1 minute read

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

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