#89: Pipeline as Code

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.

📖 POSTS OF THE WEEK

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.
Read more »

"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-related work, and similar - Read more »

"Cloud governance using Infrastructure as Code" - Organizations often adopt Terraform without proper planning, leading to issues such as lack of standardized practices, inconsistent security and compliance enforcement, and lack of code reuse. This blog post proposes a governance model to effectively utilize Terraform - Read more »

"Eliminate Kubernetes node scaling lag with pod priority and over-provisioning" - This tutorial suggests using dummy pods to over-provision worker nodes in Kubernetes to reduce lag time in scaling. The number of dummy pods is balanced between performance and cost and can be adjusted using the Horizontal cluster-proportional-autoscaler tool - Read more »

"How to debug" - The steps are generalised and applicable across backend, infrastructure, frontend, etc, they're not specific to a particular language or paradigm - Read more »

"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 - Read more »

"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 - Read more »

"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 - Read more »

🛠 PROJECTS OF THE WEEK

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

An open-source browser extension to download eBooks from AWS Resource Hub without filling forms - Learn more »

A learning roadmap to master Kubernetes from scratch covering basic to advanced Kubernetes concepts - Learn more »

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 - Learn more »

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

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

📰 NEWSWORTHY STORIES

"AWS CloudTrail vulnerability: undocumented API allows CloudTrail bypass" - Read more »

"How Cloudflare uses Terraform to manage Cloudflare" - Read more »

"Istio publishes results of 2022 security audit" - Read more »

"How we manage incident response at Honeycomb" - Read more »

📕 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. If you are unable to purchase the book, send me a direct message on Twitter and I will provide a free eBook version 😅

🎧 PODCAST/WEBINAR OF THE WEEK

Manually securing Kubernetes can leave your organization vulnerable to breaches. Armon Dadgar, CTO of HashiCorp outlines how implementing an automated zero-trust security strategy addresses common challenges users face when securing Kubernetes.

💼 OPEN JOBS OF THE WEEK