What are the best, well-maintained Github Action library for publishing to npm, deploying to production, building and testing?

What are the best, well-maintained Github Action library for publishing to npm, deploying to production, building and testing? For some reason, there are thousands of such library and it seems once in a while they break and it can be a pain in the ass to fix them, so I was wondering if I should use a library so that it's easier to fix them when they stop working.

https://redd.it/y3j1dd
@r_devops

If an organisation does not use DevOps - what do they use instead to develop and release software?

Hi,


I am only familiar with working with DevOps to develop and release software. Organizations who are yet to adopt DevOps, what do they use instead? I can't imagine how organisations can cope otherwise.


Is it that they might use GitHub or AzureDevOps, but have yet to implement proper controls and teams around it? So they are not properly implementing the DevOps tools, just partly utilising them.


It would be great to get your feedback and experience on the adoption of DevOps.


Thank you

https://redd.it/y3negp
@r_devops

Any Platform to Excercise DevOps methods like we get for programming languages like CodeChef or HackerRank??

I was applying for a job and they asked me to do a assessment and redirected to codility page there i choose DevOps Nginx as a skill and the test was really good. So i check the site and it was for companies only to provide assessments for hire. Any other sites which i can use to sharp my DevOps Skills guys??

Thank You!!!

https://redd.it/y3s8p2
@r_devops

recently graduated software engineering student doing infrastructure - i like it, but am i shooting myself in the foot in the long run by doing less complex programming?

i really do enjoy the process of devops and creating scaling infrastructure to ensure everything is smooth and running.

however, looking at my other fellow colleagues who are doing more "programming"/software architecture/mathy stuff i can't help but worry that i might be shooting myself in the foot in the long run - especially since i want to become better at C++ (but at the same time i can totally understand the importance of having a good, stable pipeline)

i basically feel like an IT dude (for developers) working in linux and editing yaml files (although it is growing in complexity) and we will be soon transitioning towards a cloud environment.

any suggestions on how i can keep my "software engineering" skills sharp?

https://redd.it/y3sld5
@r_devops

Circle CI How can i block merging in github until successful deployment check

Hi all!

So my problem is I want people to not be able to merge into master branch until circleCi checks that their deployment would not fail. Im really new to configuring circle Ci, we have many different folders and we're working with salesforce. So my question is where to start? how do i make those checks? each job can take up to 10 min so how should i approach it to not make it to time consuming to check? How do i configure it?

https://redd.it/y3tmo8
@r_devops

In reality, how possible is an always releasable trunk branch?

With the intention to use trunk based development with one of its requirements being the trunk branch to always be in a releasable state, how likely is this actually in practise?

Having the target branch of any PRs be always releasable requires a suite of tests being run against it and blocking the PR on any failures. This is fine, but to cover all cases this test suite must surely be very extensive and take much longer than is recommended to run. How do we create excellent test coverage at this point whilst also not blocking PRs for many hours whilst it runs unit, integration, end to end browser testing , screenshot tests and more?

The two requirements for tests to be both extensive and fast seem to contradict each other when slower browser tests is surely also a necessity.

Have people found much success when migrating an existing project reliant on manual testing to this philosophy whilst maintaining usual business requirements?

https://redd.it/y3xub4
@r_devops

C# Make - Cake v2.3.0 released

Version 2.3.0 of the .NET based build orchestration tool Cake has been released with new Command aliases, new .NET Workload aliases, improved global caching of scripts, bug fixes, and more. 🚀🍰 More info in the release blog post:

https://cakebuild.net/blog/2022/10/cake-v2.3.0-released

https://redd.it/y3z7nb
@r_devops

Evaluating cloud computing

Hi all,

I am an information systems management student, currently writing my dissertation about cloud computing adoption for European and US SMEs.

The goal of the dissertation is to potentially create a new cloud onboarding strategy that companies can use when deciding to move their operations from on-premise to the cloud.

Part of the research consists of investigating the organization's experience through the use of an online survey.

If you have been part of a digital transformation that included the adoption of cloud services I would really appreciate if you could spare 15 minutes to share your insights in the following Google Forms Survey: https://forms.gle/9cdNFwJX3DVHCuYG8

Thank you.

https://redd.it/y40cnb
@r_devops

Personal liability in the event of a breach

I was curious what your thoughts are regarding the level of liability devops engineers would have in the event their org was breached. What got me thinking about this is the recent verdict on the Uber CISO : https://www.darkreading.com/attacks-breaches/what-the-uber-breach-verdict-means-for-cisos-in-the-us. Now that guy clearly veered of into active cover up behavior that none of us here would likely succumb to.

