A few posts this week reminding us that storage and state make everything harder.

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News

A new podcast focused on real world devops stories. The first episode focuses on database management and how to bridge the DBA silo.
https://www.realworlddevops.com/episodes/episode-001-silvia-botros

Building teams often involves some amount of recurring meetings. This post introduces a set of useful meeting plans aimed at teams adopting SRE practices.
https://tech.mangot.com/blog/2019/01/09/an-agile-sre-meeting-plan/

Storage, and generally adding state into applications, makes things harder to manage. Kubernetes doesn’t magically solve this problem. This post does a good job of explaining the current state of storage in the cloud-native ecosystem.
https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2019/01/11/why-is-storage-on-kubernetes-is-so-hard/

ITSM in general, and ITIL in practice, tend not to get much discussion in small, or fast moving technology companies. This post acts as a primer to thinking in services, and what you can learn from frameworks like ITIL.
https://medium.com/@kaimarkaru/what-startups-should-know-about-itil-137195ba5694

Following on from last week’s monorepo posts, another follow up that makes the case for monorepos in some situations, but also hits on the important point that teams, and organisations, can be different and have different problems to solve.
https://presumably.de/monorepos-and-the-fallacy-of-scale.html

Lots of discussion around how to address different types of flakey tests, from testing in production to CI pipeline configuration and from computational precision to non-deterministic test cases.
https://tech.forter.com/0flake-reaching-reliable-non-flaky-tests/

A good set of devops and related events around the world this year.
https://techbeacon.com/best-devops-conferences-2019

Very high-level, but good straightforward advice, and a good reminder, for making backups.
https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/guidance/backing-your-data

A detailed walkthrough of adding tracing to a Javascript based application using Jaegar, and deploying the application to Kubernetes.
https://rhonabwy.com/2019/01/06/adding-tracing-with-jaeger-to-an-express-application/

Tools

Varlink is an interface definition language. It allows for describing a type-safe interface and then generating code (in C, Java, Python, Go and more) to deal with both CLI interface interactions and wire-protocol interactions.
https://varlink.org/

mkcert looks like a handy tool to generate all the required bits to have local applications served over HTTPS. The blog post does a good job of explaining why this is a good idea.
https://blog.filippo.io/mkcert-valid-https-certificates-for-localhost/
https://github.com/FiloSottile/mkcert

DevOps teams can leverage time series databases and TSDB monitoring tools to create observability into system health and optimize processes over time. Learn all about time series database monitoring tools and the benefits for DevOps and incident detection:
http://try.victorops.com/devopsweekly/tsdb-monitoring-for-devops