Express, Condé Nast and Microsoft, joins Gerhard to cover these topics in the context of the Cloud Native Fundamentals course that she developed. 15,000 students have already enrolled, and the initial feedback has been great. Tune in if you want to know why you should too, how to do it and when the course will become available for free. Join the discussion Changelog++ members save 3 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today! Sponsors: Render – The Zero DevOps cloud that empowers you to ship faster than your competitors. Render is built for modern applications and offers everything you need out-of-the-box. Learn more at render.com/changelog or email changelog@render.com for a personal introduction and to ask questions about the Render platform. LaunchDarkly – Ship fast. Rest easy. Deploy code at any time, even if a feature isn’t ready to be released to your users. Wrap code in feature flags to get the safety to test new features and infrastructure in prod without impacting the wrong end users. Cockroach Labs – Scale fast, survive anything, thrive everywhere! CockroachDB is most highly evolved database on the planet. Build and scale fast with CockroachCloud (CockroachDB hosted as a service) where a team of world-class SREs maintains and manages your database infrastructure, so you can focus less on ops and more on code. Get started for free their 30-day trial or try their forever-free tier. Learn more at cockroachlabs.com/changelog. Grafana Cloud – Our dashboard of choice Grafana is the open and composable observability and data visualization platform. Visualize metrics, logs, and traces from multiple sources like Prometheus, Loki, Elasticsearch, InfluxDB, Postgres and many more. Featuring: Katie Gamanji – Website, GitHub, X Gerhard Lazu – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X Show Notes: How this episode started Cloud Native Application Architecture - Course Syllabus 15k students enrolled KubeCon and CloudNativeCon North America 2021 registrations are open ArgoCD is the continuous deployment system mentioned in our conversation Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

This week on Ship It! Gerhard talks with Lars Wikman (independent Elixir/BEAM software consultant) why sometimes a monolith running on a single host with continuous backups and a built-in self-restore capability is everything that a small team of developers needs. That’s right, no Kubernetes or microservices. After 2 years of running changelog.com, a Phoenix monolith, on Kubernetes, what do I think? Join our discuss and find out! Join the discussion Changelog++ members save 3 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today! Sponsors: Render – The Zero DevOps cloud that empowers you to ship faster than your competitors. Render is built for modern applications and offers everything you need out-of-the-box. Learn more at render.com/changelog or email changelog@render.com for a personal introduction and to ask questions about the Render platform. Teleport – Teleport Access Plane lets you access any computing resource anywhere. Engineers and security teams can unify access to SSH servers, Kubernetes clusters, web applications, and databases across all environments. Try Teleport today in the cloud, self-hosted, or open source at goteleport.com Cockroach Labs – Scale fast, survive anything, thrive everywhere! CockroachDB is most highly evolved database on the planet. Build and scale fast with CockroachCloud (CockroachDB hosted as a service) where a team of world-class SREs maintains and manages your database infrastructure, so you can focus less on ops and more on code. Get started for free their 30-day trial or try their forever-free tier. Learn more at cockroachlabs.com/changelog. Featuring: Lars Wikman – Website, GitHub, X Gerhard Lazu – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X Show Notes: 🎬Follow-up YouTube stream Post-mortem: 10 years in the vertical: Part 1 Beam Bloggers Webring Litestream - Continuously stream SQLite changes to an object store Teaching Elixir & other videos Live stream - PromEx w. Alex Koutmos Regular Programming, conversations about software development and programming BEAM Radio - Stories and conversations around Elixir, Erlang and the BEAM ecosystem Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

This week on Ship It! Gerhard talks with Ian Miell, author of Docker in Practice as well as Learn Git, Bash, and Terraform the Hard Way. They talk about being comfortable with the uncomfortable, focusing on the tech while keeping a holistic view of the business. Following the money flows is key. Ian explains this concept really well, and Gerhard feels fairly confident you will be better off if you pay attention. Let us know in the comments! Join the discussion Changelog++ members save 3 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today! Sponsors: Render – The Zero DevOps cloud that empowers you to ship faster than your competitors. Render is built for modern applications and offers everything you need out-of-the-box. Learn more at render.com/changelog or email changelog@render.com for a personal introduction and to ask questions about the Render platform. Linode – Get $100 in free credit to get started on Linode – Linode is our cloud of choice and the home of Changelog.com. Head to linode.com/changelog OR text CHANGELOG to 474747 to get instant access to that $100 in free credit. Cockroach Labs – Scale fast, survive anything, thrive everywhere! CockroachDB is most highly evolved database on the planet. Build and scale fast with CockroachCloud (CockroachDB hosted as a service) where a team of world-class SREs maintains and manages your database infrastructure, so you can focus less on ops and more on code. Get started for free their 30-day trial or try their forever-free tier. Learn more at cockroachlabs.com/changelog. Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com. Featuring: Ian Miell – Website, GitHub, X Gerhard Lazu – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X Show Notes: Learn Git, Bash, and Terraform the Hard Way Docker in Practice, 2nd edition How To Waste Hundreds of Millions on Your IT Transformation When Should I Interrupt Someone? Follow-up 📖If You Want To Transform IT, Start With Finance Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

