Feature flags, incident response, complex adaptive systems and the return of Devops Days in a virtual format. Lots of variety this week.

env0 sponsors Devops Weekly

Preview environments give you better control over your infrastructure and a more reliable deployment setup. Check out how to set them up with Terraform.
https://www.env0.com//l/devops-wap-blog

About env0: use Terraform to let your team manage their own environments in AWS, Azure and Google. Governed by your policies and with complete visibility & cost management.

News

A good inside view of a series of incidents. Load balancer firmware, network connectivity issues and how it feels to be on the other side of an emerging incident.
https://m.signalvnoise.com/inside-a-code-red-network-edition/

A set of principles for managing feature toggles in teams, from making them visible to ensuring they are short lived.
https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/managing-feature-toggles-teams

A discussion of complex adaptive systems in relation to IT service management. Interesting points about the importance of constraint to limit negative emergent behaviour.
https://medium.com/@JonHall_/complex-adaptive-systems-ii-thinking-about-emergence-and-itsm-afec6c3305a3

Devops Days made a comeback in Chicago, with an online version. Talks on resilience engineering, growing a local devops community, chaos engineering as well as ignites and breakouts.
https://firehydrant.io/blog/devopsdays-chicago-2020-wrapup/

Tips for using third party software packages and images from public repositories, including considering availability, rebuilding from source and local caches.
https://stevelasker.blog/2020/09/01/consuming-upstream-content/

Open Policy Agent is powerful, but like any new tool has a learning curve. This 30 minute tutorial takes you through learning the basics of the Rego language.
https://academy.styra.com/

An excellent introduction to the basics of Kubernetes, covering core components, the general architecture and deploying your first applications.
https://luminousmen.com/post/kubernetes-101

Tools

oso is an open source policy engine for authorization that you can embed in your Java, Python, Ruby or Node application. It provides a consistent DSL and some good getting started documentation.
https://github.com/osohq/oso/

Gitleaks is a handy tool for detecting secrets in Git repositories, with integration with GitHub Actions and the ability to scan all repos in an organisation.
https://github.com/zricethezav/gitleaks

Continuous Machine Learning (CML) is an open-source library for CI/CD in machine learning projects. Automate model training and evaluation, comparing ML experiments across your project history, and monitoring changing datasets.
https://github.com/iterative/cml