Brent Laster

GitHub Actions Deep Dive

9:00 AM MDT

In this full-day workshop, open-source author, trainer, and DevOps director Brent Laster will provide an extensive introduction to GitHub Actions. You’ll learn about the core parts and pieces that make up an action, as well as the types of functionalities and features they provide.
You’ll also see how to combine them in simple workflows to accomplish basic tasks as well as more advanced workflows to automate typical CI/CD and other tasks. And you’ll learn about
how to create and use your own actions, create and manage artifacts, and how to debug and secure your GitHub Action workflows.

This course will leverage hands-on, guided labs using GitHub and GitHub Actions so that participants can gain “real-world” experience with GitHub Actions.”

Advanced Kubernetes – Gaining Mastery over your Deployments

8:30 AM MDT

In this ½ day course, author and trainer and DevOps Director Brent Laster will take you beyond the basics of Kubernetes to understand the advanced topics you need to know to ensure your success with K8S.

In plain and simple explanations and hands-on labs, you’ll learn about key concepts such as RBAC, admission controllers, affinity, taints and tolerations mean and how to use them. You’ll learn tips to debug your Kubernetes deployments and how to leverage probes to ensure your pods are ready and healthy – and what happens when they aren’t.

Along the way, we’ll give you hands-on experience and time to play with these concepts in a simple minikube environment running on your own virtual machine that you can keep as a reference environment after the course.

Advanced Kubernetes – Gaining Mastery over your Deployments

10:30 AM MDT

In this ½ day course, author and trainer and DevOps Director Brent Laster will take you beyond the basics of Kubernetes to understand the advanced topics you need to know to ensure your success with K8S.

In plain and simple explanations and hands-on labs, you’ll learn about key concepts such as RBAC, admission controllers, affinity, taints and tolerations mean and how to use them. You’ll learn tips to debug your Kubernetes deployments and how to leverage probes to ensure your pods are ready and healthy – and what happens when they aren’t.

Along the way, we’ll give you hands-on experience and time to play with these concepts in a simple minikube environment running on your own virtual machine that you can keep as a reference environment after the course.

Jenkins vs GitHub Actions

1:00 PM MDT

GitHub Actions is the popular automation platform that integrates with your GitHub repositories to easily provide Continuous Integration/Delivery/Deployment and more. If you're someone working with GitHub, there is a significant benefit to using this automation platform integrated in the GitHub ecosystem.

But, what if you have already invested in another CI/CD automation platform such as Jenkins? Is it worth the effort to move? What are the advantages and disadvantages? How do you best go about it?

Join DevOps director and author of “Learning GitHub Actions” Brent Laster to understand the different dimensions and options you have when comparing Jenkins and GitHub Actions and if you choose to migrate from Jenkins to GitHub Actions.

In this 90-minute session, you'll learn:

• Brief intro to GitHub Actions
• How do Jenkins and GitHub Actions compare
• What kinds of things do you need to consider if planning to migrate
• How do you go about migrating if you decide to do it

Prerequisites: Familiarity with Jenkins

Securing GitHub Actions

3:00 PM MDT

GitHub Actions is the popular automation platform that integrates with your GitHub repositories to easily provide Continuous Integration/Delivery/Deployment and more. But, as with any integration that has access to your source code and can execute automation related to it, there is a very real risk of incurring security issues.

Join DevOps director and author of “Learning GitHub Actions” Brent Laster to understand the different risk dimensions you have when using GitHub Actions and how to best shield your repositories, workflows, and actions against them.

In this 90-minute session, you'll learn:

• Common vulnerabilities that can affect GitHub Actions
• Areas and approaches to secure your work with GitHub Actions, including:

– Security by configuation - implementing appropriate controls and settings to govern what can run and when

– Security by design - leveraging tokens and secrets and to secure data; guarding against common threats such as untrusted input; securing dependencies

– Security by monitoring - reviewing changes especially when coming through pull requests; scanning; monitoring execution

Prerequisites: Good working knowledge of GitHub Actions

GitOps with ArgoCD

5:00 PM MDT

Managing Kubernetes manually is hard. Successfully updating your deployments requires following multiple steps while paying attention to myriad details—even a simple mistake can drastically affect your cluster and the applications running in it. And finding the source of problems and rolling back the state of a system can be nearly impossible when changes are made by human operators.

The GitOps pattern eliminates these issues. With GitOps you manage the state of your deployments in text files that can be stored, tracked, reviewed, etc.—in other words, treated like any other file in Git. And an “Ops” function automatically ensures that your Kubernetes system is set to your desired state. GitOps removes all the pain points and exposure that come from human interactions and automates the entire process.

Join DevOps director, open-source author, and trainer, Brent Laster to explore GitOps and learn about using Argo CD to implement GitOps for your Kubernetes deployments.

In this 90-minute session, you'll learn:

• What the GitOps pattern is
• How GitOps can be implemented to achieve automation
• How GitOps interacts with a Kubernetes system
• How GitOps can be integrated with other tools to multiply the benefits

Prerequisites: Basic working knowledge of Git and Kubernetes