CatOps

07 Apr 2024 15:53

A new issue of the CatOps Newsletter is here:

https://newsletter.catops.dev/p/catops-digest-2024-04-07

#newsletter #digest

CatOps

03 Apr 2024 14:42

I almost forgot to post it here.

Today I'm speaking at the GeekOpsUA Virtual Meetup (in Ukrainian) at 19:00 Kyiv time (18:00 CET).

There's no specific topic, it's going be just a fireside chat.

Here's the link you can join today

- GeekOpsUA on Telegram
- GeekOpsUA on LinkedIn
- GeekOpsUA on YouTube

See you there!

#event

CatOps

02 Apr 2024 19:33

For those who also had holidays.

Everything you need to know about the recent xz vulnerability in one place.

#security

CatOps

29 Mar 2024 14:45

Kondense is a Kubernetes tool that allows you resize contianers in a pod based on the memory pressure.

It’s installed as a sidecar and uses real-time memory pressure to determine the optimal memory for each containers in a pod.

You can read the justification behind this tool in this Reddit post

#kubernetes

CatOps

27 Mar 2024 12:49

A neat comparison between Argo and Flux.

I like the fact that the article mostly focuses on UX and use cases. Yet, I would disagree with this statement here:

 would deploy one Argo CD per tenant, where each tenant is an independent developer team with their applications, but it can work with multiple clusters, for example, dev/stage/prod, etc.

CatOps

25 Mar 2024 12:33

Hey!

Let's close that Starlink fundraiser by Dzyga's Paw. There's less than $1k left, so I'm pretty sure we can make it today :D

#donations #Ukraine

CatOps

20 Mar 2024 15:10

I’m a bit busy this week, so there are going to be only some “low-effort” posts this week.

So, here’s a book bundle about data pipelines.

#books

CatOps

15 Mar 2024 17:49

I don’t know how many of you here work with networks, but if you do, there’s a book bundle for you to check out.

#books

CatOps

13 Mar 2024 15:30

A new episode of our voice chat (in Ukrainian) is here!

We discussed OpenTofu and Terraform's license change in general and tried to find people, who already migrated to the new tool.

The episode is available on:

- YouTube
- Substack
- Spotify
- Apple Podcasts

#voice_chat

CatOps

11 Mar 2024 14:09

For today’s Donations Monday I want to remind you that a fundraiser from Come Back Alive for the Ukrainian snipers is still ongoing.

You can support it via this link: https://savelife.in.ua/sniping/

#donations #Ukraine

CatOps

08 Mar 2024 17:38

​​On behalf of the Architecture Stage organizational committee I want to invite you to the DOU Day Conference!

It’ll take place offline in Kyiv on the 18th of May.

The thing is that if you buy a ticket now, you will get -50% off for the second one. So, a great opportunity to grab some tickets together with your teammates.

#event

CatOps

05 Mar 2024 19:33

A new issue of the CatOps digest is here!

I know it’s not Sunday today, but better late than sorry.

https://newsletter.catops.dev/p/catops-digest-2024-03-05

#digest #newsletter

CatOps

02 Mar 2024 16:12

Kubernetes: tracing requests with AWS X-Ray, and Grafana data source is a step-by-step guide on how to setup tracing in your EKS cluster using AWS X-Ray by Arseniy Zinchenko - a member of the Ukrainian DevOps community.

Also, make sure to subscribe to his Substack! He posts new things quite often and I have no idea where does he find time and willpower to do so 😅

#aws #kubernetes #observability

CatOps

27 Feb 2024 14:22

Resend had a 12 hour outage on the 21st of February.

tl;dr:
> The database migration accidentally deleted data from production servers…
> … we performed a database migration command locally, but it incorrectly pointed to the production environment instead…

You can read it in more details is the article, but here are some of the action items from this postmortem:

- No accessible user role should have write privileges on the production database.
- Improve local development to reduce risks related to database migrations.
- Create redundancy to preserve sending function even during a database outage.
- Increase cadence for disaster recovery tests.
- Implement incident banner on Resend dashboard to inform users quickly.

So, I dunno, check your database. Maybe, you have such a risk as well.

Also, it’s kinda strange that people rarely talk about network isolation not only between their production and non-production environments, but also between their local environment and production. Make production access conscious. Put it on a separate role/VPN. Add some friction accessing it.

Moreover, for the love of god, validate your DB backups.

#postmortem #databases

CatOps

24 Feb 2024 10:13

Today marks the 2 year of the russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Today there are going to be rallies in many cities around the globe.

You can find the list here:

https://ukrainianvictory.org/publications/announcement-pro-ukrainian-rallies-marking-the-second-anniversary-of-the-russian-invasion-updated/

Go there, take your family, take your friends, take your colleagues.

Remind you local politicians that war is not over and that there would be no peace in this world until ruzzia exists!

CatOps

05 Apr 2024 13:10

Friday is a great day to listen to our CatOps voice chat (in Ukrainian)! Especially, since the topic of this episode is mental health and management.

We kinda slipped into discussing management at some point.

You can find the episode on:

- YouTube
- Substack
- Spotify
- Apple Podcasts
- RSS Feed

Enjoy!

