Depending on your seniority and title, working with diagrams may take a big chunk of your day-to-day work.

Here's a collection of diagram creation tools, so you could pick something that suits your needs. Some of these
projects are quite famous - others not so much. I personally found some
interesting things there. It's not guaranteed that I will use them, but
still.

Also, speaking of diagrams, I can recommend this talk
from FOSDEM 2023. It's not a super-entertaining one, but it has some
good suggestions on how to draw your diagrams. The talk itself if
wrapped into Kubernetes, but those suggestions are universal.

#diagrams

Saturday afternoon is the ideal time to listen to 3 hours of a discussion about AI in the new episode of our CatOps Voice Chat (in Ukrainian).

There are a lot of useful links in the description as well, so check it out!

You can find the new episode on:

- YouTube
- Substack
- Spotify
- Apple Podcasts
- RSS Feed

Hope you enjoy it!

#voice_chat #говорилка #ai

​​​​For today's Donations Monday I’d like to remind you about a fundraiser from Dzyga's Paw that they do together with 7 different units.

https://send.monobank.ua/jar/7CRy1e16Qk

Here's the description from Dzyga's Paw themselves.

Dzyga’s Paw Fund, in partnership with seven units, is launching a $300,000 fundraiser to provide them with 90 night drones — essential for precision and safety in night operations.
Donate now to support project Triad: https://dzygaspaw.com/triad-night-drones
We are bringing together two powerful forces: our international supporters and Ukrainians backing their brigades. No matter what they say, Ukraine is not tired. Our defenders fight on, and we stand with them. And our friends from all over the world are eager to help us with this mission.
Join our ambassador team to help reach this ambitious goal faster — start a smaller fundraiser! Write to us in DM, and we will provide you with all the information, visuals, and donation chart.
This war has lasted nearly 11 years, and the last three have been the most brutal. Against all odds, Ukraine continues to resist. It is our duty to ensure our defenders have the tools they need to win!

#donations #Ukraine

According to DOU, Python is the most popular programming language among the DevOps-related specialists who understand Ukrainian.

Pydantic is a popular library for configuration validation, including the configuration that comes from the environment. However, it can break the unit tests, if the required environment variables are not present.

However, you can create a fixture for your Pydantic configuration that patches the environment, so your tests are isolated. Here's an article that describes, how to do that.

#python #programming

Firefly has release a State of IaC 2025 report. As usual, you can obtain it in exchange for your personal data 🙃

#iac #terraform

Recently, Git celebrated its 20th anniversary, and the pre-commit framework marked 11 years.

Interestingly, despite their longevity, these technologies are still not being used to their full potential — especially when it comes to leveraging git hooks.

To shed some light on this, I gave a talk about them (in Ukrainian): https://youtu.be/mqzyVg5WOMM
This is a natural continuation of my previous talk on the same topic, which I gave back in 2018 :)
Covered (and skipped) topics and link to the older talk in video description. Enjoy!


#git

​​For today's Donations Monday, I'd like to remind you about the UA Responders charity foundations who specialize in tactical medicine.

I know these folks personally, so I feel absolutely confident recommending them to you!

Debezium is a popular open source tool to implement the CDC (change data capture) pattern for various data sources.

This article provides some highlights of how it works for PostgreSQL as well as it covers some practical implications of working with Debezium like figuring out LSNs, failing over to a replica, and so on.


#databases

A very nice video by Confluent that introduces Apache Iceberg:

https://youtu.be/TsmhRZElPvM?si=JA5hcWCT1iOEKEkt

#data

As you may know, there was a KubeCon Europe recently in London.

I didn’t go there, but here a member of our community shares his thoughts about the conference on LinkedIn.

Also, if you understand Ukrainian and prefer the video format, you can also check out the video from Den Vasyliev as well.

#event #kubernetes

You may have noticed a train of released AI stuff here and there. In recent times, everyone started rushing towards AI agents to vendor-lock you to their solutions even more.

And do you know why they are able to do it so relatively easily?

https://ampcode.com/how-to-build-an-agent

P.S. 400 lines of Go code. If you remove all if err != nil by using something like Python, it will be half or even fewer lines. Yep

#ai

​​For today’s Donations Monday, I’d like to share with y’all a new fundraiser from Dzyga’s Paw - Save the Crabs 🦀

They are raising $110,000 to protect 15 Self-propelled artillery systems Krab with 15 Anti-Drone Systems.

