DevOps / SRE - Top Links Last Week

Week 20 - Issue #79

From PHP to Next.js: What Trivago Learned Rewriting Its Web App

Hotel search service Trivago rewrote its frontend in Typescript on the Next.js framework, replacing a PHP codebase on Melody's homegrown JavaScript framework. From April 2020 until late 2021, the platform team created, tested, and deployed the new application, which reduced daily page size by up to 37%, increasing code releases. It was a massive undertaking, especially when nothing was inherently "wrong" or broken with the codebase. The team implemented an incredibly methodic, pragmatic approach to tackling touch engineering questions and ultimately reaching the decisions.

How to build a Helm plugin in minutes

Helm is an excellent addition to the Kubernetes ecosystem. The Helm plugin is a system that allows you to seamlessly integrate with the Helm flow and run custom code that's not part of the Helm core code. Helm knows the settings for your plugin, the command it executes when the plugin is run, and hooks for customizing the plugin lifecycle. In addition, helm provides under-documented (the closest thing I found to documentation was here) capability for hooking into the plugin's install, update or uninstall commands.

History of Web Applications

A website ranges from a marketing website for a product to a full-blown social media platform. What starts as a traditional website with HTML and CSS, returned from a web server, turns into a way more difficult full-stack application with sophisticated client-server communication and state management. This comprehensive guide shows you the evolution of web development from website to web application, where we clarify terms like the client, server, frontend, and backend.

Comparing Graviton (ARM) Performance to Intel and AMD for MySQL

Recently, AWS presented its CPU on ARM architecture for server solutions. However, some reviewers said that Graviton does not show any significant results and, in some cases, showed fewer performance results than Intel. So, we decided to investigate it and do our research regarding Graviton performance, comparing it with other CPUs (Intel and AMD) directly for MySQL. The test is designed to be CPU bound only, so we will use a read-only test to ensure no I/O activity during the trial. Monitoring was done with Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) OS: Ubuntu 20.04.

Nginx Modern Reference Architectures

NGINX Modern Reference Architectures repository has the basics for a common way to deploy and manage modern apps. We define modern app architectures as those driven by four characteristics: scalability, portability, resiliency, and agility. Over time, we'll build more example architectures using different deployment models and options – including other clouds – and you'll be able to find those here. The project is under active development, and the current work uses Pulumi with Python. Pulumi is a modern Infrastructure as Code tool that allows you to write code (node, Python, Go, etc.) that defines cloud infrastructure.