This week on Ship It! Gerhard talks with Dave Farley, co-author of Continuous Delivery and the inventor of the Deployment Pipeline. Today, most of us ship code the way we do because 25 years ago, Dave cared enough to drive the change that we now call CI/CD. He is one of the great software engineers: opinionated, perseverant & focused since the heydays of the internet. Dave continues inspiring and teaching us all via his newly launched YouTube channel, courses and recent books. The apprentice finally meets the master 🙇‍♂️🙇‍♀️ Join the discussion Changelog++ members save 3 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today! Sponsors: Render – The Zero DevOps cloud that empowers you to ship faster than your competitors. Render is built for modern applications and offers everything you need out-of-the-box. Learn more at render.com/changelog or email changelog@render.com for a personal introduction and to ask questions about the Render platform. Teleport – Teleport Access Plane lets you access any computing resource anywhere. Engineers and security teams can unify access to SSH servers, Kubernetes clusters, web applications, and databases across all environments. Try Teleport today in the cloud, self-hosted, or open source at goteleport.com Cockroach Labs – Scale fast, survive anything, thrive everywhere! CockroachDB is most highly evolved database on the planet. Build and scale fast with CockroachCloud (CockroachDB hosted as a service) where a team of world-class SREs maintains and manages your database infrastructure, so you can focus less on ops and more on code. Get started for free their 30-day trial or try their forever-free tier. Learn more at cockroachlabs.com/changelog. LaunchDarkly – Ship fast. Rest easy. Deploy code at any time, even if a feature isn’t ready to be released to your users. Wrap code in feature flags to get the safety to test new features and infrastructure in prod without impacting the wrong end users. Featuring: Dave Farley – Website, X Gerhard Lazu – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X Show Notes: Continuous Delivery, the YouTube Channel (new video every Wednesday) Continuous Delivery, the course Continuous Delivery, the staple book Continuous Delivery Pipelines, the new book Dave Farley’s blog TDD Quiz Dave Farley on Twitter Gerhard’s favourite CD videos, in order of preference: SpaceX and Software Engineering | How To Learn How To Build Quality Software Fast Why CI is BETTER Than Feature Branching What’s Wrong With The State Of DevOps? Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

This week on Ship It! Gerhard talks with Ben Ford, former Royal Marine and founder of Commando Development, about the OODA loop (observe, orient, decide, act). Shipping is just a small part of it. The OODA loop that you know is probably the wrong one. We explore Mission & Command, Situational Awareness and a few other practices that will help you deal with complexity as you code and ship. As a former Royal Marine Commando, Ben learned these skills the hard way, and then refined them over many years as a software engineer. Check out the diagrams in the show notes - they are a work of art and precision. Join the discussion Changelog++ members save 3 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today! Sponsors: Render – The Zero DevOps cloud that empowers you to ship faster than your competitors. Render is built for modern applications and offers everything you need out-of-the-box. Learn more at render.com/changelog or email changelog@render.com for a personal introduction and to ask questions about the Render platform. Cockroach Labs – Scale fast, survive anything, thrive everywhere! CockroachDB is most highly evolved database on the planet. Build and scale fast with CockroachCloud (CockroachDB hosted as a service) where a team of world-class SREs maintains and manages your database infrastructure, so you can focus less on ops and more on code. Get started for free their 30-day trial or try their forever-free tier. Learn more at cockroachlabs.com/changelog. Linode – Get $100 in free credit to get started on Linode – Linode is our cloud of choice and the home of Changelog.com. Head to linode.com/changelog OR text CHANGELOG to 474747 to get instant access to that $100 in free credit. Grafana Cloud – Our dashboard of choice Grafana is the open and composable observability and data visualization platform. Visualize metrics, logs, and traces from multiple sources like Prometheus, Loki, Elasticsearch, InfluxDB, Postgres and many more. Featuring: Ben Ford – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X Gerhard Lazu – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X Show Notes: Algorithms for Leadership Ben’s OODA YouTube playlist Team of Teams One Mission Extreme Ownership Turn the Ship Around Red Teaming The Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence Ben's OODA remake of John Boyd's original Ben's representation of OODA - my favourite 💙 The OODA diagram that is easiest to remember Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

