A packed issue this week, with lots of posts and tools on everything from new serverless platforms to musings on microservices, team organisation, vendor selection and technical posts on testing containers and migrating build tools.

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News

A good post covering pros and cons of microservices, good questions to ask when designing systems and the posit that microservices are less about architecture and more an implementation pattern.
http://www.dwmkerr.com/the-death-of-microservice-madness-in-2018/

An interesting look at Amdahl’s Law, the Universal Scaling Law and what they mean for microservices and for how we’re organsing software teams. What is the cost in your systems of maintaining coherence?
http://www.michaelnygard.com/blog/2018/01/coherence-penalty-for-humans/

A detailed walkthrough of tooling build to automate some of the tasks around being on-call. Looking particularly at ways of bringing context along with alters and to where the operator is interacting with the system.
https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2017/12/open-sourcing-fossor-and-ascii-etch

A detailed look at a specific technology selection process - from determining who was responsible for what, to reviewing potential architectures and experimenting with the technology and finally making a decision.
https://codeascraft.com/2018/01/04/selecting-a-cloud-provider/

A tale of a 10x improvement in built times for a large repository, with some good practical tips for anyone else looking at the Bazel build tool.
https://redfin.engineering/we-switched-from-maven-to-bazel-and-builds-got-10x-faster-b265a7845854

A post on the importance of design when it comes to the operator experience. I particularly liked the points about designing data formats or DSLs where the operators interact with them directly.
https://medium.com/@aHev/designing-for-the-operator-experience-21b63db8143

A solid post on cloud adoption patterns. Covering immutable infrastructure, state management, event driven architecture, infrastructure as code and more.
https://hackernoon.com/10-lessons-from-10-years-of-aws-part-1-258b56703fcf

A handy comparison between Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes. I think this misses the point about them being different levels of the stack, but that’s a common misconception and I think the post makes some good points about opinionated developer tooling.
https://medium.com/@odedia/comparing-kubernetes-to-pivotal-cloud-foundry-a-developers-perspective-6d40a911f257

Container Structure Tests demonstrates a way of writing unit tests for your Docker images. It provides tools for different types of tests including file system assertions, running commands and asserting on the output and checking metadata.
https://opensource.googleblog.com/2018/01/container-structure-tests-unit-tests.html

CNCF - Cloud Native Computing Foundation

Free Webinar - Introducing Jaeger 1.0 January 16, Online

Learn about the features released in Jaeger 1.0, its architecture, deployment options, integrations with other CNCF projects, and the roadmap.
https://goo.gl/AWfDaZ

Events

Scatter ATX 2018 is the inaugural event for distributed teams and remote workers. Taking place March 21st and 22nd in Austin TX, this single-track conference will cover the tools, processes, habits, and challenges faced for remote workers in the modern age. If you’re already working remote, want to learn how to start, or are looking for remote-friendly opportunities, this is the event for you. Use the discount code SCATTEROPS for $50 off the ticket price.
http://scatter.us/

Tools

I’ll group these three new tools together. Dispatch, Riff and Nuclio are all new serverless platforms targeting Kubernetes (Nuclio can also be run standalone). Lots of projects in this space now and probably more to come. I’d love to see links to experience reports when people have tried them out.
https://github.com/vmware/dispatch
https://github.com/projectriff/riff
https://github.com/nuclio/nuclio

Rubiks is a tool for managing Kubernetes configuration. It provides a Python based internal-DSL for generating the configs and outputs to YAML or JSON for use in other tooling.
https://github.com/olx-global/rubiks

Argo is a workflow engine for Kubernetes, intended for usecases like continuous integration and deployment or data processing. It’s implemented as a Kubernetes Custom Resource so tools (like Rubiks above) can be used for managing the configuration.
https://applatix.com/open-source/argo/

Dockly is a nice looking command line GUI for Docker. If you want something more visual than the CLI, but don’t want to leave the terminal, this looks pretty handy.
https://github.com/lirantal/dockly

See how CloudBees Jenkins Solutions & VictorOps work together to bridge the on-call gap for CI/CD in this webinar. Register today.
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