DevOps / SRE — Top Links Last Week

Week 9 Issue #16

Back by popular demand: Google Cloud products in 4 words or less (2021 edition)

Google Cloud offers lots of products to support a wide variety of use cases. But how do you even know where to start?! Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered! We have created a set of resources that makes it easy to familiarize yourself with the Google Cloud ecosystem. You can use these resources to quickly get up to speed on different products and choose those that you're most interested in for a deeper dive into documentation and other available resources.

How a Brilliant Platform Engineer Saved Twilio From 'Absolute Disaster'

In 2013 Twilio was in rapid growth mode. We’d gone from about $1 million in annual revenues in 2010 to more than $30 million in 2012. We’d raised four rounds of venture capital, totaling $103 million, and grown from three founders to more than a hundred employees, more than half of whom were software developers building our products.

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What is SDN? How software-defined networking changed everything

The phrase software-defined networking (SDN) was coined when it was necessary to distinguish the concept from the hardware-based variety. Since that time, "SDN" has come to mean the type of dynamic configuration that takes place whenever software-based services in a data center network are made accessible through an Internet Protocol (IP) address. More to the point, SDN is networking now.

Agile: 3 steps to get started

The Agile Manifesto burst onto the scene in 2001, introducing the world to a revolutionary methodology that focused on a quick, iterative approach to software development. At first, agile was squarely focused on the IT department, but as digital transformation reworked organizations from the ground up, it became increasingly apparent that agility was the path forward in a rapidly changing digital world.

Validating the resilience of your API gateway with Chaos Engineering

API gateways are a critical component of distributed systems and cloud-native deployments. They perform many important functions including request routing, caching, user authentication, rate limiting, and metrics collection. However, this means that any failures in your API gateway can put your entire deployment at risk. How confident are you that your gateway will be resilient to common production conditions such as backend outages, poor network performance, and sudden traffic surges?

SAP customers transform documents into data with OpenText on Google Cloud

An enterprise environment generates a staggering number of documents—contracts, orders, invoices, and receipts, to name a few. Each requires proper governance to store and manage over its lifetime. For SAP customers, attaching these documents to each transaction is relatively easy, but their sheer volume increases database size and slows performance.

Red Hat's survey results on the state of enterprise open-source software

If you're surprised 90% of IT leaders are using enterprise open-source software, you've been living under a rock for the last few decades. In its latest State of Enterprise Open Source report, that's exactly what leading Linux and cloud company Red Hat found.

Why IT projects still fail

In the age of agile development, devops and related management techniques, is IT project failure even a thing anymore? The answer, sadly, is yes.

What Is Microsoft Power Fx?

Microsoft Power Fx is the low code language for expressing logic across the Microsoft Power Platform. It is the same language that is at the heart of Microsoft Power Apps canvas apps today and is inspired by Microsoft Excel. It enables the full spectrum of development from “no code” to “pro code” with no cliffs in between, enabling diverse teams to collaborate and save time and expense. We are very excited to bring it to more of the Power Platform and to share it with everyone as open source. Only through a strong user community can a language grow and flourish.

Introducing Microsoft Power Fx: the low-code programming language

Today the Power Platform introduces its formula language for low-code, Microsoft Power Fx. This language originates from Microsoft Excel and is already the foundation of the Microsoft Power Apps canvas. You may wonder, why does a low-code platform need a programming language? The truth is, point-and-click tools are great for quickly assembling experiences and workflows, but many apps need a layer of logic that goes beyond what is practical to drag and drop, for example:

Why you should take a look at Nomad before jumping on Kubernetes :: Adrian Todorov

Recently I stumbled upon and then stumbled upon again on David Anderson’s interesting post about “new Kubernetes”, based on a discussion he had with Vallery Lancey about what they would do differently if they were rewriting Kubernetes from scratch. Interestingly, a decent part of the proposals for a “new Kubernetes” are design choices made by Hashicorp for Nomad, which is a pretty underrated orchestrator, and drastically simpler ( one of the main goals of said “new Kubernetes”).

Everything is broken, and it’s okay

Everything is a little bit broken. Nothing made by human hands or minds is perfect. Every car you’ve ever ridden in, every elevator you’ve ever taken, every safety-critical computer program you’ve ever trusted your life with was flawed in some way. It doesn’t matter how much money you spend—your system’s uptime will always be measured in 9s, a percentage of perfection.

The New Rules of Data Quality

For the past several years, data teams have leveraged the equivalent of unit testing to detect data quality issues. In 2021, as companies ingest more and more data and pipelines become increasingly complex, this single point-of-failure approach doesn’t cut it any more.

AWS Load-Balancer and Static Ip With Terraform

In this article, we’ll examine how to assign static IP addresses on an AWS load-balancer. Recently, I confront myself with this need to permit whitelisting IP addresses in firewalls.

Datadog to Meld Observability and DevSecOps

Datadog is planning to expand the scope of the security and observability services it provides following the acquisitions of Sqreen, an application security platform provider, and Timber Technologies, a provider of a tool, called Vector, for collecting and normalizing log data.