DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #658 - 6th August 2023

In-depth posts on graph databases and ChatGTP function calling, along with posts on building an SRE team, observability, CI configuration and more.

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News

A comprehensive post on graph databases, testing several leading candidates, looking at ingestion speed, query performance, client compatibility and lots more.
https://mihai.page/testing-graph-databases/

Some tips on building a successful SRE team, from focusing on developer training to building the right abstractions, and from optimising for self-service to automating yourself out of a job.
https://medium.com/@hans.knechtions/building-a-successful-sre-team-283232bc2694

A post considering the security issues raised by improved observability, noting anonymisation and aggregation as two tools to help.
https://medium.com/@joshuajrau/the-dark-side-of-observability-are-we-inviting-cyber-attacks-a4a00ebc46d6

A look at one company’s approach to solving observability challenges, looking at APM, exception tracking and custom tooling to help build a good user experience.
https://greenlight-engineering.medium.com/from-blind-spots-to-clear-insights-the-evolution-of-observability-tools-and-practices-at-225e5f87faf

An introduction to function calling in ChatGPT, building a simple (but powerful) conversational interface in Python.
https://semaphoreci.com/blog/function-calling

Expiring SSL certificates is an all-too-common problem, and worth setting up monitoring to avoid. This post looks at a wide range of services to help.
https://sematext.com/blog/ssl-certificate-monitoring/

Tools

Wolfi-act is a new tool that aims to make managing software used in GitHub Actions easier, installing packages from Wolfi based on a declarative configuration.
https://www.chainguard.dev/unchained/wolfi-act-dynamic-github-actions-from-wolfi-packages
https://github.com/wolfi-dev/wolfi-act

jless is a handy command line tool for reading, exploring and searching through JSON data.
https://jless.io/
https://github.com/PaulJuliusMartinez/jless