CatOps

05 Jul 2024 13:05

Today's Friday, so we can talk about some more relaxed topics.

Your Company's Problem is Hiding in Plain Sight - High Work-In-Progress (WIP) is a good reminder that working on everything everywhere all-at-once is a bad idea. I'd like to bring up this topic, because I think this issue is even more prevalent in platform teams.

What I missed in this article is some advices on how to address the issue in a controlled fashion: how to properly calculate it and "sell" to the management. Still, you can get some ideas from the discussion on Reddit.

So, as a bonus, I'd also like to share these two articles:

- One is on the Little's Law
- The second one is on the cost of context switching

P.S. I'm in that age when I really regret slacking out at the Queuing Theory lectures in the university :\

#culture

CatOps

02 Jul 2024 17:45

A reasonable article on how to provide meaningful feedback. Specifically, on how not to be afraid to provide meaningful feedback.

You may already know many of these points, but it won't hurt to re-read them. Also, this is one of the cases where actual practice weights more than theory.

P.S. The original article seems to be behind a paywall, but I was able to read it just fine via Pocket. In any case, here are the tl;dr points provided by the author himself:

Way before giving feedback…

- Build a relationship with the other person - This starts the path of giving feedback to someone like it’s your close friend. Good relationship = easy feedback.
- Share that you are open to receiving feedback - This results in the other person seeing you are growth-minded and often leads to them asking for feedback too.
- Give positive feedback first - This helps build a positive relationship and ensures the other person knows you are on their side and looking out for them.

When you do need to give feedback, follow the feedback process…

- Look inward first. Know your intent - Ensure you are sharing the feedback for the right reason. Not to vent, but to help the other person.
- Get permission - When in doubt, confirm with the other person. This allows them to opt in and prevents backlash.
- Show you care - The most important step. Let them know the reason you are sharing is because you care.
- State your observations - Stick to the facts of the situation. These should hardly be debatable. Call out the common problem.
- Explain the impact - Help the other person understand why it matters. Is it impacting you, others, or the business?
- Get their thoughts - You’re solving a problem together. Get their take on it.
- Align on next steps - Ensure it’s clear what to do moving forward.

#culture #feedback

CatOps

28 Jun 2024 12:08

Ruby was the first programming language I tried to consciously learn. Meaning, it wasn't a part of a university curriculum or something.

Despite not using it for many years, I still have some warm feelings towards this language. In this article Lucas Seiki Oshiro argues that Ruby is good for shell scripts as well.

Ruby is strongly associated with the Rails framework. So, I think this article is a good reminder that programming languages are more than just frameworks.

#programming #ruby

CatOps

25 Jun 2024 11:27

Programming skills are essential for work in tech. So, here is a book bundle by Pearson with some books that may help you with those skills.

#books #programming

CatOps

23 Jun 2024 23:01

A late night CatOps Digest is here!

https://newsletter.catops.dev/p/catops-digest-2024-06-23

#newsletter #digest

CatOps

19 Jun 2024 14:32

​​As Charity Majors put it: "Nines do not matter if your users are unhappy". At the same time, nines do not matter if your users do not care.

This small article is a friendly reminder about the cost of adding nines to your SLOs.

P.S. There are some other interesting articles in that blog, BTW.

#slo

CatOps

17 Jun 2024 18:26

For today's Donations Monday, I would like to share with you a fundraiser by Come Back Alive and PrivatBank for the establishment of the "Yatagan" UAV school.

The goal is to raise 33M UAH and currently about 21.5M are raised. It's also possible to donate using a European bank card - I've just checked that ;)

#donations #Ukraine

CatOps

13 Jun 2024 09:52

More conference videos for you!

As you sure know, if you're following this channel, we had a DevOps Days Ukraine conference recently.

Talks are already available on YouTube! Enjoy!

#slides #conference

CatOps

11 Jun 2024 10:17

A new late issue of the CatOps Newsletter is out!

https://newsletter.catops.dev/p/catops-digest-2024-06-09

I'll try to get back to the bi-weekly schedule with newsletters coming on Sundays, but no promises for the Summer.

#digest#newsletter

CatOps

08 Jun 2024 16:38

​​For those of you who like meddling with their terminal emulators - Oh My Posh is a command line prompt that can replace p10k, since the latter one is no longer actively maintained.

Here’s a video where it’s shown in action (and basically this is how I discovered it):

https://youtu.be/9U8LCjuQzdc?si=ho-67Xuht02Ql0kT

What I personally liked from the video is a possibility of creating a neat config in YAML or TOML and ease of replacing current config with another one right in the shell configuration file.

I’ll definitely give it a try when I have some time.

#terminal #tools

CatOps

06 Jun 2024 19:28

A case study from Grammarly on their migration from Graphite to VictoriaMetrics, which helped them to improve DevEx as well as save money.

