DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #602 - 17th July 2022

A classic week where I wonder if there were enough interesting posts, before diving into a wealth of interesting content. Operations, explaining SRE to management, high-level architecture for observability, infrastructure self-service and abstractions, databases and more this week. Enjoy.

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News

Still loving this series of posts on what we can learn about operations from the James Webb space telescope. The latest post covering day 2 operations.
https://flyingbarron.medium.com/day-2-operations-with-the-james-webb-space-telescope-is-about-to-begin-44049577d382

Whether it’s relevant to the CEO will depend on the organisation, but a useful post on making the economic argument to managers for adopting SRE practices.
https://www.nobl9.com/resources/how-to-explain-sre-to-your-ceo

A look under the hood of one company’s observability platform. Details of the original design goals and high level architecture.
https://medium.com/workday-engineering/pharos-the-observability-platform-at-workday-a2c0355a9427

Infrastructure self-service is often a question of the abstractions (or not) that you choose to provide to consumers. This post looks at an example of using Crossplane to implement such a system.
https://www.innoq.com/en/articles/2022/07/infrastructure-self-service-with-crossplane/

In-person events are making a comeback, and it’s nice to see posts like this covering some of the highlights. This post covers the recent Monitorama event, great to see it make a come back.
https://observe-check-react.medium.com/monitorama-2022-what-an-amazing-experience-9e58e84a91b3

Some thoughts on moving beyond Git for version control. It definitely feels like a local maxima with Git. The consistency has had lots of benefits, but it still feels like a space with untapped opportunities. Also, it mentioned DARCS which I loved.
https://dev.to/yonkeltron/is-it-time-to-look-past-git-ah4

Often understanding the basics of how something works, makes it easier to use. This handy post explains database indexes in just enough detail. Examples for MySQL, but much more widely applicable.
https://planetscale.com/blog/how-do-database-indexes-work

A post covering everything to do with PostgreSQL logs. How to find them, what information they contain, types of logs and more.
https://sematext.com/blog/postgresql-logs

Tools

OpenSLO is a specification for defining SLOs, intended to enable a common, vendor–agnostic approach to tracking and interfacing with SLOs. Interesting to see the Kubernetes API influence.
https://github.com/OpenSLO/OpenSLO

Salus is a new tool for generating an SBOM (software bill of materials). Specifically it supports SPDX 2.2 and has some interesting file hash capabilities. We’re seeing an explosion of tools like this recently.
https://github.com/microsoft/sbom-tool
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/engineering-at-microsoft/microsoft-open-sources-salus-software-bill-of-materials-sbom-generation-tool/