CatOps

10 May 2023 12:31

I know that currently there is a hiring freeze in many companies as well as a lot of folks stay put and not actively looking into changing their jobs.

Yet, some hiring is still happening, and some folks are actually joining new companies and therefore going through onboarding.

Hence, I would like to share this article with you - What I Wish I Knew About Onboarding Effectively.

This article has some interesting thoughts. For example, that you are the one who's "owning" your onboarding process. It seems obvious on the surface, but I saw many folks who assume otherwise.

Also, this article has some practical advises on how to prepare for an onboarding and make it a success.

#culture #onboarding

CatOps

07 May 2023 10:23

Avery nice read for the weekend - Postmortem of a 2005 Flickr Outage Modernized for Today.

It’s cool because it’s not just a postmortem from a well-known, but this piece also contains some history! Trust me, you will like the root cause of this one ;)

#postmortem #history

CatOps

04 May 2023 13:18

Choose Boring Culture is a new article by Charity Majors which in my opinion would be useful for engineering managers here and also to the technical leaders.

In this article, she argues that there are two types of culture: formal and informal. Formal culture is what a company and its managers build. Its goal is to make the company to succeed. And it includes all the formal policies around vacation days, compensation, postmortems, team structure, roles, promotions, etc.

All the "funny stuff" is a part of the informal culture. Informal culture is still important, but this is something that should grow organically. So, please, do not force "mandatory fun" on your employees.

And a quote from this article:

 a leader, you should absolutely care about your culture, but your primary responsibility is the health of the business. The purpose of your culture is to make your business succeed. It does not serve you, and it does not serve the people you care about, to be unclear on this front.

CatOps

01 May 2023 15:36

For today’s Donations Monday I would like to remind you about Pavlo and Naya who raise funds for recon drones and equipment for them.

- Pavlo’s requisites
- Naya’s requisites

#donations #Ukraine

CatOps

27 Apr 2023 15:21

With the whole AI hype going on, it's interesting to see how companies are trying to find an application for AI in their products.

Sometimes it's just pure hype, in my opinion. There are some
"AI-powered" tools that existed just fine without AI. However, I personally see three major areas for AI (LLMs to be precise) in the operational field:

- Taking over some boring tasks like writing some Bash, Makefiles and so on.
- Observability: basically explaining alerts to humans and suggest possible solutions. Perhaps, even apply those suggestions.
- Knowledge management. LLM can answer reoccurring questions instead of a support person. You can even try to teach a model based on your internal documentation and so on.

And here are some practical implementations in some of those areas:

- GitLab’s new security feature uses AI to explain vulnerabilities to developers
- Pulumi AI that writes IaC for you.

P.S. The news about GitLab came from our chat. So, if you have any interesting news to share, do not hesitate to join!

#ai #gitlab #pulumi #iac

CatOps

25 Apr 2023 15:14

It turned out that IBM has a lot of free courses on SRE: https://www.ibm.com/training/path/ibmcloudassociatesitereliabilityengineer(sre)

Sure, the main goal is to make you familiar with their cloud and get some adopters. However, some courses look generic. Thus, you may benefit from them even if you don’t plan to use IBM Cloud.

#learning #ibm

CatOps

23 Apr 2023 14:51

Puppet Labs have issued a new State of DevOps 2023 report.

This time it’s focused on Platform Engineering and how it helps organizations to achieve their goals and move further with their DevOps journey. Key takeaways (opinionated):

- While DevOps helps to foster collaboration and delivery velocity inside teams, platform engineering helps to increase the delivery velocity across the organization.
- Companies that have implemented platform engineering approach are satisfied with it. Also, companies that have platform teams for longer period of time are more satisfied, which is a good sign.
- Platform engineering treats infrastructure (observability, CI/CD, etc.) as a product, not as project. Therefore, platform teams benefit from a product manager position within a team.
- Yet, about a half of respondents have reported that their senior leadership is still concerned about the topic of platform engineering or confused about it.
- Centralized platform team is more common compared to decentralized and people who work in a centralized structure are more satisfied.
- Organizations plan to hire engineers to work on their internal platforms. So, you‘re safe :)
- 01 Normalize the technology stack => 02 Standardize and reduce variability => 03 Expand DevOps practices => 04 Automate infrastructure delivery => 06 Provide self-service capabilities => ???? => PROFIT!!1

#report #culture #platform_engineering #devops

CatOps

19 Apr 2023 09:26

There won’t be many posts this week, folks, because I’m at KubeCon right now.

