Derek C. Ashmore's Blog

For DevOps Professionals: Automatically Generating Terraform Documentation

Today, I'm furthering my war on DevOps busy work. This is a continuation of a previous post: For DevOps Professionals: Analyzing and Eliminating Busy Work. For this post, I want to remove the tediousness of properly documenting Terraform code.

Terraform code documentation should detail the following to make it easy for other developers to consume and maintain a Terraform configuration or project. The bottom line is high quality and accurate documentation for Terraform code makes change easier and...

For DevOps Professionals: Analyzing and Eliminating Busy Work

I periodically go through the exercise of identifying areas of busy work my team and I experience as DevOps professionals concentrating in infrastructure code development and maintenance.  While I do have a specific area of focus for my introspection today,  this is a good exercise for anyone in almost any vertical. 
I seem to be concentrating on Terraform IaC these days and migrating to GitHub workflows for CiCd capabilities.  We're entirely GitOps and 100% Infrastructure as Code. The opportunit...

For Devops Professionals: Analyzing and Eliminating Busy Work

I periodically go through the exercise of identifying areas of busy work my team and I experience as DevOps professionals concentrating in infrastructure code development and maintenance.  While I do have a specific area of focus for my introspection today,  this is a good exercise for anyone in almost any vertical. 
I seem to be concentrating on Terraform IaC these days and migrating to GitHub workflows for CiCd capabilities.  We're entirely GitOps and 100% Infrastructure as Code. The opportunit...

Improve New Feature Delivery Rate with Value Stream Mapping

 I constantly see a desire to deliver enhancements and additional business capabilities to end users at a faster rate. What I don't see is a methodical and data-driven approach to achieving a faster delivery rate. I typically use a tactic called value stream mapping to improve clients' speed to market. That tactic seems obvious to me but isn't used as widely as I think it should be.

I'm going to define and illustrate value stream mapping for you in hopes that you see the value and understand the ...

The Journey toward Continuous Delivery and Deployment: How to Start

I work with teams who are nowhere close to achieving continuous delivery, let alone continuous deployment.  Those teams are getting further and further behind where teams in other companies are on similar journeys. Often,  they don't have automated testing.  If they do,  often they are unit tests and not integration tests.  Often,  they don't have application infrastructure code and can't easily create additional environments. Often,  they work in long-lived feature branches and have teams worki...

Appropriate workloads for Kubernetes

I've been asked about hosting cloud applications in Kubernetes. People seem to assume that Kubernetes is the best practice for hosting containerized workloads in all cases. While I love Kubernetes and have used it successfully in numerous applications, It shouldn't be the default, out-of-hand, hosting solution for containerized workloads. 

Kubernetes is far from the simplest solution for hosting containerized workloads. Even with cloud vendors making Kubernetes clusters more integrated and easier...

Policy-based Management Challenges and Solutions

One of the most common best practices for managing security in the cloud is policy-based management.  Policy-based management optimally prevents security breaches or at least alerts you to their presence. Additionally, it alieviates the need for as many manual reviews and approvals, which slow down development of new business capabilities. That said, policy-based management presents many challenges. This post details common challenges and tactics to overcome them. 

Challenge #1: Introducing New o...

Move your Network to the Cloud Too!

Over the past year, I'm seeing indications of what will be a big trend in cloud consumption: let's move our network to the cloud along with data centers. I'm talking about the WAN network primarily which many enterprises maintain worldwide.  Local offices will still need connectivity to the WAN; it's just that they will increasingly become on-ramps to the worldwide WAN hosted in the cloud. In other words, data centers will no longer be the "center" for all network access. 
Graphically, the concep...

Radical Idea: Let's do more Testing in Production

There are many different types of application testing. This article is entirely about system-level testing, the most outer-level user experience testing. System-level testing is also the most difficult to automate.
I'm talking about integration or testing of the application from an end-user perspective only. Many use the term system-level testing for this activity.   Other types of testing such as unit, performance, exploratory, and usability, are not a part of this article. Other forms of testin...

Infrastructure Code and the Shifting Sand Problem

Infrastructure code (IaC) has a problem that application code does not: changes outside of infrastructure code impact its ability to function as intended. I call this the shifting sand problem . The goal is for infrastructure code executions (of the same version) to always produce the same result. In this sense, we want infrastructure code executions to be "repeatable" in the same way we strive to make application builds repeatable. When IaC executions aren't repeatable, unplanned work is the res...