CatOps

15 Apr 2023 12:49

A new episode of our voice chat is out!

This time we talked about the best practices and guidelines for writing Terraform modules as well as Terragrunt, AWS Lambda, and other stuff.

The episode is available:
- on YouTube
- on Spotify
- Apple Podcasts
- Google Podcasts
- RSS feed

Enjoy!

#terraform #aws #azure #gcp #labmda

CatOps

11 Apr 2023 17:00

While I'm editing the audio from our previous voice chat, Denys has already uploaded a new episode of his podcast (in Ukrainian) with me as a guest.

We have talked about SRE, its origins and limitations.

Also, make sure to subscribe to Denys' channel on Telegram as well as on YouTube to get the new notified when new episodes are there!

#sre #podcast

CatOps

09 Apr 2023 15:07

I have transferred my article about the types of technical interviews into English.

In that article I write about the types of interviews I have encountered through my career and how one can prepare to each of them.

You can read the original Ukrainian version on DOU.

The English version is available

- On Substack
- In my blog

Hope, this article would be helpful to you!

#interviews #blog

CatOps

07 Apr 2023 12:48

Some AWS usage statistics for 2023.

Background: survey ran from 16th Jan to 15th Feb 2023 and 331 people partisipated in it.

It provides some insights on the adoption of the AWS services as well as the satisfaction of using those.

On occasion, I want to make the last call to participate in our Kubernetes Operations Survey 2023, which goal is to better understand how people maintain Kubernetes clusters in their companies.

#aws

CatOps

05 Apr 2023 14:51

Sup!

As some of you may know, I'm a part of the DevOps Days Kyiv organizer committee. Last year we managed to raise more than €100k for various Ukrainian foundations.

This year we want to have a conference as well! Moreover, we want to focus on the Ukrainian experience specifically in regard to the disaster recovery.

So. Maybe, you had to migrate your infrastructure abroad during 2022, maybe you have an interesting story of how to organize team work during blackouts, or maybe you had to re-write your disaster recovery policies from scratch.

If this is your case, the Call for Papers. We would be happy to hear from you!

#devops

CatOps

03 Apr 2023 12:51

For today’s Donation Monday I want to remind you about individual volunteers. Specifically, about my friends Pavlo and Naya who collect funds for drones and telecommunication equipment.

- Pavlo’s requisites
- Naya’s requisites

If you know other individual volunteers, make sure to donate them as well. There is no such thing as a small donation.

#donations #Ukraine

CatOps

01 Apr 2023 14:13

As a continuation of the HashiCorp / Terraform topic, I would suggest you an article by Yi Lu “The Pains in Terraform Collaboration”.

Problems discussed in this article may not be new to the Terraform users. Those are good old: state management, organization of the environments, merge-apply dilemma, etc.

Yet, the author points out the approaches different tools leverage to overcome those issues. Also, hopefully this article will motivate you to use Atlantis if you aren’t using it already.

#terraform #hashicorp

CatOps

30 Mar 2023 17:17

GitLab is adopting FluxCD as its GitOps engine.

This is process has just started. So, GitLab's own Kubernetes agents remain the same and, according to this article, likely won't be deprecated till 2025. However, the GitOps functionality is transitioned into the maintenance mode.

Also, this article contains the justification behind Flux. Mainly, it was chosen because it fully relies on Kubernetes API, while Argo provides it's own API and UI, which is harder for GitLab folks to integrate into their own product.

#cicd #gitops #gitlab #kubernetes

CatOps

28 Mar 2023 15:59

​​​HUG Kyiv #16: Terraform will start in 2 hours!

What:
- Deploy apps to K8s with Terraform
- RenovateBot: what, why, and how we use it

Who:
- Andrii Veklychev, SRE @ LiveLink Technology
- Maksym Vlasov, CatOps Engineer @ Star


Where: Zoom (registration here), Youtube
Language: Ukrainian

CatOps

27 Mar 2023 11:45

​​Today’s Donations Monday is a reminder about the Cyberdef fundraiser by Come Back Alive.

The goal is to raise 50M UAH for telecom and compute equipment. Currently, about 40% is covered.

#donations #Ukraine

CatOps

25 Mar 2023 11:28

One of the “because we can” tools: cfnctl adds Terraform commands when working with CloudFormation.

