#spinnaker software

[vgadvisor]

[retrocgads]

USA 1990

[retrogamingloft]

Bubble Burst, released in 1984 by Spinnaker Software for the Commodore 64, is an action-arcade game where you must prevent creatures called "Zeboingers" from popping bubbles in a bathtub.

You control a target to shoot bubbles at these bird-like Zeboingers as they approach the bubble bath. The game becomes more challenging as the Zeboingers can open windows or turn on showers, which further reduce the number of bubbles. Additionally, you have a limited amount of "bubble juice" each round to defend the bath, adding a layer of strategy.

The game offers two difficulty levels: Level 1 starts from the beginning, while Level 2 lets you begin at the 11th stage. I chose to start at Level 1 and managed to progress well beyond stage 11.

[arconinternet]

Alphabet Zoo (Apple II/ZX Spectrum/Atari 8-bit/TRS-80 CoCo/Colecovision, Spinnaker Software, 1983/1984)

You can play it here.

To view controls for anything running in MAME, press Tab, then select 'Input (this machine)'.

For the C64 version, to make the emulated joystick work, press F12, use arrows (including right and left to enter and exit menus) to enter 'Machine settings' and then 'Joystick settings', and then set Joystick 1 to Numpad and Joystick 2 to None. (Numpad controls are 8462 and 0 for fire.)

[agapi-kalyptei]

Hi!! I'm the anon who sent @/jv the question about how tumblr is handling boops, thanks for answering it in detail i really appreciate it!!! I understand some of it but there's room to learn and I'll look forward to that.

can I ask a follow up question, i don't know if this makes sense but is it possible to use something like k8s containers instead of lots of servers for this purpose?

Hi! Thanks for reaching out.

Yeah my bad, I didn't know what your technical skill level is, so I wasn't writing it in a very approachable level.

The main takeaway is, high scalability has to happen on all levels - feature design, software architecture, networking, hardware, software, and software management.

K8s (an open source software project called Kubernetes, for the normal people) is on the "software management" category. It's like what MS Outlook or Google Calendar is to meetings. It doesn't do the meetings for you, it doesn't give you more time or more meeting rooms, but it gives you a way to say who goes where, and see which rooms are booked.

While I cannot say for Tumblr, I think I've heard they use Kubernetes at least in some parts of the stack, I can't speak for them. I can speak for myself tho! Been using K8s in production since 2015.

Once you want to run more than "1 redis 1 database 1 app" kind of situation, you will likely benefit from using K8s. Whether you have just a small raspberry pi somewhere, a rented consumer-grade server from Hetzner, or a few thousand machines, K8s can likely help you manage software.

So in short: yes, K8s can help with scalability, as long as the overall architecture doesn't fundamentally oppose getting scaled. Meaning, if you would have a central database for a hundred million of your users, and it becomes a bottleneck, then no amount of microservices serving boops, running with or without K8s, will not remove that bottleneck.

"Containers", often called Docker containers (although by default K8s has long stopped using Docker as a runtime, and Docker is mostly just something devs use to build containers) are basically a zip file with some info about what to run on start. K8s cannot be used without containers.

You can run containers without K8s, which might make sense if you're very hardware resource restricted (i.e. a single Raspberry Pi, developer laptop, or single-purpose home server). If you don't need to manage or monitor the cluster (i.e. the set of apps/servers that you run), then you don't benefit a lot from K8s.

Kubernetes is handy because you can basically do this (IRL you'd use some CI/CD pipeline and not do this from console, but conceptually this happens) -

kubectl create -f /stuff/boop_service.yaml kubectl create -f /stuff/boop_ingress.yaml kubectl create -f /stuff/boop_configmap.yaml kubectl create -f /stuff/boop_deploy.yaml

(service is a http endpoint, ingress is how the service will be available from outside of the cluster, configmap is just a bunch of settings and config files, and deploy is the thing that manages the actual stuff running)

At this hypothetical point, Tumblr stuff deploys, updates and tests the boop service before 1st April, generally having some one-click deploy feature in Jenkins or Spinnaker or similar. After it's tested and it's time to bring in the feature to everyone, they'd run

kubectl scale deploy boop --replicas=999

and wait until it downloads and runs the boop server on however many servers. Then they either deploy frontend to use this, or more likely, the frontend code is already live, and just displays boop features based on server time, or some server settings endpoint which just says "ok you can show boop now".

