DevOps / SRE - Top Links Last Week

Week 5 - Issue #64

A Kubernetes Documentary Shares Google’s Open Source Story

"Kubernetes: the Documentary's" is an hour-long documentary (split into two parts) collaborating with Red Hat, Google, and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. The video "captures the story directly from the people who lived it," according to its description on YouTube. In addition, it features interviews with engineers and managers who built the software and made crucial decisions that enabled Kubernetes' growth. The CNCF's chief technology officer, Chris Aniszczyk, recalled that "It was a bit nerve-wracking having a film crew show up during the pandemic."

Automating quality checks for Kubernetes YAMLs

This blog post will show how to create a simple, automated quality check of your K8s object definitions using Datree and Google Kubernetes Engine and Github Actions. The workflow will have two stages: analysis of missing configurations, quality check, and testing an example application in a real cluster (GKE) Datree analysis will stop the workflow if it finds any problems. It's essential to have a safety net like this so you can feel confident that an assistant will keep you on track even if you make a mistake or aren't aware of best practices.

Store Secrets in Repositories (Safely), and Deploy Them With Terraform

Mozilla's SOPS is a tool developed and maintained by Mozilla. It lets us encrypt JSON and YAML files using different keys, like AWS KMS, GCP, age, and PGP. The tool was designed with simplicity in mind, and it comes with a CLI that you can use to encrypt and decrypt files. For the decryption, SOPS stores metadata in the created file itself and encrypts the values of the encrypted file. You can have more than one creation rule and different encryption keys for each one.

What Is Facter? A Comprehensive Guide to This Puppet Tool

Puppet is an open-source tool for managing today's complex business software environments. Instead of setting up dozens or hundreds of servers manually, Puppet automates the configuration of servers and services. Facter is a software tool that collects data about a Puppet node and reports it. Custom facts are built into Puppet and available as global variables, meaning you can use Facter facts to customize the way Puppet behaves. The data that Facter collects about a system is comprehensive and customizable, and customizable.

Measuring Gatsby projects build time using paid plans of popular static website hosting platforms

Jamstack is showing rapid growth these days, bringing a new life for the concept of static sites generation. The platform could make a massive difference in build performance for developers, designers, and marketers since no one wants to wait hours to see the changes live. Gatsby Cloud did the job within two min., which is eight times faster than Netlify - 16.01$ per build minute. AWS Amplify has an option to persist cache between builds, but it does not work if your build lasts more than 15 minutes.

6 Reasons to use Feature Flags

Feature flags have been a secret weapon at FAANG companies for many years. They let development teams move faster, reduce the burden on DevOps and QA, and enable product teams to make better data-driven decisions. However, until recently, it was not feasible for smaller companies to fully adopt this practice due to the complexity of building and maintaining a custom feature management platform. Today, there are several good options for teams of all sizes to use feature flags. Here are six reasons you should be using feature flags in your code.

Four Ways to Improve Your AWS Lambda

Here are four ways to improve the performance of your AWS Lambda function by polishing it. First, use X-Ray to inspect your code and trace your code to get to a faster and more scalable Function. Balance the cost and performance and balance the cost of execution. You can trace your code with X-Ray to see the cost per execution ratio (you can learn more from Casalboni's tool) and trace all non-AWS requests with the custom segment of your code. For example, the first invocation time is the same for all RAM tiers, and the invocation cost is increased per tier.