1 minute read

Technology choices, several solid technical architecture posts, building an internal PaaS, monitoring and naming things. Lots to read this week.

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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:
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News

An argument for taking as much advantage of cloud-provided services as possible, rather than opting for what might be comfortable. Lots to argue over.
https://forrestbrazeal.com/2020/01/05/code-wise-cloud-foolish-avoiding-bad-technology-choices/

An interesting post on moving from storing configuration centrally in a service, to moving to a sqlite file-based database shared between multiple containers, and reaping a drastic performance benefit.
https://medium.com/@rbranson/sharing-sqlite-databases-across-containers-is-surprisingly-brilliant-bacb8d753054

A good talk on building technical infrastructure to support a development organisation, looking at building an internal PaaS.
https://srvaroa.github.io/paas/infrastructure/platform/kubernetes/cloud/2020/01/02/talk-how-to-build-a-paas-for-1500-engineers.html

One of the criticisms I’ve heard (and made) of Istio is it’s complexity, partly driven by the large number of services needed for the control plane. This post explains the problem, and also talks about how Istio is moving from this microservices architecture to a more monolithic one.
https://blog.christianposta.com/microservices/istio-as-an-example-of-when-not-to-do-microservices/

Istio is a popular service mesh component for Kubernetes. This detailed series of posts walks through what operation metrics it exposes and how to best monitor Istio to ensure it’s running correctly.
https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/istio-metrics/
https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/istio-monitoring-tools/

Monitoring systems still often require a fair amount of bespoke configuration. This post looks ahead at the potential to apply machine learning, and standardised formats, to the problem of dashboard creation and other domain problems.
https://www.zebrium.com/blog/the-future-of-monitoring-is-autonomous

A solid list of guidelines for building Kubernetes Operators that are actually operable, and which work together with others on the same cluster.
https://github.com/cloud-ark/kubeplus/blob/master/Guidelines.md

A few ambitious predictions for 2020 focused on the devops and cloud space.
https://www.contino.io/insights/devops-and-cloud-trends-2020

An introduction to the context of Security Debt. A counterpoint to Technical Debt, the post also makes a few recommendations for small teams in particular to avoid early on.
https://blog.sqreen.com/how-to-manage-security-debt-as-a-startup/

A spirited post on the problem with calling a team “a devops team”. Not a new topic, but some points in here about problems that can arise from the naming.
https://www.engineerbetter.com/blog/kill-the-devops-team/

Tools

Kubeform Kubernetes operator for Terraform. It contains generated custom resources for Terraform providers, meaning you can use CRDs to create cloud infrastructure.
https://github.com/kubeform/kubeform

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

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