Not some technical news, but important ones.

Google is delaying return to the office till mid-October at least in the US.

Also, once campuses are fully re-opened, they will demand any person to come in to be fully vaccinated. This is important because a lot of smaller companies tend to copy the behavior (and tech approaches) from the industry giants. Therefore, many other companies will delay the return as well.

Also, this a loud and clear signal regarding the vaccination. Probably, the first one came from the private sector in the IT industry.

Obviously, this article doesn't mean that Google accepts remote work. This battle is yet to be fought. However, the world has already changed. Remote work is no longer an exceptional benefit. More and more companies now offer a hybrid format at least. And I personally can only welcome these changes!

Flant has officially announced their Deckhouse solution to bootstrap ready to use Kubernetes platforms.

I've already written about it here: https://t.iss.one/catops/1723

So, not to repeat myself too much: I think this is a move in the right direction. I expect more and more Kubernetes distributions in the future, just like it happened to Linux.

People need platforms, not orchestrators!

#kubernetes

CDK Construct Hub:

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/developer/construct-hub-preview/

Construct Hub is a one-stop destination for finding, reusing and sharing constructs authored by AWS, AWS Partner Network partners, third parties, and the developer community.
CDK constructs are cloud architecture building blocks and patterns that you can use to stand up complete production-ready cloud applications.

#CDK

"When I see a door with a push sign, I pull first to avoid conflicts" - anonymous

In version 2.23 of git, two new commands have been introduced: git switch and git restore. Both are aimed to replace ambiguous behavior of git checkout. Although, the original checkout command is still available.

Switch works the same way as checkout on branches and restore as checkout on files.

Why? Because the previous implementation was confusing.

#git

​​I remember being on a meetup in the Twitter HQ where people were talking about the success of Finagle and eventually presented an idea and some first versions of Linkerd.

It was in 2017 and now Linkerd is a graduated project of CNCF.

Congratulations!

These is an interesting part:

Linkerd is the first service mesh to rise to the level of graduation. But Linkerd has a long history of firsts: Linkerd was the first service mesh project and the one to coin the term itself. It was the first project to enter the CNCF’s inception (now sandbox) phase. It was the first CNCF project to adopt Rust

P.S. A nostalgic photo from the Twitter HQ

#networking

Would be nice to get this for mobile devices as well.Anyways, this is a great feature and a huge step forward!

https://twitter.com/github/status/1425505817827151872?s=28

Welcome the new ultimate versioning convention for modern projects - 0ver!
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P.S. This is a satire post. You should not do that!

​​Ok, the headline is a bit clickbait, but the truth is that you have to use Elastic 7.14 in order to upgrade your client libraries. You will get an error otherwise.

On one hand, the recent change in Elastic clients do break compatibility with the older APIs and it generates some righteous anger. On another hand, supporting backward compatibility is hard. You have to make breaking changes sometimes.

In the current situation, it's especially important to understand that OpenSearch and ElasticSearch are different products now. You can keep compatibility between them for some time (this was a promise from AWS, not Elastic, actually) but it's obvious that two products diverge eventually. And Elastic is not obliged to keep their products compatible with whatsoever AWS has.

Although, Elastic did this change as per the minor version update, which kinda violates semVer principles. However, it seems to me that no one cares about the semVer principles these days (see the previous post).

#elasticsearch #aws

Getting back to the AWS architecture diagram from yesterday.

First of all, that was a joking post. If such an infrastructure works for them, that's OK.

The diagram is from this article, where they suggest 3 tips for working with Kinesis streams. So, if you're running Kinesis in your production systems as well, this article might be interesting for you too.

Also, they describe why did they move to such a serverless infrastructure in a series of short posts:
- An overview
- Testing and CI/CD
- Operations

There are actually more useful links for Lambda users inside those articles.

Enjoy!

#aws #serverless

An article about what qualities should one have to be a success part of a platform team. More precisely, which qualities should one have in that particular company.

It's a bit annoying, because this is yet another story about all-in-one engineer. However, it's even more annoying because this is particularly true.

So, a good platform engineer should:
- Handle the product management
- Be good in tech and be able to debug non-trivial things
- Sale their ideas to the rest of organization
- Build good UX
- Write decent documentation

Also, this article makes an interesting point about a purpose of the platform team. According to it, the platform team should be a "knowledge bus" inside the company. So, an organization can make sure that the knowledge it generates is not only preserved, but also shared inside the company in sustainable way.

#culture

​​Approximately twice a month we organize a voice chat here in CatOps.

Today is one of such occasions. And today we are going to talk about secret management and how to defent the perimiter, and probably some other toipics as well.

You can join the voice chat via this link:
https://t.iss.one/catops_chat?voicechat

Voice chat is in Ukrainian/Russian

​​When one admin makes voice chats online, another - makes voice chats offline

HUG Kyiv #12: CICD, GitOps, Terraform!

What:
- The Magic of CICD approaches and infrastructure building
- GitOps strategies for Terraform
- Terraform bad practices. What I've learned from 2 years working that way.

