#79: Run GitHub Actions Locally

This week's newsletter highlights why containers are just chrooted processes, how to migrate from Postgres to DynamoDB, login to multi-AWS accounts, running GitHub actions locally and how to monitor the pipelines, RDS access best practices, DevOps vs Platform engineering debate, AWS security assessment tools, watching World Cup 2022 from your terminal and more.
I hope you enjoy this week’s newsletter! Share it with a friend or colleague if you find it helpful, or drop me an email about topics you’d like to hear about in future editions 👋🏻

📖 POSTS OF THE WEEK

Grafana for GitHub Actions Workflows
The observability dashboard for GitHub Actions Workflows; Just like an off-the-shelf Grafana dashboard that helps you identify the issues and enhance organization-wide visibility on your GitHub Actions CI workflows!
Read more »

"Four ways pods suddenly stop running on Kubernetes" - Most people are familiar with CrashLoopBackOffs, but there are actually many ways a pod can unexpectedly stop running - Read more »

"Containers are chroot with a marketing budget" - Many people have settled on explaining containers by calling them ‘light-weight VMs’ and they are light-weight because they ‘share the kernel with the host’. This is useful, but it simplifies a lot away - Read more »

"Backup-and-restore of containers with Kubernetes checkpointing API" - Kubernetes v1.25 introduced Container Checkpointing API as an alpha feature. This provides a way to backup-and-restore containers running in Pods, without ever stopping them - Read more »

"From Postgres to Amazon DynamoDB" - This blog post outlines how the folks at Instacart migrated their existing tables from Postgres to DynamoDB while serving hundreds of terrabytes of data a day - Read more »

"Drop those credentials, use Single-Sign-On Login instead" - A hands-on tutorial on how to setup SSO login for multi AWS accounts using IAM Identity Center - Read more »

"The many ways to access RDS Postgres" - The focus of this tutorial will be on the features that protect access to the data itself vs managing access to RDS API actions - Read more »

"Mastodon on AWS: Host your own instance" - While Twitter seems to be in chaos, the free and decentralized alternative, Mastodon, is rising. At first glance - Read more »

"Verify the integrity of the Helm Charts" - Prove the authenticity of the Helm charts you manage through the HelmChart resources with the help of the cosign integration - Read more »

🛠 PROJECTS OF THE WEEK

Finch is an open source client for container development. Its simple installer provides a minimal native client along with an opinionated distribution of other open source components - Learn more »

Run your GitHub Actions locally. Rather than having to commit/push every time you want to test out the changes you are making to your .github/workflows/ files (or for any changes to embedded GitHub actions), you can use act to run the actions locally - Learn more »

Watch live World Cup 2022 matches in your terminal with this CLI. It has many cool features including live matches, team lineups, scheduled and past matches - Learn more »

MergeStat enables SQL queries for data in git repositories (and related sources, such as the GitHub API). It allows you to ask questions about the history and contents of your source code - Learn more »

A simple AWS DynamoDB viewer. The main idea of the client is to reach the required data in a few clicks without thinking a scan or query operation is required for that. This client allows easy viewing, editing, creating, and deleting of data - Learn more »

An AWS tool to help you create a point in time assessment of your AWS account using Prowler and Scout as well as optional AWS developed ransomware checks - Learn more »

📰 NEWSWORTHY STORIES

"Analysis on Docker Hub malicious images" - Read more »

"Here’s how bad a Twitter mega-breach would be" - Read more »

"Over a thousand Docker container images found hiding malicious content" - Read more »

"AWS Lambda adds support for Node.js 18" - Read more »

📕 BOOK OF THE WEEK

The book is a step by step guide of changes from top-down management approach in organisation like US Navy. Story starts with Cpt. Marquet assigned in charge of submarine with worst results in the fleet, and turns it around within a year to the best one, by changing the top-down (leader-follower) approach to the empowerment (leader-leader) approach.
I would've never guessed that I could enjoy a book written by a submarine captain, but I must say this is one of the best books on leadership that I've read.

🎧 PODCAST/WEBINAR OF THE WEEK

In this episode of LevelUp Engineering podcast, James Stanier, Director of Engineering at Shopify shares his secrets on energy management. He talks about setting yourself up for success by planning for the unexpected, goal- and achievement tracking and keeping your calendar under control.

💼 OPEN JOBS OF THE WEEK

Site Reliability Engineer @Sticker Mule
AWS, Kubernetes, Postgres
🌎 Remote, anywhere
💰 $120k+
Read more »

Site Reliability Engineer @DoubleCloud
AWS, Terraform, CI/CD
🌎 Remote, europe
Read more »

Senior Software Engineer @AssemblyAI
Go, AWS, MySQL
🌎 Remote, anywhere
💰 $125k - $200k
Read more »

Hand-picked DevOps opportunities to work from home, remotely, freelance, full-time, part-time, contract and internships - See more »

🌎 EVENTS OF THE WEEK

Get key Salesforce DevOps insights in this webinar with Mitch Spano (Google), David Reed (Salesforce), Jason Lantz (MuseLab) & Rob Cowell (Gearset) - Register now

Azure Lowlands is a single day event with multiple tracks around Microsoft Azure, ranging from for containers, data, integration all the way to DevOps, IoT and AI - Register now

AWS re:Invent is the most transformative event in tech. For 10 years, the global cloud community has gathered here to meet peers and cloud experts, get inspired, and rethink what’s possible - Register now

🐦 TWEET OF THE WEEK