Cloud performance benchmarks

Would love to get community’s feedback on something. I’m interested to know how often you(or your organization) find the need to run cloud performance benchmarks (see examples below)? OR, if you currently do not run benchmarks but you would if you had the right tool to help with the process, how often do you think running performance benchmarks would provide valuable insights?

Example benchmarks:

- disk or network throughput of different VMs.
- network throughout between different zones, regions, clouds, etc.
- cpu performance of different VM types
- performance of different DBs such as MySQL vs Postgres. Or DynamoDB vs Cassandra
- CDN performance
- api response time
- container launch time
- data warehouse comparison
- etc.

Actions/metrics:
- compare contrast clouds, zones, VMs in terms of cost and/or performance
- compare metrics over time
- infrastructure recommendations based on collected metrics

View Poll

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the dumbest problem (AWS Lambda)

I'm writing a Lambda function.

I'm clicking file > save.

When I refresh the page I'm seeing the example boilerplate

hOw Do I sAVe ThE fUnCTioN?

https://redd.it/nymtfr
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Quick primer for a developer suddenly given a devops hat

Looking for some advice on current best in class tools to document and automate an inherited distributed application.

I've recently started a new role working for a B2C company that sells real world events to individuals. It's an established business that is currently doing a few thousand transactions per month, has 100 backoffice staff doing sales, fulfilment and customer support, in about 5 different countries, just to give an idea of scale.

On the tech side, there are half a dozen back office CRUD apps as well as the main customer facing website. This is all deployed as a mishmash of services in AWS. Most of the web apps and api servers are built on node and are deployed as ECS clusters, a bunch of Lambdas, a bunch of SNS queues, etc. There's also some stuff that lives in Azure. We also use Mongo, RDS, Elastic and Dynamo as data stores....

The original architect of the system was apparently a bit of a rough personality to deal with and he left a few months ago along with all of the original dev team. There was a brief handover period with the new dev team and some knowledge transfer happened, but there is minimal documentation and no real automation, aside from a bunch of buildkite pipelines that we have been using to deploy code updates and figure out how stuff holds together.

Im a reasonably experienced dev, been building apps since the 90s, but have not had much exposure to the devops world beyond using puppet to orchestrate our mostly monolithic apps in my previous job, and some docker-compose stuff for deploying ancillary services. Im comfortable with the aws cli tools, and have a pretty good understanding of what most AWS things do. However, I've not really paid attention to the CI/CD and microservices world, mostly glossing over it as that kooky stuff those crazy california kids play with over on HN. Now it seems I have to get hip with all that.

My question is, what do I start with to get a handle on all of this stuff. I honestly get a bit lost in the overlaps of things like Puppet, Terraform, K8S, Jenkins, Buildkite, github actions, cloud formation, etc. Ideally I want to create some sort of inventory of all our services, build a dashboard to start monitoring these services and smooth out deployments and orchestration of the various containers, and hopefully end up with something resembling a DR process, and some tools to manage these services that don't require us to log on to the AWS website and drill through a bunch of menus to restart whatever service is currently misbehaving. At the moment, any serious rearchitecting of the system is not an option - it's on the road map, but we dont have the resources for that as well as keep the current business flowing.

https://redd.it/nyl71k
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Inheriting a cloud system with no documentation. What questions should I be asking?

Hey there, thanks in advance. Any guidance with this would be appreciated. I am currently a systems engineer with a sysadmin background; because of certain regulatory requirements, I have to take over a cloud system environment which is hosting an extensive web application and also expected to maintain a devops environment. All the documentation is in another language and does not translate well with Google translate.

What types of questions should I be asking for this environment? I know this is asking a lot but I am in the process of learning devops tools but I am still a junior in the devops realm. I know just enough to know I barely know anything with these tools. It's pretty fucky what they are asking as I have told them many times I do not know what I am doing if they will not take the time to train me. I do have an intern who speaks English and their language, but there seems to be a barrier as they don't fully understand what I mean. I am on the beginning of the devops path and this will be a good experience for my career. Basically I will be learning everything I can and leaving this toxic environment.

I will be working with the application developers and setting up their environments. From what I understand, we are using Prom/Terraform/Ansible/jumpserver/other tools, but as of right now not giving me access to these tools. I am expected to build out my own Jenkins for this environment, since they will not give me the code or access to the company Gitlab so I have a guide for this.

Thanks for taking the time to read this and appreciate any support.

https://redd.it/nyizca
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Udemy & Resumes

Hey everyone! My wife and I have been going over my resume endlessly and we came to my certifications. I have the Azure Fundamentals and the AWS CP.

