Starting off this week with a post on operability, a topic that probably deserves more focus that it normally gets when discussing new technology.

From our sponsor, Victorops

System visibility is DevOps 101. With cloud-based applications, DevOps teams need a whole different set of tools for monitoring, alerting, and incident management. So, we laid out some helpful resources for maintaining more robust cloud services:
http://try.victorops.com/devopsweekly/cloud-services-tools

News

A good slidedeck on the importance of operability as a shared concern for development and operations teams. Discussion of modern logging, metrics, runbooks and more.
https://www.slideshare.net/ConfluxDigital/5-practical-operability-techniques-for-teams-matthew-skelton-addo-2018

An excellent experience report of using Istio, looking at the overhead imposed by current versions and the cost/benefit analysis of adopting any middleware.
https://tech.bigbasket.com/bigbaskets-experience-with-istio

A slide deck on withstanding regional outages in infrastructure environments. Looking at availability, latency and cost. Lots of diagrams to explain the context.
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1mE80byUHpNUAm7E7O0jKVLPdHzC-i7R-v3yBEcXWOzQ/edit

A handy way of testing your Kubernetes cluster configuration. Specifically this post shows how to check RBAC rules using the handy can-i subcommand and then with bats.
https://medium.com/yld-engineering-blog/testing-kubernetes-rbac-5e00dc93af8e

An interesting post on avoiding some of the disadvantages of using an ORM, looking at approval testing to avoid issues introduced at the SQL level.
https://blog.remix.com/orm-we-approve-60f2a68f73fb

This set of content rounds up the concept of Chaos Engineering nicely. A bit of history, the importance of failure in complex distributed systems and how to use chaos monkey and more recent tools.
https://www.gremlin.com/chaos-monkey/

An example of using the kubeless serverless framework on Kubernetes. Useful Python examples of reading Kubernetes events as well.
https://leebriggs.co.uk/blog/2018/10/16/using-kubeless-for-kubernetes-events.html

A detailed set of posts which cover both the architecture of Pivotal Cloud Foundry and also the important metrics and logs to pay attention to in order to run a production-quality cluster.
https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/pivotal-cloud-foundry-architecture/
https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/pivotal-cloud-foundry-metrics/
https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/collecting-pcf-logs/

A post on balancing building your own tooling with using existing tools, and resisting not-invented-here.
https://opensource.com/article/18/10/nice-things

Jobs

Close.io is hiring a DevOps Engineering Team Lead! We are a ~30 person entirely remote team (~13 engineers) that is profitable and building a product our customers love. You will be doing both hands-on technical work yourself and managing a small remote team (2-3) of exceptional Senior SRE/DevOps Engineers.
https://jobs.lever.co/close.io/26369307-318c-4fee-893d-a1d3d0e4ae1c?lever-origin=applied&lever-source%5B%5D=DevOpsWeekly

Tools

Kubehiera is a port of the Hiera tool popular with Puppet users for managing hierarchical configuration, for example for different environments. In this case Kubehiera is aimed at rendering Kubernetes configuration.
https://gitlab.com/msvechla/kubehiera/blob/master/README.md

A provisioner for Terraform which allows for running inspec-based acceptance tests during the run.
https://github.com/inspec/terraform-provisioner-inspec

System visibility is DevOps 101. With cloud-based applications, DevOps teams need a whole different set of tools for monitoring, alerting, and incident management. So, we laid out some helpful resources for maintaining more robust cloud services:
http://try.victorops.com/devopsweekly/cloud-services-tools