DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #638 - 19th March 2023
From 40 year old technology in MX records to brand new technology in GPT-3, and lots in between this week.
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News
It’s often useful to know more about how the internet works that you think you need when it comes to investigating problems. This post delves into MX records in lots of detail.
https://www.netmeister.org/blog/mx-diversity.html
Large language models combined with chat interfaces provide a hugely powerful assistance capability. This post explores a few use cases related to systems management, from writing small utility scripts to answering configuration questions. Some tips for getting started too.
https://blog.devgenius.io/using-chatgpt-for-devops-7daa7c1783e9
A comprehensive list of best practices for using Terraform, covering modules, workspaces, tagging, variable usage and lots more.
https://spacelift.io/blog/terraform-best-practices
A nice walkthrough of adding metrics to prometheus, in this case for any xDSL modems.
https://grafana.com/blog/2023/03/17/how-to-monitor-an-xdsl-modem-using-a-prometheus-exporter-plugin-and-grafana-agent-on-grafana-cloud-with-grafana-oncall/
https://github.com/Dentrax/xdsl-exporter
How best to manage access to a DynamoDB database? It turns out there are quite a lot more options that you probably expect, but this post walks you through them.
https://blog.symops.com/2023/03/10/access-dynamodb/
An argument against infrastructure as code, at least for all use cases.
https://lukeshaughnessy.medium.com/infrastructure-as-code-is-not-the-answer-cfaf4882dcba
Tools
Chainloop is an open source software supply chain control plane, a single source of truth for artifacts plus a declarative attestation process. Taking a lot of the lower-level work on standards and frameworks, and lowering the barrier to adoption.
https://github.com/chainloop-dev/chainloop
A nice plugin for VSCode that generates a graphviz visualisation live alongside the HCL code.
https://github.com/adamiBs/vscode-terraform-live-graph
A small tool that grabs some aggregate information about GitHub Actions usage, including the number of workflows and average and total building time.
https://github.com/self-actuated/actions-usage