DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #668 - 15th October 2023

Posts this week covering alert design, eBPF usage, LLM operations, new tools for secrets management and for instrumentation, and the latest DORA State of Devops report.

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News

Hints and tips for effective observability, looking mainly at good alert design.
https://medium.com/@letathenasleep/alerting-the-dos-and-don-ts-for-effective-observability-139db9fb49d1

A post on using open source LLM models, in particular focused on engineering for performance, including details of benchmarks and optimisation techniques.
https://www.databricks.com/blog/llm-inference-performance-engineering-best-practices

A detailed, technical, post on embracing eBPF for monitoring at the network layer and providing better control of a large microservice and infrastructure platform.
https://doordash.engineering/2023/08/15/bpfagent-ebpf-for-monitoring-at-doordash/

An interesting post on the ongoing FTX fraud trial, which highlights the importance of source code and source code management in understanding fraud and other intent.
https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/p/the-fraud-was-in-the-code

The latest DORA State of Devops report is out, which this year identifies 5 key takeaways on the importance of culture, user focus, fairness, documentation and flexible cloud infrastructure.
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/devops-sre/announcing-the-2023-state-of-devops-report

Tools

Tauri is a framework for building native desktop applications using HTML, CSS and Javascript. Built with Rust, and using native operating system capabilities to keep the file system down and provide native security capabilities.
https://tauri.app
https://github.com/tauri-apps

esc is a new tool for managing environments, secrets and configuration. It includes a CLI tool to provide just-in-time authenticated and short-lived access to cloud credentials amongst other features.
https://www.pulumi.com/blog/environments-secrets-configurations-management/
https://github.com/pulumi/esc

Autometrics looks like an interesting framework, aimed at making it easier to instrument an application. It generates Prometheus metrics and queries automatically, and automatically generates documentation linking to generated dashboards.
https://github.com/autometrics-dev/