DevOps Bulletin #89: Pipeline as Code

#gratitude

This week, I have a lot of exciting topics for you. To start off, we cover the basics of effective dashboard design and how you can create a Grafana dashboard that will make troubleshooting incidents a breeze. If you’re looking to break into the Linux industry, I’m sharing a month-long free course. We explore cloud governance using Infrastructure as Code and provide tips to eliminate Kubernetes node scaling lag.

In addition, I cover best practices for debugging and provide an extension review for AWS SSM Lambda. And why you shouldn’t teach during code reviews and provide a complete guide to AWS Lambda pricing. I also have an open-source browser extension to download eBooks from AWS Resource Hub without filling out forms, as well as a learning roadmap to master Kubernetes. I also cover how Cloudflare uses Terraform to manage its infrastructure and highlight a vulnerability in AWS CloudTrail. And that’s not all! I also have a book on Pipeline as Code, which covers building your CI/CD pipeline in a cloud-native world and more 🔥

I hope you enjoy this week’s newsletter! Share it with a friend or colleague if you find it helpful, drop me an email, or send me a DM on Twitter about topics you’d like to hear about in future editions.

Headline Tutorials:

👀 “Why you can’t find anything in your monitoring dashboards” — This guide will go over the basics of effective dashboard design, and how to create a Grafana dashboard that will make it easy for you to troubleshoot an incident.

🛠 “The Linux upskill challenge” — A month-long free course aimed at those who aspire to get Linux-related jobs in the industry — junior Linux sysadmin, DevOps, etc

🔒 “Cloud governance using Infrastructure as Code” — Organizations often adopt Terraform without proper planning, leading to issues. This blog post proposes a governance model to effectively utilize Terraform.

🚀 “Eliminate Kubernetes node scaling lag with pod priority and over-provisioning” — Using dummy pods to over-provision worker nodes in Kubernetes to reduce lag time in scaling.

💡 “How to debug” — The steps are generalized and applicable across the backend, infrastructure, frontend, etc, they’re not specific to a particular language or paradigm.

⭐️ “Extension review: AWS SSM Lambda” — This extension retrieves parameter values and caches them for future use. Using the Lambda extension can reduce your costs by reducing the number of API calls to Parameter Store.

🚨 “Don’t teach during code reviews” — You probably heard it already but, yes, code reviews are an excellent way to teach, learn and help each other. But here’s why you shouldn’t play a teacher during code reviews.

💸 “AWS Lambda pricing: a complete guide” — Learn about the pay-per-use pricing model of AWS Lambda and how it charges based on usage, runtime, and the number of requests.

Latest open source projects

Reply to emails with ChatGPT

Open-source project showcasing how to use ChatGPT to automatically reply to emails using AWS Lambda functions and AWS Simple Email Service.

AWS eBook Downloader

An open-source browser extension to download eBooks from AWS Resource Hub without filling out forms.

Kubernetes Learning Roadmap

A learning roadmap to master Kubernetes from scratch covering basic to advanced Kubernetes concepts.

SBOM Scorecard

When generating first-party SBOMs, it’s hard to know if you’re generating something good or not. SBOM Scorecard hopes to quantify what a well-generated SBOM looks like.

DocsGPT

DocsGPT is an open-source tool that streamlines the process of finding information in project documentation. With its integration of powerful GPT models, developers can easily ask questions about a project and receive accurate answers.

node-latency-for-k8s

The node-latency-for-k8s tool provides process-level telemetry via prometheus metrics, cloudwatch metrics, and markdown timing charts to optimize K8s node launch times.

Book of the week

I wrote a book called Pipeline as Code which focuses on automating your development pipeline in a cloud-native, service-driven world. The book covers the use of infrastructure-as-code tools such as Packer and Terraform to create robust CI/CD pipelines for various cloud-native applications, including Kubernetes and Serverless. It also teaches how to build and deploy a Jenkins cluster from scratch on AWS, GCP, and Azure.