CatOps

Observability in the Age of AI is an article by Charity Majors and Phillip Carter that speculates about the changes that observability stacks and engineering teams alike will face with an introduction of AI.

This is an article from the company, so of course you have self-promotion here, but there are also very good points:

- If you can compute the answer, you probably should compute the answer
- Often people use AI to try to close the gaps of data they do not collect, yet AI results would be also better if that data is present
- When talking about people, AI is better used as an additional reviewer rather than a creator

And one thing that is not directly related to observability, but has given me a lot of food for thoughts:

- We expect software will bifurcate into two categories: disposable code and the code that runs the world.

I've put direct quotes in italic.

#observability #ai

​​Seva from UkrOps has started an English version of his blog with the first post about handling concurrency in Bash!

Bash still does a lot of heavy-lifting inside automation tools, task managers, and "CI/CD" systems, as well as for automating mundane ad-hoc tasks. So, you can easily apply ideas from this article in your setup.

#bash #programming

An interesting article by Google about the evolution of SRE.

In nutshell, they describe how they can apply the control theory principles towards software systems to see how can not just individual components fail, but also what are the failure patterns of those components working together.

#sre

​​It’s time to get out from the holidays hibernation and get back to this channel again. And what could be the best way to start a year, if not with a donation for AFU?

Wife of my friend from my very first tech-related job raises 15k UAH for AFU. There’s also a raffle to win a certificate to buy books.

The goal is not that high, so I’m pretty sure we can close it today together!

Monobank Jar:
https://send.monobank.ua/jar/72CpNXHERf

#donations #Ukraine

З новим роком, коти! ❤️

An almost New Year episode of our voice chat (in Ukrainian).

At the end of this year, we gathered to discuss certifications: who needs them and why, and how to obtain them. You can find the episode on:

- YouTube
- Substack
- Spotify
- Apple Podcasts

Enjoy this new episode while making some New Year salads!

P.S. Please, let me know in the YouTube comments or elsewhere, if you like the voice chat format and if it makes sense to continue it in the new year. Cheers!

#voice_chat #certifications

For today’s Donations Monday, I want to share with you a fundraiser from one of our community members.

This is a fundraiser for a mini-excavator for the 36th separate brigade of AFU, which will tremendously help them to dig trenches in winter.

https://send.monobank.ua/jar/3aq2sBa6Fk

#donations #Ukraine

Breaking down OpenAI's outage: How to avoid a hidden DNS dependency in Kubernetes - in this article, folks at Render analyze the recent OpenAI outage and provide some insights on the possible cause of the issue.

This article also serves as a reminder that you'd better run DNS and the Control Plane on separate nodes and also that the data in ETCD is organized by namespace, thus listing "all" resources is very costly, especially in large clusters, since you need to scan everything.

#kubernetes #postmortem

An online calculator for DataDog costs + some tips on how to keep these costs in check.

Yes, this is a marketing material, so you need to take the "comparison" part with a kilogram of salt. Also, the calculator itself is tricky: DataDog has many ways of "committing" to some capacity, which impacts the price drastically. They mention this fact in the article as well. So, this calculator is rather a reference than a precise tool.

Otherwise, this article provides some sane tips on the DataDog cost management.

#costs #finops #observability

For today's Donations Monday, we’re raising funds to support a friend of my wife, who is currently serving with the KORD Special Purpose Police Unit on the front lines in Donetsk.

His team is in urgent need of essential components for
the FPV drones.

The funds are for:

- Repeaters for better signal range
- Antennas for stable communication
- Batteries for extended flight time

Your support will help KORD improve their operations and stay safe while protecting Ukraine.

https://send.monobank.ua/jar/4WLw91UqFe

Every donation matters!

#donations #Monday

Asking questions during an interview is as important as answering them, one could argue.

Here are a couple of articles with examples of what to ask your potential employer and the team.

- Reverse Interviewing Your Future Manager and Team - an old article from Gergely Orosz on the topic. Kudos to him for not closing old articles behind a paywall as many Substack creators do!
- 40+ questions to ask at a job interview - the website itself is Berlin-centric, but these questions are independent from a location.

Also, one of the top motivations to search for a new job is compensation. So, if you have spare 10 minutes this Sunday afternoon, folks from DOU would greatly appreciate if, if you could participate in their annual salary survey (in Ukrainian). This year they collect all the answers, including people who do not live in Ukraine (hopefully, those answers won’t be filtered out in the end results as well).

#jobs #salary #survey

I didn't pay enough attention yesterday, so I didn't post the second part of the article about Argo CD :\

Let's fix it! Here it is. This second part focuses on the .source configuration parameter of ApplicationSet.

#cicd #argocd

One of the members of our community wrote an article about ArgoCD, more specifically about generators in an ApplicationSet.

This article has words "Part I" in it, so I hope that other parts are ready as well, since there is a golden rule: do not publish parts unless you have all of them ready :D

#cicd #argocd

A new CatOps Digest is here!

https://newsletter.catops.dev/p/catops-digest-2024-12-08

#digest #newsletter

Regardless my feelings about Python, it's still a very popular language among the platform people.

So, here is a bundle of Python books by Pearson that I forgot to share with you earlier!

This offer is still valid for 7 days. As usual, you can pay about €25 to unlock the whole bundle.

#books #programming #python

And to re:Invent announces:

AWS accidentally reinvented a few things once again like "K8s administrator not needed anymore" and "DBA not needed anymore" which means that these folks will have a wonderful opportunity to automate some toil work 🥳

If you haven't checked out yet Top announcements of AWS re:Invent 2024, they are pretty decent

​​For today’s Donations Monday I would like to remind you of a standing jar of my German teacher.

https://send.monobank.ua/jar/8jQSHW57kP

He’s also a volunteer and he uses this jar to address ongoing requests from the combatants.

These things may not be as favorable to the media compared to some other equipment, but it doesn’t make it not important.

#donations #Ukraine

Another interesting article from our chat.

As you probably already know, Terraform has introduced ephemeral values in version 1.10. The goal is to address the long-standing issue with credentials in the state file.

However, there is also a great complimentary article by a HashiCorp developer, who worked on this feature, with the detailed justification. Honestly, this article is a good read!

#terraform #hashicorp

AWS at last allowed users to serve assets from private networks via CloudFront.

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/11/amazon-cloudfront-vpc-origins/

In the announcement, they mention simplification of operations and security, but not cost, and you have to pay for public traffic in AWS. So, not sure, what are the hidden costs of this new feature.

#aws

A critical view point on OpenTelemetry implementation from VictoriaMetrics.

In nutshell, the idea is good, but the implementation is too bloated, which often happens when the aim is to provide a one-size-fits-all solution.

As a commenter pointed out in a Reddit discussion:

 problem is they are right, otel is a simple idea standardize observability. However when you get every vendor involved it can expand to a huge project very quick.

#observability #otel