The idea is that you still have to write CloudFormation templates but the tool adds commands like plan, apply, destroy, and output.

#aws #tools

CatOps

23 Mar 2023 12:44

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

This time we talked a little bit about observability and deploy of AWS Lambdas. You can find it on:
- YouTube
- Spotify
- Apple Podcasts
- Google Podcasts

Enjoy!

Also, I used AI-based voice enhancement by Adobe in this episode. So, let me know if it's better this way in the chat. Also, if you want to participate in the upcoming voice chats, do not hesitate to join! We usually do those each other Thursday at 20:00 Kyiv time. The next one will probably be next week.

P.S. If you want even more than that, DOU is currently looking for hosts for their own DevOps-themed podcast! If you want to be one, make sure to fill out that form!

#voice_chat #говорилка #observability #serverless

CatOps

21 Mar 2023 10:00

​​An article about why you should think twice before using Alpine Linux for your container images.

In nutshell, Alpine uses musl - an implementation of C standard library and many things depend on C standard library including DNS. Since musl doesn’t support DNS over TCP by design, you may get nxdomain errors if the DNS response is more than 512 bytes. And it can happen in Kubernetes.

TBH, Alpine got more stable in the recent years, but still…

The article also provides some alternatives like Wolfi, UBI, and of course, Debian/Ubuntu images. You can use Distroless images as well if you are looking for a small and secure images.

Also, here’s a related Reddit thread, so you can follow the discussion there as well.

#docker #alpine #dns #Kubernetes

CatOps

19 Mar 2023 12:27

The new CatOps Digest is here!

Also, now you can access CatOps newsletter on its own domain: https://newsletter.catops.dev/

Have a nice day 👋

#newsletter #digest

CatOps

16 Mar 2023 09:30

​​You can know inside Terraform is a resource already known during plan stage or will be known only after apply.

That could be a useful hack to avoid "for_each" value depends on resource attributes that cannot be determined until apply error in cases when it could happen and still be able to use nice naming, that does not trigger resource recreation in case of list values change/reorder.

P.S. Not sure that it should be used anywhere at all.

#terraform

CatOps

13 Apr 2023 15:12

Coordination Headwind (How Organizations Are Like Slime Mold) is a 171-slide presentation by Alex Komoroske that tells a story of changes in the organizational dynamics as an organization grows.

This presentation answers the question that many of you might have had at some point of the time: how comes that it suddenly becomes an impossible task to do something in an organization that was able to execute things superfast just a couple of years ago?

Alex digs into the project delivery math as well, highlights some things that inevitably lead to the execution slowdown.

Sure, you may say that this presentation would more interesting to the managers, but not only them! Individuals matter! Also, this is still a channel about DevOps and DevOps is about culture and collaboration.

#culture

CatOps

10 Apr 2023 13:56

​​Today’s Donations Monday is dedicated to Pavlo and Naya again.

Their goal for this week is to get €7k for drones and tech equipment

- Pavlo’s requisites
- Naya’s requisites

#donations #Ukraine

CatOps

08 Apr 2023 14:48

This morning I was browsing Reddit and came across a topic called: “Learning path for a new SRE?”.

I know this is always kinda hot topic of how to get into DevOps / SRE / Platform Engineering. So, I decided to share this tread as well as some links from there here.

- School of SRE by LinkedIn. This cource seems incomplete at this point. Yet, it has some useful inforation to start with.

- Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) Interview Preparation Guide. This guide on another hand is too braod. I’d suggest using it only as a reference to specific topics.

- Articles on Site Reliability Engineering by Gremlin Inc. I mean, I couldn’t pass the materials from a company with such ame, could I? Gremlin Inc is a company that provides solutions for chaos engineering and has some good articles on various practices around yur platform.

- And of course the old playlist by Google which has videos describing what SRE is and what are its practices.

Hope, it’ll be helpful to you!

#sre

CatOps

06 Apr 2023 18:33

Love `yq` or hate unordered lists in YAML?

Try the pre-commit-yq hook that provides both possibilities!

Yeah, it is mainly used as yet another YAML prettier, but with the support of comments and blank lines inside (at least, it doesn't remove most of them)

yq itself able works with YAML, XML, and TOML, and build on top of jq.

So, in case you can in yq/jq syntax and still have not found normal prettier for these file types - here it is.