And then when it's over and they disable it in frontend, just again kubectl scale .. --replicas=10 to mop up whichever people haven't refreshed frontend and still are trying to spam boops.

This example, of course, assumes that "boop" is a completely separate software package/server, which is about 85/15% chance that it isn't, and more likely it's just one endpoint that they added to their existing server code, and is already running on hundreds of servers. IDK how Tumblr manages the server side code at all, so it's all just guesses.

Hope this was somewhat interesting and maybe even helpful! Feel free to send more asks.

[apexon-digital]

SRE Technologies: Transforming the Future of Reliability Engineering

In the rapidly evolving digital landscape, the need for robust, scalable, and resilient infrastructure has never been more critical. Enter Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) technologies—a blend of software engineering and IT operations aimed at creating a bridge between development and operations, enhancing system reliability and efficiency. As organizations strive to deliver consistent and reliable services, SRE technologies are becoming indispensable. In this blog, we’ll explore the latest trends in SRE technologies that are shaping the future of reliability engineering.

1. Automation and AI in SRE

Automation is the cornerstone of SRE, reducing manual intervention and enabling teams to manage large-scale systems effectively. With advancements in AI and machine learning, SRE technologies are evolving to include intelligent automation tools that can predict, detect, and resolve issues autonomously. Predictive analytics powered by AI can foresee potential system failures, enabling proactive incident management and reducing downtime.

Key Tools:

PagerDuty: Integrates machine learning to optimize alert management and incident response.

Ansible & Terraform: Automate infrastructure as code, ensuring consistent and error-free deployments.

2. Observability Beyond Monitoring

Traditional monitoring focuses on collecting data from pre-defined points, but it often falls short in complex environments. Modern SRE technologies emphasize observability, providing a comprehensive view of the system’s health through metrics, logs, and traces. This approach allows SREs to understand the 'why' behind failures and bottlenecks, making troubleshooting more efficient.

Key Tools:

Grafana & Prometheus: For real-time metric visualization and alerting.

OpenTelemetry: Standardizes the collection of telemetry data across services.

3. Service Mesh for Microservices Management

With the rise of microservices architecture, managing inter-service communication has become a complex task. Service mesh technologies, like Istio and Linkerd, offer solutions by providing a dedicated infrastructure layer for service-to-service communication. These SRE technologies enable better control over traffic management, security, and observability, ensuring that microservices-based applications run smoothly.

Benefits:

Traffic Control: Advanced routing, retries, and timeouts.

Security: Mutual TLS authentication and authorization.

4. Chaos Engineering for Resilience Testing

Chaos engineering is gaining traction as an essential SRE technology for testing system resilience. By intentionally introducing failures into a system, teams can understand how services respond to disruptions and identify weak points. This proactive approach ensures that systems are resilient and capable of recovering from unexpected outages.

Key Tools:

Chaos Monkey: Simulates random instance failures to test resilience.

Gremlin: Offers a suite of tools to inject chaos at various levels of the infrastructure.

5. CI/CD Integration for Continuous Reliability

Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines are critical for maintaining system reliability in dynamic environments. Integrating SRE practices into CI/CD pipelines allows teams to automate testing and validation, ensuring that only stable and reliable code makes it to production. This integration also supports faster rollbacks and better incident management, enhancing overall system reliability.

Key Tools:

Jenkins & GitLab CI: Automate build, test, and deployment processes.

Spinnaker: Provides advanced deployment strategies, including canary releases and blue-green deployments.

6. Site Reliability as Code (SRaaC)

As SRE evolves, the concept of Site Reliability as Code (SRaaC) is emerging. SRaaC involves defining SRE practices and configurations in code, making it easier to version, review, and automate. This approach brings a new level of consistency and repeatability to SRE processes, enabling teams to scale their practices efficiently.

Key Tools:

Pulumi: Allows infrastructure and policies to be defined using familiar programming languages.

AWS CloudFormation: Automates infrastructure provisioning using templates.

7. Enhanced Security with DevSecOps

Security is a growing concern in SRE practices, leading to the integration of DevSecOps—embedding security into every stage of the development and operations lifecycle. SRE technologies are now incorporating automated security checks and compliance validation to ensure that systems are not only reliable but also secure.

