DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #500 - 26th July 2020

I sent the first issue of Devops Weekly on the 30th of November 2010. I definitely didn’t think for a minute that nearly 10 years later I’d be sending the 500th issue. Thanks to everyone who has subscribed. Thanks to the sponsors who have made it possible to keep running. And thanks to everyone who has written posts, given talks or built tools that have been featured in the newsletter.

env0 sponsors Devops Weekly

env0 lets you enable your entire dev team to create and manage their own cloud environments while maintaining total visibility, predictability, and governance over it.
https://www.env0.com/devops-self-serve

500 issues

Here are 5 posts still worth reading from Devops Weekly issues through the years.

Issue #1 But what is Devops? I know a number of people have signed up to this newsletter having only recently come across the term. It’s safe to say Devops means different things to different people at this early stage, but I’m going to start out by pointing everyone to James Turnbull’s WHAT DEVOPS MEANS TO ME
https://www.kartar.net/2010/02/what-devops-means-to-me/

Issue #100 Interesting set of blog posts, describing protocols or patterns for Devops adoption. The first two talk about the advantages of starting small and fixing a real problem quickly and about configuration management and limiting manual changes.
http://www.agileweboperations.com/devops-protocols-start-small
http://www.agileweboperations.com/devops-protocol-no-manual-changes

Issue #200 If you’re just getting to grips with monitoring it can be difficult to know where to start. This presentation gives you a quick overview of the last 5 years. Lots of ideas for things to improve.
https://speakerdeck.com/auxesis/5-years-of-metrics-and-monitoring

Issue #300 I attended the recent Operability conference in London and these two posts nicely summarise the various talks and provide lots of links to the slides.
https://skeltonthatcher.com/blog/operability-io-2016-operations-is-crucial/
https://skeltonthatcher.com/blog/operability-io-2016-operations-still-relevant-day-1/

Issue #400 Good tips for ensuring the software release process is robust, emphasising that this means clear ownership and treating deployment software like the critical production system it is.
https://charity.wtf/2018/08/19/shipping-software-should-not-be-scary/

News

It’s that time of year again. The regular Puppet State of Devops survey is open. The focus this year is the relationship between change management, continuous delivery and self-service platforms.
https://polls.onresearch.net/xsurvey/20JT028/20JT028T1/Survey.aspx?ckie=true

Documentation and design serve a critical role in building robust systems. This post looks at why design documents are useful and what sort of thing they should include.
https://www.industrialempathy.com/posts/design-docs-at-google/

A new report on the state of public Terraform code security. Some useful data and some good tips for anyone using Terraform to configure services.
https://bridgecrew.io/blog/state-of-open-source-terraform-security-report-2020/

A look at using Azure Pipelines to validate a sysmon configuration automatically.
https://medium.com/falconforce/using-azure-pipelines-to-validate-my-sysmon-configuration-48315dba7571

A good story of migrating a low-level component at scale, in this case an application server. Canary rollouts, upstream contributions, performance and other interesting topics.
https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/07/08/migrating-to-puma-on-gitlab/

Embracing cloud native technologies and ways of working comes with challenges, some of which this post documents, including security, lack of expertise, slow release cycles and more.
https://www.cloudops.com/2020/07/top-7-challenges-to-becoming-cloud-native/

Tools

kube-iptables-tailer does just what you expect. It exposes the underlying iptables data to kubectl, Handy for spotting services trying and failing to communicate to one another in Kubernetes.
https://github.com/box/kube-iptables-tailer

Kconmon is a Kubernetes connectivity monitoring tool that runs frequent tests (tcp, udp and dns), and exposes Prometheus metrics that are enriched with the node name, and the locality information (such as zone), enabling you to correlate issues between availability zones or nodes.
https://github.com/Stono/kconmon