DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #393 - 8th July 2018
Some great posts this week on important topics, including the economics of serverless, management in organisations adopting devops, and the importance and risks of metrics and measurements.
Sponsor
Tooling for your DevOps teams can maximize collaboration and ultimately reduce time to incident remediation. Check out some of these awesome tools to help you make on call suck less:
http://try.victorops.com/DevOpsWeekly/on-call-tools
News
An excellent, detailed analysis of the economics of serverless - looking at when EC2 pricing is more efficient than AWS Lambda. Lots of data and the assumptions made.
https://www.bbva.com/en/economics-of-serverless/
A post on the human scalability of devops. Lots of good points, although the arguments are based on a specific definition and a startup usecase. In my experience large organisations are better about the non-fungibility of engineers.
https://medium.com/@mattklein123/the-human-scalability-of-devops-e36c37d3db6a
Metrics and measurement are important parts of adopting devops but using the wrong metrics, or not evolving those metrics as your organisation evolves, can be problematic.
https://medium.com/@JonHall_/metrics-and-measurement-some-lessons-for-devops-from-itsm-c2a02e47a857
Some interesting, practical, observations around managing teams adopting devops practices. Devops tends to encourage multi-functional teams, but what management structures best support those functions working well together?
http://techalignment.com/managing-for-devops/
Etcd underpins Kubernetes as well as a number of other distributed systems, so understanding how to manage, and in particular upgrade, it is crtiical.
https://gravitational.com/blog/kubernetes-and-offline-etcd-upgrades/
If everything is a DNS problem then a good understanding of DNS is essential. This series covers everything from resolvconf to dnsmasq and the anatomy of a DNS lookup on Linux.
https://zwischenzugs.com/2018/06/08/anatomy-of-a-linux-dns-lookup-part-i/
https://zwischenzugs.com/2018/06/18/anatomy-of-a-linux-dns-lookup-part-ii/
https://zwischenzugs.com/2018/07/06/anatomy-of-a-linux-dns-lookup-part-iii/amp/?__twitter_impression=true
A look at how you can use Helm to deploy self-signed certificates along with services to Kubernetes.
https://medium.com/nuvo-group-tech/move-your-certs-to-helm-4f5f61338aca
An introduction to using AWS Secrets Manager, including password rotation and integration using AWS Lambda.
https://sanderknape.com/2018/07/manage-custom-secrets-aws-secrets-manager/
Jobs
Pearson are on an exciting mission to change education for the world. Our new digital platform is at the centre of how we transform a 174 year old FTSE-100 company, if you want to be part of bringing a better quality of learning to the entire planet and have a passion for using new technology to enable cloud native services, then we are actively hiring for Site Reliability Engineers in the United States and Sri Lanka. See more about what we do and sign up here:
https://pearson-technology.jobs/jobs/?q=SRE
https://kubernetes.io/case-studies/pearson/
Events
The O’Reilly Velocity Conference heads to New York City and London this fall
Velocity helps engineers and developers build the systems that power modern businesses. Join your peers in New York City (Sep 30-Oct 3) or London (Oct 30-Nov 2), and learn the strategies and tools you need to make your systems fast, resilient, and secure. Topics include systems performance, containers, monitoring and observability, cloud infrastructure, security, and more. Check out the program and pricing for each event here:
https://oreil.ly/2yUELKM
Tools
Creating and managing self-signed certificates for local usage can be tricky. Mkcert looks like a handy tool with a simple user interface.
https://github.com/FiloSottile/mkcert
Reg is a useful command line tool for interacting with a Docker registry; listing repositories and tags, retrieving manifests and digests and downloading individual layers.
https://github.com/genuinetools/reg
Tooling for your DevOps teams can maximize collaboration and ultimately reduce time to incident remediation. Check out some of these awesome tools to help you make on call suck less:
http://try.victorops.com/DevOpsWeekly/on-call-tools