We Made a March Towards Continuous Development: Introducing The DevOps FaunCast

In each episode of The DevOps Fauncast, we'll treat you to an in-depth talk about a topic related to DevOps, SRE, distributed computing, Kubernetes, cloud computing, containers, and other similar concerns.

You'll listen to the stories behind the stories and learn new things in each episode.

You can join us on faun.dev/podcast

Today we're thrilled to announce the launch of our newest and first show: The DevOps FaunCast.

You've followed Faun online on our newsletters, Medium publication, Slack, and social networks. Now, you'll hear us loud and clear.

Many of you know FAUN, but let's talk a bit about it.

In 2016, Aymen El Amri aka Eon, a software engineer, started a side project called DevOpsLinks. The idea was to share his online readings in a weekly newsletter with other engineers, developers, and DevOps enthusiasts.

So, he put online a web page with a subscription form and waited for the very first subscriber.

One day later, he received some notifications from Gena, Stefan, Tarik, Paul, and many others who had joined the mailing list. And that's how the first subscribers got the first issue of the newsletter.

A few months later the project incorporated other newsletters:

• A newsletter about serverless technologies called "Shipped"
• Another one about Kubernetes and this wonderful ecosystem of orchestration and distributed systems - the newsletter is called "Kaptain".

Other newsletters are on the list and will soon be released, such as "Xenilla" which deals with topics related to Blockchain and BlockOps. "PyDog" the newsletter dedicated to the awesome programming language "Python" and "GoPanda", the newsletter that Go developers will love.

The project grew and became a set of newsletters, but that's not all. FAUN also has a Slack channel with thousands of subscribers, a job board, a Medium publication. And, today, this podcast that you've been waiting for, makes its way into the community projects.

This is the short story of FAUN.

Some months ago, someone on Slack asked, but what does the name FAUN mean?

Well, FAUN is the goat man. You know, the half-goat, half-human fantasy creature. With its horns, hooves, and twitchy tail, it may sound like a scary creature, but don't worry, Fauns are a symbol of peace in some mythologies, and they have their own undeniable charm.

They're generally friendly to the people trotting their woodland paths, and they're known for their love of music, dancing, jokes, delicious food, and the forest.

If you look at the newsletter, each one has a logo of a cute, adorable animal like the cow for DevOpsLinks. So for newsletters with animals logos, read by humans - a half-human, half-animal creature like FAUN should be the perfect name!

After all of these introductions, what's better than starting at the very beginning? DevOps.

If you look at the history of inventions, you'll certainly find out that doers came out with most of them before thinkers. You may not agree with me on this, but in the IT world, hackers are leaders.

There's something important we can learn from "Hackers and Painters" book written by Y Combinator founder Paul Graham: Hackers are more like painters than mathematicians.

So, hackers are more doers than thinkers.

We're talking about the old definition of hacker here: Back to 1960s, a hacker was an expert programmer, a passionate problem solver.

The MIT group defined a hack as a project undertaken or a product built to fulfill some constructive goal but also out of pleasure for mere involvement.

And this is precisely what drives enthusiastic developers: delivering useful products and solving problems for the sake of pleasure, self-fulfillment ... and profit undoubtedly.

In the DevOps movement, developers were involved in solving many of the problems that can be encountered in other models such as Waterfall.

From optimizing the development process, building better quality software, automating all testing to continuous development. The DevOps community has helped in solving real-world problems related to the application lifecycle and other essential aspects.

Working together in cross-functional teams, DevOps specialists and site reliability engineers ensure the smooth operation of several parts of a modern software-defined data center. Technically, several disciplines have emerged, and others have been transformed.

Some examples are:

Source Code Management (SCM), which is the task of tracking and controlling changes in the software.

Continuous Integration or the practice of merging all developers' working copies to shared repository preferably several times a day

Continuous Delivery which is the process of producing software in short cycles, guaranteeing that it can be released at any time.

There are many others like

• Packaging & Artifacts
• Virtualization
• Containerization
• Cloud computing
• Configuration Management
• Provisioning
• Orchestration
• Service Discovery
• Process Management
• Logging
• Monitoring
• Observability
• Visualization
• Security
• and Error Tracking

We're certainly going to consider most, if not all of these topics, learn new things about them, and share new stories in the upcoming episodes, so keep in touch and subscribe to our podcast on https://faun.dev/podcast.

Also, we'd love to hear from you. If you have a question, or a suggestion you can use the hashtag #AskFaun on Twitter or Instagram or email to community@faun.dev