DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #539 - 25th April 2021

It feels like we’re at the time of year where interesting events are starting to crop up. DevX Conf and Failover Conf mentioned below coming up this week definitely qualify and KubeCon EU is in a couple of weeks. Posts on platform teams, handover, incident commanders and more as well.

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News

A strong argument for why you need a platform team to really benefit from running on Kubernetes.
https://polarsquad.com/blog/why-you-need-a-platform-team-for-kubernetes

In a growing organisation, ownership of services will naturally move from team to team over time. This post contains some great tips on how to make those types of transitions more successful.
https://developers.soundcloud.com/blog/how-to-successfully-hand-over-systems

A post on using the role of incident commander to aid in addressing operational incidents smoothly.
https://increment.com/reliability/technical-incident-command/

I’m a fan of light-weight community metadata standards. a8r.io is a set of annotations for Kubernetes objects for finding things like runbooks, issue tracking, log viewers, chat channels, etc.
https://ambassadorlabs.github.io/k8s-for-humans/

AsyncAPI is a project aiming to make building and working with event driven architectures easier. Open source tools and specifications similar to OpenAPI.
https://www.asyncapi.com/

A post on using preemptible nodes on GCP. These are unreliable by design, so implementing chaos engineering approaches is even more critical.
https://expel.io/blog/migrating-gke-preemptible-nodes-making-space-for-chaos-monkeys/

Lots of teams are managing increasingly large Kafka clusters. This post introduces Cruise Control and some of it’s features for rebalancing and visualising cluster workloads.
https://medium.com/teads-engineering/visualization-in-kafka-cruise-control-83da2e0a93e3

Jobs

Do you love solving business problems? Are you driven by translating what you see into the design and implementation? Are you looking to automate and manage day-to-day operations of software and hardware infrastructure? Optiver are hiring Site Reliability Engineers!

As Site Reliability Engineer you will deploy, maintain, monitor and improve the reliability, scalability and performance of our in-house built trading software. You will sit on the trading floor together with the end-users and set standards for the production environment – it is an engineering role, not a support role. You will have a real, direct impact on our ability to trade and trading results. You will work with short feedback loops and flat hierarchy. No two days are the same!
https://www.optiver.com/working-at-optiver/career-opportunities/1470795/

Events

DevX Conf is coming up this week on the 28th and 29th of April. A virtual conference dedicated to developer experience. 20+ speakers covering everything from code editors to collaboration, and build and release tooling to monitoring and security. The focus throughout is on bringing back joy and speed to our workflows.
https://devxconf.org

This year’s Failover Conf won’t be like any other virtual conference, with panel discussions, lightning talks, fireside chats, dance parties, pet slideshows, tons of swag, and more. Join us for discussions on reliability, DevOps, and SRE on April 27th at 9am PDT.
https://go.gremlin.rocks/3v69tZD

Tools

ConsoleMe is a web service that aims to make AWS IAM permissions and credential management easier for end-users and cloud administrators.
https://github.com/Netflix/consoleme

Early, but very interesting. Zellij is on the surface just another terminal multiplexer. But it’s webassembly plugin system and plans for a browser based interface look interfacing for sharing reusable UIs.
https://zellij.dev/news/beta/

Qovery is a high-level cloud application platform. It provides an interface based around Git and branches but deploys to your cloud environment, supporting AWS, Azure and GCP.
https://github.com/Qovery/engine