DevOps

Someone posted a blog here a little while ago. I wrote up a big response only to find that OP deleted the post. I figured I might as well post my response here since it took me 45m to type out of my phone 🫠

What an interesting list. Some of these suggestions are good with others are not. I think we can reorder things a bit and make this more reasonable.

~~Jenkins~~

Jenkins is terrible! It should have been killed off a decade ago. Seriously, just don’t use Jenkins. There are much better offerings now.

Source control and CI/CD

The current trend is to rely on your source control provider for ci/cd. You may or may not have a choice in this space so let’s name some big ones. GitHub, Gitlab, Azure DevOps, Bitbucket, Gitea/Forgejo. They all act as a git server and all offer automation. Learn whichever your company uses. If you get to choose… GitHub is great! Gitlab is also good but the automations will be focused on bash and tend to get messy IMO. ADO is truly a Microsoft product with many nonsensical choices. I find it frustrating to use. I haven’t done ci/cd with bitbucket. If you want a foss option, check out forgejo (a fork of gitea). I have not used either yet though it looks nice and I really want to.

Containers

Docker is a fine choice. I really like some alternatives tools like buildah, podman, etc. but nearly every piece of documentation out there is based on docker. The choice is yours here but docker will probably give you the simplest experience.

Kubernetes is an amazing runtime environment! IMO should be used as a standard interface for running resources in a public cloud. However, this is a huge jump and you’ll want to learn at least a dozen good tools here. This one is a many years long practice but absolutely worthwhile. A quick and very incomplete list of tools: k9s, k3d, helm, kustomize (better than helm in most cases), flux, Argo (better than flux), istio. Seriously these are just the basics.

Infrastructure Management

While ansible is good, I would be looking to retire it at this point. A big possible exception is if you are running your own hardware and don’t have a great interface for alternative tools. If somebody just gives you a VM to use, then ya use ansible.

Terraform is great but don’t use it. OpenTofu is a foss fork and people should honestly just use this instead. But both tools have some limitations and oddities. People seem to love using terragrunt as well to make this easier to use.

If you’re using k8s, there’s also the open tofu controller. I’ve haven’t personally used it, but people I 100% trust in this space absolutely love it.

Observability

Firstly I like the numeronym instead: o11y.

Don’t use nagios. It’s old and there are better alternatives.

Elasticsearch is ok but I don’t really like it. Everything is stored as a document and just… eh, there are better options.

Prometheus is quite good.

Here’s the biggest mistake that people make today. Use OpenTelemetry as the core of your o11y solution. It’s the 2nd biggest CNCF project (right behind k8s) and it’s a fantastic tool. It lets you collect telemetry data and build data pipelines to whatever storage devices you want. That includes Prometheus and elasticsearch but you also can choose many more options as well with only tiny configuration changes.

ChatGPT

This entire post looks 100% like a copy/paste from ChatGPT. AI is a cool tool but OP, you should learn to use it a little better. Tell it to not use so much fluff text or such a rigid structure. Make edits afterwards. And most important of all, make sure it’s actually providing good info.

Always call out Cloudflare for their bullshit. For those working for companies in devops, share this with your teams...

I'm looking forward to switch from Terraform to OpenTofu, but i have the impression that the ecosystem around it didn't catch up yet.

Did any of you already did the switch? If so, what do you use as a replacement for Terraform Cloud, the VSCode extension and/or terraform-ls?

For Terraform Cloud, the are many options: scalr, spacelift, etc. Spacelift looks nice as it can also run Ansible, but Scalr seems to have a better and simpler UI.

But on the editor side, there doesn't seem to be much... the VSCode extension has been forked but it still seem to be in its early days (cf. this issue: it still uses terraform-ls under the hood, which itself looks for the terraform binary).

Struggling with a problem that i just can't seem to figure out.

When starting from scratch self hosting both the SCM and CI/CD server.

Given that you can't use an existing setup to deploy/manage it, what is the best practice for deploying said services?

I can't seem to find any trace of comparison between these specific libraries. I'm planning on using Python for them. I just don't wanna write YAML.