Key Tools:

HashiCorp Vault: Manages secrets and encrypts sensitive data.

Aqua Security: Provides comprehensive security for cloud-native applications.

Conclusion

The landscape of SRE technologies is rapidly evolving, with new tools and methodologies emerging to meet the challenges of modern, distributed systems. From AI-driven automation to chaos engineering and beyond, these technologies are revolutionizing the way we approach system reliability. For organizations striving to deliver robust, scalable, and secure services, staying ahead of the curve with the latest SRE technologies is essential. As we move forward, we can expect even more innovation in this space, driving the future of reliability engineering.

[techtweek]

Introduction

The DevOps approach has revolutionized the way software development and operations teams collaborate, significantly improving efficiency and accelerating the delivery of high-quality software. Understanding the DevOps roadmap is crucial for organizations looking to implement or enhance their DevOps practices. This roadmap outlines the key stages, skills, and tools necessary for a successful DevOps transformation.

Stage 1: Foundation

1.1 Understanding DevOps Principles: Before diving into tools and practices, it's essential to grasp the core principles of DevOps. This includes a focus on collaboration, automation, continuous improvement, and customer-centricity.

1.2 Setting Up a Collaborative Culture: DevOps thrives on a culture of collaboration between development and operations teams. Foster open communication, shared goals, and mutual respect.

Stage 2: Toolchain Setup

2.1 Version Control Systems (VCS): Implement a robust VCS like Git to manage code versions and facilitate collaboration.

2.2 Continuous Integration (CI): Set up CI pipelines using tools like Jenkins, GitLab CI, or Travis CI to automate code integration and early detection of issues.

2.3 Continuous Delivery (CD): Implement CD practices to automate the deployment of applications. Tools like Jenkins, CircleCI, or Spinnaker can help achieve seamless delivery.

2.4 Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Adopt IaC tools like Terraform or Ansible to manage infrastructure through code, ensuring consistency and scalability.

Stage 3: Automation and Testing

3.1 Test Automation: Incorporate automated testing into your CI/CD pipelines. Use tools like Selenium, JUnit, or pytest to ensure that code changes do not introduce new bugs.

3.2 Configuration Management: Use configuration management tools like Chef, Puppet, or Ansible to automate the configuration of your infrastructure and applications.

3.3 Monitoring and Logging: Implement monitoring and logging solutions like Prometheus, Grafana, ELK Stack, or Splunk to gain insights into application performance and troubleshoot issues proactively.

Stage 4: Advanced Practices

4.1 Continuous Feedback: Establish feedback loops using tools like New Relic or Nagios to collect user feedback and performance data, enabling continuous improvement.

4.2 Security Integration (DevSecOps): Integrate security practices into your DevOps pipeline using tools like Snyk, Aqua Security, or HashiCorp Vault to ensure your applications are secure by design.

4.3 Scaling and Optimization: Continuously optimize your DevOps processes and tools to handle increased workloads and enhance performance. Implement container orchestration using Kubernetes or Docker Swarm for better scalability.

Stage 5: Maturity

5.1 DevOps Metrics: Track key performance indicators (KPIs) such as deployment frequency, lead time for changes, mean time to recovery (MTTR), and change failure rate to measure the effectiveness of your DevOps practices.

5.2 Continuous Learning and Improvement: Encourage a culture of continuous learning and improvement. Stay updated with the latest DevOps trends and best practices by participating in conferences, webinars, and training sessions.

5.3 DevOps as a Service: Consider offering DevOps as a service to other teams within your organization or to external clients. This can help standardize practices and further refine your DevOps capabilities.

Conclusion

Implementing a DevOps roadmap requires careful planning, the right tools, and a commitment to continuous improvement. By following this comprehensive guide, organizations can streamline their development and operations processes, achieve faster delivery times, and enhance overall product quality.

For organizations looking to accelerate their DevOps journey, partnering with experienced DevOps service providers can provide the expertise and support needed to successfully navigate the DevOps landscape.

[opsmxspinnaker]

Customers Can Continue Their GitOps Journey with Argo and OpsMx Following the Shutdown of Weaveworks

[gmlocg]

107.) In Search of the Most Amazing Thing

Release: 1983 | GGF: Adventure, Puzzle, Simulation | Developer(s): Tom Snyder Productions, Inc. | Publisher(s): Spinnaker Software Corporation | Platform(s): Apple II (1983), Atari 8-bit (1983), Commodore 64 (1983), DOS (1983)

[tricksdevops]

DevOps Tools and Toolchains

DevOps Course in Chandigarh,

DevOps tools and toolchains are crucial components in the DevOps ecosystem, helping teams automate, integrate, and manage various aspects of the software development and delivery process. These tools enable collaboration, streamline workflows, and enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of DevOps practices.

Version Control Systems (VCS): Tools like Git and SVN are fundamental for managing source code, enabling versioning, branching, and merging. They facilitate collaboration among developers and help maintain a history of code changes.

Continuous Integration (CI) Tools: Jenkins, Travis CI, CircleCI, and GitLab CI/CD are popular CI tools. They automate the process of integrating code changes, running tests, and producing build artifacts. This ensures that code is continuously validated and ready for deployment.

Configuration Management Tools: Tools like Ansible, Puppet, and Chef automate the provisioning and management of infrastructure and application configurations. They ensure consistency and reproducibility in different environments.

Containerization and Orchestration: Docker is a widely used containerization tool that packages applications and their dependencies. Kubernetes is a powerful orchestration platform that automates the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.

Continuous Deployment (CD) Tools: Tools like Spinnaker and Argo CD facilitate automated deployment of applications to various environments. They enable continuous delivery by automating the release process.

Monitoring and Logging Tools: Tools like Prometheus, Grafana, ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana), and Splunk provide visibility into application and infrastructure performance. They help monitor metrics, logs, and events to identify and resolve issues.

Collaboration and Communication Tools: Platforms like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Jira facilitate communication and collaboration among team members. They enable seamless sharing of updates, notifications, and project progress.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Tools: Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, and Azure Resource Manager allow teams to define and manage infrastructure using code. This promotes automation, versioning, and reproducibility of environments.

Continuous Testing Tools: Tools like Selenium, JUnit, and Mocha automate testing processes, including unit tests, integration tests, and end-to-end tests. They ensure that code changes do not introduce regressions.

Security and Compliance Tools: Tools like SonarQube, OWASP ZAP, and Nessus help identify and mitigate security vulnerabilities and ensure compliance with industry standards and regulations.

In summary, DevOps tools and toolchains form the backbone of DevOps practices, enabling teams to automate, integrate, and manage various aspects of the software development lifecycle. These tools promote collaboration, efficiency, and reliability, ultimately leading to faster and more reliable software delivery.

[sialenon233]

The 10 Best DevOps Tools to Look Out For in 2023

As the demand for efficient software delivery continues to rise, DevOps tools play a pivotal role in enabling organizations to streamline their processes, enhance collaboration, and achieve faster and more reliable releases. In this article, we will explore the 10 best DevOps tools to look out for in 2023. These tools are poised to make a significant impact on the DevOps landscape, empowering organizations to stay competitive and meet the evolving needs of software development.

Jenkins:

Jenkins remains a staple in the DevOps toolchain. With its extensive plugin ecosystem, it offers robust support for continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) pipelines. Jenkins allows for automated building, testing, and deployment, enabling teams to achieve faster feedback cycles and reliable software releases.

2. GitLab CI/CD:

Ranked among the top CI/CD tools, GitLab CI/CD simplifies the software delivery process with its user-friendly interface, robust pipeline configuration, and scalable container-based execution. Its seamless integration of version control and CI/CD capabilities makes it an ideal choice for organizations seeking efficient and streamlined software delivery.

3. Kubernetes:

Kubernetes has emerged as the de facto standard for container orchestration. With its ability to automate deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications, Kubernetes simplifies the process of managing complex microservices architectures and ensures optimal resource utilization.

4. Ansible:

Ansible is a powerful automation tool that simplifies infrastructure provisioning, configuration management, and application deployment. With its agentless architecture, Ansible offers simplicity, flexibility, and scalability, making it an ideal choice for managing infrastructure as code (IaC).

5. Terraform:

Terraform is an infrastructure provisioning tool that enables declarative definition and management of cloud infrastructure. It allows teams to automate the creation and modification of infrastructure resources across various cloud providers, ensuring consistent and reproducible environments.

