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

CatOps

26 Aug 2023 08:35

The drama around HashiCorp’s decision to move to Business Source License (BSL) continues. So, now we have OpenTF.

However, today I want to share with you this sane article: hello_9187/why-we-are-not-supporting-opentf-a46855f52dc4">Why We Are Not Supporting OpenTF which pretty much resonates with my thoughts.

P.S. Here is OpenTF if you’re interested.

#hashicorp

CatOps

24 Aug 2023 12:00

​​Happy Independence Day, fellas!
🎉💛💙🎉

CatOps

22 Aug 2023 13:03

Bounded channels is a common way of limiting the concurrency in Go applications.

From deckarep/gos-extended-concurrency-semaphores-part-1-5eeabfa351ce">this article you can learn some theory behind this approach as well as about the sync/semaphore package. I didn’t know about the latter.

#programming #go

CatOps

19 Aug 2023 13:07

Here’s some original content, folks!

I wrote an article on how to create a workflow in GitHub Actions that is triggered with a comment.

There are some caveats with such workflows in GHA. Also, you have to do some additional tweaks to make it better from the UX perspective.

You can read the article:

- In my blog
- On Substack

Hope, you’ll enjoy it!

#github #cicd

CatOps

17 Aug 2023 11:36

I know that many of you, folks, do not like Azure or Microsoft in general. Yet, this is one of the major cloud providers.

So, today I want to share with you a bundle of the materials to help you to get ready for Azure exams.

Ace your Microsoft certification exams bundle on Humble Bundle.

#books

CatOps

14 Aug 2023 09:00

Late CatOps Digest is here!

#digest #newsletter

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

27 Aug 2023 21:57

A late night edition of the CatOps Digest is here!

https://open.substack.com/pub/catops/p/catops-digest-2023-08-27

#digest

CatOps

25 Aug 2023 13:51

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

This time we spoke about observability: what vendors and solutions do people use as well as what problems they have encountered. We also briefly touched topics of SLI/SLO/SLA and synthetic monitoring in this episode.

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

Enjoy!

#voice #observability

CatOps

23 Aug 2023 09:30

Amazing article about decision making

It's big but it's worth it.
TLDR version can be "try to understand why it was done in this way, before trying to abolish or replace it with something else. Otherwise, it can get worse than it was."

#culture

CatOps

21 Aug 2023 13:21

Small fundraiser campaigns are good to cover local needs right here, right now.

Currently, my wife is raising 150k UAH to get 18 complete medical kits to the 27th battalion of the 67th brigade of the AFU.

Her brother's girlfriend's relative serves in that battalion.

Requisites for donations:

🎯 Goal: 150 000.00 ₴

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

💳 Card number
5375 4112 0823 3556

Thank y'all for your support!

#donations #Ukraine

CatOps

18 Aug 2023 12:38

Avoiding Pitfalls in Go is a good article for those who just starts their journey with this language.

Yet, there are some aspects that are useful even if you use it already. Especially, if your use cases were limited to some simple code.

#programming #go

CatOps

14 Aug 2023 15:58

For the #Donations Monday I would like to remind you about the UA Responders foundation that collects funds for tactical medicine, hospitals and other medical equipment.

I trust these people and I know a couple of them personally.

Thank you for supporting #Ukraine!

CatOps

12 Aug 2023 14:49

AWS NLB now supports security groups! This is amazing and it would’ve prevented a couple of questionable architectural decisions on my side in the past.

P.S. Yet, the most discussed news is the licensing changes by HashiCorp. Unpopular opinion here: nothing changes for you as a practitioner. However, companies like Spacelift and Terramate got hit. Also, big huge cloud providers won’t be able to adopt “Terraform as a Service”. That’s it. Survives the one who can adapt to the new realities the best. And the new realities is that people pay for “service platforms” and not for the code written.

#aws #hashicorp