A mix of posts, tools and events this week. Covering monitoring, infrastructure management, vulnerability management, data engineering and more.

StackHawk sponsors Devops Weekly

AppSec is full of nuances (and acronyms). Let’s start by drawing the line between API security testing and monitoring. Learn more here:
https://sthwk.com/api-testing-vs-monitoring

News

Collecting data is just the start of a good monitoring effort, and it’s easy to skimp on designing useful dashboards. This post has some good tips on effective dashboard design.
https://horovits.medium.com/unreadable-metrics-why-you-cant-find-anything-in-your-monitoring-dashboards-12fcc23d34c8

A post on AWS architecture, in particular looking at performance profile EC2 instances in order to determine the best fit for your needs. Fun fact, EC2 now supports over 400 different instance types!
https://blog.symops.com/2023/01/27/aws-performance-testing/

Infrastructure as Code and Terraform may not be new to many readers of this newsletter, but lots of teams are still getting started. This post is a nice introduction.
https://www.aviator.co/blog/getting-started-with-terraform-in-devops/

A big part of devops practices is building a culture of sharing and collaboration, and some teams adopt a formal writing style to do that. This post covers an internal tool called Hermes build to facilitate a large team collaborating on RFC style documents.
https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/introducing-hermes-an-open-source-document-management-system
https://github.com/hashicorp-forge/hermes

Events

SCaLE is back, March 9th to 12th, including several parallel events. It’s the largest community-run open-source and free software conference in North America. The code DEVWK will get you a 50% discount at registration. .

SCaLE March 9-12, 2023 www.socallinuxexpo.org

KCD LA March 9-10, 2023
https://community.cncf.io/events/details/cncf-kcd-los-angeles-presents-kcd-los-angeles-at-scale-20x/

DevOps Day LA March 10, 2023
https://www.devopsdays.org/events/2022-los-angeles/welcome/

Tools

OpenVex is a new project comprising a specification and accompanying tools for managing VEX documents, which are used alongside SBOMs to indicate whether vulnerabilities are exploitable in a given project.
https://github.com/openvex

Dolt is an interesting new MySQL-compatible database, which also supports a Git-like interface. You can fork, diff, merge and commit database instructions.
https://github.com/dolthub/dolt

Another interesting new data tool, Directus builds an instant REST and GraphQL API and no-code data collaboration app for any SQL database.
https://github.com/directus/directus