6. Prometheus:

Prometheus is a leading open-source monitoring and alerting tool designed for cloud-native environments. It provides robust metrics collection, storage, and querying capabilities, empowering teams to gain insights into application performance and proactively detect and resolve issues.

7. Spinnaker:

Spinnaker is a multi-cloud continuous delivery platform that enables organizations to deploy applications reliably across different cloud environments. With its sophisticated deployment strategies and canary analysis, Spinnaker ensures smooth and controlled software releases with minimal risk.

8. Vault:

Vault is a popular tool for secrets management and data protection. It offers a secure and centralized platform to store, access, and manage sensitive information such as passwords, API keys, and certificates, ensuring strong security practices across the DevOps pipeline.

9. Grafana:

Grafana is a powerful data visualization and monitoring tool that allows teams to create interactive dashboards and gain real-time insights into system performance. With support for various data sources, Grafana enables comprehensive visibility and analysis of metrics from different systems.

10. SonarQube:

SonarQube is a widely used code quality and security analysis tool. It provides continuous inspection of code to identify bugs, vulnerabilities, and code smells, helping teams maintain high coding standards and ensure the reliability and security of their software.

Conclusion:

The DevOps landscape is constantly evolving, and in 2023, these 10 DevOps tools are poised to make a significant impact on software development and delivery. From CI/CD automation to infrastructure provisioning, monitoring, and security, these tools empower organizations to optimize their processes, enhance collaboration, and achieve faster and more reliable software releases. By leveraging these tools, organizations can stay ahead of the curve and meet the increasing demands of the dynamic software development industry.

Partnering with a reputable DevOps development company amplifies the impact of these tools, providing expertise in implementation and integration. By leveraging their knowledge, organizations can optimize processes, enhance collaboration, and achieve faster, more reliable software releases.

[retrocgads]

USA 1990

[lidikcyber]

My Selection Software Program Evaluations

The market for third-party support on software is rising quickly. Rimini Street, Spinnaker Support, Alui, Support Revolution and CedarCrestone offer support on many software products from top distributors, often with higher SLAs than what the software program writer will provide. As a vendor, having the ability to provide the buyer the possibility to buy third party help will greatly improve the…

[donatotech]

Best Cloud and Application Services Company in Dallas

We offer scalable management solutions and end-to-end application development.

We do everything from analysis to implementation and rollout.

CLOUD MIGRATION, AUTOMATION, DEVELOPMENT, INTEGRATION, MAINTENANCE, DEVOPS SERVICES — (AWS, AZURE, GCP) –

Solution Architects, Data Architects, Lakehouse, Data Mesh Architects, Devops engineers

CICD — GitHub, Jenkins, Spinnaker/Travis

IaaS -Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi,CDK

Configuration management-Ansible, Chef, Puppet, Salt Stack

Containerization- Kubernetes, Docker, Docker Swarm, systemmd-nspawn

We offer a pool of services such as

load balancing

application performance monitoring

application acceleration

autoscaling

micro-segmentation

We provide these services to make sure your applications are optimally deployed and run well.

Our applications service management team will take care of the process of configuring, monitoring, optimizing, and orchestrating your app systems.

Our application development services are holistic, from the design to modernizing software development processes we take care of it all. We ensure that all your application development projects are of high quality and are completed quickly and more efficiently.

It could be a completely new development or building cutting-edge solutions on industry-leading platforms or just performing extensive quality assurance work, clients engage us as an extended part of their own IT team.

In line with our philosophy of collaboration, we deliver our application services either jointly with our clients or in a fully managed way at the client location facilities.

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Donato Technologies offers IT Staffing & Strategic Resources comprising professionals with diverse knowledge who play a key role in meeting business objectives.

[postwell]

9 essential skills for AWS DevOps Engineers

AWS DevOps engineers cover a lot of ground. The good ones maintain a cross-disciplinary skill set that touches upon a cloud, development, operations, continuous delivery, data, security, and more.  

Here are the skills that AWS DevOps Engineers need to master to rock their role.

1. Continuous delivery

For this role, you’ll need a deep understanding of continuous delivery (CD) theory, concepts, and real-world application. You’ll not only need experience with CD tools and systems, but you’ll need intimate knowledge of their inner workings so you can integrate different tools and systems together to create fully functioning, cohesive delivery pipelines. Committing, merging, building, testing, packaging, and deploying code all come into play within the software release process. 

