BitOps Community Meeting (28 Sep 2022): Survey Results, Twitch Demo ideas, Roadmap

[arm4b]

We invite everyone (developers, adopters, or just curious people) to join the bi-weekly BitOps Community 1 hour Meeting on Wednesday, 28 Sep 2022, 12:00 PM US East to discuss the ongoing project developments, updates, and plans, share use cases and stories or ask/answer questions about BitOps tool.

See #288 for more info on how to join.

Agenda

Follow-ups from the previous #301 Meeting

• BitOps benefits Brainstorming -> Landing Page
• Parked BitOps Twitter/LN social accounts (for future)
• Update the BitOps StackStorm/HeyEmoji blogs to v2

BitOps Survey Results Overview & Discussion

Discussion and overview of the Internal (Bitops Engineers) Survey. What we learned, what to improve in BitOps, and how it connects to the Roadmap.

BitOps Demo on Twitch

Based on @dylan-bitovi idea from the previous meeting #294, we could use Bitovi Twitch and host something like a BitOps demo. Any ideas on what could be a good topic example for a demo, any interested folks hosting it, event format, marketing pre-req, prep work?

Roadmap #245 & Development Discussions

• Create a Roadmap page (docs)?
• BitOps Plugin support for private repos #60
• Parse passwords / credentials out of logging output #208
• Project Quality as KPI
  • Documentation:
    • Refactor: Development & Plugins & About sections in the Docs #282
    • Documentation: Getting Started Guide #302
    • Documentation: BitOps vs Other Tools #303
    • The 5 W's of open source #143
    • Plugins configuration docs: format parameters as a table #280
    • Cleanup docs from TODOs, remove unimplemented features
  • Testing
    • BitOps Unit Tests #286
    • Code Linting (Python) #271
    • Setup Code Coverage % #287
  • CI/CD
    • CI/CD Refactoring & Release pipeline #293
    • Plugins: Testing / Validation and CI/CD #224
  • Stability/bugfixes
  • Feature consistency
• Ops Repo Composability (needs a dedicated issue w description)
• Default folder support follow-up

[mickmcgrath13]

in-call notes:

General questions

• Post notices for the community calls on LinkedIn, too (is happening)
• parked a twitter (bitops_sh)
• bitops.sh

twitch demo

• options
  • dylan: something simple, tried&true. an existing blog post
    • terraform, ansible, website create (https://www.bitovi.com/blog/bitops-terraform-ansible)
    • should update for v2
  • phil: maybe the heyemoji one
  • mick: existing TF repo migrate into bitops
• considerations
  • want to minimize IaC (i.e. it's not an IaC tutorial)
    • focus on the power that bitops brings to connect IaC tools
  • maybe a subset of the bitovi devops twitch
  • maybe use an existing blog as a litmus test
• get ourselves on someone else's meetup
  • example: https://twitter.com/luca_cloud
  • Phil's notes:
    • Leveraging audiences of reputable platforms means that we can tap into a resource that already exists.
    • This def does not need to be scoped to BitOps as this would be a great way to possibly find new client leads as we prove our DevOps expertise
    • It can also be treated as a handout, specifically with a little "reach out to us" slide

Survey results discussion

• continue to focus on "beginners"
• multi-step pipeline flow
  • difficult to debug or rerun if something fails in the middle
  • maybe divide bitops into steps (similar to competitors)
• BitOps is really (maybe too much) focused on CD
  • need a focus on CI
  • could be marketing/docs (ex: PRs that run TF Plan in docs)
• docs enhancements
  • need a getting started guide (look at dagger)
  • look over issues in GitHub
• Terraform (is a bad fit?)
  • plan/apply
  • could be docs enhancements
• env duplication
  • there are already tools for TF (and k8s) that organize envs in a native way
  • terragrunt plugin?
• shared ops repo and blast radius
  • multiple helm deployments
  • mitigation: env-focused pipelines
  • mitigation: only run pipelines for charts that changed
  • mitigation: back-and-forth with "gates"
• too many env variables
  • maybe a docs issue
  • .env file to mitigate the issue of needing to mess with the deploy.sh script (could vary based on pipeline runner)
  • maybe also could introduce bitops.config.yaml files at the root ops repo level and env level
• MVP and versioning
  • that we're on 2.0.0 can be misleading (maybe versioning is too aggressive
• marketing
  • bitovi org level marketing could be a hinderance to bitops specific marketing
  • we do need more meetups, though
  • just need to find outlets to spread the word here
• project quality and intuitiveness
• missing social proof

Roadmap

• landing page
• getting started guides & docs
  • example: PRs for TF plan, quick start for ansible, best practices/use cases, blast radius mitigation, helm chart separation
• code quality
• spreading the word

review landing page notes

didn't talk of this specifically

Takeaways, next steps

• add the heyemoji slack app youtube video to the blog
  • youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVX_87r-ySA
  • blog: https://www.bitovi.com/blog/heyemoji-slack-app-aws-terraform-ansible
• twitch stream: get one scheduled for bitops (maybe as a follow up to getting on another person's meetup)
• Heather to start compiling a list of people who does meetups to get onto
  • need a slide deck for BitOps (benefits, anticipated questions, etc)
• Review/organize a roadmap (see above)