Odd sending a technical newsletter at times like these, but on balance it’s nice to have something to read and new tools to experiment with. Several architecture posts this week, along with some interesting serverless content.

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News

A detailed look at the Envoy proxy, focused on usage patterns rather than technology. Interesting looking at the different use case, both low level and integrated into higher-level service mesh tooling.
https://mattklein123.dev/2020/03/15/on-the-state-of-envoy-proxy-control-planes/

An interesting post looking at using Kubernetes DaemonSets to help cluster administrators manage the cluster. Nice examples of provisioning SSH access to cluster nodes and running a virus scanning.
https://starkandwayne.com/blog/managing-your-kubernetes-cluster-with-daemonsets/

A discussion of abstractions and how that maps to serverless architectures and some thoughts on configuration management.
https://blog.softwaremill.com/abstractions-and-serverless-3dfaccaf85b6

A discussion of incident management practices, in particular looking at involving developers in incident response and on-call activities.
https://www.infoq.com/news/2020/03/engineers-incident-management/

Another post on architectural approaches to splitting up a large monolithic application, in particular looking at the strangler pattern and the importance of observability.
https://particular.net/blog/break-that-big-ball-of-mud

Analysis of a recent paper on analyzing characteristics of serverless usage, looking at the interesting optimisation where users want fast function start times and the cloud provider wants to minimise resources consumed.
https://blog.acolyer.org/2020/03/20/serverless-in-the-wild/

A post on the importance of egress filtering of network traffic. ALthough this particular post talks about Serverless, this is relevant to any architecture or infrastructure I think.
https://medium.com/swlh/egress-filtering-in-serverless-applications-25c2953a7290

Tools

Backstage is described as a platform for building developer portals. It has an impressive vision, to become a standard toolbox for the open source infrastructure landscape.
https://backstage.io/
https://github.com/spotify/backstage

Docker released a useful new GitHub Action which makes building and publishing Docker images easier. Some nice touches like automatic tagging and building multiple tags.
https://github.com/docker/build-push-action

With a surge of developers and IT practitioners working remotely, there’s also a surge of confusion and operational inefficiency. See how data and automation is improving the way DevOps and IT operations engineers build, release and maintain reliable services remotely:
https://go.victorops.com/devopsweekly-data-and-automation-for-remote-teams