If you’re using the native AWS services for your continuous delivery pipelines, you’ll need to be familiar with AWS CodeDeploy, AWS CodeBuild, and AWS CodePipeline. Other CD tools and systems you might need to be familiar with include GitHub, Jenkins, GitLab, Spinnaker, Travis, or others.

2. Cloud

An AWS DevOps engineer is expected to be a subject matter expert on AWS services, tools, and best practices. Product development teams will come to you with questions on various services and ask for recommendations on what service to use and when. As such, you should have a well-rounded understanding of the varied and numerous AWS services, their limitations, and alternate (non-AWS) solutions that might serve better in particular situations. 

With your expertise in cloud computing, you’ll architect and build cloud-native systems, wrangle cloud systems’ complexity, and ensure that best practices are followed when utilizing a wide variety of cloud service offerings. When designing and recommending solutions, you’ll also weigh the pros and cons of using IaaS services versus PaaS and other managed services. If you want to go beyond this blog and master the skill, you must definitely visit AWS DevOps Course and get certified!

3. Observability

Logging, monitoring, and alerting, oh my! Shipping a new application to production is great, but it’s even better if you know what it’s doing. Observability is a critical area of work for this role. An AWS DevOps engineer should ensure that an application and its systems implement appropriate monitoring, logging, and alerting solutions. APM (Application Performance Monitoring) can help unveil critical insights into an application’s inner workings and simplify debugging custom code. APM solutions include New Relic, AppDynamics, Dynatrace, and others. On the AWS side, you should have deep knowledge of Amazon CloudWatch (including CloudWatch Agent, CloudWatch Logs, CloudWatch Alarms, and CloudWatch Events), AWS X-Ray, Amazon SNS, Amazon Elasticsearch Service, and Kibana. You might utilize tools and systems in this space, including Syslog, logrotate, Logstash, Filebeat, Nagios, InfluxDB, Prometheus, and Grafana. 

4. Infrastructure as code

An AWS DevOps Engineer will ensure that the systems under her purview are built repeatedly, using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools such as CloudFormation, Terraform, Pulumi, and AWS CDK (Cloud Development Kit). Using IaC ensures that cloud objects are documented as code, version controlled, and can be reliably replaced using an appropriate IaC provisioning tool.

5. Configuration Management

On the IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) side for virtual machines, once ec2 instances have been launched, their configuration and setup should be codified with a Configuration Management tool. Some of the more popular options in this space include Ansible, Chef, Puppet, and SaltStack. For organizations with most of their infrastructure running Windows, you might find Powershell Desired State Configuration (DSC) as the tool of choice in this space.

6. Containers

Many modern organizations are migrating away from the traditional deployment models of apps being pushed to VMs and to a containerized system landscape. In the containerized world, configuration management becomes much less important, but there is also a whole new world of container-related tools that you’ll need to be familiar with. These tools include Docker Engine, Docker Swarm, systemd-nspawn, LXC, container registries, Kubernetes (which includes dozens of tools, apps, and services within its ecosystem), and many more.

7. Operations

IT operations are most often associated with logging, monitoring, and alerting. You need to have these things in place to properly operate, run, or manage production systems. We covered these in our observability section above. Another large facet of the Ops role is responding to, troubleshooting, and resolving issues as they occur. To effectively respond to issues and resolve them quickly, you’ll need to have experience working with and troubleshooting operating systems like Ubuntu, CentOS, Amazon Linux, RedHat Enterprise Linux, and Windows. You’ll also need to be familiar with common middleware software like web servers (Apache, Nginx, Tomcat, Nodejs, and others), load balancers, and other application environments and runtimes.

Database administration can also be an important function of a (Dev)Ops role. To be successful here, you’ll need to have knowledge of data stores such as PostgreSQL and MySQL. You should also be able to read and write some SQL code. And increasingly, you should be familiar with NoSQL data stores like Cassandra, MongoDB, AWS DynamoDB, and possibly even a graph database or two!

8. Automation

Eliminating toil is the ethos of the site reliability engineer, and this mission is very much applicable to the DevOps engineer role. In your quest to automate everything, you’ll need experience and expertise with scripting languages such as bash, GNU utilities, Python, JavaScript, and PowerShell for the Windows side. You should be familiar with cron, AWS Lambda (the service of the serverless function), CloudWatch Events, SNS, and others.  