#voice_chat

CatOps

03 Apr 2024 12:14

A nice step-by-step guide of how to test a Python AWS Lambda function locally with LocalStack.

This guide doesn't cover fixtures in LocalStack, though. In my experience, adding fixtures into LocalStack is PITA, but I have a very specific scenario where I need to create a couple of thousands of S3 objects relatively fast.

#aws #serverless #python

CatOps

30 Mar 2024 10:18

RedHat reported a 10/10 vulnerability in the xz compression library.

The vulnerability provides remote backdoor access and present in xz 5.6.0 and 5.6.1.

There’s also an interesting discussion of this vulnerability on HackerNews:

 annoying - the apparent author of the backdoor was in communication with me over several weeks trying to get xz 5.6.x added to Fedora 40 & 41 because of its "great new features".

CatOps

28 Mar 2024 15:16

People often say that Observability is a Data problem. Although, it sounds correct intuitively, I cannot say that I fully understood how Data engineering approaches could be applied to the Observability systems.

This article about Wide Events clarified things for me a bit. Indeed, if any event that happened in the system is just an object with some value and useful metadata, things like metrics, logs, and traces become less relevant - it's all events now!

Apparently, this is how Observability is done in Meta, according to the author, and apparently people in Meta like it. I never worked for Meta, I don't know what they really use there and if it's better than the tools available to us mere mortals.

However, this is an interesting concept, and it would be wonderful to see similar projects that are not internal to the Big Tech companies.

#observability

CatOps

26 Mar 2024 08:39

Some time ago, I predicted that there is going to be more Kubernetes distributions. Then it didn’t happen, so I thought I was wrong.

Yet, now Canonical has introduced their Kubernetes distribution.

It’s based on the upstream Kubernetes 1.30, has some built-in add-ons, and yes, you can install it with snap.

#kubernetes

CatOps

24 Mar 2024 11:32

A new (delayed) issue of the CatOps Digest is here!

https://newsletter.catops.dev/p/catops-digest-2024-03-24

Better late than never, right?

#digest #newsletter

CatOps

18 Mar 2024 13:13

​​For todays Donations Monday I want to share with you a fundraiser for 101 Starlink terminals by Dzyga Paw foundation:

https://dzygaspaw.com/starlinks-101

#Donations #Ukraine

CatOps

14 Mar 2024 12:17

The core idea of this article is pretty simple: you need to protect your Terraform states. I don't think this is a debatable topic, and anyone has a different opinion on this matter.

To quote the article itself:

 an attacker can modify the Terraform state file it’s game over and bad times ahead.

CatOps

12 Mar 2024 09:30

After reading this good retrospective article, I can say for sure:

#git is fine.

CatOps

09 Mar 2024 16:21

A bundle of programming books by “No Starch Press” on Humble Bundle.

#books #programming

CatOps

07 Mar 2024 20:20

I know that many folks have a mix of corporate and private repositories on their laptops. By private, I mean their small projects, dotfiles repo, forks of public repositories, etc.

Here's an interesting guide on one of the ways of how to keep separate users (email, signing key, name) for different repositories.

This would also work if you have repositories backed by different provides. For example, if you need to push to both GitHub and GitLab and use different SSH keys for that.

Here's a condensed version of this article on StackOverflow.

#git

CatOps

04 Mar 2024 19:29

​​I got a bit distracted in the recent days, so I make posts with delays.

Today we have a Donations Monday with a twist.

We are raising funds for two foundations at the same time:

- For NayTak for camouflage nets.
- For UA Responders an IVL and a defibrillator for medics from Kraken.

The twist is that you can win a remnant of an S-300 rocket (on the picture).

Every donation for >50 UAH is a chance to win!

You can donate on:

- a Monobank jar: https://send.monobank.ua/jar/5SizeGGzBM
- top up the card directly: 5375 4112 1191 0851

Please, add your contact details if you don’t use MonoBank for donations, so they know how to find you in case you win.

P.S. Tomorrow I will send a new nesletter issue, that I should’ve sent yesterday.

#Donations #Ukraine

CatOps

29 Feb 2024 17:55

S3 cache for GitHub Actions - a drop-in replacement for the native GHA cache functionality that is technically unlimited because of S3.

I haven’t used it personally and I don’t have an AWS account to test it. This thing comes as a part of RunsOn - a solution to setup your self-hosted runners for GHA in AWS.

Might be worth checking if you want to bring your own worker nodes to GHA but don’t want the hustle configuring them.

#github #gha #cicd

CatOps

26 Feb 2024 16:08

​​For today’s Donations Monday I would like to remind you about pavlobondarenkopaypal/support-ukrainian-army-with-and-da077ccda388">Pavlo and Naya, who raise money on drones and telecommunication equipment.

P.S. Here’s a photo of a drone you helped to buy last week and it’s already on its way to the place.

CatOps

23 Feb 2024 15:34

Some time ago I had a task to split the helm template output into separate files per object.

So, I found this issue in the Helm’s repository. People were suggesting using AWK for that, but that didn’t work well for me at the time, so I opted out for YQ.

A couple of days ago someone left a comment to that issue that apparently there is a tool called Kubesplit that can do exactly that. So, feel free to use it if you need to achieve something similar to what I did.

#kubernetes