A broad range of ops topics this week, from the new (chaos engineering, cloud cost management) to the old (security, database operations, branch strategies).

From our sponsor, VictorOps

Our people and tools need to be connected now more than ever before. That’s why VictorOps is offering free, 90-day extended Enterprise trials for on-call incident response and alert management, up to 100 users, to anyone who needs it:
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News

A detailed write up from the recent Failover Conf on all things chaos engineering. Lots of notes and links to related content.
https://www.firehydrant.io/blog/failover-conf-wrapup/

A good post for any software developers needing to operate databases, in this case PostgreSQL. Covers tracing, query profiling, slow query logs and more.
https://medium.com/scopedev/introduction-to-profiling-and-optimizing-sql-queries-for-software-engineers-3cf376ecc712

A look at applying feature branches to infrastructure, automatically provisioning new Terraform workspaces for testing distinct changes.
https://medium.com/env0/from-feature-branches-to-feature-environments-with-terraform-652c0fdf0e78

Related to the above post, this article covers patterns for using source control branches effectively.
https://martinfowler.com/articles/branching-patterns.html

A tutorial on managing exceptions in policy, using Open Policy Agent and Conftest. Looking at testing different types of Dockerfiles.
https://menendezjaume.com/post/policy-as-code-exceptions-lists/

An excellent recorded conversation, and transcript, on securing software. Covering the challenge of increasing complexity, the cost of vulnerabilities and lots more.
https://trendtalks.fyi/cloud/2020/the-security-of-software/

A writeup of the new cf-for-k8s project, which provides a way to run Cloud Foundry on top of Kubernetes.
https://starkandwayne.com/blog/deploy-cf-for-k8s-to-google-in-10-minutes/

A look under the hood of Docker images, exploring the underlying overlay filesystem and the OCI specification.
https://dev.to/napicella/how-are-docker-images-built-a-look-into-the-linux-overlay-file-systems-and-the-oci-specification-175n

A set of tips for managing your cloud bills, looking at optimising applications, understanding your invoices, precommits and other ways to cut costs.
https://www.cloudops.com/2020/04/8-ways-to-cut-cloud-consumption-costs/

Tools

Paketo is a new project, providing a set of curated, high quality, cloud native buildpacks for common languages and frameworks. Use with pack or other tools to build container images quickly with minimal configuration.
https://medium.com/paketo-buildpacks/building-apps-for-kubernetes-get-to-know-paketo-buildpacks-6dc29b0f3cf3
https://paketo.io/

Our people and tools need to be connected now more than ever before. That’s why VictorOps is offering free, 90-day extended Enterprise trials for on-call incident response and alert management, up to 100 users, to anyone who needs it:
https://go.victorops.com/devopsweekly-extended-trials-for-incident-response