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Discussion on: Welcome Thread - v76

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Raphael Habereder • Edited

Hello, insert some kind of wave emoji, I'm Raphael. I'm a freelance DevOps and do unhealthy amounts of automation, kubernetes-stuffs and cloud magic. I've been a lurker for about 3 years and last week thought I'd finally open my mouth and chime in :D

If you want to read about Container, Kubernetes or Cloud-Stuff, I'd be happy to write a few things down for you :D

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Raman CreativeIT

Welcome!

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Feargus Brickley

Hey Raphael

I’m going from being a low-code developer to full-stack. I’m building my first web app and wondering how I go from ‘it runs on my machine’ to ‘ive got a multi-environment, self-healing, auto-scaling, well-oiled internet machine’. What would you say are the key tasks to achieve with containers and when should they be done in the project?

Cheers
Ferg

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Raphael Habereder • Edited

Oof, that is a fantastic question, and deserves a detailed answer.
If you want, I can whip up an article about this real quick, since it might blow up your viewport, once I hammer out the things I think "are necessary".
It would probably be too much / out of scope for this welcome thread :)

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Feargus Brickley

Rereading it, it is a massive question! No need to rush on my part but would be great to hear what you’ve got to say. I currently work with a development platform that provides a lot of developer functionality through containers and orchestration so I’ve seen the benefits. What I don’t know is how effortful things are, so I guess I’d also be interested in where the biggest return on effort is.
How long have you been doing devops/cloud/container stuff for?

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Raphael Habereder • Edited

Indeed it is a massive question, but I love it to be honest. I'll gladly write about it. Maybe it's so much, it could become a series. I'll see how far I'll get tomorrow, I already got a sizeable post drafted :D

I've been doing devops for about 12 years now, though I have been more on the automation side of things, so heavier on the ops part, than dev.
Containers and Cloud I'd say about 8-10 years, though at first more "private cloud" corporate stuff, public clouds roundabout 5 years with Azure and AWS now.

As for the effort of things.
I'd say the ROI depends on the requirements and the mentality of the team, you decide how far you want to go.
From a perfectly automated pipeline that is triggered by a git push, all the way through staging, up to production is a perfectly normal thing and, depending on the requirements, can be done in just a few days, up to a few weeks, or even months.

Others in the meantime want to build containers locally, test them by hand and go down their checklist, like a "manual pipeline", until they deploy their container to production by hand.

Disclaimer: I'm pretty hardcore on the automation side. While it is definitely a bigger investment up-front, once you are fully or even semi-automated (which isn't as much work as it may sound at first), you are essentially developing 100% of the time. All the menial deployment tasks are gone, which can result in a huge net profit in development-time, which itself again results in more features, more quickly and thereby happier stakeholders.

A few days back I wrote a post about "Zero to Kubernetes", which basically automates a local kubernetes setup into one command. If you want to dabble with containers, you could probably make good use of that :)

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Feargus Brickley

Cheers Raphael, I will take a look at your post tonight. I’m in full agreement with you about automation - I’d rather invest a bit more time now to save time later, and also hope to avoid mistakes through humans doing repeatable tasks. Plus repeatable tasks are just boring, right?

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Raphael Habereder

I just started the first post in the series of "How to transition to containers". If you would like, I would love to credit you for the inspiration :)