DevOps / SRE - Top Links Last Week

Week 1 Issue #8

How to use Terraform modules to create an AWS ECS cluster with an attached ALB.

This blog post will show you what resources I used to containerize my front end code in docker, host the image in AWS ECR, and deploy it to AWS ECS with an application load balancer directing traffic to multiple instances in ECS cluster with all the necessary roles, policies and permissions to deploy your application. If you’re interested in the Terraform modules, check it out here.

Who’s at the Helm?

Most of today’s cloud infrastructure is still being built on duct tape and kite strings. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, unless someone tries to drive a train across it. I’m particularly worried about this today in the area of open source supply-chain management. To identify and illustrate some of these gaps, I spent a day playing around with Helm 3 — “The package manager for Kubernetes.”

Please consider supporting the Weekly DevOps / SRE Report. Subscribe to the phpops Newsletter on our website!

Software Is Drowning the World

One of the many upsides I’ve had from working at lots of organisations is that you get to see what’s common. Are things like this everywhere? Frequently, the answer is yes!

AWS Automation: EBS Volume Encryption

The goal for this article is to protect the data in our volumes by encrypting its operations with the application. If the data in our application/system is encrypted, we can guarantee our users a more reliable and secured experience.

DevOps Girls 2020 in Review

In total, there were 15 events run by DevOps Girls in 2020. This is by far the most we’ve ever run as a community! We don’t have 100% accurate numbers for attendance, but we can guess that at least 100 people attended our events over the year.

New Year’s Resolution: A DevOps Transformation

DevOps is a cultural shift that combines development and operations into a single team. The automation framework is a key backbone to implementing a successful DevOps transformation. This article details the practical stages to implement DevOps on your stack.

DevSecOps — Baking Security into Development Process

In simple words, DevSecOps is a process of baking security into the engineering process early on. You integrate and automates security processes and tooling into all the development workflow so that it’s seamless and continuous.

Using Prometheus to Monitor Kubernetes Clusters Running Cloud Foundry

Telemetry lies at the heart of every application that needs to be optimized for performance. In addition, every abstraction layer built over the cloud infrastructure running these applications introduces a new set of parameters that need to be observed for potential failures.

Testing in Infrastructure as Code and why Terraform may not be the best option

Often, when we talk about Infrastructure as Code tools, Terraform comes to our minds. It is great for maintaining your infrastructure state and talking to your cloud provider’s API, but you have to write code in HCL, which is not a real programming language. Is it bad? Sometimes yes, especially when it comes to writing unit tests. Let’s check how we can test the Terraform code and what we can use instead, and have real unit tests!

The CI / CD odyssey

Who never heard the term CI/CD? Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery are common practices widely used by most technology companies as part of the development cycle to make product development faster.

GitOps — the way for Kubernetes

The entry of containers and container orchestrators has surely altered the DevOps landscape. Many new challenges followed Kubernetes in the world of DevOps and to address those hurdles novel strategies and tools were introduced. ‘GitOps’ is one of the strategies that aims to solve that problem. The term ‘GitOps’ was coined by Alexis Richards, the CEO and founder of WeaveWorks. Yes, this is the same company that also introduced the FluxCD for the Kubernetes and has been advocating GitOps for a long time.

DevOps What's it all about? Part 4- Tooling and Culture?

Before the creation of time, there were both devs and ops: ancient arch-enemies and rival tribes. Developers were called programmers, and they were the ones who would write the programs that were running on the computers. Operators were the people who operated the machines. They were making sure that the computers were working and available to the users.

Understanding Connections and Pools

Connections are the hidden mechanism using which computer systems talk to each other—and they've become so fundamental that we overlook how important they are, how they work, and when they fail. We're often ignorant of them until there's a problem, which usually shows up a massive failure when our systems are doing their most amount of work. But because they're present everywhere and are so important in pretty much every system, they're worth spending a little time understanding.