CatOps

12 Oct 2023 11:50

For a bit longer than a week you can buy the Python Crash Course book from Humble Bundle with 45% discount.

I personally don’t use Python, but I know that it’s pretty popular in platform engineering. So, this offer may be interesting to you.

#books #programming #python hon

CatOps

10 Oct 2023 09:00

Let’s continue with Serverless. I Reviewed 1,000s of Opinions on Serverless is a collection of takes on Serverless. The author has collected and analyzed opinions on Serverless from Twitter (RIP), Reddit, Hackernews, ans other websites and broke them down into 3 categories: negative, positive, and neutral.

Tl;dr: as always, it depends. Serverless is no silver bullet. You have to architect your applications from ground up and choose tools fit for purpose - not jump on hype trains.

In any case though, there are some good comments about Lambdas and stuff in this article.

#serverless

CatOps

04 Oct 2023 10:20

The Guardian tells a story of their migration into AWS Aurora Serverless.

This article doesn’t go too deep into technical aspects, but provides a nice overview of the issues one may encounter when trying to move to Aurora.

A couple of things that I found interesting:

- Whatever cloud migration tools are there, pg_dump and pg_restore are your trusted friends.

- This paragraph:


We’re spending roughly $220/month for storage and compute for the database. For the same price we could have rented a db.m7g.xlarge (16GB RAM, 4 vCPUs) Postgres instance along with 100GB of EBS storage or a db.r7g.large (16GB RAM, 2 vCPUs) Aurora instance. I suspect both of these options would have done the job for us, and maybe not have suffered from the same cold start problems as our serverless database, but after 3 migrations, it’s probably time to get back to doing some feature work!


#databases #postgres #aws

CatOps

02 Oct 2023 11:44

​​The beginning a month is the time when you topically get charged for your subscriptions.

So, I am once again asking you to enroll in a monthly subscription to the Come Back Alive foundation.

#donations #Ukraine

CatOps

29 Sep 2023 13:22

Death by a thousand microservices.

You can consider it to be yet another “old tech guy yells at cloud” article, but it has ratio in it.

Yet, I wouldn’t say that we have to throw away the whole idea of distributed systems. Distributed systems is the reason why I still have a job!

So, I would rather read this piece as a “memento mori” article, a reminder that we have to take things in moderation.

For example, there’s an idea of having a “trunk” monolith supported by a handful of additional smaller services. I know a company that does just that and you know what? They’re fine!

#friday #culture

CatOps

25 Sep 2023 14:41

​​For today’s Donations Monday I would like to remind you about Pavlo and Naya, who raise funds for AFU since the start of the full-scale invasion. Their this week’s goal is 310974 UAH .

- Pavlo’s requisites
- Naya’s requisites

#donations #Ukraine

CatOps

23 Sep 2023 10:55

If you want to know what an IDP (Internal Developer Portal) is, but at this point you are too afraid to ask; this article is for you!

It goes through some core features of an IDP and describes why those exist and how can one benefit from them.

Yes, I must admit that this is a marketing article and eventually they will try to sell you their service. However, you don’t have to buy anything to read it!

#idp

CatOps

18 Sep 2023 12:55

​​"Winter is coming" as the House of Stark used to put it.

Yet, we can prepare ourselves. The Come Back Alive foundation together with Nova Posta are running the "Protect the Sky" fundraiser.

The goal is to raise 330M UAH (8,9M USD) for Air Defense and mobile command posts.

About the half of the goal is reached.

#donations #Ukraine

CatOps

15 Sep 2023 18:55

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwDIEIDy1Dk

CatOps

13 Sep 2023 15:16

DevOps Days Ukraine is happening tomorrow!

Make sure to register if you haven't done it already! We have a lot of great speakers!

Also, we have open spaces! Open spaces are basically the same thing as our CatOps voice chat. Well, actually, CatOps voice chat is based on the DOD open spaces!

See you tomorrow at 6pm (Kyiv time)!

CatOps

11 Sep 2023 13:51

My German teacher (he's Ukrainian, he just teaches me German :D ) is raising funds for an auto for the 36th Brigade of the AFU.

Monobank jar: https://send.monobank.ua/jar/3a2A4R2P8g

P.S. It looks like Monobank has some issues processing international cards. At least, I wasn't able to replenish this jar from 2 different cards :\

CatOps

08 Sep 2023 13:44

If you have AWS Lambdas in Go, you likely know that AWS is going to deprecate the go1.x runtime and forces its users to migrate to the generic al2.provided runtime.

The premise is that the new runtime is more performant. However, here is an article that argues why this move is bad for Go users on AWS as well as goes through some caveats you may encounter during the migration.

#go #aws #serverless

CatOps

06 Sep 2023 13:01

I usually do not post event announcements, but there are two exceptions.

One of them is DevOps Days Ukraine! This year we have a topic of Disaster Recovery.

I'm one of the organizers of this conference, and we are going to have the next one very soon: on the 14-15th of September, with some amazing speakers from the industry.

The conference is online, so you can join from anywhere in the world! Just keep in mind that the conference is held in the Kyiv timezone.

See you there!

#event

CatOps

04 Sep 2023 12:30

The beginning of each month is usually the time when you're being charged for all your subscriptions.

So, it's also a good time for me to remind you that you can subscribe to Come Back Alive - one of the biggest and well-known charity foundations in Ukraine!

#donations #Ukraine

CatOps

31 Aug 2023 13:57

Fixing a memory leak in Kubernetes with a single line of code.

I love such debug stories because you can read them almost as a thriller or a detective literature. Also, this case is very interesting indeed and it took that team a couple of months to figure it out.

