DevOps / SRE — Top Links Last Week

Week 7 Issue #14

Configuring GitHub Actions to access AWS

In October 2018 GitHub announced the launch of GitHub Actions and a year later it became generally available. GitHub Actions allows users to automate software workflows. It is a CI/CD that supports popular languages and platforms, including Node.js, Python, Java, PHP, Ruby, C/C++, .NET, Android, and iOS.

How to deploy Hugo sites to Cloudflare Workers Sites using GitHub Actions

Cloudflare Workers Sites is Cloudflare’s service for hosting static websites directly on Cloudflare’s edge nodes. Hugo is a program for generating static web pages easily and quickly.

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

Fast vs Easy: Benchmarking Ansible Operators for Kubernetes

With Kubernetes, you get a lot of powerful functionality that makes it relatively easy to manage and scale simple applications and API services right out of the box. These simple apps are generally stateless, so the Kubernetes can deploy, scale and recover from failures without any specific knowledge. But what if Kubernetes native capabilities are not enough?

GitHub Actions In Action

Ever get tired of having bash scripts or makefiles that you have to run to in order to perform repetitive mundane tasks — running tests, building?
Do you feel setting up a CI/CD is overkill for a small home project?
Well, you shouldn’t feel that way — it’s super easy using GitHub Actions.

Build vs. Buy: Why It’s Completely Okay to Stand on the Shoulders of Giants

This isn’t a decision to be taken lightly as it can have lasting impacts on your operational efficiency, ongoing costs, bottom line, and more. Feel like you’re stuck between a rock and a hard place? You’re not alone! We have helped many clients navigate the “build vs. buy” dilemma and here are some insights from the trenches, as well as our recommendations, to help you make the right decision.

Shift Left: How Security Pros Should Prepare Developers for DevSecOps

Moving from a traditional approach to security — we might call it the “roadblock” model, where security teams block applications from deploying due to security issues — to a DevSecOps approach requires a dramatic shift in how organizations manage security and how they define the responsibilities of all the stakeholders in the engineering organization. In addition to changing day-to-day responsibilities, many organizations moving towards DevSecOps add new roles to help bridge the gaps between development, operations, security and executives.

Advanced Helm practices for perfect Kubernetes deployments

We will talk about templating and cluster state management in this article, leaving chart repositories for later.

How to Build a Deployment Pipeline With Gitlab CI/CD and Cloud Foundry

GitLab is one of the most popular tools for source code management and DevOps lifecycle available today for developers. A lot of engineering teams and also developers today use GitLab to help automate their entire DevOps workflow.

Kubernetes Probes: Startup, Liveness, Readiness

Kubernetes has been disruptive due to the scalability, velocity, portability, and observability it adds to cloud deployments. While it brings a whole ecosystem of great features and options and eases complex deployment, it also has its own challenges. One of the great features Kubernetes has brought us is that of high availability. There are many high availability options in Kubernetes; in this article, we will discuss high availability options used for the application/microservice itself.

Migrating Issues from Jira to Gitlab

After a trial of a few different solutions out there it was decided that we would migrate everything to Gitlab.

How to create a project roadmap. A step by step guide

Here is a step-by-step checklist that will help you to understand the whole process and ensure that you don’t miss any critical points of the journey.

Build and Deploy a Docker Image to Jenkins + Kubernetes Cluster

Let’s start with Jenkins. In order to build and deploy a Docker image through a Jenkins Pipeline, we need to install the Plugin Docker Pipeline plugin.

Running Nomad for a Home Server

It's been a long time since I've written a post on Hydra (my home server). I use Hydra as a testbed to learn new tools, workflows and it just gives me joy to self-host applications while learning something in return.

Front-of-the-Front-End and Back-of-the-Front-End Web Development

The Great Divide is real, and I’m pleased that the terms “front-of-the-front-end” and “back-of-the-front-end” have gained traction ever since I quipped about them on the Shop Talk Show. A few of my clients have actually moved away from a culture of “we only hire full-stack developers” and have instead adopted the labels “front-of-the-front-end” and “back-of-the-front-end” to help them better organize their teams and refine their hiring practices. This makes me incredibly happy as these labels provide a much-needed distinction between the types of web development that need to occur in order to build successful web things.

Announcing the Community Ansible 3.0.0 Package

Version 3.0.0 of the Ansible community package marks the end of the restructuring of the Ansible ecosystem. This work culminates what began in 2019 to restructure the Ansible project and shape how Ansible content was delivered. Starting with Ansible 3.0.0, the versioning and naming reflects the new structure of the project in the following ways:

Team building with “I dare you” challenge

I dared the team to enlist for an unknown challenge that they will know nothing about until the very last minute.

How to run commands remotely on an EC2 instance using AWS Systems Manager

If you are a System administrator and assigned a task to upgrade the packages for one application running on EC2 instance, but due to some security restrictions, you are not permitted to access production instances via SSH or bastion host. In this situation you can use AWS Systems Manager to remotely run shell scripts or certain commands to update packages on EC2 instances. In this blog, we will cover everything you need to know about AWS Systems Manager and how to use it!

How They SRE

A curated collection of publicly available resources on how technology and tech-savvy organizations around the world practice Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)

20 Years of the Agile Manifesto

Even if the manifesto has not changed, the application of its understanding varies from place to place. I’ve been working with Agile software development for more than a decade. During this period, as a freelance engineer I have witnessed over ten companies using agility —all implementing it differently.