Everything from how work works in organisations, when to adopt microservices, scaling database migrations, several posts on Terraform best practices and more this week.

From our sponsor, VictorOps

Host extraordinaire, Benton Rochester, talks with Gene Kim about DevOps and his excellent new book, The Unicorn Project. Don’t miss this highly-anticipated episode of Ship Happens, the Splunk + VictorOps podcast:
https://go.victorops.com/devopsweekly-ship-happens-with-gene-kim

News

A post on organisational friction, and getting things done where work crosses team and other boundaries. Lots of examples and a useful framing of this type of problem.
https://noidea.dog/blog/surviving-the-organisational-side-quest

Microservices are one architectural approach, rather than the answer to all systems problems, at least according to this post on the tradeoffs and design decisions of choosing to adopt microservices.
https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/should-i-use-microservices

An interesting discussion of the role of database migrations, looking at historical approaches and a new automated approach using GitHub Actions.
https://github.blog/2020-02-14-automating-mysql-schema-migrations-with-github-actions-and-more/

Most things in Kubernetes go through the API Serverer. That makes the Kubernetes audit log, which records those requests, a powerful monitoring tool. This post explores what it contains and how you can use that data effectively.
https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/monitor-kubernetes-audit-logs/

A fantastically comprehensive look at what’s new in the latest Salt release. Far more than just a list of features, the post puts new capabilities in context and shows lots of examples.
https://salt.tips/whats-new-in-salt-neon/

A nice migration story, moving a CI/CD pipeline from Jenkins to Concourse. Observations about improvements and expectations as well as difficulties. The fly CLI tool looks nice.
https://wgtwo.com/blog/replacing-jenkins-with-concourse/

Infrastructure described with Terraform is still code, and applying programming techniques like refactoring to keep it maintainable is important. This post explains why and shows a few examples.
https://blog.doit-intl.com/refactor-terraform-into-modules-the-right-way-7bce4d57d66a

Another post on writing maintainable Terraform code. Lots of examples and a seet of rules around modules, data, interpolation, state and more.
https://medium.com/capital-one-tech/terraform-poka-yokes-writing-effective-scalable-dynamic-and-error-resistant-terraform-dcbd6a0ada6a

This post nicely summarises why Go has made such an impact on infrastructure and cloud-based applications, outlining several of the advantages of the runtime and toolchain in particular.
https://rakyll.org/go-cloud/

Events

Devops Days New York is coming up on March 3rd and 4th with the usual mix of talks, ignites and open spaces. Interesting topics like lifecycle management, product management for operations teams, CI/CD pipeline sprawl and more. TIckets are available now and you can get a 15% discount with the code “devopsweekly”.
https://devopsdays.org/events/2020-new-york-city/registration

Tools

Preflight is a tool for verifying a Kubernetes cluster is configured correctly using an opinionated set of Open Policy Agent policies.
https://github.com/jetstack/preflight

Host extraordinaire, Benton Rochester, talks with Gene Kim about DevOps and his excellent new book, The Unicorn Project. Don’t miss this highly-anticipated episode of Ship Happens, the Splunk + VictorOps podcast:
https://go.victorops.com/devopsweekly-ship-happens-with-gene-kim