Messaging middleware, containers and CI systems, speeding up encryption and a few useful tools for anyone managing AWS this week.

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News

A series of posts on common message-based middleware patterns using NATS. An introduction on the benefits of message architectures, setup instructions and more.
https://choria.io/blog/post/2020/03/23/nats_patterns_1/
https://choria.io/blog/post/2020/03/24/nats_patterns_2/
https://choria.io/blog/post/2020/03/25/nats_patterns_3/
https://choria.io/blog/post/2020/03/26/nats_patterns_4/
https://choria.io/blog/post/2020/03/27/nats_patterns_5/

A detailed look at improving the performance of disk encryption in Linux.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/speeding-up-linux-disk-encryption/

Many CI systems have adopted Docker containers to run the compute. This post explains why that’s useful, and how and why to build customer images to support your toolchain.
https://spin.atomicobject.com/2020/03/22/custom-docker-image-ci/

A useful post on observability and tracing, with some good explanatory diagrams and discussion of opentracing.
https://medium.com/swlh/tracing-and-observability-9ab98438d773

An explanation of how to catch recent API changes in your Kubernetes configuration using Open Policy Agent, Conftest and GitHub Actions.
https://opensource.com/article/20/3/deprek8

A post in praise of AWS S3. The influence of S3 is hard to argue against and this post explains why.
https://info.acloud.guru/resources/brazeal-in-praise-of-s3-the-greatest-cloud-service-of-all-time

A starter kit for managing Helm charts using Helmfile. The repository introduces an opinionated workflow and provides examples of separating out per-environment configuration.
https://github.com/paulczar/helmfile-starter-kit

Tools

ssmsh is a handy shell for AWS EC2 Parameter store. The UI is modelled after a simple filesystem, so browsing parameters is immediately intuitive with ls, mv, rm and the like.
https://github.com/bwhaley/ssmsh

A set of small tools for using AWS Systems Manager, including opening an interactive shell and running a command on multiple instances based on instance tags or names.
https://github.com/disneystreaming/ssm-helpers

Major incidents lead to more alerts, more downtime and unhappy customers. See how modern DevOps-minded teams are building virtual war rooms to quickly mobilize cross-functional engineering and IT teams around major incidents – improving incident remediation while reducing burnout:
https://go.victorops.com/devopsweekly-war-rooms-for-major-incidents