Convert your rage into donations.

Together with UkrOps Digest we are still raising funds for the Skelyar platoon. These funds will be spent on the equipment for UAV. Right now, we have 1/3 or the required sum.

🎯Goal: 150 000.00 ₴

🔗Monobank Jar
https://send.monobank.ua/jar/6k2H9iu8tN

💳 Direct card number

5375411219683781

#donations #Ukraine

How Wise reduced AWS RDS maintenance downtimes from 10 minutes to 100 milliseconds is an interesting story for those who do DB operations.

From time to time, it's necessary to apply changes that require downtime. However, it's unacceptable to have long "maintenance windows" nowadays. So, one has to be creative.

#dba #mariadb

At last! I converted my talk from FW Days DevOps 2024 into an article in English.

You can find it in my blog or on Substack.

This is the Part I which goes through the ideas behind the testing of Helm charts. But have no fear! I learn on my previous mistakes, so the second part that walks you through the technical aspects of tests is also ready and will be published tomorrow!

Also, you can still watch the video of my talk on the FW Days conference (in Ukrainian). It has basically the same content as the articles.

Enjoy!

#kubernetes #helm #testing

The second practical part of the Helm charts testing article.

- Read in the blog
- Read on Substack

#kubernetes #helm #testing

The fundraiser by UkrOps continues. It has slowed down a bit, so let’s keep it running strong!

Convert your rage into donations.

These funds will be spent on the equipment for UAV.

🎯Goal: 150 000.00 ₴

🔗Monobank Jar
https://send.monobank.ua/jar/6k2H9iu8tN

💳 Direct card number

5375411219683781

#donations #Ukraine

Many years ago there was an open lecture or rather Q&A in my university by one of Facebook engineers.

He mentioned that they do not use Git, to which I was surprised and asked why. He didn’t provide a concrete answer, since it was like this when he joined.

However, this article may have an answer to why Facebook uses Mercurial instead of Git. “May” because obviously there’s just one viewpoint.

Tl;dr: because they had a unique use case as well as unique amounts of money to contribute to a custom solution. Still, it’s interesting that their initial proposal to contribute to Git was sorta declined.

So, here we are. Does it mean that you also need to switch to Mercurial to be like Facebook? No! Very likely you’re not Facebook. Moreover, I only used 1 project stored in Mercurial in my life (I’m not trying to argue that there are more).

Still, I like such articles on the topic of “tech history”. I think they help us to better understand why we are where we are and how did we get here.

#git #hg #facebook #history

All of us use open source in our day-to-day life, often as tools to make living. However, there is a looming danger in the open-source community. To illustrate it, here’s a quote from the Register:

A "Youth and Open Source" panel was held at the United Nations (UN) Open Source Program Office (OSPO) for Good conference in the UN building in Manhattan. There was only one little problem with it. To quote Ruth Ikegah, a young Nigerian open source project manager, "We need more young people here because I see a lot of old people here."

With more people going into retirement like James Gosling - the creator of Java - did recently, there is a risk of many crucial projects left undermaintained in the long run. Another quote from the Register:

As David Nalley, president of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) and director of open source strategy at Amazon Web Services (AWS), said at the conference: "Getting people to maintain old code isn't easy. For experienced programmers, it leads to burnout, and younger developers want to make new things. Who doesn't?"

I wanted to end this post on some positive note, like “contribute to open source - it’s fun”, but sometimes it is not. So, I dunno, I don’t have a solution at hand.

#opensource

That was a long Friday for us... to check all the memes about CrowdStrike and Microsoft.
Anyway, there is 7 min educational video about what causes all these Windows crashes just by one badly compiled CrowdStrike file.

Today's donation Monday is more IT-related than ever.

NGO Aerorozvidka makes and supports many interesting stuff for the Defense Forces of Ukraine, starting from IT solutions (like DELTA), through ISTAR, to Robotics technologies.

You can choose which direction to support on aerorozvidka.ngo/donate-page or just pop-up their Monobank.

And not so long ago they celebrated their 10th anniversary.

#donations #Ukraine

Today I want to share with you some preparation materials for certifications:

- By Sybex Comptia
- By Packt

Also, till the end of July you can get Linux Foundation certificates with a discount!

And last but not least, some Rust books recommendations as a bonus.

#books

Anyone can Access Deleted and Private Repository Data on GitHub

Sounds scary, if you didn't deep dive into how git works and how GitHub hosts it.

