DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #497 - 5th July 2020

A wide mix of posts this week, from academic papers, reference architectures for Serverless, embracing policy controls in the development process, chaos engineering and lots more.

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News

Dashboards aren’t just used in computer operations, and we can always learn from other disciplines. This excellent essay on the history of urban dashboards is well worth reading.
https://placesjournal.org/article/mission-control-a-history-of-the-urban-dashboard/

A project to describe a set of reference architectures for AWS Serverless applications. Lots of hard won knowledge here. Starting with a simple web service, scalable webhook and strangler pattern.
https://www.jeremydaly.com/serverless-reference-architectures/

An interesting paper on Residuality Theory, and the design of complex software systems. In particular looking at non-functional properties as first class citizens of design efforts.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877050920305585

A nice example of a team using Open Policy Agent and Conftest to enforce best practices and various policies when authoring Kubernetes configuration.
https://engineering.plex.com/posts/kubernetes-policy-conftest/

Notes from the recent HashiConf Digital. Lots of news and case studies around Terraform, Consul, Vault and more.
https://www.firehydrant.io/blog/hashiconf-digital-wrapup-june-2020/

A nice introduction to chaos engineering, putting it in context with other types of testing.
https://www.chaosmesh.com/chaos-engineering/

A presentation on the state of serverless, with lots of thoughts about where serverless is heading and what the most interesting problems are in 2020.
https://www.slideshare.net/TimWagner/aws-serverless-community-day-keynote-and-vendia-launch-6262020

A look at the Azure Service Operator, a set of custom resource definitions for Kubernetes for managing Azure services like Storage Account, Virtual Machines and Azure SQL,
https://medium.com/01001101/azure-service-operator-manage-your-azure-resources-with-kubernetes-69f49d9dbbc5

Tools

Vector is a lightweight, ultra-fast tool for building observability pipelines. Take data from files, syslog, statsd and more, then transform and output to S3, elasticsearch, prometheus, etc.
https://github.com/timberio/vector

Ortelius is a tool for mapping microservices. Version and track application configuration and help with adopting domain driven design.
https://github.com/ortelius/ortelius
https://ortelius.io/

BeeMesh is intended to run services on a cluster of machines, using a peer-to-peer model and podman under the hood. Potentially interesting in edge scenarios.
https://www.beemesh.io/
https://github.com/beemesh