#donations #Ukraine

Long post due issue of the CatOps digest is here!

https://newsletter.catops.dev/p/catops-digest-2025-04-27

#digest #newsletter

​Let's help Hospitallers rebuild their base to continue the work of one of the most outstanding volunteer medical battalions

https://send.monobank.ua/jar/2QrD4xoAsb

Other ways to support Hospitallers:
- https://www.hospitallers.life/needs-hospitallers
- https://www.hospitallers.org.uk/ways-to-help

#donations #Ukraine

A new books bundle on Humble Bundle:

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/devops-2025-oreilly-books

These are O'Reilly books, which are usually good quality. A couple of the books from this bundle were quite popular when they were initially released.

#books #bundle

GitHub has its own container registry for quite some time. Also, starting from the Helm version 3.8, it's possible to use any OCI registry to store your Helm charts. So, why not to store them on GitHub?

Here's an article that describes how to do that.

As a bonus, here's another article that provides an example of a GitHub Action workflow that allows you to publish your multi-architecture images to GHCR using GoReleaser. Actions' versions are outdated in that article, but you can simply set the new ones.

#github #helm #ghcr

Today, I'd like to share with you a thing I've worked on for quite some time. Well, the majority of the time I was procrastinating it, but still.

This small project is called Cost Exporter. It's designed to fetch metrics from AWS Cost Explorer API and present them as Prometheus metrics on an HTTP endpoint.

In theory, it's extensible. So, other cloud providers and formats could be added.

It may have some rough edges, since I haven't tested it in real production, only in my test account. Also, this is a classical pet-project: its main goal is to refresh some knowledge and play with some new technologies - not necessarily provide a production-grade solution. Still, I think it may be a useful tool. At least, the idea itself is definitely useful.

Cost Exporter is written in Go, has a Helm chart, everything is stored in GHCR, and automated using GitHub Actions. I have some other ideas on how to improve it, but I cannot guarantee that I do that.

Hope, you'll find this project interesting!

#go #programming #aws #kubernetes

It’s frequently been said, that when one goes up the career ladder, communication skills aka soft skills become as important, if not more important, as technical skills.

Here’s an article by A Life Engineered with some tips on how to improve your communication skills. Just like any other skills, those can be improved with enough dedication.

#culture

​​Let's close this fundraiser today - there's not much left to reach its goal and buy a re-transmitter for drones.

https://send.monobank.ua/jar/21w3A2UaUH

This fundraiser was shared with me with a long-time member of our community and my colleague from the very first paid work of mine. I'm pretty sure, we can close it today!

#donations #Ukraine

One of my favorite comics books has the phrase: "Who watches the Watchmen?".

Re-phrasing that: how is the oncall schedule organized in a company that provides tools for oncall and observability?

In this article you could take a glimpse on how oncall is organized at Datadog.

#oncall #sre

One thing I really like about Helm is that you can "tune" the level of complexity of your codebase. Or one could say, tune the "DRY-ness" of
your codebase.

Thus, you can have simple templates which are mostly plain YAML with only a few values that are set by a user. Or you can have complex configurations with logic, extensions, libraries, tests, and so on. Go templates are ass, but you can totally do that.

One of the common ways of making Helm codebase DRY-er is to move common specs into separate templates. Thus, in some charts you can see files like _pod-spec.tpl, _job-spec.tpl, and so on. Later on, you can include those templates into higher level objects (this is basically how library charts work).

But what if you want to pass an additional variable, not from
the values file, but from a high-level template itself? Think of a private
variable that controls if some parts are included in the manifests,
depending on from where they were called? Say, you want to enable profiling on a subset of pods, so you create two deployments: with
profiling off and on. This is the same app, so both deployments could share the same spec. You need to tell Helm somehow, that one of the deployments should have additional config to enable profiling.

You can actually do that! Helm template function accepts a single
argument that can be a dictionary of parameters, your usual {{ template "foo" . }}, where dot represents all the values in the current scope, which you could later access as {{ .Value.foo }} in your template. The scope here is a dictionary, so you can extend it with any private
variables you like.

For example:

 include "foo" (merge (dict "myVar" "bar") .) }}

Then, you'll be able to access myVar within the included template.

See:
- One
- Two.

#helm #kubernetes