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.

StackHawk sponsors Devops Weekly

Bridge the gap between security and development teams by sharing valuable context on common web application threats. Check out 5 common threats to address together here:
https://sthwk.com/common-web-threats

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