On Tuesday I gave a talk at KubeCon called High Reliability Infrastructure Migrations. The abstract was:

For companies with high availability requirements (99.99% uptime or higher), running new software in production comes with a lot of risks. But it’s possible to make significant infrastructure changes while maintaining the availability your customers expect! I’ll give you a toolbox for derisking migrations and making infrastructure changes with confidence, with examples from our Kubernetes & Envoy experience at Stripe.

video

slides

Here are the slides:

since everyone always asks, I drew them in the Notability app on an iPad. I do this because it’s faster than trying to use regular slides software and I can make better slides.

a few notes

Here are a few links & notes about things I mentioned in the talk

skycfg: write functions, not YAML

I talked about how my team is working on non-YAML interfaces for configuring Kubernetes. The demo is at skycfg.fun, and it’s on GitHub here. It’s based on Starlark, a configuration language that’s a subset of Python.

My coworker John has promised that he’ll write a blog post about it at some point, and I’m hoping that’s coming soon :)

no haunted forests

I mentioned a deploy system rewrite we did. John has a great blog post about when rewrites are a good idea and how he approached that rewrite called no haunted forests.

ignore most kubernetes ecosystem software

One small point that I made in the talk was that on my team we ignore almost all software in the Kubernetes ecosystem so that we can focus on a few core pieces (Kubernetes & Envoy, plus some small things like kiam). I wanted to mention this because I think often in Kubernetes land it can seem like everyone is using Cool New Things (helm! istio! knative! eep!). I’m sure those projects are great but I find it much simpler to stay focused on the basics and I wanted people to know that it’s okay to do that if that’s what works for your company.

I think the reality is that actually a lot of folks are still trying to work out how to use this new software in a reliable and secure way.

other talks

I haven’t watched other Kubecon talks yet, but here are 2 links:

I heard good things about this keynote from melanie cebula about kubernetes at airbnb, and I’m excited to see this talk about kubernetes security. The slides from that security talk look useful

Also I’m very excited to see Kelsey Hightower’s keynote as always, but that recording isn’t up yet. If you have other Kubecon talks to recommend I’d love to know what they are.

my first work talk I’m happy with

I usually give talks about debugging tools, or side projects, or how I approach my job at a high level – not on the actual work that I do at my job. What I talked about in this talk is basically what I’ve been learning how to do at work for the last ~2 years. Figuring out how to make big infrastructure changes safely took me a long time (and I’m not done!), and so I hope this talk helps other folks do the same thing.