CatOps

23 December 2024 16:57

For today’s Donations Monday, I want to share with you a fundraiser from one of our community members.

This is a fundraiser for a mini-excavator for the 36th separate brigade of AFU, which will tremendously help them to dig trenches in winter.

https://send.monobank.ua/jar/3aq2sBa6Fk

#donations #Ukraine

CatOps

17 December 2024 11:09

An online calculator for DataDog costs + some tips on how to keep these costs in check.

Yes, this is a marketing material, so you need to take the "comparison" part with a kilogram of salt. Also, the calculator itself is tricky: DataDog has many ways of "committing" to some capacity, which impacts the price drastically. They mention this fact in the article as well. So, this calculator is rather a reference than a precise tool.

Otherwise, this article provides some sane tips on the DataDog cost management.

#costs #finops #observability

CatOps

15 December 2024 12:47

Asking questions during an interview is as important as answering them, one could argue.

Here are a couple of articles with examples of what to ask your potential employer and the team.

- Reverse Interviewing Your Future Manager and Team - an old article from Gergely Orosz on the topic. Kudos to him for not closing old articles behind a paywall as many Substack creators do!
- 40+ questions to ask at a job interview - the website itself is Berlin-centric, but these questions are independent from a location.

Also, one of the top motivations to search for a new job is compensation. So, if you have spare 10 minutes this Sunday afternoon, folks from DOU would greatly appreciate if, if you could participate in their annual salary survey (in Ukrainian). This year they collect all the answers, including people who do not live in Ukraine (hopefully, those answers won’t be filtered out in the end results as well).

#jobs #salary #survey

CatOps

12 December 2024 14:14

One of the members of our community wrote an article about ArgoCD, more specifically about generators in an ApplicationSet.

This article has words "Part I" in it, so I hope that other parts are ready as well, since there is a golden rule: do not publish parts unless you have all of them ready :D

#cicd #argocd

CatOps

04 December 2024 16:50

Regardless my feelings about Python, it's still a very popular language among the platform people.

So, here is a bundle of Python books by Pearson that I forgot to share with you earlier!

This offer is still valid for 7 days. As usual, you can pay about €25 to unlock the whole bundle.

#books #programming #python

CatOps

02 December 2024 15:44

​​For today’s Donations Monday I would like to remind you of a standing jar of my German teacher.

https://send.monobank.ua/jar/8jQSHW57kP

He’s also a volunteer and he uses this jar to address ongoing requests from the combatants.

These things may not be as favorable to the media compared to some other equipment, but it doesn’t make it not important.

#donations #Ukraine

CatOps

27 November 2024 13:06

AWS at last allowed users to serve assets from private networks via CloudFront.

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/11/amazon-cloudfront-vpc-origins/

In the announcement, they mention simplification of operations and security, but not cost, and you have to pay for public traffic in AWS. So, not sure, what are the hidden costs of this new feature.

#aws

CatOps

25 November 2024 10:21

​​Our friends from UA DevOps continue raising funds for the special operation forces on the Kursk direction.

You can join the fundraiser here:
https://send.monobank.ua/jar/oyWPJi2ER

#donations #Ukraine

CatOps

23 November 2024 15:15

A nice overview of the evolution of Bluesky by Gergely Orosz and Elin Nilsson.

Bluesky is a decentralized social network which was born as an alternative to Twitter. It’s super interesting that for almost half a year Bluesky only had 2 engineers and even today the team behind the whole platform is rather small.

It’s also interesting that infrastructure wise they have started with AWS and Pulumi and eventually moved to their own equipment for cost savings.

#architecture

CatOps

20 November 2024 11:13

Where you good at math in school?

Humble Bundle sales a collection of Math for Programmers books. One of the books is from the “Grokking” series. I’ve heard that series is a good one.

Also, one of the books is written by a Ukrainian author. You can read an interview with him on DOU (in Ukrainian).

#books

CatOps

18 November 2024 08:51

A new fundraiser for the International Legion, where my friend's brother serves.

https://send.monobank.ua/jar/7wNX44oe8W

This is a fundraiser for ongoing expenses such as car repairs and Starlink fees. The goal is 80k UAH and about a half is achieved already.

#donations #Ukraine

CatOps

14 November 2024 12:34

You have a Database that can be affected by Disk corruption, and you have millions of transactions? Well, good for you that nothing bad happens yet.

But what if I say that there is better solution, x1000 faster and safer? Just send 0.1BTC called TigerBeettle.

Also, it has of the best presentation what I ever saw. Check it

Testing simulation showed at the end, if you want to try yourself - sim.tigerbeetle.com

#databases

CatOps

12 November 2024 11:39

25 years of Google data-center networking evolution is a sneak peek into Google's internal network, phases of its evolution through the company's history, as well as technologies that allow them to handle up to 13 Petabits/sec of bisectional bandwidth.

I especially liked this quote:

 network is the foundation of reliability for all other compute services, from storage to AI. As such, the network must fail last and fail least.

CatOps

07 November 2024 14:51

If you work with NodeJS on backend, this article may be useful to you.

This one is about how to increase (or decrease) memory limit for NodeJS when working with PM2.

#programming #nodejs

CatOps

05 November 2024 14:53

A hot take was shared in our chat yesterday: Gitpod wrote an article on why they moved away from Kubernetes.

While the title sounds clickbaity, this is actually a good article that explains technical considerations for a very particular use case. It also has links to some Kubernetes' functionality that you may find useful for your workloads, such as dynamic resource allocation.

Where did they migrate, you may ask? Well, I can spoil the article for you a little bit: they have built their own orchestrator. Now, do I think this is a good solution? In their very specific use case, it may be. Is it a good solution in general? In my opinion, hell no!

