DevOps / SRE - Top Links Last Week

Week 53 Issue #7

Is Hindsight Still 2020? Reviewing the Year in Tech

So what happened in 2020? We aren’t going to recap that roller coaster of terror. If you just woke up from a coma, we suggest easing back into the news as we experienced it, one long day at a time. Instead, let’s focus on the tech side of things.

AWS Lambda Terraform Cookbook with working examples

The objective of this tutorial is to understand AWS Lambda in-depth, beyond executing functions, using Terraform. This tutorial walks through setting up Terraform, dependencies for AWS Lambda, getting your first Lambda function running, many of its important features & finally integrating with other AWS services.

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New setup for 2020

This year, we simplified and improved the changelog.com setup further by replacing Docker Swarm and Terraform with Linode Kubernetes Engine (LKE). Not only is the new setup more cohesive, but deploys are 20% faster, changelog.com is more resilient with a mean time to recovery (MTTR) of just under 8 minutes, and interacting with the entire setup is done via a single pane of glass:

Terraform plan in Pull Requests with GCP Cloud Build

Running Terraform locally just to review a pull request always was a bit of a pain in the ass. Good thing is, there are some nice people running projects like Atlantis and if you host them by yourself or use Spacelift, you’re good to go.

A simplified view of Kubernetes cluster and its components/architecture

In this blog we will look at a very simplified view of how does a Kubernetes cluster looks likes, and what are its different components. In the other blogs of this series we will see how to create K8s cluster on local or cloud, and how to deploy applications on it.

Dockerfile Best Practices

This repository has best-practices for writing Dockerfiles that I (@slimsag) have quite painfully learned over the years both from my personal projects and from my work @sourcegraph. This is all guidance, not a mandate - there may sometimes be reasons to not do what is described here, but if you don't know then this is probably what you should be doing.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to DevSecOps

DevSecOps refers to the DevOps practice with embedded security operations. This is realized through automating and integrating security processes into Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery (CI/CD). Ideally, we should not need to call out the Sec (in DevSecOps) because DevOps should include the security operations. However, security was an after thought in many early DevOps implementations, hence DevSecOps.

Using Helm to Deploy a Kubernetes Application to Multiple Environments (QA/Stage/Prod)

One of the most typical challenges when deploying a complex application is the handling of different deployment environments during the software lifecycle.

The most typical setup is the trilogy of QA/Staging/Production environments. An application developer needs an easy way to deploy to the different environments and also to understand what version is deployed where.

Advanced AWS Serverless Provisioning: Terraform + Serverless Framework

Infrastructure as code has been one of the greatest changes in paradigm brought by DevOps in recent years. Behind are now the complicated provisioning, deployment, and release of cloud infrastructure processes, in which you had to follow a complicated list of steps to create your cloud resources by hand and copy/paste values all over the Amazon Management Console.

Deployment maturity levels

As software engineers, we love to develop features for making our customer lives easier, but until those features are available to end-users, it adds no value to the business. Therefore the deployment process is an essential part of succeeding as a development team.

With six years of experience in Continuous Delivery, this is how I would classify the maturity level for deployments: