A few good case studies this week, along with articles on project governance, understanding how third parties are using your Puppet modules, AWS container benchmarks, monitoring Kafka and more.

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Episode 6 of the Ship Happens Podcast is here! Tammy Butow, Principal SRE and Executive Team Member at Gremlin talks about her journey into SRE, chaos engineering and the importance of on-call training. Check it out:
https://go.victorops.com/devopsweekly-ship-happens-tammy-butow

News

An excellent article on how to de-risking custom technology projects, looking at devops practices, incremental development, budgeting and other governance issues.
https://github.com/18F/technology-budgeting/blob/master/handbook.md

A look at one company’s deployment pipeline to Kubernetes, using a GitOps pull approach and FluxCD.
https://itnext.io/how-we-do-gitops-mettle-4cc771a6c029

When building software, understanding how it’s being used by others is often hard to determine. This post, and new tool, analyzes all of the public Puppet code and identifies breaking changes in downstream modules.
https://binford2k.com/2020/04/06/rangefinder/
https://github.com/puppetlabs/puppet-community-rangefinder

An interesting benchmark of how quickly AWS scales up container workloads using the different options; EKS, Fargate and ECS.
https://www.vladionescu.me/posts/scaling-containers-in-aws.html

A great Serverless case study, looking at a migration from a monolithic architecture to a 100+ Lambda functions running on AWS.
https://medium.com/lego-engineering/accelerating-with-serverless-625da076964b

An interesting look at Rust for developing against the Kubernetes APIs. Some general Rust observations, in particular in comparison to Go.
https://deislabs.io/posts/kubernetes-a-rusty-friendship/

Docker Compose is a wildly popular tool for standing up a stack of containers. A new effort is starting to standardise the format and make it more applicable to other platforms too.
https://codeengineered.com/blog/2020/docker-compose-spec/
https://www.compose-spec.io/

A set of posts on monitoring Kafka, looking at how to collect the various metrics and which ones are important for maintaining a performance cluster.
https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/collecting-kafka-performance-metrics/
https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/monitoring-kafka-performance-metrics/

Tools

Tilt is a development tool focused on helping manage the complexity of microservices. It now has a handy extension mechanism and a shared repository of extensions for various workflows.
https://github.com/windmilleng/tilt-extensions

Krustlet aims to make it easier to run WebAssembly code on Kubernetes, by providing a custom Kubelet implementation.
https://deislabs.io/posts/introducing-krustlet/
https://github.com/deislabs/krustlet

Episode 6 of the Ship Happens Podcast is here! Tammy Butow, Principal SRE and Executive Team Member at Gremlin talks about her journey into SRE, chaos engineering and the importance of on-call training. Check it out:
https://go.victorops.com/devopsweekly-ship-happens-tammy-butow