A takeaway for myself:
- It‘s useful to have a dashboard (and potentially a monitor) that shows the difference of the node memory usage and the memory usage by pods.

#kubernetes #postmortem

CatOps

11 Oct 2023 10:10

​​I know that y’all want to hear about the cUrl vulnerability. So, here you are: a first hand article from Daniel Stenberg (the author of cUrl) himself.

I haven’t read it yet, tho.

#security #curl

CatOps

09 Oct 2023 16:00

​​With your help we managed to deliver 18 medical kits to the 27th Separate Bataillon!

We had a new request from them for the winter boots and a thermal vision. We had some money left from the previous fundraiser, so the winter boots are on their way to the frontlines already. Now, we are raising funds for the thermal vision!

The goal is 85k UAH (~2200 EUR). This is the price for the thermal vision, but we still have money left. So, we will “break” the Monobank jar as soon as we have the required amount from all the sources.

Also, we work together with the UA Responders foundation to be clear on all the legal stuff. So, you can also donate to their PayPal or SWIFT, since Monobank sometimes has issues accepting money from the EU cards. Please, put “27” in the message if you donate via PayPal or SWIFT, so we know that these money are meant for the 27th Battalion.

You can find all the requisites via this link: https://quicknote.io/145c93c0-6612-11ee-8acd-1fef365d67eb

Разом переможемо!

#donations

CatOps

03 Oct 2023 12:01

Learn from memes is a working strategy!

Therefore, I’d like to share with you this article (quite a long one) that describes a Postgres meme.

So, you could learn its concept broken down by a “level of depths”.

#databases #postgres

CatOps

30 Sep 2023 15:38

A couple of days ago I got together with amazing people to record an episode of the DeadOps Show (in Ukrainian).

Initially we wanted to talk about the hero culture but somehow the conversation slipped into the topic of burnouts.

So here you are. Yet another episode about the thing that never gets old.

#podcast

CatOps

26 Sep 2023 13:43

O’Reilly is being on a streak now!

Right after the Software Architecture book bundle, we’ve got the Cybersecurity Month bundle!

As usual, you can pay different amount of money to unlock different number of books. But still, the whole amount is probably less than the individual price for some of the titles.

#books #humblebundle

CatOps

24 Sep 2023 17:08

A new issue of the CatOps Digest is here!

#digest #newsletter

CatOps

19 Sep 2023 15:07

Some time ago, there was a story of a programmer who held the entire Ukrainian customs service as a hostage, because he was the only one familiar with the obscure codebase (that he has created himself).

Unfortunately, this is not a single case over the industry. When a Programmer Holds the Code Hostage tells a similar story that, frankly, could happen at any company.

What are the takeaways? Appeasement doesn't work. It takes some courage and will from the management to identify and successfully address the situation. There are even some tips on how to do it in the end.

#culture

CatOps

17 Sep 2023 15:57

At last! A new episode of the CatOps Voice chat (in Ukrainian) is here!

This time we spoke about pet-projects as well as marketing of the open source technologies.

As a bonus you can learn what ML and wine have in common 😉

You can listen to this episode on:

- YouTube
- Spotify
- Apple Podcasts (the episode hasn’t appeared there yet for some reason)
- Google Podcasts
- Substack

Enjoy!

#говорилка

CatOps

14 Sep 2023 18:06

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjVV_SSrSCw

CatOps

12 Sep 2023 18:04

This book bundle by O’Reilly mostly contains books on the software architecture, but you may find some microservice-related books there that may be of your interest.

#books

CatOps

10 Sep 2023 15:47

Welcome a new issue of the CatOps Digest!

#digest #newsletter

CatOps

07 Sep 2023 14:49

I have updated my article on triggering GHA workflows with comments.

Recently, I have found another caveat that has really bitten me in the ass. You can look for the keywords UPD 2023-09-07 on the page.

As usual, you can read it:

- In my blog
- On Substack

#cicd #github

CatOps

05 Sep 2023 12:17

Today, I would like to present to you The Dark Side of SRE.

Basically, this is a yet another article on the things that sucks at work. Things like stress from the incidents, continuous context switch, the need to use multiple technologies and thus inability to become an expert in one, and so on...

I disagree with some points made in this article. Specifically:

- Operational Treadmill:
this where Platform Engineering shines. The whole idea of PE is to switch from the reactive operational approach to the proactive
product-focused approach (OPS still exists in this paradigm, tho)

- The Limited Career Progression: I didn't get this point at all. An SRE can become a manager just as any other engineer if they wish. Obviously, being a manager requires a completely different skill set. However, this point almost sounds like the author was denied a promotion and now is sour about it.

Yet, this article has an interesting document
linked - an instruction from Google SREs on what to expect from an SRE
position outside Google. It's hilarious, TBH. This document shows once again how inconsistent are the titles across the industry. Especially, when it comes to the OPS roles.

#culture #sre

CatOps

01 Sep 2023 16:36

If you’re using serverless computing in your company (it for your own project) you may be interested in the State of Serverless report by DataDog.

On things that I really appreciate about this report is that they have out their methodology in the article as well.

#serverless

CatOps

28 Aug 2023 13:19

As for today, I would like to remind you about the fundraiser that my wife is running currently:

The goal is to get 150k UAH (~3700 EUR) for 18 complete medical kits to the 27th battalion of the 67th brigade of the AFU.

Requisites for donations:

🔗 Monobank Jar:
https://send.monobank.ua/jar/5zCptYx1sb

💳 Card number
5375 4112 0823 3556

Right no, a little bit more than 2/3 is there.

Thank y'all for your support!

#donations #Ukraine