Unfortunately, there are not many technical details in this article, but I still want to share it, ‘coz I’ve rarely seen posts about VictoriaMetrics in production. So, maybe you are the one who can write something on the matter?

P.S. Do you, folks, even remember Graphite?

#observability

CatOps

03 Jun 2024 13:49

Together with GeekOps and Brokee we are starting a fundraiser for reconnaissance units that work on the Sumy direction.

We are raising funds for Starlinks and electronic warfare equipment for communication and protection against enemy's drones.

The goal is: 95 000 UAH.

You can donate on the Monobank Jar:
https://send.monobank.ua/jar/3D2HEywrZ5

Or to the card directly:

4149 4998 0815 3090


Crypto wallets are also available:
USDT trc 20: TCGcEu5eUWFN8niDvrVUSPPtLWosKj61Gu
USDT erc 20: 0x9e7f1d08f71f0d228c6f7f14e1b0192ec964566b
BTC: 3NktSaKQB8Wwv4txaZTKeZ3EUQs5y9dJ2U

#donations #Ukraine

CatOps

31 May 2024 13:36

A month ago I had a talk about Renovate after 1 year of its use (in Ukrainian)

Recording - https://youtu.be/zePUpFGWbFM
Slides - https://tinyurl.com/gen-renovate

#slides

CatOps

29 May 2024 19:06

Yet another DevOps books bundle by Packt.

I’m not familiar with many of these books, so I cannot vouch for any of them, but this bundle is also cheaper compared to those from O’Reilly.

#books

CatOps

23 May 2024 11:37

Another book bundle for y’all!

This time it specifically focuses on DevOps.

One of the books there - “How Linux Works” was a book I used to learn Linux back in a day. I have been always recommending it and I cannot recommend it more.

So yeah, that’s a good bundle. I would buy it just for that one book. However, there are some other great books as well.

#books

CatOps

03 Jul 2024 11:08

In case you missed it somehow.

regreSSHion: Remote Unauthenticated Code Execution Vulnerability in OpenSSH server

A newly discovered vulnerability allows a malicious actor to execute code remotely with the highest privileges on a host. CVE assigned to this vulnerability is CVE-2024-6387.

Glibc-based Linux systems are affescted.

Affected OpenSSH versions:

- OpenSSH versions earlier than 4.4p1 are vulnerable to this signal handler race condition unless they are patched for CVE-2006-5051 and
CVE-2008-4109.
- Versions from 4.4p1 up to, but not including, 8.5p1 are not vulnerable due to a transformative patch for CVE-2006-5051, which made a
previously unsafe function secure.
- The vulnerability resurfaces in versions from 8.5p1 up to, but not including, 9.8p1 due to the accidental removal of a critical component
in a function.

OpenBSD systems are unaffected by this bug, as OpenBSD developed a secure mechanism in 2001 that prevents this vulnerability.

Here's another interesting fact: "In our security analysis, we identified that this vulnerability is a regression of the previously patched vulnerability CVE-2006-5051, which was reported in 2006."

This is why you always need to have several lines of defense in your systems. Also, since I got into the industry, it was always advised not to open SSH to the world and hide it behind a VPN or such. This advice still stands. Moreover, today you have solutions in place that allow you avoiding SSH at all.

#security #ssh

CatOps

01 Jul 2024 10:59

​​​​Sup!

Together with UkrOps Digest we are raising funds for the UAV equipment for the Skelyar platoon of the Rubizh brigade.

Specifically, we are raising money for:

- Antenas
- Batteries
- Controller unit
- 2 sets of cables

The end goal is 150k UAH.

There is also a raffle:

1. Our defenders will sign two platoon banners. Each 300 UAH donation is a chance to win one. So, if you donate 300UAH, you get one "ticket", 600 UAH - 2 "tickets", and so on.
2. Those with top 5 highest donations will have a chance to write a message on a drone!

Vsevolod Polyakov - the author of UkrOps Digest - knows these guys personally, thus I can vouch for them as well.

🎯Goal: 150 000.00 ₴

🔗Monobank Jar
https://send.monobank.ua/jar/6k2H9iu8tN

💳 Direct card number

5375411219683781

Many thanks to y'all!

#donations#Ukraine

CatOps

27 Jun 2024 11:37

The upcoming systemd 256 release will have a replacement for sudo - run0.

You can read more about run0 in this article.

#linux

CatOps

24 Jun 2024 14:03

For today’s Donations Monday, I want to share with you a fundraiser from the Come Back Alive foundation “The second line of air defense”.

#donations #Ukraine

CatOps

20 Jun 2024 13:18

An article called Maybe you need Kubernetes is surprisingly not about Kubernetes.

Instead, it touches the topic of embracing the complexity of modern tech and, more importantly, how one can only progress by learning complex stuff.