TL;DR: If some repo can git fetch upstream - all these fetchable commits will be always accessible from this fork/main repo.
Only after the visibility of the repo changes - new commits will be not discoverable.

For more details and examples, check this article, which was brought to us from CatOps Chat.

#security #git #github

Today is the Sysadmin’s day. My congratulations to everyone involved!

In an episode about SRE with Denys Vasyliev there was a point that SRE is just a glorified OPS.

So, I think this ongoing book would be appropriate for today:

Reliability Engineering Mindset.

It’s ongoing and, apparently, you can subscribe to get updates.

#sysadmin #sre #books

A new issue of CatOps Digest is here!

https://newsletter.catops.dev/p/catops-2024-07-28


#digest #newsletter

​​UkrOps continues raising funds for the Skelyar platoon.

Right now, about a half of the goal is accumulated.

🔗Monobank Jar
https://send.monobank.ua/jar/6k2H9iu8tN

💳 Card number

5375411219683781

A link to the original message:
https://news.1rj.ru/str/UkropsDigest/636

#donations #Ukraine

CatOps is more than 7 years old. I hope during this time many of you have got promotions!

Perhaps, some of you have even switched to the management track. Thus, I think this article about 10 common ways engineering managers get stuck may be interesting to you.

Also, it’s written in a peak Internet content form: a numbered list! Items on the list are:

1. Ignoring destructive behaviors
2. Trying to please everyone
3. Fighting too hard for your principles
4. Not spending time building relationships
5. Defining your role too narrowly
6. Forgetting your manager is a human being
7. Neglecting Personal Development
8. Only managing down
9. Only managing up
10. Never managing up

A denoscription of each item is in the article.

#management

Yet another explainer of what has happened to CrowdStrike on July 19th and more importantly, how.

tl;dr: config changes. Config changes can be dangerous too. Despite there were successful deploys between the update of CrowdStrike Scanner and the outage, it seems like a new type of config was deployed which caused the entire clusterfuck.

This line is also interesting:

 June 4th, Red Hat released a KB relating to kernel panics that were caused by the Crowdstrike sensor 
process. This was a bug in the Linux kernel itself, that the sensor was 
triggering and wasn’t Crowdstrike’s fault. However it does prove that config that has passed the Content Validator can cause kernel panics.

UPD: I think the most important take-away here is not what caused the outage or how the deployment process at CrowdStrike looks like. It's the fact that problems can be obscure enough. When something goes wrong big times, it's easy to "blame" a "big thing": the whole deployment process, or code quality, or people behind the software. This is much more comforting than the idea that any small change can cause a butterfly-effect and take your whole system down. This was true for CrowdStrike and this is true for you as well.


#postmortem #crowdstrike #windows

The wrong way to use DORA Metrics.

If you’re not aware, so-called DORA metrics are the core metrics DevOps report is built on:

- Deployment frequency
- Lead time for changes
- Change failure rate
- Time to restore service
- Reliability

These metrics are frequently used to measure the performance of a team. So, this article highlights some pitfalls of using DORA metrics for measuring productivity, including, of course, the good old Campbell’s Law.

#culture

For today's Donations Monday I have not one but two requests.

1. Folks from the Airbus VYK channel continuously raising funds for drones and related equipment. Subscribe to the channel to see recent fundraisers and detailed reports.

2. Our colleague and an author of the UA DevOps channel is raising funds for a Mavik 3T drone

#donations #Ukraine

A bit of Ukrainian tech community building.

Recently, our friend from UkrOps Digest asked his subscribers if they have any Telegram/YouTube channels, blogs, or other communities where they share their technical expertise.

Needless to say that there are quite a few responses to that post. I'm sure you'll be able to find something to your taste there as well!

Also, if you have a channel or a blog, make sure to leave a comment there as well. Or even better - make a pull request to the Awesome List of Ukrainian IT Communities!

#community #culture #Ukraine

OpenTofu 1.8.0 is out.

It's not like I'm following this project very closely. However, now its features started to diverge from Terraform. So, as they put it themselves:

Since Terraform doesn't support these new language features, OpenTofu now supports the .tofu file extension. When a file with the .tofu extension is present, OpenTofu will ignore the identically named .tf file. Using this new file extension, module authors can use the new 
features of OpenTofu and still keep older code around for compatibility.

So, if you support any open-source modules, have fun, I guess.

Also, it's interesting how many of you actually use OpenTofu in production?

#terraform #opentofu