Since one year, my life gone to hell⌫⌫⌫⌫ the newsletter

Celebration post 🎉🥳🎈

Yes, you are right! This is another non-technical post in this almost always technical newsletter. But look at the calendar! I started this newsletter nearly one year ago, on February 23rd. Byzantine emperor Justinian laid the first stone of the Hagia Sophia, Johannes Gutenberg published the Gutenberg Bible, and I started the newsletter! Everything was on the same day!

The long way to the newsletter

I started my blogs several times during the last twenty years. I started my first blog about twenty years ago. I remember that I had a new job in April 2005, and sometime before that, I started searching for my future colleagues on the Internet. I found many of them on livejournal.com and decided to start my blog there, too. It was not as dedicated to some technology as this newsletter, but it became well-known, and thanks to the blog, I met many interesting people.

In August 2009, I moved to Germany and was unemployed for many months. The other (good) side of being unemployed is that you have more than enough free time. I bought an old POWER4 box on eBay and started another blog in German. This time, it was about IBM Power.

Was it popular? I have no idea. I didn’t have any statistics. Some years later, one of my colleagues showed me a page he found online and saved it as a PDF for future reference. He then tried to explain to me how to use OpenFirmware. Yes, it was my OpenFirmware reference, which I had published many years before.

At some point, I received a warning from an IBM employee that I distributed IBM trade secrets and NDA information through my blog, even though I didn’t have access to such information. I decided to close the blog. I had a small business and didn’t have much time to write blogs at that time.

In 2019, I attended the GSE IBM Power working group session in Germany and heard presentations. Reinhold Farsch, ITGAIN, talked about using Vagrant to automate testing Db2 environments on x86 and was sad that he couldn’t use the same procedure on IBM Power. That was why I started the Power DevOps project and ported some DevOps software to the IBM Power platform.

I needed a way to inform the users of the ported software about new versions. I started the newsletter first using the tools provided by my hosting provider. It was terrible. It didn’t work as it should, and the formatting was always problematic.

The other problem is that informing people about new versions is cool but doesn’t help people too much. Let’s say you know a new Terraform or Inspec version can be downloaded from the site. What’s in it for you if you don’t know how to use them? I tried to make my newsletter more informational and failed again.

I wanted to continue writing my newsletter and provide more meaningful information to the readers, but I didn’t have a platform for it. I had a negative experience with my hosting provider and a similar negative experience with LinkedIn.

I asked on LinkedIn where I should blog. My good friend Lionel Clavien, InnoBoost Switzerland, suggested Substack. Thank you, Lionel, for the good advice! I am very satisfied with the Substack.

One year ago, I re-started my newsletter using Substack. It is now not only a newsletter; you can also read it as a blog on the site. You can use it as a podcast if you don’t have enough time to read it. Substack can read it for you if you use the Substack app.

What is this newsletter about?

Looking at the post titles, you may think I write only about Ansible. I consider this an “unfortunate” development of the newsletter. As the newsletter’s name implies, my idea was to write about DevOps tools and promote the DevOps culture in IBM Power environments. Automation is a very big and important topic, but not the only one if we talk about DevOps.

Even if my queue is packed with automation projects and posts, the idea is to help you and every IBM Power user get the maximum out of IBM Power boxes using modern tools and techniques.

My biggest achievement would be if every IBM Power shop were wholly automated and modernized. IBM Power is the best hardware in the world, supporting the three best operating systems—AIX, IBM i, and Linux. Unfortunately, many IBM Power users still live in the 1990s. They do their jobs manually, don’t think about integration with other enterprise systems, and use tools and techniques developed 50 years ago that they learned in their youth.

IBM Power is evolving. It is more performant with every generation. It solves the most critical problems of your enterprise. It can do more and more every year.

Yes, we had a significant decline when many AIX users migrated to Linux on x86 several years ago. However, in the last few years, not only existing IBM Power users have learned to value IBM Power. IBM sells more and more Power boxes every year, and the market is growing. Even “classic” workloads like AIX and IBM i are growing. New workloads like SAP HANA or OpenShift on Power are growing by two-digits.

We must learn, adapt to IBM Power, and use the best techniques developed in the x86 world.

As IBM Power users, we must match the platform: be more performant and able to solve our enterprises' most critical problems every year.

I hope I help you achieve these goals. I learn a lot with you writing the posts.

Schedule and posts

Every Friday, you receive a post from me—either as an email in your box or as a post in the Substack app. Of course, you can also open the site every Friday and read it online.

These Friday posts contain my thoughts and my way of solving a problem I have had in the past. Usually, they include some commands or code, like Ansible, that help automate the solution.

If you have any questions about these posts, comment under the post or reply to the email. The email address is actual, and I hope I get your email. If I do, I will answer it. Don’t expect an answer in seconds after you send the email. I have enough duties and will probably answer in the next few days. If you don’t get my answer, write another email one week later.

The Friday posts are archived after 2 weeks on the site and in the app. If you want access to them after 2 weeks, please save them in your mailbox.

There is an additional post almost every Wednesday. If the previous Friday post contained some code, like Ansible, the Wednesday post will have the whole playbook’s code. The Wednesday posts are usually available for paid subscribers. If you need some code, you can make a trial subscription - IIRC, you will get one month for free from Substack and can get the code.

So we came to the important topic:

Support the Power DevOps Newsletter!

Writing newsletters takes time, testing the code requires infrastructure, and no big company like IBM pays me for it. That’s why I have huge thanks and respect for everyone who decided to support me and make a paid subscription.

The paid subscription shows me that you, my readers, really need the information and encourages me to continue writing.

I understand that you probably use IBM Power because your company bought it. It is your company’s business, maybe not yours. If you think that your company should pay for it, let me know. You can get official tax-deductible invoices from Substack or from me. If you are in Europe, the second choice may be preferable for you.

Upgrade to our paid tier to unlock every article in the archive. Become a Founding Member for a little extra and book a 1-to-1 coffee chat with Andrey Klyachkin.

Spread the word!

I hope you could benefit from the information in the newsletter last year and will benefit from it this year and the following years. As I wrote, I have more topics in the queue and can definitely write about IBM Power, VIOS, AIX, and Linux on Power for the next several years.

Spread the word about the newsletter, tell your colleagues, and let’s have fun together!

Thanks for being with me!

Andrey

Hi, I am Andrey Klyachkin, IBM Champion and IBM AIX Community Advocate. This means I don’t work for IBM. Over the last twenty years, I have worked with many different IBM Power customers all over the world, both on-premise and in the cloud. I specialize in automating IBM Power infrastructures, making them even more robust and agile. I co-authored several IBM Redbooks and IBM Power certifications. I am an active Red Hat Certified Engineer and Instructor.

Follow me on LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube.

You can meet me at events like IBM TechXchange, the Common Europe Congress, and GSE Germany’s IBM Power Working Group sessions.