But here are some CNCF reports you can read in the meantime.

#cncf #report

CatOps

17 Apr 2023 13:09

​​For today's Donations Monday, I want to remind you about the Cyberdefence Fundraiser by Come Back Alive.

The goal is to raise 50M UAH for the IT equipment and technologies. Currently, 56% of the goal is reached. So, let's make sure that it moves to 100% faster!

#donations #Ukraine

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

08 May 2023 12:03

Today's Donations Monday goes to the artillery.

The "Reactive Post" charity organization allows creating a monthly subscription for donations which go to artillery brigades for spare parts, repairs, etc. You can check their website for more information.

They accept one-time donations as well. Plus, they support crypto.

#donations #Ukraine

CatOps

05 May 2023 15:44

Database trends spotted by Redis at KubeCon.

In nutshell:
- Running databases is hard.
- Running databases in Kubernetes = all the complexity of running databases + all the complexity of running Kubernetes.
- Yet, Data on Kubernetes community exists and has quite a few success stories.
- One of the problems is that there are no standard. Frequently, there are at least a couple of different operators and charts to run %dbname%. So, it might be hard for users to decide what tools to use in which case.
- Another problem is the lack of people, who are experts in both running databases and running Kubernetes.

So, if you want to be in demand on the market, get yourself familiar with data operations. That thing is getting momentum right now.

#databases #kubernetes

CatOps

02 May 2023 12:34

Personally, I prefer Go over Python. Yet, I know that Python is very popular inside the platform engineering community (for some reasons unknown to me).

Therefore, I want to share with a Python book bundle by “No Starch Press”.

As usual, you can pay different amount of money to unlock different number of books. The whole bundle costs about €33.

Although, some of those books are oriented towards full-time developers, other books are focused on the automation tasks. Thus, I believe this bundle would be interesting to you.

#books #programming #python

CatOps

30 Apr 2023 12:07

A new CatOps Digest is here!

#newsletter

CatOps

26 Apr 2023 17:05

A video report from KubeCon featuring Denys Vasyliev, Stanislav Kolenkin, and myself.

It‘s in Ukrainian (mostly). And we also have a text report which is coming soon.

#event #kubernetes

CatOps

24 Apr 2023 14:26

​​Let's start a week with the fundamental stuff affecting all tech folks over decades.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YbK8o9rZfI

#culture #programming

CatOps

20 Apr 2023 09:43

​​There are many ways to contribute to open source! And it’s not necessary about writing code.

Today at KubeCon they’ve said that a couple of localizations for Kubernetes including Ukrainian require some love.

This is an amazing opportunity for your contribution! Here is the manual on how to start.

(picture via deadopsclub)

#kubernetes

CatOps

18 Apr 2023 17:41

Vox populi vox Dei.

We (DevOps Days Kyiv organizer team) want to hear your voice.

As you may know, conferences (even non-profit ones) run on sponsors’ money.

Just like last year, we want to forward money that we raise for DevOps Days to Ukrainian humanitarian funds.

The problem is that we’re struggling to raise a meaningful amount before May, the month we initially wanted to have the conference. Thus, we have two options:

1. Have the conference in May anyways and donate whatever amount we manage to raise in this short period of time.

2. Postpone the conference till autumn and work with the companies to raise more money.

I’ll put a poll right after this message. Your vote is important because we make this conference for you, dear community!

#event

CatOps

16 Apr 2023 11:44

A new issue of the CatOps Digest is here!

#newsletter

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