9. Collaboration and communication

Last (but not least) is the cultural aspect of DevOps. While the term “DevOps” can mean a dozen different things to a dozen people, one of the best starting points for talking about this shift in our industry is CAMS: culture, automation, measurement, and sharing. DevOps is all about breaking down barriers between IT operations and development. In this modern DevOps age, we no longer have developers throwing code “over the wall” to operations. We now strive to be one big happy family, with every role invested in the success of the code, the applications, and the value delivered to customers. This means that (Dev)Ops engineers must work closely with software engineers. This necessitates excellent communication and collaboration skills for any person who wishes to fill this keystone role of a DevOps engineer. 

AWS Devops?

AWS offers various flexible services that allow organizations to create and release services more efficiently and reliably through the implementation of DevOps techniques.

These services make the provisioning and management of infrastructures, such as deploying application code and automating the release process for software, and monitoring your application's and infrastructure's performance.

[c64screengrabs]

A week or so ago I was browsing a thread on Reddit titled, "What is that one childhood video game that you loved to bits, yet no-one else seems to have ever heard of?" That sort of thing is right up my alley, so I searched through it hoping to find some C64-specific posts and, I did! They are also ones I haven't yet featured, so let's do so!

First up, u/MELMHC posted: "Below the root on C64"

Below the Root was a nice little sidescroller RPG released in 1984 by Windham Classics, a once-division of Spinnaker Software. It's based on a series of fantasy novels titled The Green Sky trilogy by Zilpha Keatley Snyder which were published between 1975-77, which I actually didn't know until now so I looked up the books for more backstory.

In the books, a race of people called The Kindar of Green-sky are a utopian society, ruled by leaders called the Ol-zhaan, who are considered deities. "Unjoyful" emotions like anger and sorrow are banned and kept under strict control by a system of meditation, chant and ritual, accompanied by the use of narcotic berries. The people are vegetarians and surround themselves with pets. Babies are born with paranormal powers, which is kept into adulthood, but were disappearing earlier with each successive generation. The people lived in fear of the forest floor and the pash-shan, legendary monsters said to stalk below the roots of their magnificent tree-cities.

A novice Ol-zhaan named Raamo and his friend Neric (one of the game's playable characters) set out to discover if the monsters truly exist. What they found were the Erdlings, a race made up of exiled Kindar dissidents and their descendants. Where the Kindar live their whole lives in the shade, the Erdlings seek places where the sun penetrates the caverns. They have been living in the caverns and subsisting on plants, mushrooms and the occasional unwary rabbit (lapan) or ground bird, plus fallen fruits from the Kindar orchards. They are superb craftsmen, metalworkers and jewelers; they have fire, which is unknown in Green-sky, and transport people and supplies by railway, using steam propulsion. They have no taboos against anger, sadness or other "unjoyful" emotions, and (possibly as a result) appear to have retained much more of their psychic powers than have the Kindar.

Their discovery shakes the very foundation of Green-sky's social order. The Erdlings are released from their exile and the Ol-zhaan disbanded, but reconciling the two societies takes a long time. An unnamed society of disgruntled Ol-zhaan (called Salite in the game) and the Nekom, vengeance-seeking Erdlings, began patrolling the branch-paths and causing unrest. Furthermore, Raamo himself apparently perished, silencing a voice for tolerance and unity.

In the game's manual, you are told that the wise old woman (and former Ol-zhaan high priestess) D'ol Falla has a vision, in which she heard these words: "The Spirit fades, in Darkness lying. A quest proclaim - the Light is dying." Your character (one of five from the series) then begins the game looking for clues to the meaning of D'ol Falla's vision in hopes of restoring peace to both nations.

The game does a great job in sticking close to details of the books, such as making you unable to steal as that behaviour is banned in the society. To obtain and item you must ask characters for permission to take it, or to pay with tokens you can gain in-game. Also adhering to this, the game was made to be almost entirely non-violent. You can only be hurt by contact with venomous animals, falling, or colliding with a barrier. Your character can also be kidnapped and taken hostage, and collect weapons, which can mostly only be used to cut vine barriers. Killing someone renders the game unwinnable.

The nicely coloured graphics were considered advanced for the time, and competent controls made gameplay easy. The game was well-received, and now has a fanpage for the game and the books up online.