​​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

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

​​​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

​​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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

​​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

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

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

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

A new issue of the CatOps Digest is here!

#newsletter