DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #399 - 17th August 2018

Everything from the challenges of running stateful workloads on Kubernetes to tools for managing Kafka, via the problem with healthchecks and discussion of ITSM and digital transformation.

Sponsor

On-call doesn’t have to be a horror movie. Incident response data and tools can be used to improve on-call rotations, escalation policies, and collaboration. Read about some on-call horror stories and see how you can better avoid on-call disasters:
http://try.victorops.com/devopsweekly/avoiding-on-call-disasters

News

An interview discussing the challenges of running database workloads on top of Kubernetes, applicable to many stateful workloads.
https://gravitational.com/blog/running-postgresql-on-kubernetes/

The second post in a series on patterns for helping organisation adopt devops and agile practices and principles. This post focuses on the benefits of making things smaller in scope to achieve the biggest impact over time.
https://medium.com/@jonathansmart1/want-to-scale-agile-dont-descale-the-work-first-achieve-big-through-small-7bdd09962540

Encouraging organisations to change practices and adopt devops principles can rarely be done by edict. This post delves a bit into how to build alliances between different business units or groups.
https://medium.com/@cote/creating-alliances-and-holding-zero-sum-trolls-at-bay-3047c5804e34

A detailed post on healthchecks in distributed systems, the problems of binary determinations and what to do in the case of a failing check.
https://medium.com/@copyconstruct/health-checks-in-distributed-systems-aa8a0e8c1672

A tale of going from no appreciable monitoring to instrumenting a application and it’s infrastructure, and identifying some large performance gains in the process.
https://buildchimp.me/Through-a-Dashboard-Darkly/

An argument that ITSM and devops are more closely aligned than people sometimes thing, with the interesting observation about the common mistake of underestimating the importance of culture.
https://www.thinkhdi.com/library/supportworld/2018/devops-itsm-why-are-we-arguing.aspx

A quick comparison, along with examples, of using different tools to configure an AWS serverless environment, looking at Terraform, Serverless framework and the new AWS CDK.
https://blog.james-mullen.me.uk/2018-08-04-how-many-ways-can-you-skin-infrastructure-as-code/

An interesting behind-the-scenes look at the architecture and technology stack for an ecommerce operation. Discussion of technology choice over time and the tools used to build and deploy the applications.
https://shopifyengineering.myshopify.com/blogs/engineering/e-commerce-at-scale-inside-shopifys-tech-stack

A set of useful serverless use cases (like email, video processing, cron, etc.), albeit with examples tied heavily to AWS functionality.
https://www.simform.com/serverless-examples-aws-lambda-use-cases/

Jobs

We’re hiring a DevSecOps Engineer onsite here at HelloFresh in Berlin. Our ideal candidate is passionate about contributing to open source, security, and loves to automate things! You can get a taste of what we’ve been working on by checking out our engineering blog linked below.

If you love food and want to work for one of the fastest growing companies in Europe then don’t hesitate to apply. We’ll support you with full relocation assistance to Berlin if needed.

Engineering blog: https://engineering.hellofresh.com/ Job description/Application: https://grnh.se/5d8e54541

CNCF - Cloud Native Computing Foundation

EnvoyCon is taking place on December 10th in conjunction with KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America. Interested in sharing your expertise on Envoy? Submit a proposal to speak by August 24th!
http://bit.ly/2OjkMIp

Events

DevOps Sessions & Tutorials at Open Source Summit Europe

October 22 - 24, 2018, Edinburgh, UK

Open Source Summit Europe, October 22-24 in Edinburgh, UK is the premier open source event in Europe and offers DevOps professionals a unique opportunity to learn how to more efficiently manage environments, migrate legacy infrastructure, integrate the latest tools, and much more. Network with your community peers in the hallway track, or get educated on cutting edge technology - like Serverless and Kubernetes - in the 300+ sessions. Whether you’re interested in DevSecOps, infrastructure automation or container testing and orchestration tools - you will have the chance to learn about the latest advances and best practices.

View the full schedule, and save 15% with discount code OSSDEVOPS15.
http://bit.ly/DevOpsOSS18

Tools

Kafka-Kit is a collection of tools for managing kafka clusters, including tools that handle partition to broker mappings, failed broker replacements, storage based partition rebalancing, and replication auto-throttling.
https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/engineering/introducing-kafka-kit-tools-for-scaling-kafka/
https://github.com/DataDog/kafka-kit

On-call doesn’t have to be a horror movie. Incident response data and tools can be used to improve on-call rotations, escalation policies, and collaboration. Read about some on-call horror stories and see how you can better avoid on-call disasters:
http://try.victorops.com/devopsweekly/avoiding-on-call-disasters