DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #659 - 13th August 2023

Distributed systems, incident management and reliability culture, OpenTelemetry, databases and more. A good mix this week of super technical posts and more people and process focused content.

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News

How do you build a culture of reliability? This post looks at the introduction of a single metric to drive conversations, called a Service Delivery Index.
https://slack.engineering/service-delivery-index-a-driver-for-reliability/

How best to organise teams for incident management? This post looks at centralised vs distributed structures and the pros and cons of each.
https://firehydrant.com/blog/exploring-distributed-vs-centralized-incident-command-models/

A nice walkthrough of instrumenting an application with OpenTelemetry. The example is in Go, but the introduction does a good example of explaining the fundamentals.
https://tripathy-sibaprasad.medium.com/opentelemetry-a-beginners-handbook-to-instrument-your-application-861f40f2b4d8

PostgreSQL can be used for a wide range of sometimes surprising database needs. This post explains how to store graph data in Postres.
https://www.dylanpaulus.com/posts/postgres-is-a-graph-database/

How do you make the business case for investing in a new tool? Given the current financial situation in many companies, this is likely a more rigorous process today than before.
https://liblab.com/blog/how-to-convince-management-to-invest-in-tools-you-need

As your application grows, invariably you run into data management issues. This long post is a good primer on why, starting with ACID and describing the challenges with distributed transactions and multiple datastores.
https://wso2.com/whitepapers/transactions-in-a-microservice-world/

Tools

Travelgrunt is an interesting tool for navigating a Terraform/Terragrunt monorepo. It’s a replacement for cd, providing shell aliases to make moving around much quicker and more intuitive.
https://github.com/ivanilves/travelgrunt

Protobom is a new project providing a protobuf description of a SBOM, aiming to facilitate easier conversation between existing SBOM formats.
https://github.com/bom-squad/protobom
https://www.chainguard.dev/unchained/can-protobom-end-the-sbom-format-wars