CatOps

A late Sunday digest is out!

https://open.substack.com/pub/catops/p/catops-digest-2024-01-21

#digest #newsletter

Google shares their experience from 20 years of SRE.

This article contains overview and lessons learned from some older incidents. It’s nice, but I can’t say that there is any mind blowing information in there. Anyway, it’s nice that it came from Google.

#sre

We usually don't post event announcements. Yet, there's an exception: our direct involvement in the event :)

On 17th of February I'm speaking at DevOps fwdays'24 conference together with other wonderful people.

You can join the conference either offline in Kyiv or online from anywhere in the World as long as you have the Internet connection.

Also, I have a promo-code CCD4090099 that gives 15% off for any type of tickets!

UPD: if you would like to talk at the conference, you have the last chance to submit your talk via the CfP form!

#event

Infrastructure as Code and Configuration Management topics are old and boring. It seems like it's almost impossible to have anything conceptually new in this domain, except some drama around licensing.

Yet, in this blogpost Nathan Peck (he works in AWS, IIRC) argues that we could do it differently and that we could do it better.

The core idea is that instead of writing some YAML or DSL to define various resources and then try to group them somehow, we could leverage the same approach that Web technologies took. More specifically, "decorating" objects with properties provided separately. Similarly to what CSS does to HTML.

There's also a discussion of this post on Hacker News

#iac

​​For today’s Donations Monday you can support our snipers to start your week on a good note.

#donations #Ukraine

💡Міністерство оборони України шукає найкращі технологічні рішення для вдосконалення безпілотних систем на фронті.

28-29 січня проводимо Хакатон «Наступ Машин».

Якщо ви — інноватор, інженер чи військовий і маєте ідею щодо розвитку безпілотних систем, реєструйтеся за посиланням: https://forms.gle/Yu7uRrj578ihsXJu6

Серед членів журі Хакатону:
▪️Тарас Чмут (https://www.facebook.com/TarChmut )
▪️Серж Марко (https://www.facebook.com/serg.marco )
▪️Сергій Флеш (https://www.facebook.com/Serhii.Flash )

І це ще не всі – інших анонсуємо згодом.

Перелік челенджів та деталі щодо заходу ви отримаєте після реєстрації.

Наша мета — створення технологічної переваги над ворогом 10:1. Воювати мають машини, а не люди.

Для цього розвиваємо технології перемоги разом! Craft the Future of Unmanned Systems.

Співорганізаторами Хакатону є Генеральний штаб ЗСУ, Міністерство з питань стратегічних галузей промисловості і defence tech кластер Brave1.

​​Good news in Terraform world!

tofu test syntax is the same (or pretty similar) to terraform test syntax in 1.6+

Also, it's first GA release of opentofu (about 5 months from forking)
Let's see how it will go. Currently, I can said that there bunch of folks who bombard everything with "please support tofu in N" (before there were any releases) but don't do anything to contribute to projects.

Also, in case you're excited about migration to tofu - firstly, you must fix all your TF code stacks, which is nearly impossible in huge organizations. Or make gradual migration => live with both tf and tofu side by side for months.

#terraform

You know how it works: people are posting their end-of-the-year results at the end of each year and their predictions for the future at the beginning of each year.

In this video, Viktor Farcic shares his thoughts on the tools to check out (or continue using) in 2024.

#tools #predictions #video

Just recently Denys made a video about the interviewing process into a “hot” AI startup.

They use Python there (surprise, surprise). And just today I’ve noticed a Python book bundle on Humble Bundle.

Also, if you’d rather switch to the management career track all together, there’s another book bundle for you.

I know that some people complain about the quality of Packt books, but I’m a simple man: I see a relevant book bundle - I share it. Now, you can decide for yourself.

#python #management #books

​​I would like to remind you about the UA Responders foundation that raises funds for tactical medicine.

You can support them here:

https://uaresponders.org/donate/

#donations #Ukraine

The first CatOps digest of the year 2024 is available here:

https://newsletter.catops.dev/p/catops-digest-2024-01-07

#digest #newsletter

A new episode of our voice chat is here! This time we had a single yet broad topic of architecture and the architect role in companies.

The episode is in Ukrainian and available on:

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

Enjoy!

P.S. Also, CatOps is participating in the DOU Awards "Podcasts" department! I would really appreciate it if you could support us here with your vote!

#voice_chat

​​Start the new year with donations to the Ukrainian military!

Back and Alive raise 220M UAH for Ukrainian snipers.

You can join the fundraiser here

#donations #Ukraine

Let's start a new year with something entertaining, like talk about hacking train DRM to be able to fix it.

Additional points, if you'll describe in comments which DevOps, Software Engineering, and Legal Practices were violated by the train manufacturer (:

And, don't forget to support Ukraine 🇺🇦.

​​З Новим Роком, коти!

Happy New Year! 🎄

I was about to leave for the wnter holidays, but then I recalled that I still owe you the last issue of the CatOps Digest of this year.

So, here you are!

https://open.substack.com/pub/catops/p/catops-digest-2023-12-26

I wish you very pleasant holidays and see you next year!

#digest #newsletter

Root Cause Chronicles: Connection Collapse is a hypothetical (or not?) scenario of a production outage.

What I like about such hypothetical scenarios compared to postmortem articles is that they usually focus on the process, while postmortems focus on outcomes. In other words, in articles like this you see something like: “We checked an app A and then an app B, and then this DB and that cluster; and finally we found it!”, while postmortems tend to condence the same process into dry statements like: “After thorough investigation we found that it was a DNS issue”.

Thus, such hypothetical articles better showcase an actual process of the incident resolution, in my opinion.

Bonus: InfraCloud (authors of this article) have a repository with such incident scenarios that you can study.

#sre #oncall #incident_management

Let's talk a little bit about culture. Culture of sabotage!

That's a nice guide of how to drop productivity to a minimum without being caught. Enjoy!

https://erikbern.com/2023/12/13/simple-sabotage-for-software.html

#culture

​​**Database Fundamentals.**

Because it just fundamentals, it can take a few hours to read and understand + mandatory breaks :)

It's one of the best articles I've seen on general DB topics, with a huge amount of links and notes to go deeper into Rabbit Hole. Definitely recommend it to read.

#databases

A Linux book bundle on Humble Bundle. Now, I know that people have mixed feelings about books by Packt. Some folks say that they are too basic.

So, if you’re unhappy about the Packt books, you may want to check the Software Development bundle that has a couple of books on CI/CD, DevOps, and SRE topics.

#books