Obviously, as a devops engineer, I'm way down the totem pole and but if for example there's a breach and I know my org isn't following the regulations on timely disclosure, does this now mean that I have to automatically consider becoming a whistleblower just so I don't go to jail when the feds come knocking?

https://redd.it/y3xjvm
@r_devops

How should data population/cleanup scripts be ran in production?

I know, how dare I suggest running a script in production. I am a DevOps Engineer, I should never condone such craziness. But the truth is, sometimes a new table is created and needs to be populated with data, or data in an existing table needs to be cleaned up.

In my situation, this is a somewhat common occurrence and the scripts are written by engineers who obviously don't have access to production. We do have proper dev/qa/staging environments where the scripts can be tested. And these are big tables, so the scripts can take hours or even days to run.

What's the best way to allow developers to run these data population/cleanup scripts in production without compromising on security?

https://redd.it/y3yuw4
@r_devops

Best Training Platform?

Hi There,

Over the next 2 years. I want to improve my knowledge of DevOps and all things related.

I currently work in SEO and handle website migrations from one platform to another and have a friend that works in this industry and I want to pivot to this role as it sounds more interesting and I genuinely enjoy talking to him about his job and I'd like to do it.

Anyways.... I need to learn and get qualifications before I apply for junior roles.

What are the best learning platforms for someone looking to get into DevOps?

What about:-

Cloud Guru?
Cloud Academy?
AWS Training Platform?
Udemy?


I am happy to invest money and was originally looking at Cloud Guru but has some bad reviews so don't want to sink money into something that isn't worth it.

So I am turning to a wider group for guidance. Any help would be appreciated.

https://redd.it/y43m0u
@r_devops

In an ideal DevOps setting, where is the people in the loop?

Once you have a DevOps environment, it seems like if you successfully automate the workflows, then only the coding itself and the actual user are the only people in the loop. Is this true? I'm assuming that the pipeline is already established, so I'm not counting that person.

https://redd.it/y42ncb
@r_devops

Is there an Industry Standard CI/CD tool? (or some contenders for that title?)

I've worked a little bit with Azure Devops CI/CD and a little bit with CircleCI CI/CD. Is there an industry standard CI/CD tool yet? Or a few that I should keep my eye on? I'm wondering where I should spend my time learning.

https://redd.it/y4aipe
@r_devops

lightweight and simple worker agents for Windows machines?

Hello. I work for a fairly large Enterprise, we have a solution for zero touch operations as far as permissions, parameters, operation packages, and auditing. But when we need to actually do work within a privileged environment, the guidance is basically roll your own solution.

So we could call out to a web endpoint or run arbitrary.net code with some restrictions to orchestrate the operation end to end, but if for instance I needed to free space periodically on a vm by running a cleanup script, I need some sort of executive on that machine to actually run that script. Does anybody have any simple, ideally free solutions in this space?

Otherwise I'm probably going to leverage our team's familiarity with azure DevOps and just use azure DevOps agents all over the place which are already pretty ubiquitous to do this kind of work and let the orchestrator call into DevOps as a service principle.

https://redd.it/y41zsm
@r_devops

DevOps first job opinion

Hi people!
So, basically I did a bootcamp in Java for 6 months and after that I did one internship for 3 months which was also in Java, but I had contact with docker, Jenkins and k8s. Now, I started applying for a job and after some interviews for Java Developer I suddenly got one job proposal to devOps that I am considering, but it seems more a ETL Developer job than devOps. But I don’t really have experience to tell.

For this job, the company asks for skills in SQL, one OOP language and ETL processes knowledge (ODI). They also mention PL/SQL, Elastic Stack and mediation components.

Do you guys think this is a good first opportunity in devOps? Or should I search another one?

I will have another interview with the company and the team manager and I will ask him, but since I don’t have too much experience I would like to have one point of view from who really knows about this.

Thanks in advance

https://redd.it/y4b8cf
@r_devops

Will ssh certificates will work for windows users?

