Month: September 2019

Choose Your Own Adventure: SRE Life at Red Hat

Red Hat does managed services. We do DevOps in the style of the Google SRE Book. We’re a decent sized and growing org that supports customers 24/7.  Our team is at the forefront of operationalizing OpenShift 4’s revolutionary set of capabilities, and are a way-to-market for many of Red Hat’s newest portfolio offerings.

What does a day-in-the-life of a Red Hat SRE look like…  You remember these, don’t you?

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If you drop into one of our Slack channels, you might find some interesting discussions on

  • Building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines.
  • Writing Operators in golang to handle managed services use-cases.
  • Handling upgrades of managed OpenShift clusters.
  • Chatting with cloud provider technical teams on weird quirks of their API.
  • Debugging bizarre, nearly intractable production issues using the scientific method.
  • Ensuring our managed OpenShift platforms are the most secure offerings possible.
  • Patternfly-based front-end work:  https://cloud.redhat.com/openshift
  • We should probably write a library that lets teams version control their SLI/SLO/SLAs and generate Grafana dashboards from them.
    • Prometheus and Grafana and Thanos ftw.
  • Developing the microservices behind api.openshift.com.
    • Actually operating those microservices.

I hear you might be interested a job like this.  Let me know, and we can sync up about it!

Maybe Stop Sending Me Emails about Performance :-)

[I’ve been meaning to write this post for several months]

Earlier this year I changed roles within Red Hat.  My new role is “OpenShift SaaS Architect”, and organizationally is part of Red Hat Service Delivery.

Service Delivery encompasses:

Basically, if you’ve had any interaction with OpenShift 4, you’ve likely consumed those services.

I’d been in my previous role for 7 years, and celebrated my 10th anniversary at Red Hat by being acquired by Big Blue.  My previous team (Red Hat Performance and Scale) afforded me endless technical challenges, opportunities to travel, present, help shape product and build engineering teams from the ground up.  Perhaps most importantly, I had the opportunity to mentor as many Red Hatters as I possibly could.

Red Hat Service Delivery allows me to broaden my technical and architecture skill set to areas outside of performance, scale and optimization, while letting me apply the many hard-fought lessons from prior chapters in my career.

Hopefully $subject makes a bit more sense now.  Onward!