P.S. I'd like to invite Gitpod folks to the FOSDEM conference. For example, in 2023 there was a talk on how to checkpoint and restore your containers in Kubernetes. According to their article, this feature, or rather a lack of it, was a major pain for them.

#kubernetes

CatOps

18 December 2024 10:28

Breaking down OpenAI's outage: How to avoid a hidden DNS dependency in Kubernetes - in this article, folks at Render analyze the recent OpenAI outage and provide some insights on the possible cause of the issue.

This article also serves as a reminder that you'd better run DNS and the Control Plane on separate nodes and also that the data in ETCD is organized by namespace, thus listing "all" resources is very costly, especially in large clusters, since you need to scan everything.

#kubernetes #postmortem

CatOps

16 December 2024 11:24

For today's Donations Monday, we’re raising funds to support a friend of my wife, who is currently serving with the KORD Special Purpose Police Unit on the front lines in Donetsk.

His team is in urgent need of essential components for
the FPV drones.

The funds are for:

- Repeaters for better signal range
- Antennas for stable communication
- Batteries for extended flight time

Your support will help KORD improve their operations and stay safe while protecting Ukraine.

https://send.monobank.ua/jar/4WLw91UqFe

Every donation matters!

#donations #Monday

CatOps

13 December 2024 16:03

I didn't pay enough attention yesterday, so I didn't post the second part of the article about Argo CD :\

Let's fix it! Here it is. This second part focuses on the .source configuration parameter of ApplicationSet.

#cicd #argocd

CatOps

08 December 2024 19:02

A new CatOps Digest is here!

https://newsletter.catops.dev/p/catops-digest-2024-12-08

#digest #newsletter

CatOps

03 December 2024 09:30

And to re:Invent announces:

AWS accidentally reinvented a few things once again like "K8s administrator not needed anymore" and "DBA not needed anymore" which means that these folks will have a wonderful opportunity to automate some toil work 🥳

If you haven't checked out yet Top announcements of AWS re:Invent 2024, they are pretty decent

CatOps

29 November 2024 17:38

Another interesting article from our chat.

As you probably already know, Terraform has introduced ephemeral values in version 1.10. The goal is to address the long-standing issue with credentials in the state file.

However, there is also a great complimentary article by a HashiCorp developer, who worked on this feature, with the detailed justification. Honestly, this article is a good read!

#terraform #hashicorp

CatOps

26 November 2024 11:03

A critical view point on OpenTelemetry implementation from VictoriaMetrics.

In nutshell, the idea is good, but the implementation is too bloated, which often happens when the aim is to provide a one-size-fits-all solution.

As a commenter pointed out in a Reddit discussion:

 problem is they are right, otel is a simple idea standardize observability. However when you get every vendor involved it can expand to a huge project very quick.

CatOps

24 November 2024 14:27

A new issue of the CatOps Digest is available!

https://newsletter.catops.dev/p/catops-digest-2024-11-24

#digest #newsletter

CatOps

21 November 2024 15:46

Thoughtworks have published their usual TechRadar. You can also get the full PDF report there there.

This tech radar provides some valuable insights into the industry. Besides, this is already the 31st volume, so you can compare it with previous versions. Just keep in mind that this tech radar (as any other) is biased, because it basically represents the Thoughtworks' customer base, thus it's not universal.

#tech_radar

CatOps

19 November 2024 15:47

An article and a CNCF NA talk about Atlas - a tool to manage database migrations, and specifically about the Atlas Operator - a way of managing database state in Kubernetes. It's important to point out, that the database itself doesn't have to reside in Kubernetes.

Except some advertisement for Atlas, this article actually points out problems of executing migrations that are not limited to K8s. Still, even though this is an article about a tool from a creator of the tool, I think both blogpost and the tool itself are interesting.

But to be completely fair, there's also the SchemaHero tool - a truly open source one.

#databases #kubernetes

CatOps

16 November 2024 11:03

You have likely seen this already, but still.

Prometheus 3.0 is available!.

Notable changes (as listed in their release page):

- New UI
- Remote Write 2.0
- Native histograms
- Improved UTF-8 and OTLP (OTel Protocol l)support
- Better performance

#observability #prometheus

CatOps

13 November 2024 13:18

A brief overview of how to choose the right size for your RDS instance in AWS.

Although, I would argue that certain workloads would already experience problems at 80%+ CPU load on CPU. So, sometimes it doesn't make sense to wait the whole four-week evaluation period.

Also, make sure to keep track of your reserved instances: you don't want to pay more than you should when jumping between instance types!

#aws #databases

CatOps

11 November 2024 11:55

In his last interview for Deutsche Welle, Taras Chmut - the head of Come Back Alive foundation - described that it's much harder to raise funds for projects that are focused on trainings and other strategic initiatives that may not result in the "direct hits" on the battlefield.

That's why today I'd like to share a fundraiser for the Captain's Trainig program by Come Back Alive.

#donations #Ukraine

CatOps

06 November 2024 13:15

KiND is a popular tool for local development in Kubernetes. But what if the thing you're developing is not published anywhere yet?

Sure, you can use tools like Tilt or Skaffold, but they add additional knowledge overhead.

However, you can also load a Docker image into a KiND node. Of course, this won't be such a streamline developer experience as with the tools mentioned above, but it will make the job done with very little additional configuration.

#kubernetes

CatOps

04 November 2024 11:15

​​For today's Donations Monday I want to share with you a fundraiser for 1000 FPV-drones from our friends at DOU:

https://dou.ua/forums/topic/50669/

The page has all the information. Also, they have a raffle there. The information is in Ukrainian. So, here's also a direct link to their Monobank Jar:

https://send.monobank.ua/jar/22kincSfqv

#donations #Ukraine