Welcome to this week’s edition of the DevOps Bulletin!

Curious if you truly need Redis or if Kubernetes is still the best fit for your infrastructure? We cover insightful stories from teams reconsidering these technologies and share lessons on optimizing decisions. Worried about unexpected cloud costs? Learn from a case where following an AWS Amplify guide led to a $1,100 bill—and how to avoid such surprises.

This week, explore tutorials on visualizing SQLite indexes, monitoring Node.js apps with PM2 in production, and estimating networking costs accurately. Get practical advice on selecting the right AWS RDS instance size, simplifying release management with Semantic Versioning, and using Ansible blocks to streamline error handling.

For security-minded readers, discover how to separate Terraform changes from manual S3 updates and efficiently manage AWS EKS permissions with Terraform and OpenTofu.

Our featured open-source projects include running macOS in Docker, using Amazon S3 as a Git remote, and tools for PostgreSQL data transformations.

All this and more in this week’s DevOps Bulletin—don’t miss out!

Newsworthy Stories

• Moving off Heroku, slowly

• Do you really need Redis?

• We’re leaving Kubernetes

• I followed the official AWS Amplify guide and was charged $1,100

• What I wish someone told me about Postgres

• Discovering hidden vulnerabilities in Portainer with CodeQL

• What’s new with Robinhood, our in-house load-balancing service

• 52 Weeks of SRE

• Reducing the cost of a Google Cloud Dataflow Pipeline by over 60%

Tutorials of the week

• SQLite Index Visualization: Learn how SQLite organizes and stores Indexes using B-Trees, with insights on data structures, memory, and disk storage.

• Networking Costs Calculator: A sample of a networking costs calculator helps to estimate the networking costs such as Data Transfer, Transit Gateway Attachments, NAT Gateways, etc.

• SQL Style Guide: This SQL Style Guide outlines best practices for writing clear and maintainable SQL code.

• Choose the Right Instance Size for AWS RDS: How to select the ideal AWS RDS instance size to balance performance, cost, and scalability.

• Semantic Versioning to Simplify Release Management: Learn how to use Semantic Versioning with semantic-release and GitHub Actions in your AWS CDK project.

• Managed DevOps Pools: This guide covers setup, using pre-built or custom images, and leveraging private networking to improve infra security.

• How to Use Blocks in Ansible Playbooks: How to use Ansible blocks to group tasks, handle errors gracefully, and manage cleanup operations effectively in your playbooks.

• Monitoring PM2 in production: Learn how to monitor PM2-managed Node.js apps in New Relic using Flex, capturing key metrics like CPU, memory, and logs with a streamlined setup.

• How to Differentiate Manual Changes from Terraform Changes in S3 Bucket: This step-by-step guide filters manual S3 actions and sends SNS notifications, ensuring Terraform actions don’t trigger alerts.

• Managing AWS EKS access entries with Terraform and OpenTofu: Learn to set up access entries, leverage predefined policies, and efficiently manage permissions without manual errors.

• Infra as Code with CDK for Terraform: Learn how Zip’s security team used Python CDK for Terraform to enforce security guardrails on AWS infrastructure.

• Ingesting CloudWatch Logs into OpenSearch: Sample code to showcase ingestion of Amazon CloudWatch logs into Amazon OpenSearch Serverless.

• AWS Cost for Home Assistant: This tutorial showcases how to get the month-to-date cost and forecast cost and make it available on Home Assistant.

• Installing Windows XP in DOSBox-X: Learn how to install Windows XP on DOSBox-X, even though it’s not officially supported.

Projects of the week

Highlighting cool DevOps projects to keep an eye on:

• Git-remote-s3 is a library that enables using Amazon S3 as a git remote and LFS server.

• ToolGit is a collection of scripts that extend Git with various sub-commands to make life easier.

• Pkdns is a DNS server providing self-sovereign and censorship-resistant domain names.

• Pg_flo is a CLI to move and transform data between PostgreSQL databases using Logical Replication.

• Macos provides a way to run macOS inside a Docker container using KVM acceleration.

• Pgpdf is an extension for PostgreSQL that provides a pdf data type and assorted functions.