CatOps

06 May 2025 15:57

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

CatOps

02 May 2025 11:16

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

CatOps

30 April 2025 12:36

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 Actions' versions are outdated in that article, but you can simply set the new ones.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

CatOps

28 April 2025 12:58

​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

CatOps

21 April 2025 13:52

​​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

CatOps

17 April 2025 18:07

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

CatOps

15 April 2025 18:33

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

CatOps

11 April 2025 14:55

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

CatOps

08 April 2025 11:36

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

CatOps

05 April 2025 13:18

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

CatOps

03 April 2025 12:17

Helm docs is a neat tool for generating documentation based on your values.yaml file.

I recall, I wanted to write something similar back in a day, but I got bitten in the ass by YAML parsing 🙃

#kubernetes #helm

CatOps

01 April 2025 19:14

Lurking Variables is a story about contributing factors. Specifically, those factors that people do not take into account right away, or better said, are not instinctively taken into account.

Anyway, this is a good read about a very real problem of confirmation bias when handling incidents.

#sre #incidents

CatOps

30 March 2025 16:14

A new issue of the CatOps Digest is here:
https://newsletter.catops.dev/p/catops-digest-2025-03-30

#digest #newsletter

CatOps

25 March 2025 07:27

We are continuing our security marathon with some news about very popular NGINX Ingress for Kubernetes.

Wiz Research discovered CVE-2025-1097, CVE-2025-1098, CVE-2025-24514 and CVE-2025-1974, a series of unauthenticated Remote Code Execution vulnerabilities in Ingress NGINX Controller for Kubernetes.

Exploiting these vulnerabilities can lead to unauthorized access to cluster secrets as well as remote code execution inside the ingress pod.

This vulnerability is fixed in Ingress NGINX Controller version 1.12.1 and 1.11.5, but if you cannot upgrade right now for whatever reason, Wiz has other recommendations on how to mitigate this.

P.S. Many thanks to the chat for sharing this story!

#security #kubernetes #nginx

CatOps

23 March 2025 13:41

A new vulnerability is discovered in Next.js - a popular web framework based on React. This vulnerability allows an attacker to bypass the redirect middleware as well as potentially make a cache poisoning attack.

Here’s also a thread by Gergely Orosz about this issue.

#security

CatOps

05 May 2025 11:03

​​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

CatOps

01 May 2025 09:00

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

CatOps

29 April 2025 13:29

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

CatOps

27 April 2025 12:58

Long post due issue of the CatOps digest is here!

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

#digest #newsletter

CatOps

18 April 2025 09:30

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

CatOps

16 April 2025 14:20

A very nice video by Confluent that introduces Apache Iceberg:

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

#data

CatOps

14 April 2025 19:05

​​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!

CatOps

09 April 2025 17:58

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

#iac #terraform

CatOps

07 April 2025 20:19

​​​​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

CatOps

04 April 2025 13:56

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

CatOps

02 April 2025 09:15

“5 Whys” is a fairly popular framework for searching for a contributing factors of an incident.

However, this framework has its own limitations. Here is an article that presents these limitations in a concise way.

#sre

CatOps

31 March 2025 15:15

​​For today's Donations Monday we have a fundraiser from Dzyga's Paw that they do together with 7 different units. My friend's brother serves in one of those 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

CatOps

26 March 2025 13:05

Some books on programming and software architecture on Humble Bundle.

#books #programming

CatOps

24 March 2025 11:48

​​Last week, we closed Maksym's jar for Hospitallers in a day! Let's now do the same favor to another ember of our community - Dmytro!

His wife is raising funds to repair two cars for the 41st separate mechanized brigade. The goal of the support jar is 30k UAH. Also, there's a raffle for all the donations which are multiples of 100 UAH.

More info about the raffle is in this Instagram post (in Ukrainian):
https://www.instagram.com/p/DHV5cfCg1GU/

#donations #Ukraine

CatOps

22 March 2025 09:30

AWS gives a chance to complete some certifications for free, but with few preconditions

Covered certs:
- Foundational: Cloud Practitioner, AI Practitioner
- Associate: Solutions Architect, SysOps Administrator, Developer, Data Engineer, Machine Learning Engineer

Note, that you need to prepare and pass exam(s) before Aug 2025.

#aws #certification