Pulumi seems more prone to the "single vendor is the new proprietary" theory, because they're an actual business and shit, so might do a bait and switch here Terraform-style. But that's the only difference I can spot besides obvious API differences.

Does anyone have an opinion?:)

Out of principle I refuse to put any type of analytics on my sites. I don't want to send user data to third parties and I don't want to rely on data that comes from JavaScript on the browser unless strictly necessary.

But the thought recently occurred to me that I could use my server logs to create some basic data visualisation on Grafana.

I'd like very basic stuff:

• hits
• common referrers
• geo location by IP address
• bounce rates per page

What would be the recommended way to get this, assuming that I have traefik logs aggregates via Loki and Grafana installed?

Trying to do a couple things. I have 2 jump hosts I can use to get into my cluster login node. From my laptop to the jump hosts is password. From jump hosts to login node can be key-based, so if I do it all from CLI:

[me@home ~]$ ssh user@jump1
Password:
[user@jump1 ~]$ ssh user@login1
[user@login1 ~]$ 

Same process if I use jump2.

So first thing I'm trying to do is set up my ~/.ssh/config to use the ProxyJump host and key file to get to login1. I have the following:

Host jump1
  Hostname jump1.domain
Host jump2
  Hostname jump2.domain
Host login1
  Hostname login1.cluster
  ProxyJump jump1
  #ProxyJump jump2

I'm not sure how to configure the IdentityFile entries for each jump host. The user on the jump hosts has different id_rsa keys in ~/.ssh, but both are in the authorized_keys file on login1.

Second thing I'm trying to do is join or start a tmux session. From CLI, I can run:

tmux has-session -t mysession || tmux new -s mysession && tmux a -t mysession

I've learned that to just join a running session (tmux a -t mysession), I need to include "RequestTTY yes" in my ssh config entry for login1. What I can't get working is the conditional statement that will fire up a new tmux session if it doesn't already exist.

What is the industry/production grade solutions or if you have already any experience please share it. Thanks

I have came across Percona xtrabackup but I am curious what is the best production deployment best practices and tools that are actually used by companies.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/9143654

Apologies in advance for sharing two link posts here two days in a row. Unemployment may be driving me a little nuts... 😅

I've been working on Satounki since I got laid off last month. It's the culmination of a lot of experience building similar ad-hoc internal tooling at various places throughout my professional career.

Satounki already includes:

• AWS support
• GCP support
• Cloudflare support
• Auto-generated Terraform providers from the Rust API
• Auto-generated Typescript client wrapper from the Rust API
• Slack bot for request notifications, approvals and rejections
• CLI for requests, approvals and rejections
• Dashboard for exploring policies, requests and stats

The scope of this project is pretty big and I'm looking for contributors.

The majority of the project is written in Rust, including the generated Go and TS code. The stack is pretty simple; Actix, Diesel, SQLite, Tera etc., so if you have experience with writing web apps in Rust it should feel familiar!

Even if this is a totally new stack to you, this is a great project to develop some familiarity and experience with it, especially if you can help improve the quality of the generated Go and TS code at the same time!

I'm the author. With 5 years experience as a DevOps Engineer then Lead, I've wanted, for a very long time, to distill my critique and pave a way toward a healthier practice of DevOps. Before anyone jumps to tell me how DevOps Engineer is a misnomer, I address this in the article.

I wrote this piece because DevOps has all too often been misunderstood as a practice. Here I attempt to examine successful DevOps practice as a sociotechnical solution that weds culture and tools (the DevOps most are familiar with) with radical agency and visibility. I reference some stupendous thinkers in this space, like Jabe Bloom and Andrew Clay Shafer who were the first to argue for a sociotechnical approach to our work as IT professionals.

I recently had to migrate my team's CI from Bors-NG to Github Merge Queues. In this post I share my experience in doing so.

Tryna get back to RSS. I currently love reading tonsky.me but that's about it, and it's not uhhh devopsy. So I'm all ears for anything interesting that you all like!