Well, it's been two years since I started at Tideworks. I was hired to help usher Tideworks to the cloud. They produce software that runs terminals (as in container ships docking and unloading containers). They have several different applications that run in their own (or customers) data center. They want to leverage the elasticity of cloud computing.

When I first started one of my initial projects was Kubernetes and two years later, we have realized that without our applications being properly refactored that Kubernetes was premature. We still see it in the future but right now it is overkill. We don't need it yet.

We are moving towards fully deployable customer environments with a single click (and all that entails). A lot of Terraform, Ansible, and AWS.

Two years on we haven't migrated existing legacy environments to AWS but have spawned new environments there. Eventually everything in our on-premises data center will be in AWS (or Azure or a combination of both).

It's no secret the vision behind this bold effort recently left Tideworks (as well as other high-ranking folks) and now there is a subtle re-evaluation if moving the existing legacy environments to cloud makes financial sense and instead just focus on new environments.

If your application fully embraces AWS services and is elastic, you can save a lot of money and scale without issues.

If your application is a legacy one that sits on EC2 instances...well AWS isn't cheaper, and it might be more expensive.

I love working for Tideworks. I get to work on a lot of different things. The work is never boring. I am glad I accepted my job offer there.

I have accepted a new position at Tideworks as a Senior Developer Operations Engineer.

DevOps is two things:

1. Applying the methods of modern software development (version control, automation, DSLs...) to operations (provisioning, config, deployment, monitoring, backups...).

2. Reducing silo barriers between devs and ops groups so that everyone is working together as a team, rather than blaming each other for poor communication and the resulting messes.

Then there are all the DevOps hijacking attempts, such as equating it to Agile or Scrum or XP, or insisting that it's a way to stop paying for expensive operations experts by making devs do it, or a way to stop paying for expensive devs by making ops do it, or a way to stop paying for expensive hardware by paying Amazon/Google/$CLOUD to do it.

No matter what your software-as-a-service company actually does, it will need to execute certain things:

• have computers to run software

• have computers to develop software

• have computers to run infrastructure support

You can outsource various aspects of these things to different degrees. Anywhere you need computers, you have a choice of buying computers (and figuring out where to put them and how to run them and maintain them), or leasing computers (just a financing distinction), or renting existing computers (dedicated machines at a datacenter) or renting time on someone else's infrastructure. If you rent time, you can do so via virtual machines (which pretend to be whole servers) or containers (which pretend to be application deployments) or "serverless", which is actually a small auto-scaled container.

Docker is a management scheme for containers. VMWare provides management schemes for virtual machines. Kubernetes is an extensive management scheme for virtual machines or containers.

A continuous integration tool is, essentially, a program that notes that you have committed changes to your version control system and tries to build the resulting program. A continuous deployment system takes the CI's program and tries to put it into production (or, if you're sensible, into a QA deployment first).

Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20894733

EnergySavvy was purchased by Tendril Networks. Tendril Networks then merged with Simple Energy forming a new company called Uplight.

Oracle wasn't for me. I tendered my resignation today. Luckily EnergySavvy has welcomed me back.