Who:
- Oleg Chulanov @ Diebold Nixdorf
- Igor Rodionov @ CloudPosse
- Konstantin Lazarenko @ Star

When: Saturday 28th August, 18:00 (Kyiv TZ)
Where: Officially it's Kyiv, details in meetup. + Online
Languages: Russian, Ukrainian

Please, register here

#event

Not long ago, I wrote about the rise of Kubernetes distributions. So, take a few more:

* Airship - a tool for creating platforms based on Kubernetes, which is backed by some big tech.
* KubeZero - opinionated zero downtime Kubernetes platform
* Cluster.dev - and of course an opinionated Kubernetes cluster setup tool by SHALB

Hope, you can find something useful for you. Or you can build your own opinionated setup tooling, of course.

Because people need platforms, not clusters!

#kubernetes

All of us read a lot these days. Documentation, articles, books, how-tos, even the CatOps posts. We need to consume and prcess enormous amounts of information in order to just stay afloat.

So, is there a way to make it better? How can one keep up with the flow?

How to Remember What You Read provides some practical advices on how to improve the quality of the reading process as well as… well, remember what you read.

Although, it’s not at all a technical article, this content may be beneficial for everyone, who’s going through the piles of tech literature. I would even argue that that tese advices might be more valuable in this case. Since, professional literature is usually more data dence than fiction.

If you want to see just a brief summary of this article, let it be this. Quote:

But if you only remember six things after reading this article, it should be the following truths about reading:

1. Quality matters more than quantity. If you read one book a month but fully appreciate and absorb it, you’ll be better off than someone who skims half the library without paying attention.

2. Speed-reading is bullshit. Getting the rough gist and absorbing the lessons are two different things. Confuse them at your peril.

3. Book summary services miss the point. A lot of companies charge ridiculous prices for access to vague summaries bearing only the faintest resemblance to anything in the book. Summaries can be a useful jumping-off point to explore your curiosity, but you cannot learn from them the way you can from the original text.

4. Fancy apps and tools are not needed. A notebook, index cards, and a pen will do just fine.

5. We shouldn’t read stuff we find boring. Life is far too short.

6. Finishing the book is optional. You should start a lot of books and only finish a few of them.

#books #culture

Humble Bundle has a new portion of O'Reilly's Linux books

As usual, you can pay €1, ~€9, or ~€15 to unlock books about useful Linux utilities and other related stuff. The bundle is valid till the 12th of September. It includes:

- Bash Cookbook
- Linux Observability with BPF
- Mastering Regular Expressions
- Effective awk Programming
- Linux Pocket Guide
- Cybersecurity Ops with bash
- Learning the Bash Shell
- Learning the vi and Vim Editors
- Linux in a Nutshell
- sed & awk
- Linux System Programming
- Classic Shell Scripting
- Linux Device Drivers
- Introducing Regular Expressions
- grep Pocket Reference
- Unix Power Tools

#books

Continuing the topic of Linux utilities, here is a good guide about xargs utility.

In nutshell, xargs allows you to work with outputs provided by another program. So, you can think of many applications of it. My favorite one is that xargs has a -P flag, which allows you to parallel processing of the outputs. So, it can be more optimal than running a for loop in some occasions.

#toolz

​​​​​​​​​​HUG Kyiv #12: CICD, GitOps, Terraform tommorow!

Program:
- Oleg Chulanov: The Magic of CICD approaches and infrastructure building rus
- Igor Rodionov: GitOps strategies for Terraform rus
- Konstantin Lazarenko: Terraform bad practices. What I've learned from 2 years working that way. ukr

Will be 28th August, 18:00 (Kyiv TZ) in Kyiv and YouTube

#event

CNCF is creating a new working group around "Cooperative Delivery".

Here is a part of the problem statement this group is trying to address:

In most app-delivery scenarios, the packaging format and delivery mechanism of the application artifacts are targeted, but not necessarily the app's infrastructure dependencies such as data stores and message queues. That is, application and infrastructure delivery are not coordinated. Often, applications are heavily dependent on infrastructure resources that are not directly linked to a specific deployment, and therefore problems with non-existing infrastructure resources might cause deployments to fail. In addition to this, the application and infrastructure lifecycles are not synchronized, creating additional complexity and challenges when delivering workloads.

The goal of this group is not to provide a definitive solution, rather gather the information in the industry on how people are doing "cooperative delivery". Which trends are there. Are there any emerging approaches, etc.

It'll be very interesting to see their findings. Struggles with application bundling is something I encounter personally and I believe a lot of other engineers do.

#culture #cncf

A blog post by Charity Majors about why you should ask Ops questions when interviewing software engineers.

In short, we all are responsible for the stability of our systems as well as encouraging good practices of deploying, releasing, observing software, etc. Therefore, it's not enough to just have an SRE team and push that burden on them. Reliability and operations should be a concern for any team within a company.

Quote:
Our industry has gotten very good at pressing operations engineers to get better at writing code, writing tests, and software engineering in general these past few years. Which is great! But we have not been nearly so good at pushing software engineers to level up their systems skills. Which is unfortunate, because it is just as important.

#culture

​​Two day ago was HUG Kyiv #12, and here is record and slides (links in description)

Enjoy!

#slides