This article with a clickbait noscript got my attention recently. It was even translated in Ukrainian by one of the largest Ukrainian developers-oriented media.

The most interesting part of this article, in my opinion, isn’t its premise and even not the points that the author is making (some of those points are 5 years late, TBH). The thing that caught my attention was what the author chooses to compare Kubernetes to. And those are managed platforms like Heroku, etc.

This is interesting for a couple of reasons: first of all it seems like other orchestration solutions are out of the table already. Second, it reaffirms the statement of Viktor Farcic (you can find those in the Den Vasyliev’s blog). Basically, the idea is that in the future Kubernetes will “disappear”. Not in the sense that it will fade away, but in the same way hypervisors have “disappeared”. The majority of us use them today, but we rarely think about what virtualization powers our cloud instances, etc. In the same way at some point there will an extendable API that allows one to run workloads and whatever cluster technology is underneath would be a concern of a cloud provider.

#kubernetes

A train edition of the CatOps Digest is here!

A couple of highlights from that digest related to CatOps itself:

- We are going to have a voice chat on Thursday at 20:00 Kyiv (19:00 Berlin) time.
- You can now follow CatOps on WhatsApp! I haven’t figured out yet if it’s possible to use markdown or any other formatting there but still.

#digest #newsletter

​​It's getting colder, so I would like to remind you to support the Air Defence Forces!

You can do it by donating to the joint fundraiser by Nova Posta and Come Back Alive - Protect the Sky.

The goal is to raise 330M UAH ($8.9M) for Ukrainian Air Defence.

#donations #Ukraine

​​Terraform variable validation, when 2+ vars depend on each other

Basically, where is the answer in SO how to do it in 0.13+ via locals, but it does not include some important details:

This check works only for known during terraform plan values of variables.
If value of any of variables in the check is not known during terraform plan, the check will be skipped and error message will pop up only after terraform apply in the next terraform plan.

The pic below is an example of how that check works.


Note, that there is a feature request to make able to refer to other variables in the variable condition check, but that's needs architecture redesign, so there no ETA when we can drop that hack.

P.S. You can achieve something similar by using lifecycle precondition and postcondition in case if you support only TF 1.2+


#terraform

Starting from February 1, 2024 AWS will charge their customers $0.005 per IP per hour

This number doesn't look huge without a perspective, however this might add some significant networking costs to some topologies. Thus, the best time to move your things into private subnets was a couple of years ago, the second best time is now.

#aws

Чисто нагадати, що сьогодні ми будемо робити Говорилку CatOps про менторство, а точніше: як стати хорошим ментором.

Стартуєм о 20:00 по Києву (19:00 по Берліну) в чаті.

Посилання на Говорилку

#voicechat

TemaBit (a part of Fozzy Group) wrote an article on how to manage SonarQube with Terraform. They’ve also mentioned that they manage GitLab with Terraform, but without examples.

A nice quick read for weekend that shows that Terraform is not just for Infrastructure (i.e. cloud) but basically a thin glue code for providers that can manage whatever you want.

#terraform

​​Today let’s continue helping Pavlo and Naya with drones, telecom equipment, and tactical medicine.

- Pavlo’s requisites
- Naya’s requisites

See the attached picture for this week’s goals.

#donations #Ukraine

I think I have posted something like this before, but anyway...

Here's a two part story of how to optimize memory usage of a Go application just by reshuffling fields in structs.

Part one provides some theory on this matter, while part two has some benchmarking results.

I'm not trying to say that you should run and reshuffle fields in all your Go structs right now. Especially, if you're satisfied with the memory consumption of your app - sometimes it makes sense to optimize for readability or just store pointers in structs.

However, these articles describe some details of how memory allocation works in Go, which you may find interesting.

#programming #go

Backstage is not an Internal Developer Portal, but a framework to build one.

This article highlights an important difference between the two. Basically, you won’t get an IDP out of the box with Backstage, you need to put some time and effort to make it useful and this fact leaves people, who thought otherwise, frustrated.

Also, it’s interesting how the author draws a parallel with Kubernetes. I would argue that Kubernetes is also a framework to build a platform and not an out of the box solution.

#backstage #idp

​​git branches: intuition & reality - an explainer by Julia Evans.

#git

A new issue of the CatOps Newsletter is here!

Also, we have a great CyberWeek deal: you can subscribe to CatOps on Telegram, WhatsApp, or Substack for free instead of $0! Don’t miss it!

#digest #newsletter

​​You likely know that this weekend more than 70 Shahed drones were shot down.

It’s crucial to support Air Defense and Come Back Alive together with Nova Posta do just that!

Donate to strengthen the Air Defense. Currently, 84% of the total goal is reached.

#donations #Ukraine

Aqua Security warn people about the danger of the supply chain attacks using Kubernetes Secrets.

We all know this story: base64 is not an encryption, Kubernetes Secrets may have a ton of sensitive information, etc. The article just provides some data from Aqua’s recent research.

However! There’s another viewpoint on Kubernetes Secrets - Plain Kubernetes Secrets are fine. This is the thing I wanted to share with you today.

The main gist of this article is that you cannot really tell if something is secure or not without a threat modeling. Also, that the auto-unsealing feature in Vault kinda negates some if its security features.

Apparently, there’s a discussion about this article in a form or a podcast but I haven’t checked it out yet.

Also, if you need some guides for threat modeling, OWASP website is a good place to start.

So, do your due diligence, do threat modeling, and have a nice day!

#security #kubernetes

A new episode of the CatOps Voice Chat is here!

This time we have talked about mentoring other people and some other topics.

You can find it on:

- YouTube
- Substack
- Spotify
- Apple Podcasts
- Google Podcasts

#voice #mentorship

​​A new fundraiser by Come Back Alive to strengthen Ukrainian snipers.

Unfortunately, the page is only available in Ukrainian as for now. Yet, all the modern browsers have the translate function these days.

The goal is 220M UAH.

#donations #Ukraine

An opinionated article that claims that one has to keep all the dependencies in version control.

Now, I don’t have strong opinions here. On one hand the proposal in this article sounds extreme. On another hand, my team has quite a few Go projects and we use vendored modules there.

So, we actually keep the dependencies in VCS. As anything else, it has its pros and cons. I could build a project and run some isolated tests on a plane. But also it almost impossible to review a PR that touches that vendor/ directory.

The author points out that it’s Git’s fault that it’s not designed to work with large number of files and files of a large size. Yes, I’d ask for a reality check here, some Git is omnipresent these days.

#programming #git #opinion

A collection of video tutorials on various DevOps-ish topics on Humble Bundle.

I don’t know if any of those are good, but there are some of the big names behind some videos.

If you’re not interested in videos, there’s also a bundle of book on ML and AI from O’Reilly. Those are usually good.

#books

I haven’t participated in salary surveys by DOU because it was limited to people based in Ukraine. This limitation is lifted now.

Also, this time (not sure if it was always like this) salary survey comes together with the survey about the popularity of programming languages. It would be interesting to compare its results with the similar research by StackOverflow.

Yet, for the results to be representative, make sure to spend a couple of minutes and fill out the survey!

A new issue of the CatOps Digest is here!

https://open.substack.com/pub/catops/p/catops-digest-2023-12-10

#digest #newsletter

​​Less than 10% left to fulfill the Protect the Sky fundraiser that Come Back Alive is doing together with Nova Posta.

This is a big one, but let’s pull out!

#donations #Ukraine