DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #544 - 30th May 2021

The growing cost of cloud services, on-demand staging environments, defining SLOs in code, data sharing and several other topics this week across the devops spectrum.

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News

The DORA/Google State of Devops survey is open, focusing this year on metrics, how SRE fits with Devops, security and compliance, distributed teams and more.
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/devops-sre/take-2021-state-devops-survey-shape-future-devops
http://goo.gle/DORA2021Survey

A post on providing on-demand test environments for growing development teams, supported by a developer portal.
https://increment.com/containers/on-demand-staging-environments-kubernetes/

OpenSLO is a service level objective (SLO) language that declaratively defines reliability and performance targets using a simple YAML specification. Store your SLOs in Git, with tooling to help validation in your CI pipeline.
https://openslo.com

A post on the reality of cloud costs as organisations grow. Lots of useful insights into public data, mainly pointing out it’s more nuanced at scale for certain types of workloads.
https://a16z.com/2021/05/27/cost-of-cloud-paradox-market-cap-cloud-lifecycle-scale-growth-repatriation-optimization/

A reminder that system complexity can easily reduce uptime of the whole. The examples are simplistic, ignoring partial failures, but still a useful example to bear in mind.
https://which-50.com/how-systems-complexity-reduces-uptime/

A post on profiling production services using Prometheus and Jaeger.
https://medium.com/miro-engineering/profiling-in-production-to-detect-server-bottlenecks-321919d2da51

An in-depth look at autoscaling in Kubernetes. What problems does it solve, how is it implemented and how it works under-the-hood.
https://around25.com/blog/horizontal-pod-autoscaler-in-kubernetes/

Delta sharing is an open protocol for secure real-time exchange of large datasets, aiming to enable secure data sharing across products.
https://delta.io/sharing/
https://databricks.com/blog/2021/05/26/introducing-delta-sharing-an-open-protocol-for-secure-data-sharing.html

Tools

Open Policy Agent, and it’s Rego language, can be applied to lots of different problems. Confectionary provides a set of policies for testing Terraform plans. My hope is we’ll see more of these sorts of pre-packaged policies.
https://github.com/Cigna/confectionery