I am coming from a 15+ year career in Graphic Design. The only experience I have is the Udemy courses I have been taking over the past 2 years. My wife wants to figure out a way to put the Udemy courses on my resume, but I explained that my stating I have the knowledge to do these things kind of tells them about the Udemy courses. Also, I can specify that if I get an interview.

What are your thoughts?

https://redd.it/nyopva
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Have you managed a separate “design” repository before? How did you make it seamless?

We’ve run into a problem at my company with a very large grails application where we have a ton of .css files that we’re trying to combine to be more uniform and only have a couple imports. The problem is, we initially broke out the overall css files into a good structure, but we’re having to import 7+ files every time we used it.

I have an initial solution for this by importing all the project design files into one like “main.css”, however that shouldn’t be the long term solution due to having to send a request for all the files anyway, and the files can’t be reused as we move to a micro service architecture.

So I want to move the design files into a separate repository and run a script on it when we build that will minify the project and copy it into the necessary folder in any service we run.

So having it minify in the builds is easy enough, my problem is, we use grails run-app locally, so having a separate design repo would either cause the developers to run a script to minify it when they make a change, or if we clone the repo into the project itself locally, there may be file name mis-matches on the imports.

How have you guys made this seamless at your company? I understand I might need to containerize the app, which will likely happen soon anyway, but even past that, how have you set up watchers to build those files on change? Any info helps.

https://redd.it/nyplic
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Encryption and decryption of secrets while deploying it onto an EKS container.

I have a dockerfile where I am trying to copy everything in Github to dockerfile and build it as an image. I have a file called config.json which contains sensitive user data such as username and password. This will also be copied. The issue here is, since this contains sensitive data, I have decided to encrypt this file and store it in Github repo. I want the image to be deployed on to an EKS cluster in AWS and I want this encrypted file to be decrypted. I have a KMS key to be used for encryption and decryption. I had a couple of questions on the same:

1: At which phase am I supposed to decrypt such that the pod contains decrypted file. Should it be during the runtime or in the readiness probe? Or if there is another method to achieve this?
2: Is this method of using KMS the right approach? Or if there are other methods to achieve the same?

https://redd.it/nxz5eq
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Digital Ocean Web Server HELP!

Hi Everyone,
I am currently stuck on what digital ocean droplet I will choose for my Web APP. My web app has an API built with laravel/lumen and frontend of Angular and the database is mysql. I want it to deploy on 1 server. But I don't know what particular droplet type will I choose. My system is a medium scale system which will host RSS Feeds, and will have around maximum of 100 users. I currently deployed it on a General Purpose Server which has 4 CPUS and 16GB Ram, and the feedback is slow, so I am planning to scale up, but I am stuck on what to choose, a CPU optimized or Memory Optimized.

https://redd.it/nyseq7
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Getting Started with Step Functions for Serverless Workflows

https://towardsaws.com/getting-started-with-step-functions-for-serverless-workflows-8c030c2552fb

https://redd.it/nyuwb8
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Application for inventory of enterprise applications that supports subscribing to an application to get notifications of ~configuration changes, etc

Say you're at a large enterprise with 50 or so enterprise applications (Active Directory, Peoplesoft, etc etc etc) and you wanted to undertake an initiative to implement a "portal" of some sort where people could go to see details on applications like version, add-ons (and versions), configuration settings, etc (basically, the things that one would need to know for integrations). Additionally, I'd like to have support for things like maintaining a history of major events (configuration changes, etc), as well as proposals for future events, which "subscribers" to the app would be notified of by email, something like:

On Sept 25, 2021, we are planning to make the following changes to Application XYZ: 1,2,3,4,5. If you have any questions or concerns, click here to review the details and open a ticket with any concerns or questions you have regarding this change.

Anyone know of any existing tools that have this sort of functionality (either as existing functionality in something like ServiceNow, or else dedicated standalone apps)?

https://redd.it/nypv1u
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What's most important to you when it comes to log analysis tools?

I'm new in the space, and I'm (somewhat unfortunately for everyone involved) my junior role has me tasked with cold outreach on phones and via email to book meetings with prospective customers for a log analysis platform.

I want to help, not annoy. What actually matters when it comes to logging?

I'm not going to say who I work for because I (a) don't want to come across as self-aggrandizing and (b) I'm not looking to advertise.

https://redd.it/nz5yw2
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How Do You Handle System Patching / App Upgrades?

I'm looking for a high level overview of some recommendations on automated patching / application updates setups.

By system patching it could be client facing production containers or VMs, or internal systems as well.

By application upgrades I mean say a new version of GitLab is released, how are you implementing that? Do you schedule a maintenance window and patch manually, do you automate it through a pipeline to a testing environment and have that same pipeline patch the production system after a couple automated checks?

