Day three was jam packed with some really interesting talks. It started off with a talk titled Develop Faster on Kubernetes with Google Container Tools and Cloud Build. After lunch, I attended a few of the smaller sessions in more informal fireside chat spaces. These later talks mainly focused on building devops teams and utilizing good devops practices within an organization.
The theme of the day for me, it seemed, was how to utilize Google tools and
infrastructure as code to streamline infrastructure automation. I’m sure this
was somewhat intentional at a subconscious level as that’s been my primary area
of focus at work recently. To this end, Develop Faster on Kubernetes with Google Container
Tools and Cloud Build was particularly interesting. They discussed using
Skaffold in conjunction with
the Skaffold integration in VSCode and Cloud Build to allow developers to
quickly iterate on a project without the need to constantly run kubectl and
docker commands to rebuild their changes (Now I just need to find something
like this for vim ;) ).
The fireside chats later in the day covered a couple of different topics. The first one was mainly about how to build a devops team and form a culture that promotes collaboration across teams. The next session covered Service Levels and Error Budgets. I found this talk particularly interesting as it’s something we’ve been working on at Mailchimp for a while now; finding a balance between pushing new production features while also maintaining a very high level of service availability for our global customer base. One point that I found most interesting was that Stackdriver provides convenient tools for calculating your error budgets based on collected metrics. I could definitely see this being useful as we continue to improve our processes around this.
Finally, the day wrapped up with another small talk called Batteries Included Devops. This talk felt like a higher level continuation of the previous talk, focusing heavily on how Google Cloud provides tools out of the box for making the right devops practices convenient or automatic.
After the talks completed I headed out for a nice Burrito with several other Mailchimp engineers over in the Mission District. It was chilly out but nice to hang out in the park with my coworkers and talk about stuff that wasn’t work related; a rare treat.
I look forward to tomorrow. Another jam packed day full of learning and fun.