​​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

​​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

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

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

​​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

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

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

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

#culture #programming

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

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

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

A new CatOps Digest is here!

#newsletter

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

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

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.

#culture

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