Hi,
I am currently managing mainly Linux hosts for a development team (test servers and CI/CD hosts).
At the moment I have an ansible playbook which fetches ssh keys from their GitHub profiles and inserts them to the authorizedkeys files every hour. It kind of works, but feels not like an ideal solution. I recently found ssh certificates, e. g. mentioned in https://smallstep.com/blog/use-ssh-certificates/ or https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/redhatenterpriselinux/6/html/deploymentguide/sec-usingopensshcertificateauthentication.
Sounds great so far, just sign public keys and don't require individual keys on all hosts.
But, I also have windows users in the team, does anyone know if it would work for them? Currently, most of them are using putty with ppk files.

Thanks

https://redd.it/y4iedc
@r_devops

A practical guide to reducing monthly cloud spend in AWs

Hi,

I have been wanting to do this for a long time, One of the things that I am really passionate about is using a data driven approach to save money on Cloud spend. The most rewarding jobs I have undertaken in the past are going into an AWS environment and saving money on cloud spend and optimising the best performance for less money!

It's a great value add for any organisation.

Alot of the organisations spend more on fancy tools to try and save money on Monthly cloud spend which I think is pointless as it often outweighs the cost of the money they try and save. Also I have seen tools that don't even check the basics. The data is already there for you in AWS and it's simply a case of extrapolating it using a bit of engineering time which you pay for anyway and the result is that you can often save more money!

Certainly I have seen it a lot here in Reddit, Cost is becoming ever more prevalent in many AWS environments.

Two things to mention, There are copies I will give away for free to those engineers who will agree to read it and implement the savings ideas in their environments and give me feedback and comments, So it would be good to see how much you saved over a month. It would be interesting to gauge feedback.

I have to spend a bit of time mentoring Juniors in the past so I know especially at the moment how the job market is. So I will give away free copies to Junior engineers looking for ideas how to break into the market and some handy tips to increase your chances of standing out when going to for an interview.

If you feel this is you, Feel free to DM me.

Anyway without giving too much away, I have produced a guide for it here.

Amazon Kindle Link

https://redd.it/y4k3w1
@r_devops

European cloud app platform?

Hi there,

I am searching quite a while now for a PaaS with following criteria:

- based in Europe
- automatic horizontal and vertical scaling
- CI/CD build pipeline

Basically managed Kubernetes or app platform like DigitalOcean.

Do you know something similar in Europe?

Just found the new player Zerops and it is promising. IONOS has some interesting offers (but costly).

I would like to know some more experiences in that field.

https://redd.it/y4pn3y
@r_devops

Benefits/drawbacks of edge-based API gateways?

It seems like edge-based API gateways are becoming a trend e.g. Cloudflare API gateway.

Obviously deciding wether to use one would heavily depend on the project requirements.

I’d like to start a discussion about the pros and cons of using an edge-based API gateway versus cluster-based API gateway.

One downside for example, is it overly relies on proprietary software, or a sort of ecosystem.

https://redd.it/y4rivf
@r_devops

Discussion: What about Continuous Delivery and Dave Farley?

I'm in a team of "DevOps Engineers" for a small software company that also offers "DevOps as a Service," (meaning that we do the IaC, pipelines and cloud consulting for third parties). This team grew out of the company's SysAdmin/FrontDesk team and this load is still with the team. Nonetheless, the company does also use our skill in a true DevOps way. We write the pipelines, and the infrastructure code. We consult the application architects on which cloud resources to use for different purposes, what authentication mechanisms to use in a particular cloud and we also mainstream a number of tools to make the developer platform self service. Not to mention that we do the cost estimates for the cloud bill, think about the availability, monitoring and redundancy of deployments. My team has also crafted and implemented disaster recovery plans though I have not done this personally. Also a number of developers make their own deployments with Terraform and some even write their own pipelines.

However, mostly the attitude in my team is that we are responsible only for the IaC and the pipeline, (which we obviously have to discuss with the devs, at least for the build process). Most of us avoid getting into the application code for any reason. Similarly, some devs seem to feel the same about a truly integrated pipeline that automates regression tests, acceptance tests, etc. "We would have to be doing everything ourselves if this was the case," is one objection.

