DevOps / SRE - Top Links Last Week

Week 13 - Issue #72

The Black Swan Events in Distributed Systems

The Black Swan Events in Distributed Systems look at a real-life metastable failure. This class of incidents that continue to keep going even after the initial trigger has been removed are called metastable failures. These incidents can cause system outages for an extended time; it could be hours or even days. The Infamous EC2 and RDS Service Disruption are so important that we should know about them to learn from these events. Although this type of event happens ever so rarely, when they do occur, they cause havoc.

We don’t use a staging environment

Squeaky uses pre-live environments, such as development, staging, and feature-level environments, to test our latest changes before they end up in front of our users. We only have two environments: our laptops and production, and our main branch. We have a flat branching strategy, and all changes get merged back into the main branch and get back into production. We believe it's helping us ship faster and lower the number of issues on production. There are various elements to our approach, but most importantly: we only merge code that is ready to go live in production.

Integrating with GitHub Actions – CI/CD pipeline to deploy a Web App to Amazon EC2

Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) is among the essential things to start building. In addition, CI/CD practice reduces the time it takes to release new software updates by automating deployment activities. In this post, you will use GitHub Actions and AWS CodeDeploy to deploy a sample Java SpringBoot application to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances in an Autoscaling group. The solution utilizes the following services: GitHub Actions, CodeDeploy, and GitHub. CodeDeploy is a deployment service that automates application deployments to Amazon EC2 instances.

The Okta Mess Is Even Worse Than It Appears

Hacking group LAPSUS$ revealed they'd gotten their way into Okta's systems and showed off screenshots. Okta said an attack had been made on Okta's computer via a third-party customer support engineer's computer. The attacker had started a Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) session on the laptop. From there, the attacker used the SuperUser application. Okta states that it only gives read access to some files despite the scary name.

Software Estimation: Points vs. Time

Some teams prefer to estimate in units of time, such as hours or days. Others prefer to use story or effort points to represent the amount of effort over time. Here are some examples of when I would recommend using points to estimate your project using time. When a team is in constant flux, it may be easier to estimate using a range of time. Remember to use a unit of measurement that works for the team, and yes, you may be choosing between points and time.