As the author puts it himself:

People don’t like to hear this, but difficulty is a moat. When something gets easy, it gets cheap. If you want to be paid a lot, you need to be really good at something that’s both in-demand and hard. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it.

CatOps

18 Jun 2024 11:20

A new DevOps book bundle on Humble Bundle.

It has some well-known books on Kubernetes, Terraform, Ansible, and other stuff. Also, these are O'Reilly books, which should be good.

#books

CatOps

14 Jun 2024 14:42

There are some articles-cheat sheets that are very useful in certain circumstances.

For example, here's a nice cheat sheet for reassignment of Kafka partitions. As you may know, Kafka doesn't reassign partitions automatically when new brokers are added or removed from a cluster.

Save this one just in case, especially if you have Kafka somewhere.

#kafka #cheatsheet

CatOps

12 Jun 2024 20:44

My talk from DevOps FW Days 2024 about Helm charts testing is available on YouTube now!

All the code that I used for the demo is available on GitHub as well!

The talk is in Ukrainian, but I'll write a blog post in English on this topic soon (tm) - I've just wanted to ensure that the materials are publicly available on the FW Days side, so I don't violate any policies.

#slides #helm #kubernetes

CatOps

10 Jun 2024 11:35

​​Last week it was the 7th (!) time we had the DevOps Days Ukraine conference!

One of the important part of it, apart from presentations and open space discussions, is to raise funds for Ukrainian charities.

We've been working with the UA Responders foundation for a couple of years already, and this time we've been raising funds for a surgical aspirator for Dnipro University Hospital.

We have a €1000 goal and just a couple of hundreds below the target. So, we can easily make it with your support!
#donations#Ukraine

CatOps

07 Jun 2024 18:07

Bees With Machine Guns is a tool to load test web applications.

The main difference from other popular tools like Vegeta is that in this case instead of using a single CLI, the tool creates a "swarm" of micro instances in AWS to emulate a DDoS attack so the load originates from multiple points, not a single one.

#security

CatOps

04 Jun 2024 12:09

​​DevOps Days Ukraine 2024 is starting today!

Meet wonderful people, who will talk you through security and also make sure to check out open space rooms to discuss various topics with your peers!

Just to name a few speakers:

- Nazar Tymoshyk — CERT-UA State Communications Engineer
- Anastasiia Voitova — Head of Security Engineering at Cossack Labs
- Brian Tarbox — Principal Solutions Architect at Caylent
- Rotem Refael — Director of Engineering and open-source ARMO
- And many more!

Check out the agenda & register for free 👉 https://www.devopsdays.com.ua

#event

CatOps

01 Jun 2024 12:46

A nice read about ArgoCD.

What I especially liked about it is that it goes beyond your typical “hello world” examples and also touches topics like multi cluster deploys, app-of-apps pattern, and encryption.

#argocd #cicd

CatOps

30 May 2024 11:54

As you may know, I'm a part of the DevOps Days Ukraine organizers committee, and I'm proud to finally present you this year conference!

This year, the focus of the conference is security.

We'll discuss context-based security, cloud hacking scenarios, information security in the cloud, defense against cyberattacks and the complexities of cyber warfare, vulnerability management implementation with AWS services, OWASP Top Web Application Security Risks, and more.

Just to name a few speakers: Nazar Tymoshyk — CERT-UA State Communications Engineer, Anastasiia Voitova — Head of Security Engineering at Cossack Labs, Brian Tarbox — Principal Solutions Architect at Caylent, Rotem Refael — Director of Engineering and open-source ARMO, and many more!

Check out the agenda & register for free 👉 https://www.devopsdays.com.ua

When? June 4-5
Where? Online

And of course, there are going to be open space discussions after each day of the conference!

See you there!

CatOps

28 May 2024 12:15

An old but great article about load balancing by Matt Klein - the creator of Envoy Proxy.

"Load balancing" is the term we often throw around, so it's always a good thing to take a glance on how does it work.

Another old article is a comparison of the circuit breaking functionality between Envoy (and inherently Istio) and Netflix Hystrix, which is a dedicated circuit breaker library.

#networking

CatOps

22 May 2024 12:16

​​This channel was created exactly 7 years ago. So yeah, today is CatOps' bithday!

Fun fact: this channel had a different name when it was created, but was renamed to CatOps shortly after.

Another fact: y'all know that I usually post donation requests on Mondays, but again, we kinda have a special occasion today. There's a long-standing tradition to give presents on one's birthday. You can give CatOps a little birthday present by donating for FPV drones for Territorial Defense of Mykolaiv.

Each 20k UAH is a single drone, so let's see how many we can get! You can donate via this Monobank jar:

https://send.monobank.ua/jar/3u6w8ar23z

to this card directly: 5375 4112 1759 7652

#catops #birthday #donations #Ukraine