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.
September 11, 2020
Where we talk about what Service Level Objectives actually are and why they are so important in the field of Site Reliability Engineering. We cover the definition of an SLO, how they relate to error budgets, and take a look at various implementations of time series databases’ support for calculating accurate percentiles.
August 28, 2020
Where we interview Greg Harris, Principal Security Engineer at Fitbit. We cover security issues around BeyondCorp, VPNs, Docker, and vulnerability scanning. With Greg we learn how to stop reacting to security incidents and instead focus on building threat models for your software and company to forecast and prevent them.
August 12, 2020
Where we discuss the possible rise of ARM on the desktop as a replacement or challenge to the supremecy of Intel’s venerable x86_64 instruction set.
July 31, 2020
Where we talk about being multi-cloud, along with the reasons and challenges of doing so, and talk about if it is really worth it.
July 17, 2020
Where we discuss findability and search with a special guest - JP Sherman, the Manager of Search and Findability at Red Hat.
July 2, 2020
Where we talk about building a modern linux desktop, for both personal and professional use. There’s some talk about Intel vs AMD, Apple and ARM, and video cards… all in good fun.
June 19, 2020
Where we talk to CloudTruth’s Matt Conway and Greg Arnette about why they are configuration management geeks, and some of the realities of looking at problems with configuration management in mind.
June 5, 2020
Where we talk at length with Brandon Peskin, a Sysadmin turned Network Engineer, who has pretty much seen and done it all - from microwave repeaters across parking lots to massively redundant datacenter to cloud migration projects.
May 22, 2020
Where we discuss practice, and how it makes everything easier - for both personal and professional things.
May 8, 2020
Where we discuss Greg Kogan’s Article, “Simple Systems Have Less Downtime” and rant about simplicity and how to choose what things to spend time running.