A pragmatic podcast discussing Systems, Operations and Scaling with a focus on real world use cases and solutions to common problems.
Hosted by Breandan Dezendorf,
Breandan Dezendorf has 20 years of operations experience,
a degree in Journalism and has managed monitoring and alerting
systems for every company he's ever worked for.
Ken Mink,
Ken Mink has spent 30 years as a Unix Administrator and Developer.
He started out on AIX and HP-UX in the early '90s. Ken finally
started using Linux in 1994 while working at Gateway. Since then
he's bounced between doing development, administration, later
HPC administration, and now DevOps. While Ken has recently spent
time handling very large HPC and database clusters, he really
enjoys small SBCs. Ken is also a long time user of MythTV.
Jack Neely,
Jack Neely has been in operations for close to 20 years and
finds solutions through code. Experience in configuration
management, time series based metrics, and automating platform
deployments for large companies.
and Jarod Watkins.
Jarod Watkins has over 12 years experience in operations at small
companies and startups. Automation and infrastructure as code are
his specialty.
Practical Operations is a pragmatic podcast about the difference between running your IT organization the "Right Way" and the Practical Way. Your hosts talk about the theory of small to web scale operations and DevOps and then discuss how to get the most out of these tools in practice.
Your hosts Breandan Dezendorf, Ken Mink, Jack Neely, and Jarod Watkins have over 70 years of IT experience. Practical experience in small companies and research groups of only a handful of people to large multinational technology companies, cloud providers, and major universities. We practice operations.
April 9, 2021
Where we discuss licensing and how it intersects with everything we do - from Elastic adopting Mongo’s SSPL to the mess that was made public with Wireguard, PFSense and BSD. Licenses are important, folks, choose them well and with purpose, ideally with a laywer in the room.
March 27, 2021
Where we talk with Brian Miller about running large scale networks for a major university and his adventures in Internet2, IPv6 and wireless all come up.
March 12, 2021
Where we discuss the risks you take using package managers and code you do not host yourself.
February 26, 2021
Where we discuss the failure of the Texas energy grid and how it relates to a failure to plan ahead. We look at active/active, n+1 and other cases where redundancy sneaks away from you.
February 12, 2021
Where we discuss deplatforming, through the lens of what happened to social media sites after the political upheaval in early January.
January 29, 2021
Where we discuss the state of the Kubernetes project with someone who knows a lot about it - Seth McCombs. Seth, a Cloud Orchestration Software Engineer at Workday, is member of Kubernetes SIG-Release and SIG-Docs. The conversation covers the qualities of building communities, the road ahead, and the things he likes the most about the project.
January 15, 2021
Where we discuss how to handle opportunities - ones at your current job, how to approach new jobs, and tackling some of the personal sides of things.
January 1, 2021
Where we discuss the year this was, what we thought it was going to be, and how wrong we really were. We also discuss the future a little bit, and try to find patterns in this chaos.
December 18, 2020
Where we talk with Darren Fallis about some of the reasons you should really upgrade to a modern TLS version, and what that means in practical terms. At the moment, this is TLS 1.3, but as with all advice - especially security related advice - please stay current!
December 4, 2020
Where we talk with Evan Bloom about getting started in this industry, coming from a very different world of music. This includes where to get started with linux, programming and generally how to look at the careers we talk about on this podcast.