Also, pre-commit can be simply run in your CI, here are examples for Github Action: usual usage, usage with dirty hack

CatOps

04 Apr 2023 13:55

Well, there are a lot of tools that can scan your Kubernetes cluster and provide various security and performance advices. Yet, now you can d that with AI. Because today, everyone wants to do things with AI.

Hence, k8sgpt - a tool that provides recommendations for your cluster using OpenAI's ChatGPT.

Although, I believe that you don't need a full-fledged AI to provide some recommendations for your cluster. However, I think it may be a great addition to observability tools. Just imagine AI-generate runbooks for your alerts that are tailored to the specific case based on a metric or even a combination of metrics, logs, and other inputs.

#kubernetes

CatOps

02 Apr 2023 18:07

The new CatOps Digest is here!

You can read in on Substack. Also, if you like it, make sure to subscribe and tell your friends or colleagues about it 😉

#newsletter

CatOps

31 Mar 2023 10:19

Video from the 16th HashiCorp User Group Kyiv meetup (in Ukrainian) is available now!

If you were wondering what to watch on Friday, you have a perfect candidate!

Topics of this meetup:
- Deploy apps to K8s with Terraform
- RenovateBot: what, why, and how we use it

#slides #hashicorp #terraform #kubernetes

CatOps

29 Mar 2023 12:43

​​And back to events.

Videos from the Kubernetes Community Days Ukraine are now available on YouTube!

Enjoy more than a dozen talks from the leaders of the industry!

#slides #kubernetes

CatOps

28 Mar 2023 11:00

My boss from one of the previous jobs has written an article about algorithms that an SRE should know.

This is not a comprehensive article that describes each of them, rather a list that one can use to dig further. The list contains some load balancing, distributed consensus, and health check algorithms that we encounter every day but seldom think how they work under the hood.

#algorithms #programming #sre

CatOps

26 Mar 2023 14:35

​​Just a reminder that our Kubernetes Operations Survey is still open! The goal of this survey is to better understand so-called 2nd day operations on Kubernetes e.g. upgrades, migrations and maintenances.

I would really appreciate it if you can spend a couple of minutes to complete it. Thanks a lot!

#kubernetes

CatOps

24 Mar 2023 10:47

I love reading postmortems. A good postmortem usually unveils a set of problems some of which you can have in your company as well. As they say: there is never a single root cause.

Here is a postmortem from Reddit about their Pi-day outage.

It has everything you love: complex systems, legacy software, processes that were not tested that well, sacred knowledge that is long gone, etc.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m saying that not to shame Reddit. In fact they did a great job highlighting all the problems. It’s much harder and takes more courage than just say: Calico broke - Calico bad.

Also, I have similar problems at my place as well and I bet you have too. This why it’s important to recognize the importance of such “low priority tech debt”. Cleaning that out may save your company’s ass someday.

#kubernetes #networking #postmortem

CatOps

21 Mar 2023 17:30

​​​HUG Kyiv #16: Terraform

What:
- Deploy apps to K8s with Terraform
- RebonateBot: what, why, and how we use it

Who:
- Andrii Veklychev, SRE @ LiveLink Technology
- Maksym Vlasov, CatOps Engineer @ Star

When: Tuesday 28th March, 19:00 (Kyiv TZ)
Where: Online
Language: Ukrainian

Please, register here

#event

CatOps

20 Mar 2023 10:39

Today I want to remind you about the UA Responders foundation that is gathering funds for tactical medicine.

They accept donations via cards, PayPal, and bank transfers. Also, they have a legal entity in Poland, so it's easy to transfer money inside the EU.

#donations #Ukraine

CatOps

17 Mar 2023 12:24

We are not about Marketing, but today's neat peak is:
Bad communication is a key to being remembered by millions of users.

https://www.docker.com/blog/we-apologize-we-did-a-terrible-job-announcing-the-end-of-docker-free-teams/

CatOps

15 Mar 2023 17:20

And not so great news about Docker.

Apparently, Docker is now deleting Open Source organizations.

Basically, the bottom line is that you cannot have an organization on a free account. At the first glance, it looks ok: you want a production-grade SaaS - you pay for it.

The main concern is that there's no official statement from Docker that existing names of such organizations will be locked, so no one can get those except original owners, even with paid accounts. Otherwise, it will open a gate for potential malicious code injection attacks.

#docker