There seems to be a ton of different ways to approach this, and I have ideas about how I could do it, but I'm pretty new to DevOps and I'm curious as to what others are doing.

https://redd.it/nz81sh
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Ideas on adding more devops tool into my work flow

Currently working as a sysops administrator dealing with o365 environment (ad server and azure ad with iam responsibilities (adding people to sso permission sets). I also create the aws workspaces for now. I have learned aws cli to add the aws sso users, terraform for building aws workspaces and power shell to create new users and dynamic groups to added to sso apps. I am running out of ideas to add more tools to my tool belt. Would any you have any ideas on what I could expand on or add to practice in becoming a seasoned sre/ devops engineer .

https://redd.it/nzb083
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How to do better at one-on-ones as an ops

I'm 3 months in at a new job as an operation engineer. I mostly monitor system outages and page devs when something goes down. Unlike the devs, I don't have any project I'm in charge of, nor do I do any codings/scripting (yet). Whenever I have my one-on-one, I have no clue what I should say other than that I'm doing well so far lol. My meeting always ends early... it's kinda awkward.

If you are a manager, what do you expect new hires to talk about?

If you have gone through something similar to me, what do you suggest I should talk about?

What kind of mindset should I have to get something meaningful out of these meetings?

What are the topics can I talk about to lead my one-on-one meetings better? Please help..

Thanks.

https://redd.it/nzefmw
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Join OpsMx at Spinnaker Summit and cdCon 2021

OpsMx welcomes you to join Spinnaker sessions in Spinnaker summit and cdCon 2021, and learn how to mordernise your CI/CD

https://redd.it/nzfxw2
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Evaluating DevOps Candidates

Folks who hire engineers to automate deployment of infrastructure and software, how do you evaluate candidates?

For software dev jobs, there are sites to help test coding skills. Do you use something similar?

Do you have people write code during an interview?

Do you ask detailed questions about the particular tools you use?

With the wide diversity of tools companies use, the relatively short existence of many tools, and a general low supply of tech talent compared to demand, it would seem for DevOps automation jobs a company would limit their candidate pool too narrowly if they focused on specific technologies. I’m curious how people are assessing aptitude to learn and adapt to new technologies in the constantly changing landscape of scripting languages and tools.

https://redd.it/nzgljh
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Newbie to DevOps, seeking opportunities.

Hello all, as the title says I am a newbie to DevOps and want to seek some direction. Can you people help me understand how can I get opportunities with no work experience in this field? LinkedIn is full of openings for 3+ experience engineers. Do companies look for internships or entry level jobs as well? If yes, what skills they seek and how can I build a promising resume?

https://redd.it/nzh97r
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Monitoring PoV

I'm working for a quite large multicloud org and it was asked to me to setup the new monitoring reference architecture.

What are the common elements to take care of?

Workloads are a mix of legacy and cloud-native, so I thought about something like a data lake (like Splunk perhaps) to correlate\\have a single source of dashboards\\reports for service.

What's your experience? Are there some attention points?

https://redd.it/nzivh6
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Curious about Hikaru but don't want to download all the dependencies just to try it? You can now see how it can convert your Kubernetes YAML to Python online.

https://www.incisivetech.co.uk/try-hikaru.html

https://redd.it/nzjp62
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Do you run gitlab inside k8s cluster how is your experience ?

I am curious to know if some one is running gitlab inside (on prem) k8s cluster in production.

If yes how is your experience compared to running it in plain Docker or VMs. If you can share your insights on stability and if there are any benefits you see over other methods.=

https://redd.it/nzi9mp
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Which of my straggles would be the best strategy for creating a Release in azure pipelines?

Which of my straggles would be the best strategy for creating a Release in azure pipelines?

The reason for 3 builds is that environment variable has to be built in on build time.

I have a pipeline which can create 3 builds and publish the artifacts, given the branch that triggers the pipeline. This means that if master triggers, it will only build master and dev trigger will only build dev.

Before artifacts publish, I set the artifacts name to either art-dev, art-test and art-prod given the branch.

Now I will create a Release in azure, and I am wondering what would be my best strategy.

First approach:

Create a release with 3 artifacts source, where each artifacts set default version to latest from a specific branch with tags, and then create the stages and set an artifact filter that choose which artifact and branch it should scope. Would this be an optimal way of doing it or is any of the steps I am doing unecessary?

Second approach:

Remove artifacts name when publishing or set it to drop.

Create a release with only one artifact source (drop )and then for each stage, set artifact filter with build branch, would this make sure that each stage will deploy correct build since we no longer mark each artifact with environment name anymore?

https://redd.it/nzllj8
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