Brownfield

In response to a twitter thread about questions to identify whether a applicant would want to accept a job, one of the most brilliant responses was by Lars Albertsson (@lalleal) asking “How much does it cost your company to buy a thing for 1000 EUR? Spend a day chasing approvals, and you are at > 100% overhead.”

The book Power to the Public by Tara Dawson McGuinness and Hana Schank is a fantasic overview of the Brownfield nature of the public sector. The book goes into a few fantastic examples of how things can be better.

Legacy organizations with legacy products have designed complex and rigid processes for releasing software into a production environment. The production environment is special and has limited access and compliance and constraints and needs to always work so developers shouldn’t even try to look at it.

Except things change and stuff breaks. So now what? Continuous deployment to the rescue!?

From experiencing organizations ranging from 10-person start-ups to dozens-of-thousands-of-people organizations, I have found a consistent experience among shared service providers. They say “no.” A lot.

As-of posting this, Mike is moving from GitLab to Coder. The purpose of this site and the gitlab.com group are not changing, though the day-to-day problems to solve are likely to be more about Developer Experience going forward.

Coder recently made their enterprise offering free for up to 10 developers. Since my solution, which I will henceforth call “ICSW”, supports 1 developer, it is well within that limit. I configured a new namespace in the same cluster to run the Coder Enterprise system to see how they compare.

TL;DR: Coder Enterprise has a lot of benefits for centrally managed code-server deployments as well as a multi-image workflow.

Upgrading code-server from 3.4.1 to 3.5.0 was always supposed to be easy. Turns out it was easy.

Just for the sake of sharing the ease, I’ve written up the embarrassingly simple process.

The new capability is running additional pods and services (and ingress and statefulsets) within the development namespace using the developer service account. This limited access role can’t impact other services but can start a container and use internal DNS and services to access them.

The GitLab Commit this summer is free for all with unlimited attendance due to the pandemic. This creates an opportunity for tons of people to have access to fantastic ideas that can help their organizations, teams, and individually.

In support of simplifying the Segregation of Duties pipeline definition, the Lab Assistant app will now create a dotenv formatted file and deliver it to the newly created branch. This perfectly meshes with what the Auto Deploy Image is expecting to allow Segregation of Auto DevOps Duties.

To help make it clear what the intermediate step is between the existing Deployment project example and real DevOps, I created a streamlined version.