The last issue of the year. It’s somewhat comforting to remember topics like service levels, monitoring, service-based architecture and ETL are all as relevant today as when I started this newsletter. At the same time new innovations and topics emerge, like WebAssembly or OpenTelemetry. Here’s to seeing what turns up in 2021.

env0 sponsors Devops Weekly

Big News Alert! Introducing remote-run support for Terragrunt workflows, now available in env0!
https://www.env0.com/blog/terragrunt-release

About env0: use Infrastructure as Code to let your team manage their own environments across clouds. Governed by your policies and with complete visibility & cost management.

News

SLOs, and any sort of change, generally needs management buy-in in order to properly implement. This post is a good example of how one team went about selling SLOs to engineering management.
https://medium.com/brexeng/how-to-sell-slos-to-engineering-directors-9c6379c3f246

A nice description of using WebAssembly to allow for untrusted code execution. WASM as a generic extension capability I think will become pretty common, nice to see a specific approach.
https://shopify.engineering/shopify-webassembly

Details of one team moving away from (some) microservices and merging code back into a monolithic application. Good discussion of the advantages and costs of microservices and how to right-size individual services.
https://www.bennadel.com/blog/3944-why-ive-been-merging-microservices-back-into-the-monolith-at-invision.htm

A good architecture post on building a realtime platform API, moving from polling to gRPC-based bi-directional streaming.
https://eng.uber.com/real-time-push-platform/

A post on how applying GitOps practices can improve the security characteristics of your deployment pipeline.
https://www.weave.works/blog/how-gitops-improves-security-development-pipelines

Most Dockerfiles are simple, but it’s possible to solve more complex problems too. This example shows cross-compilation patterns for expensive compilation targets.
https://www.docker.com/blog/compiling-qt-with-docker-multi-stage-and-multi-platform/

A look at OpenTelemetry and in particular it’s usage in Java applications.
https://lightstep.com/blog/opentelemetry-java/

Tools

Tobs is a distribution of monitoring tools for Kubernetes. Setup a full stack with Prometheus, Grafana, Promscale, Promlens and more with Helm or a custom CLI.
https://github.com/timescale/tobs

Singer is an open source toolkit for ETL. At its core is a specification, and a system of taps (for extracting data) and targets (for saving it).
https://www.singer.io
https://github.com/singer-io

Grafana-sync is a handy tool for syncing dashboards between Grafana installs using the Grafana API.
https://github.com/mpostument/grafana-sync