Everett Toews

Our industry is determined to deliver value ever more rapidly, safely, and securely across software development lifecycle environments. One way to achieve this is through GitOps. In broad terms, GitOps is about applying the Git feature workflow to operations. I took this idea and narrowed it down to exactly one use case, using Git to drive deployments on OpenShift. This is a walk-through of the concepts and components we used to enable GitOps driven deployments all the way from development to production for a real-world enterprise client deploying a payroll solution known as EdPay.

Face to face communication is essential. It’s a necessary and irreplaceable form of communication. Chat also has numerous benefits. However, it’s best to establish some norms around the use of chat to realise those benefits and avoid some of the pitfalls.

A curated list of learning resources I’ve used as I’ve climbed the learning curve on OpenShift.

Providing configuration to applications via environment variables (env vars) is one of the principles of twelve-factor apps. If that configuration contains sensitive information like credentials, the best way to do that is using Secrets in Kubernetes. There are a lot of different ways to manage env vars and Secrets in Kubernetes. Here are a few things I do to make working with them more convenient.

Often times you need to inject a configuration file into a container in Kubernetes. This is really easy to do using the ConfigMap resource. But once in a while you might need to inject an executable script into a container.

Running a successful developer workshop (aka tutorial) is really difficult. I’ve attended enough workshops that have gone poorly to know that for a fact. Participating in such a workshop can be very frustrating and a huge turn off for whatever technology is being presented. That translates directly into losing developer mindshare. I think we, as an industry, can do a better job of running developer workshops.