I'm not saying that any of this is wrong or that I am unhappy with it. However, an obvious tension exists with the idea of Continuous Delivery. I am inspired by Dave Farley's Youtube channel, Continuous Delivery, so I understand it as he presents it. Among other things in his opinion DevOps is not someone working with a set of tools, like Jenkins or Terraform. Dave Farley presents a shift-left point of view. He doesn't advocate eliminating separate Dev, Ops and QA roles but I get a sense that he wants everybody on the same team and I guess with multiple skills sets. I have not seen anything like this in action in my short career.

This tension is also obvious on r/devops. To give you my sense, people coming from the Dev world are told not to blame Kubernetes for the complexity of problem it solves, not having been exposed to it. People coming from the Admin world are told that DevOps is a culture and not Cloud Engineering with a pipeline and IaC. I see a split in this subedit and almost anywhere I look about what DevOps is, why it may be needed or beneficial, whether it's Cloud IaC, finops, secops or I don't know what on one side, or whether its a way of understanding the SDLC on the other hand.

So I am perplexed and frustrated, not knowing where to go with this thought. I am hoping that someone treated this issue with some care and would like to share his input. Let me be clear, I don't care about the job market reality much. I would appreciate a principled explanation more. I am also curious about what the impression is on the Continuous Delivery side of the isle. Is anyone actually working in the way for which Dave Farley advocates?

Thank you for your attention and, please, let us discus this politely.

EDIT: Style, syntax edits

https://redd.it/y4od8y
@r_devops

An idea for a tech learning platform. learning with a Devops methodology.

The Problem

I recently wanted to improve my knowledge of Kubernetes, a logical way to do that (I thought) was to go through some of the exam prep.

My thought was if I could find some exam questions, I could fire up a cluster and learn how to answer them by working through the problems. This lead me to the realisation of a problem, and a possible solution.

The problem is that tech based learning is a scam. It places an artificially high bar on self improvement and job mobility.

To improve this situation, we need to fix two areas of study. Learning and exam prep.

Learning a new technical topic is frustrating. You can spend hours watching YouTube, reading blogs but it is hard to find content that has a density that works. It is difficult to know what exactly it is you're looking for if you're very new to the tech. Wouldn't it be better if you could stand up an instance of the tech you're wanting to learn, and then solve problems against it. Solving problems makes learning a lot easier, it gives you something to focus on and work through. More importantly, it gives you something to put into google to find those answers.

Once you've actually managed to learn a tech stack, you come to the highly expensive area of preparing for the exam. which breaks into a more structured learning routine and trying to get a taste of some exam questions you can expect.

To do this, you either need to pay - a lot - or you turn to the darker corners of the internet, and fall down a rabbit hole of torrents, newsreaders, and onion routers.

I believe, as a community, we can do better.

The Solution

The core of the problem we're looking to solve is how to provide guidance for a user approaching a new tech stack. How can we take someone with minimal knowledge of a stack to being a competent operator, without needing any hand holding by somebody more knowledgable.

The tech world has had a fascination with automation for a while now. As an industry we don't like touching things. We don't like repeating ourselves. We want to push a button and walk away and to only be bothered by that again if something goes wrong.

It turns out that automation is the perfect companion for learning. Let's look at how to learn Kubernetes against this type of solution.

The Walkthrough

The project would have some expectations of hardware to run the system on. Whether that is Docker, VMs, or a public cloud account.

There would be detailed instructions of how to get the project running in whichever environment you have available.

Wherever that was, the end result would be a running Kubernetes cluster and a web frontend. The frontend would provide a selection of learning paths. Once one is selected you would be given a task to complete on the Kubernetes cluster. Once completed you would go back to the frontend and tell it you're done. At which point tests would be run to verify whether you had successfully completed the task. If you have you move on to the next one, if you haven't you are told what went wrong and you can go back and try again.

The goal here is to create a framework for the creation of standalone infrastructure / test processes. At this stage there are a lot of details missing, there is a lot of work needed to get the idea to a place where it can be built. But the end goal is a framework that allows anybody to create a question / test package. So for something like Kubernetes you can choose from thousands of learning paths, ranging from very basic introductions to complicated expert level questions.

Exam Prep

This one is a lot easier, let's create a solution that has a whole bunch of free exam prep. Where as a user you can go to a site, log in, and choose a technology to be tested on and are given a bunch of questions you can work through. Either in your own time, or under exam timing criteria.

Let's talk about the money

I hear what you're thinking. Why the hell are you going to time into creating any of this, so some eejit (me) can make a fortune