DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #604 - 24th July 2022

Lots of topics this week, from technology learning materials to DNS, and formal methods to alert design, plus several azure infrastructure management tools.

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News

High quality learning material is hugely useful given the large number of technologies relevant to modern software development and operations. This set of crash course posts on Docker, Kubernetes, AWS and Terraform look super useful for anyone just getting started.
https://blog.gruntwork.io/the-docker-kubernetes-terraform-and-aws-crash-course-series-dca343ba1274

What’s the maximum size of a DNS response? If you thought the answer would be straightforward you’ve not dealt with DNS enough.
https://www.netmeister.org/blog/dns-size.html

Synchronisation in real-world distributed systems is a surprisingly complex problem. This post looks at an example, and how lightweight formal methods can be used to ensure correctness.
https://jakub-m.github.io/2022/07/17/laport-clocks-formal.html

An in-depth look at AzOps, a highly integrated approach to managing Azure infrastructure with out-of-the-box pipelines and tooling built-in. Includes a good list pros and cons.
https://www.singlestoneconsulting.com/blog/a-look-at-azops-for-azure-infrastructure-management/

Designing good alerts is tricky, but important if you’re to make them useful and avoid alert fatigue. This post has some tips and discussion about improving alerts.
https://medium.com/@tophatengblog/alerts-what-are-they-good-for-fe085e9ab4db

A post about the utility of checklists in software development teams.
https://www.etsy.com/codeascraft/a-checklist-manifetsy

Tools

A handy tool for bootstrapping the use of Terraform for an existing Azure environment. It generates Terraform code directly from existing Azure resources.
https://github.com/Azure/aztfy

KDL is a new document language with some interesting ideas. It’s intended to be suitable as a serialisation format and as a configuration language.
https://kdl.dev/

Kubefire is a new tool for creating and managing Kubernetes clusters based on FireCracker microVMs.
https://github.com/innobead/kubefire

Carbon is an experimental successor language to C++. Basically designed for anyone who can’t just move to Rust or other languages. Carbon is to C++ what TypeScript is to JavaScript.
https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang