DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #540 - 2nd May 2021

Cost efficiency, runbooks, using games to build teams, logging services, secrets management and more. Lots of core operations topics this week. Plus the return of an in-person event later in the year.

StackHawk sponsors Devops Weekly

Join StackHawk Tuesday May 4 at 9 am PT for a hands-on technical workshop! By the end of the session, you will have three types of security testing running in your GitHub pipeline. Register:
http://sthwk.com/tech-workshop

News

An interesting post covering a few topics, including Backstage as a platform for developer context and the movement to shift cloud cost control to development teams.
https://redmonk.com/jgovernor/2021/04/28/shifting-cost-optimisation-left-spotify-backstage-cost-insights/

A post on the importance of planning and runbooks for important operational activities, and a tribute to the astronaut Michael Collins, who passed away this last week.
https://flyingbarron.medium.com/michael-collins-carrying-the-fire-6ac19cdf0983

A nice post stepping back over the last 20+ years and considering the evolution of operations and the technology we’re operating.
https://www.effx.com/blog/the-evolution-into-devops-and-why-it-works-today

All of the videos from the DevX event last week have been posted, covering all things developer experience. This has been a focus for lots of teams building developer tools as the expectations have increased over the last several years.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3TSF5whlprUTnpP9drAl-knNUnPqKrui

A post on the importance of games as learning tools for operations teams, for improving team communication, incident response, delegation and more.
https://opsdrill.com/blog/games-devops-teams-play-to-stay-sharp/

A description of various anti-patterns when it comes to operating models, and in particular assuming one size fits all when it comes to large organisations.
https://www.remoteaf.co/blogs/operating-model-anti-patterns

There are now lots of SaaS services to help handle distributed logging challenges. This post (from one of the included vendors) provides a handy list and overview of some of the current offerings.
https://sematext.com/blog/cloud-logging-services/

Jobs

Are you interested in challenges outside “the cloud”? Would you like to utilize software engineering for best-in-class tailored solutions to our infrastructure? Would you like to participate in the design and implementation of core infrastructure systems?

Join Optiver as Infrastructure Software Engineer!

We look for Engineers with Linux Servers experience and an ability code in Python or have the propensity to pick it up. If you don’t consider yourself a developer, no problem! We’re also looking for individuals able to do scripting while working with Linux or networking low levels. Take a look here for further details of the role and how to apply:
https://www.optiver.com/working-at-optiver/career-opportunities/3090815/

Events

Monitorama is back, on the 13th to the 15th of September in Portland, Oregon. Yes, a real life in-person event. As always Monitorama will bring together the open source and operations communities in pushing the boundaries of observability software and practices.
https://monitorama.com/2021/pdx.html

Tools

Teller is a command line tool for managing and accessing secrets. It supports Hashicorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, Google Secret Manager, and more for secure storage.
https://github.com/spectralops/teller

gRPCurl is a command line tool for interacting with gRPC endpoints. It can browse remote schemas, show protocol buffers and send requests using JSON as input.
https://github.com/fullstorydev/grpcurl