DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #523 - 3rd January 2021

The first issue of 2021, with posts on developer dashboards, long-running CI pipelines, compression and cloud service billing, message queue and more.

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News

A good discussion of the benefits of compression. Starting out with a nice case study of migrating log data, bit expanding to other data transfer use cases. Particularly interesting because of the numbers and showing the financial savings on cloud services.
https://blog.lawrencejones.dev/compress-everything/

Working to reduce the time taken for CI/CD pipelines is nearly always a good investment of time. This post covers a few areas you can likely optimise.
https://charity.wtf/2020/12/31/why-are-my-tests-so-slow-a-list-of-likely-suspects-anti-patterns-and-unresolved-personal-trauma/

A great introduction to message queues, with a detailed look at various software options including AWS and GCP services, Kafka, NSQ and NATs.
https://sudhir.io/the-big-little-guide-to-message-queues/

A quick introduction to Kyverno, an open source policy based tool for Kubernetes. In this example we’re shown how to easily automate adding labels to namespaces.
https://nirmata.com/2020/10/30/auto-labeling-kubernetes-resources-with-kyverno/

A strong argument for strong schemas when defining APIs.
https://buf.build/blog/api-design-is-stuck-in-the-past

Tools

Buf is providing a toolkit for making working with Protobuf APIs much easier, both for producers and consumers. Code generation as well as built-in linting and breaking change detection.
https://github.com/bufbuild/buf

Zap describes itself as a simple cross-platform configuration management and orchestration tool. Store reusable plans in HCL and run a variety of tasks against remote machines.
https://github.com/rtyler/zap

Clutch provides a platform for runtime changes to infrastructure. Out of the box it has lots of features, but it’s mainly about making it easy to build custom developer dashboards with extensions.
https://clutch.sh