DevOps Industry Updates #7

Did somebody say “auto-remediation of configuration drift”? Read all about that and other hot topics (like the miracles of GPT-3 and the woes of DoH) in the 7th issue of DevOps Industry Updates:

🔥 Top Cream

This issue’s top 4 stories:

  1. Google to Keep Employees Home Until Summer 2021
  2. OpenAI’s new language generator GPT-3 is shockingly good
  3. State of Software Delivery Management Report 2020
  4. Design Docs at Google

🌎 Society

  • Google to Keep Employees Home Until Summer 2021 by Rob Copeland & Peter Grant: Google will keep its employees home until at least next July, making the search-engine giant the first major U.S. corporation to formalize such an extended timetable in the face of the coronavirus pandemic.

  • 25 In-Demand Tech Jobs and Skills at Amazon by Nick Kolakowski: in early June, we used Broken Glass (which collects and analyzes millions of job postings from across the country) to analyze the skill-sets and roles that the company is hiring for. Now we’re back with an update, and things have slightly changed.

  • AWS Container Day at KubeCon: join AWS for a day of technical deep dives, product demos, and product announcements. The AWS Kubernetes team will be streaming on Twitch all day, ready to answer your questions.

📟 DevOps

  • State of Software Delivery Management Report 2020 by Sanjeev Sharma: Accelerated Strategies Group conducted the State of Software Delivery Management 2020, surveying software delivery practitioners and key industry leaders to assess the current state of software delivery management (SDM) and examine the impact of SDM adoption as a capability.

  • Under the hood of Linkerd’s state-of-the-art Rust proxy, Linkerd2-proxy by Eliza Weisman: there’s been a recent surge of interest in Linkerd2-proxy, the underlying proxy used by Linkerd. I’ve been working on Linkerd2-proxy for the majority of my time as a Linkerd maintainer so this topic is near and dear to my heart. In this article, I’m going to shed a little more light on what Linkerd2-proxy is and how it works.

  • Introducing Domain-Oriented Microservice Architecture by Adam Gluck: our (Uber’s) goal with DOMA is to provide a way forward for organizations that want to reduce overall system complexity while maintaining the flexibility associated with microservice architectures.

  • Docker Releases Plugin for Simplified Deployments into AWS ECS and Fargate by Matt Campbell: Docker has announced the public beta of their enhanced integration of Docker with AWS Elastic Container Service and AWS Fargate. The release of the ECS plugin allows for developers to work within the Docker experience to create the necessary infrastructure to operate within AWS.

🛠️ DevOps Tools

  • GitHub Action: Run infracost by Ali Khajeh-Hosseini: automatically adds a pull request comment showing the cost estimate diff if a percentage threshold is crossed.

☸️ Kubernetes

🔐 Security

  • Thinking of a Cybersecurity Career? Read This by Brian Krebs: thousands of people graduate from colleges and universities each year with cybersecurity or computer science degrees only to find employers are less than thrilled about their hands-on, foundational skills. Here’s a look at a recent survey that identified some of the bigger skills gaps, and some thoughts about how those seeking a career in these fields can better stand out from the crowd.

  • Twilio had an unsecured AWS S3 bucket breached by Shaun Nichols: Ruh-roh! Twilio confirmed one or more miscreants sneaked into its unsecured cloud storage systems and modified a copy of the JavaScript SDK it shares with its customers.

  • New ‘Meow’ attack has deleted almost 4,000 unsecured databases by Ionut Ilascu: hundreds of unsecured databases exposed on the public web are the target of an automated ‘meow’ attack that destroys data without any explanation. The activity started recently by hitting Elasticsearch and MongoDB instances without leaving any explanation, or even a ransom note.

  • DoH Isn’t Better, It’s Just What Google Likes by Mike Schroll: as the need for DNS encryption evolves, there seems to be a growing debate between DNS-over-TLS (DoT) and DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH). With Google (and Firefox) adopting DoH as their DNS encryption method for their browsers, there seems to be a belief that DoH is superior to DoT.

💻 Programming

  • Python Packages: Five Real Python Favorites by Real Python: in this tutorial, you’ll meet some of the authors at Real Python and learn about packages they like to use in place of more common packages in the standard library, including pudb, requests, parse, dateutil and typer.

  • Design Docs at Google by Malte Ubl: one of the key elements of Google’s software engineering culture is the use of defining software designs through design docs, which document the high level implementation strategy and key design decisions with emphasis on the trade-offs that were considered during those decisions.

📖 Machine Learning

🐧 Linux

  • Highlights from Git 2.28 by Taylor Blau: the open source Git project just released Git 2.28 with features and bug fixes from over 58 contributors, including a new configuration option init.defaultBranch which allows branches other than master to be cloned by default.

  • Colorize Your CLI by Danilo Spinella: in this post, we will setup a colourised CLI. This will be a comprehensive guide and there will be (almost) no need to read any documentation.

☁️ Cloud

  • IaaS Pricing Patterns and Trends 2020 by Rachel Stephens: it can be difficult to properly assess how competitive cloud providers are with one another because their non-standardized packaging makes it effectively impossible to compare services on an equal footing. To this end we offer the following deconstruction of cloud pricing for base on-demand infrastructure.

AWS

  • Implement automatic drift remediation for AWS CloudFormation by Bryant Bost: AWS CloudFormation now offers a “drift detection” feature to automatically detect unmanaged configuration changes to stacks and resources. With this feature, CloudFormation analyzes the current specifications of resources in a stack against the specifications defined in the stack template, and reports the difference.

  • Announcing CDK Pipelines Preview: CDK Pipelines is a library for the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) that makes it easy to set up simple or complex continuous delivery pipelines with AWS CodePipelines.

  • Designing scalable API on AWS spot instances by Kirill Potekhin: how we had cut costs three times for the servers by using spot instances on the production environment. I’ll also walk you through configuring auto scaling. Firstly, you will see the overview of how it works and then we provide the instruction to launch it.

GCP

  • Using new traffic control features in External HTTP(S) load balancer by Jeff Piazza & Gautam Nirodi: in April, we announced two new actions supported by the URL map: redirects and rewrites. With URL redirects the load balancer redirects incoming requests from one URL to another. With rewrites, you can present external users with different URLs than those used by the backend service.

Article version: 1.0.0

Written on July 28, 2020