CatOps

A story about how chaos engineering helps companies teams to find bottlenecks in their systems.

The good thing about this article is that it provides links some tools you can use for your infrastructure as well.

#chaos_engineering #culture

Yesterday was the 5th birthday of CatOps 🎂

I’m very glad to all of you for being with us! Thank you!

If you want to make us a birthday present, you can check one of the links below and donate to Ukrainian volunteer organizations 😊

- Come Back Alive
- Serhiy’s Prytula Foundation
- Razom
- Voices of children
- KOLO
- Monstrov Org
- Insight
- Happy Paw

Yet another bundle for you. This time about AWS.. Also, this time it’s an online course bundle!

As usual, you can pay different amount of money to unlock different number of items and the part of money collected will be donated to charity.

The bundle is provided by Pluralsight and contains a few courses on specific services like Lambda and Step Functions, but the majority cover generic topics like security in AWS, networking, etc. There are also a few courses for exam preparation. So, if you’re looking forward for getting an AWS certification, this is something definitely worth checking.

#aws

​​Just a reminder that tomorrow we have DevOps Days Ukraine online conference!

One of our goals is to raise funds for various humanitarian efforts to help Ukraine.

However, the conference itself is free to attend!

You can register via the link:

https://devopsdays.com.ua/

#event

A nice small article on when it makes sense to use pointers in Go.

As with the previous article, if you write in Go a lot that would probably provide you no new information. However, if you’re just learning it or switching from another language like Python, or writing Go code not that frequent; this article should be interesting.

And a quote:

In fact, I'll quote Ben Darnell, who is the lead engineer of CockroachDB (built in Go) :

"Whenever in doubt, use a value instead of a pointer"

#go #programming

On-Call: Leave It Better Than You Found It.

A short article with some practical recommendations for those, who are going to participate in an oncall rotation.

TBH, I haven’t got any new information from there. Probably, since I always participated in oncall since the very beginning of my career. However, if oncall is something new to you or if you know someone, who’s just about to take a pager; this article could be quite useful.

#oncall

On Thursday, November 18, 2021, Dropbox did not go down. It sounds like a beginning of some modernist novel. Yet, this is rather a post-mortem on an incident that never happened.

This is a great story of leadership and dedication, which lasted for a few years. Results? Dropbox were able to literally pull the network cord from their data center and “do not go down on 18 of November, 2021”. And not just a data center, but their main one.

I really enjoyed this story because it proves once again a few basic things that we prefer not to think about:
- Any project take time and effort. Big projects take a lot of time and effort. If you’re looking into rebuilding your system from scratch, that won’t take a week or two.
- Big projects require dedication. You cannot just add them as a side hassle for your existing team and expect them to deliver everything with the highest quality.
- Iterative improvements. Apollo 11 was the first mission to reach the Moon not because 11 is a pretty number.
- Test and exercise. It’s not enough just to “implement the best practices”, you have to validate if those are actually working as expected. And if there’s a process involved, you have to repeat it frequently enough to not to get rusty.

#infrastructure #culture #postmortem

Humble Bundle books on Python.

As usual, you can pay various amounts of money to get 2, 6, 13 books, or the whole bundle (18 items).

Another good thing about this bundle is that many books are not focusing on a specific framework, but rather on a generic stuff.

#books

Just a reminder, that VPN should not be used to secure your infrastructure. Use Software-Defined Perimeter (SDP) when possible.

#security

​​So, here's an update that I promised. tl;dr: We are gonna have DevOps Days Ukraine this year!

Initially, the whole committee was against an online event, but then our lives suddenly changed.

On 17-18 May we are going to have a free online DevOps Days #StandWithUkraine conference with the main focus on how to do devops in the times of crisis. You can find a lot of familiar faces among the speakers, including people from the Ukrainian DevOps community.

The event itself is free, but we ask you to donate to the Ukrainian army or volunteer organizations of your choice. We will provide more details during the conference, but you can also find some useful links attached to this post.

More info here: https://devopsdays.com.ua/

#event

Back in a day I ran a quick survey about the topics that would be interesting for my audience. One of those was about soft skills. So, here you are.

This is not a very popular topic for many reasons, but in this article Charity Majors provides some ideas on what should one say on the exit interview. An exit interview it typically done when a person resigns from a company to reflect on this person’s experience and make improvements and adjustments in the corporate culture, processes, etc.

