So, following up on 2 months in, what more have I done?
I have a better grasp of what we manage (a lot of stuff) and a tiny bit of office politics (sigh). I can start recognizing people, but only as names though MS Teams or Github or email (all microsoft products...).
Within our team, I also have a better idea of whose input to lend more weight to, and whose to question. Also started doing code reviews, if only because I feel sorry for regularly sending out PRs that touch 50-100 files at once. Yes I try to be detailed without being nitpicky.
Finally finished up the boring work of upgrades (lots of third party apps)
and migrations (ansible, helm2 -> helm3).
Added some more migrations like an elastic cluster
(that I don't think I did properly), because you can't have too many, right?
Oh, and some code cleanup and standardization while everyone was away
(formatter, unified build/deploy commands with make).
After a 2 month fruitless discussion on CI/CD I can finally push my preferred direction solution (split CI/CD + GitOps). Started dumping ideas on the team for automation, among the ones we investigated and are likely to adopt:
Security is also an ongoing focus: locking down permissions, having a private copy of all dependencies, rotating credentials, futzing around with iam, enabling security features in k8s ( shielded nodes cos_containerd ) and possibly in the future ( hierarchical namespaces workload identity network policy cilium ) as well as my current ongoing time sink: cloudflare bot management
Observability work is coming... soon... hopefully. I have ideas, but I do want to clear out this set of changes first.