A few posts this week on choosing software, both of which touch on the desire to outsource operations. Another post on the evolution of the role of systems administrations which talks about the people-side of that shift.

env0 sponsors Devops Weekly

Tired of having to deal with manually managing resource tags across all your clouds? env0 just open sourced Terratag to make it easier to automatically tag all your resources!

Check out the blog for more details.
https://www.env0.com/l/terratag-for-devops

News

A post on one open source project’s search for a new CI system. Lots of useful research for anyone investigating CI and build systems.
https://buoyant.io/2020/09/16/linkerds-ci-kubernetes-in-docker-github-actions/

A good post on the evolution of systems administration, the embrace of devops, shifting responsibility and changing job titles.
https://medium.com/@brandonkenna/the-evolution-of-devops-and-why-we-are-here-f34771b3a70d

The idea of commercial off-the-shelf software is fine, but the reality often differs. This post explains the frustration and suggests it’s only COTS if you can get something up and running in a day.
https://sboots.ca/2020/09/16/fake-cots-and-the-one-day-rule/

Dependency management is an unfortunate consequence of a library ecosystem. This post, reviewing a recent paper looking at the Python ecosystem, has some interesting ideas and tooling demonstrations.
https://blog.acolyer.org/2020/09/21/watchman/

A look at Terraspace, a deployment tool for Terraform that provides some interesting high-level features and visualisation tools.
https://blog.boltops.com/2020/09/19/terraspace-all-deploy-multiple-stacks-at-once

AWS has grown to have several different overlapping approaches to managing users and accounts. This post looks at some of the nuance and makes some recommendations.
https://cloudonaut.io/aws-account-structure-think-twice-before-using-aws-organizations/

Krew, the plugin manager for kubectl, now supports custom indexes. So you can distribute kubectl plugins for your own projects or for internal company usage.
https://krew.sigs.k8s.io/docs/user-guide/custom-indexes/

Tools

version-checker is a Kubernetes utility for observing the current versions of images running in the cluster, as well as the latest available upstream. These checks get exposed as Prometheus metrics to be viewed on a dashboard.
https://github.com/jetstack/version-checker

Portus is an open source authorization service that sits atop a Docker container registry. It provides user management and a number of other useful features.
http://port.us.org/