DevOps / SRE - Top Links Last Week

Week 8 - Issue #67

GitHub’s database of security advisories is now open source

The GitHub Advisory Database is the largest database of vulnerabilities in software dependencies globally. GitHub is publishing the entire contents of the Advisory Database to a new public repository to make it easier for the community to benefit from this data. Since the database's inception, the data has been licensed under a Creative Commons license, making it forever accessible and usable by the community. To contribute to a security advisory, you can suggest changes or provide more context on packages, affected versions, impacted ecosystems, and more.

Cron + Docker = The Easiest Job Scheduler You’ll Ever Create

I have created the most accessible job scheduler to schedule jobs in Linux. The solution has two components: Cron and Docker. Cron + Docker is the key to making the most accessible job scheduling tool you'll ever use. It can run anywhere I want it to, without messing with dependencies, and consistently run in the same way. A crontab command is a simple tool that takes jobs defined in a cron table file, a "configuration file that specifies shell commands to run periodically or on a schedule."

Just Ansible It

Ansible is an open-source automating tool for provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, and infrastructure, also known as infrastructure as a code (IaC). Ansible was presented to solve the problem of redundant work on multiple servers, such as preparing the production virtual machines to java. It takes quite some time to prepare it on one machine, so what would happen if you needed that on 10+ virtual machines? Ansible came to solve that problem with its "playbook," which has tasks to do some action on the target servers.

How SREs Benefit From Feature Flags

Feature flags are a technique in software engineering that allows developers to turn specific features on or off at application runtime. Site reliability engineers (SREs) should work closely with developers to ensure that the applications they support include feature flags. SREs can leverage feature flags as a way of keeping the core SRE goal: Maximizing reliability. Feature flags minimize the risk associated with fast-moving software development pipelines. They allow teams to experiment with new application functionality while safeguarding against buggy feature implementations.

Automate and Configure Your RDS Database With Terraform

Automate and Configure Your RDS Database With Terraform. I will assume that you already have your aws credentials configured and terraform installed. You're also familiar with configuring an S3 bucket as Terraform backend — so I will mainly focus on the module's sections and go thru the deployment part briefly at the end. The project will deploy a few items, such as One bastion host group located in a public subnet, that will allow you to ssh tunnel to your database + the associated security group.