A new year and lots of posts on continuous delivery and operational resilience this week. If anyone has any 2020 prediction posts, or posts looking back on 2019, let me know too as I’ll feature a few.

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If moving from a SysAdmin role into a DevOps-centric role is part of your 2020 resolution then you can’t miss this walkthrough for evolving your skillset:
https://go.victorops.com/devopsweekly-sysadmin-to-devops

News

A post outlining a set of principles for what the authors calls production oriented development. Lots of good tips and practices for building and running services.
https://medium.com/@paulosman/production-oriented-development-8ae05f8cc7ea

A nice review of a recent incident, looking at the timeline of what happened and what being resilient in the face of failure means.
https://m.subbu.org/studying-an-incident-8dffdd641c78

A look at using Terraform to manage resources on Kubernetes. The example uses EKS, which nicely shows the integration with AWS APIs in the same Terraform code.
https://medium.com/@Joachim8675309/deploy-kubernetes-apps-w-terraform-266f3e8028d2

An interesting look at the concept of data gravity applied to cloud providers, modelling out different data scenarios and looking to come up with a formula that can be used when making architecture decisions.
http://blog.thestateofme.com/2020/01/03/an-economic-model-for-data-gravity/

A nice primer on applying service level objectives, service level indicators and error budgets to improving service reliability.
https://medium.com/kudos-engineering/managing-reliability-with-slos-and-error-budgets-37346665abf6

It’s the new year so some folks are writing predictions for 2020. This post looks at the Kubernetes ecosystem. I like a lot of the ideas here, though I’m more skeptical than the author about how quickly some of them will happen.
https://medium.com/@dlorenc/unsolicited-kubernetes-predictions-for-2020-e38dc822e472

A case study of adopting continuous delivery, moving from a release every 2 weeks to 25+ releases a week. Nice breakdown of benefits and challenges.
https://medium.com/wandera-engineering/you-build-it-you-release-it-the-path-to-continuous-delivery-c5a4d7edd75d

A few tips for reducing the time spent on deciding whether or not to release, critically important when making the move to continuous delivery.
https://unremarkabletester.com/2019/11/20/some-ideas-for-reducing-release-decision-time/

A walkthrough of installing and using Open Policy Agent Gatekeeper in Kubernetes to restrict what resources can do via the API.
https://marcyoung.us/post/gatekeeper-v3/

A nice Prometheus monitoring for beginners post which goes over the what, why and how if you’re just starting out.
https://itnext.io/prometheus-for-beginners-5f20c2e89b6c

Tools

Tanka is a utility for managing Kubernetes configurations using the jsonnet data language. It’s intended as a drop-in replacement for ksonnet.
https://tanka.dev/
https://github.com/grafana/tanka/

If moving from a SysAdmin role into a DevOps-centric role is part of your 2020 resolution then you can’t miss this walkthrough for evolving your skillset:
https://go.victorops.com/devopsweekly-sysadmin-to-devops