This week on Ship It! Gerhard talks with Alex Koutmos about Elixir observability using PromEx. Why do we need to understand how our setup behaves? What is PromEx and where does PromEx fit in changelog.com? Bonus! Tune in to our LIVE Friday evening deploy 😱 of Erlang 24 for changelog.com. Check the show notes for a link on YouTube. 🍿 Join the discussion Changelog++ members save 3 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today! Sponsors: Render – The Zero DevOps cloud that empowers you to ship faster than your competitors. Render is built for modern applications and offers everything you need out-of-the-box. Learn more at render.com/changelog or email changelog@render.com for a personal introduction and to ask questions about the Render platform. Cockroach Labs – Scale fast, survive anything, thrive everywhere! CockroachDB is most highly evolved database on the planet. Build and scale fast with CockroachCloud (CockroachDB hosted as a service) where a team of world-class SREs maintains and manages your database infrastructure, so you can focus less on ops and more on code. Get started for free their 30-day trial or try their forever-free tier. Learn more at cockroachlabs.com/changelog. Linode – Get $100 in free credit to get started on Linode – Linode is our cloud of choice and the home of Changelog.com. Head to linode.com/changelog OR text CHANGELOG to 474747 to get instant access to that $100 in free credit. Grafana Cloud – Our dashboard of choice Grafana is the open and composable observability and data visualization platform. Visualize metrics, logs, and traces from multiple sources like Prometheus, Loki, Elasticsearch, InfluxDB, Postgres and many more. Featuring: Alex Koutmos – Website, GitHub, X Gerhard Lazu – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X Show Notes: prom_ex - an Elixir Prometheus metrics library built on top of Telemetry Grafana Agent Alex’s hex.pm packages My.Thoughts v1 Beam Radio Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

This week on Ship It! Gerhard is joined by Constance Caramanolis, Principal Engineer at Splunk and former maintainer of Envoy Proxy, and Stephen Augustus, Head of Open Source at Cisco & self-proclaimed Caesar of Systems. Constance and Stephen are the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon co-chairs. Join us to find out what happens before and after KubeCon gets shipped. Join the discussion Changelog++ members get a bonus 1 minute at the end of this episode and zero ads. Join today! Sponsors: Render – The Zero DevOps cloud that empowers you to ship faster than your competitors. Render is built for modern applications and offers everything you need out-of-the-box. Learn more at render.com/changelog or email changelog@render.com for a personal introduction and to ask questions about the Render platform. Linode – Get $100 in free credit to get started on Linode – Linode is our cloud of choice and the home of Changelog.com. Head to linode.com/changelog OR text CHANGELOG to 474747 to get instant access to that $100 in free credit. Cockroach Labs – Scale fast, survive anything, thrive everywhere! CockroachDB is most highly evolved database on the planet. Build and scale fast with CockroachCloud (CockroachDB hosted as a service) where a team of world-class SREs maintains and manages your database infrastructure, so you can focus less on ops and more on code. Get started for free their 30-day trial or try their forever-free tier. Learn more at cockroachlabs.com/changelog. Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com. Featuring: Constance Caramanolis – GitHub, LinkedIn, X Stephen Augustus – X Gerhard Lazu – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X Show Notes: Kubernetes Community on GitHub Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Welcome to Ship It! This is a new show from Changelog about shipping software - and all the details, challenges, and problems that surface. Changelog SRE Gerhard Lazu is taking us on a journey into the world of shipping code, infrastructure, ops, and the people making it happen. Shipping is near and dear to every developers’ heart. We do it every day. It’s the essential first step. You have to ship it to share your ideas with the world. New episodes ship weekly. Join the discussion Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today! Featuring: Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X Jerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X Gerhard Lazu – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X Show Notes: The Changelog #441: Inside 2021’s infrastructure for Changelog.com The Changelog #419: Inside 2020’s infrastructure for Changelog.com The Changelog #344: Inside 2019’s infrastructure for Changelog.com The Changelog #254: Deploying Changelog.com Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!