This is a short article, but here are a few takeaways:
- Be constructive and try to make an exit interview effective: simple ranting won’t helm anyone, but saying “all good, just a next step in my career”, when there are huge issues in the company, won’t help anyone either.
- Start from the high-level overview of corporate problems if any
- Try to tighten the problem to a material outcome (revenue loses, hours of downtime, number of people who resigned)
- Keep it short and put it in writing
- Provide a written copy to a person with administrative power within a company, who you trust

#culture #exit_interview

We are resuming CatOps operations in a little steps.

I cannot promise the pre-war posting ratio. I’m too overwhelmed right now to find and filter as much content as I used to. Yet, I can do it to some extent.

Also, there are cool announcements coming soon!

For now, I would like to share this Reddit discussion about the struggles of SRE leadership.

Some common problems:
- Dogmatism: X is the best thing just because.
- No clear leveling: there are juniors who are more capable than seniors, etc.
- “We will do X because a big company is doing so!”
- Hiring

You can find more pain points as well and, of course, I welcome you to participate in that discussion as well!

#sre #management

Доброго утра мои любимые котики и котенессы!

Огромное спасибо всем кто откликнулся в прошлый раз! Очень хорошо помогли!

Раненько с утра можно сделать хорошее дело 🙂

Есть Саша Милушев. Мой друг. SRE lead. Даже на конференциях выступает, не говоря про то, что на всех сходках с удовольствием жарит шашлыки и хвалит (и ругает) кубернетис хаха

А ещё он активный участник сообщества, помогает новичкам и старичкам и просто велеколепный (хоть и лысый) парень.

Так вот, не смотря на свою алергию на глютен, Саша сейчас служит в ДПСУ, под Николаевом. В один из прошлых разов мы хорошо собрали им на турникеты. Сейчас собираем на:

1. Медицина - бандажі, голки, спреї знеболювальні, комірці, кровоспинні, тощо
2. Плитоноски
3. Плити

Сумма нужна серьезная — €8900, поэтому и сбор серьезный. Это цель номер один.


А ещё есть возможность по очень хорошей цене купить нацгвардии (тоже под Николаевом, рядом с Сашей) короба на 170 патронов которые им нужны
1500 × 30 = 45 000 грн
Это — цель 2, на ачивку “веселый единорожек”

Если закроем, то я после окончания войны печатаю стикеры и бесплатно раздаю всем участникам

А если соберем больше, то есть хороший рамный внедорожник, за €3500 для ПВО тоже под Николаевом (им ОЧЕНЬ СИЛЬНО нужны машины) который могут бесплатно доставить в Украину, а потом по Украине до Николаева.
Это — бонусная цель уровня радосная поняшечка

Если закроем все три, то по окончанию войны — с меня футболки. Футболки, Карл!

Собираю деньги лично я, под свою ответственность. Также собираем и покупаем, и доставляем как наша команда, так и волонтеры которые помогают.

До победы рукой подать!

Номер карты: 4441 1144 5694 3818
PayPal: seva@ctrlok.com

🚜 Ukrainian fArmy — нова українська гра, де треба трактором збирати ворожу техніку: танки, БТРи та вантажівки.

Гру можна завантажити за донат будь-якого розміру. Усі кошти підуть на допомогу волонтерським та некомерційним організаціям, які допомагають Україні.

Більше про гру та посилання на її завантаження — у новині.

👉 https://dou.ua/goto/UJXl

​​Here you can directly contribute to the needs of Kharkiv territorial defence.

#StandWithUkraine

Як розповісти ЗСУ про ворожу техніку, інструкція від ТрО:

🔻як тільки ви особисто побачили російську техніку чи військових - телефонуйте за номером +380 800 507 028
🔻якщо побачив ваш друг/знайомий/родич - він повинен зателефонувати сам
🔻повідомляйте оперативно: побачили - зателефонували
🔻вказуйте точний час і місце, кількість, тип техніки та розпізнавальні знаки.

Росія має знати правду.
Російські журналісти з YouTube-каналу «Зыгарь», телеканалу «Дождь», порталу «Медуза» та видань «Коммерсантъ» і «Новая Газета» отримали відповіді на всі запитання. Чітко й по поличках.