About Serena Serena Tiede is a SRE at Optum, a healthcare technology company that manages everything from the delivery of care to the management of patient data. Prior to becoming an SRE they were a Kafka operator for real time security logging and ingestion. In their off time, they moonlight as the proud admin of an incredibly over engineered Minecraft server.  Links:
Optim: https://www.optum.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/SerenaTiede

Personal Blog: https://blog.serenacodes.com

TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Your company might be stuck in the middle of a DevOps revolution without even realizing it. Lucky you! Does your company culture discourage risk? Are you willing to admit it? Does your team have clear responsibilities? Depends on who you ask. Are you struggling to get buy in on DevOps practices? Well, download the 2021 State of DevOps report brought to you annually by Puppet since 2011 to explore the trends and blockers keeping evolution firms stuck in the middle of their DevOps evolution. Because they fail to evolve or die like dinosaurs. The significance of organizational buy in, and oh it is significant indeed, and why team identities and interaction models matter. Not to mention weither the use of automation and the cloud translate to DevOps success. All that and more awaits you. Visit: www.puppet.com to download your copy of the report now!Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Thinkst. This is going to take a minute to explain, so bear with me. I linked against an early version of their tool, canarytokens.org in the very early days of my newsletter, and what it does is relatively simple and straightforward. It winds up embedding credentials, files, that sort of thing in various parts of your environment, wherever you want to; it gives you fake AWS API credentials, for example. And the only thing that these things do is alert you whenever someone attempts to use those things. It’s an awesome approach. I’ve used something similar for years. Check them out. But wait, there’s more. They also have an enterprise option that you should be very much aware of canary.tools. You can take a look at this, but what it does is it provides an enterprise approach to drive these things throughout your entire environment. You can get a physical device that hangs out on your network and impersonates whatever you want to. When it gets Nmap scanned, or someone attempts to log into it, or access files on it, you get instant alerts. It’s awesome. If you don’t do something like this, you’re likely to find out that you’ve gotten breached, the hard way. Take a look at this. It’s one of those few things that I look at and say, “Wow, that is an amazing idea. I love it.” That’s canarytokens.org and canary.tools. The first one is free. The second one is enterprise-y. Take a look. I’m a big fan of this. More from them in the coming weeks.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I’m Corey Quinn. A recurring theme of this show has been for a while, where does the next generation of cloud engineer come from because the path I walked of being a grumpy Unix admin isn’t really as commonly available as it once was, and honestly, I wouldn’t wish my path on anyone in good conscience. My guest today is Serena Tiede, who’s a site reliability engineer at Optim and didn’t start their career as a grumpy systems administrator. Serena, welcome to the show.Serena: Hey, thanks for having me. I’m so pumped to be here.Corey: Don’t worry, that will soon pass. What I’m wondering is, you didn’t come to be an SRE through a giant ops background of clawing your way up by dealing with hardware and data ce