chmod 600 and helping Bitcoin miners

I have just completed my second pass through The Docker Book.  Running through it again was a good decision.  I flew through it this time and surprised myself at how much I have learnt.

I even learnt what happens when you run the command ‘chmod 600’ on it’s own (a cut and paste error).  Even that turned out to be a positive learning experience as it pushed me down the route (or root haha) of using AWS snapshots and volumes for real to resolve the issue.

This time around I noticed the following text which escaped my attention first time:

The significance of this was not lost on me.  First time around I completed the Docker API chapter and being short of time left the “authenticate your API” chapter until a few days later.  When I came back to it, imagine my surprise at seeing Bitcoin mining containers happily whirring away on my host.

In both of these examples I realised that learning by your mistakes is a powerful learning tool, particularly as I am using my own AWS hosts.  Clearly either of these mistakes would have been disastrous in a real life production context.  This time around I was very thorough in only opening up as much access as was needed rather than having everything open to the world.

So what next?  I had been planning to Dockerise Riemann for the Art of Monitoring book.  I will get to that, but feel the need to branch out a bit even if Docker still plays a part.  Current thinking is to study and play with:

  • MongoDB
  • Git (I am embarrassed by how little I use it)
  • Kubernetes (really excited about this)

I am also going to try and organise my reading a little so am planning to tackle the following:

  • The DevOps Handbook
  • Sam Newman’s Microservices
  • Google SRE
  • The Lean Enterprise

Some choices there are influenced by a possible change of role – which will be a good step towards something more DevOpsy (sorry) – for which I am going to have to know my stuff.  I hope re-reading the first two will be as rewarding as a second pass through The Docker Book.

To further assist my mission, I have set myself the objective of watching a webinar each week. I am amazed at how much great material is out there.

My Picks

Finally, I liked the Food Fight’s Picks” so much, I am going to borrow it.  My first one in homage to Food Fight is one of their very own podcasts on the Netflix OSS.  This is a few years old (2013) but I enjoyed it immensely.  Find it here..

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