DevOps Industry Updates #28: Q3 Hits Edition

Welcome back! It’s already been nearly 10 weeks since the last edition. As it turns out, having a baby is pretty demanding time-wise, but in between all the play times and diaper changes came this beautiful part of the day called naps. That’s when I would catch-up on tech, and I’m glad to present to you a special edition of DevOps Industry Updates that I’ve been curating. It includes just the most important updates from Q3, so grab your coffee, we have a lot of big hits to cover:

🔥 Top Cream

This issue’s top 6 stories:

1. ChaosDB: How we hacked thousands of Azure customers’ databases
2. Managing the Risk of Cascading Failure
3. Industry leaders launch eBPF Foundation
4. Docker Desktop no longer free for large companies
5. Computers are the easy part
6. AWS’s Egregious Egress

🌎 Society

• An Old Hacker’s Tips On Staying Employed: some real words of wisdom in here.

• Industry leaders launch eBPF Foundation: “eBPF is a revolutionary technology that allows us to modify operating system behavior in real time without risky or expensive kernel code changes.”

• Computers are the easy part: software systems are complex, and so are their human operators.

📟 DevOps

• How to learn PromQL with Prometheus Playground: excellent hands-on blog post series on Prometheus.

• Managing the Risk of Cascading Failure: Laura Nolan discusses some of the mechanisms that cause cascading failures, what can be done to reduce the risk, and what to do if there is a cascading failure situation.

• RabbitMQ adds support for Streams: RabbitMQ 3.9 introduces a new type of data structure: streams. Streams unlock a set of use cases that could have been tedious to implement with “traditional” queues.

• NoOps: What Does the Future Hold for DevOps Engineers?: Does NoOps mean the end of the DevOps era? Or is it simply the next step in the progression of DevOps? In this article, we’ll explore this question in detail.

• Docker Desktop no longer free for large companies: Docker will restrict use of the free version of its Docker Desktop utility to individuals or small businesses, and has introduced a new more expensive subscription, as it searches for a sustainable business model.

• Terraform is not currently reviewing Community Pull Requests: HashiCorp has acknowledged that it is currently understaffed and is unable to review public PRs.

🛠️ DevOps Tools

• sift: grep on steroids: a fast and powerful alternative to grep.

• Grafana 8.0: unified Grafana and Prometheus alerts, live streaming, new visualizations, and more.

• Five Ansible Techniques I Wish I’d Known Earlier: if you’ve ever spent ages waiting for an Ansible playbook to get through a bunch of tasks so yours can be tested, then this article is for you.

• AWS Lambda Power Tuning: visualize and fine-tune the memory/power configuration of Lambda functions.

☸️ Kubernetes

• Kubernetes 1.22 – What’s new?: this release brings 56 enhancements, an increase from 50 in Kubernetes 1.21. Of those 56 enhancements, 13 are graduating to Stable, a whopping 24 are existing features that keep improving, and 16 are completely new.

• How etcd works and 6 tips to keep in mind

• NSA, CISA release Kubernetes Hardening Guidance: the report details threats to Kubernetes environments and provides configuration guidance to minimize risk.

• Automatic Remediation of Kubernetes Nodes

🔐 Security

• ChaosDB: How we hacked thousands of Azure customers’ databases: data breach alert: Wiz’s research team was able to gain complete unrestricted access to the accounts and databases of several thousand Microsoft Azure customers, including many Fortune 500 companies.

• Email Authenticity 101: DKIM, DMARC, and SPF: “password resets, two factor codes, business secrets, private conversations… Email is at the centre of most of life and business, and so we must ensure it is trustworthy and authentic.”

🐧 Linux

• New in Git: switch and restore: “to my surprise, I recently found out about 2 new additions to the list of high-level commands: git restore and git switch”.

• All you need to know about netcat: “netcat has been referred to as the TCP/IP / networking swiss army knife. In this article we’ll look at different applications of netcat and how it can be useful in day to day activities of a pentester, security professional and sysadmin.”

• Gentle Guide to Get Started With tmux

• Learn to think in sed, awk, and grep: “Do people really write these long, convoluted commands?” In a word: yes.

🚢 Leadership

• 4 ways to improve your influence as an SRE

☁️ Cloud

• Containers in the Cloud: What Are Your Options?: AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform all offer services to run containerized workloads securely at scale, but which one is the best?

AWS

• AWS’s Egregious Egress

• Firecracker internals: a deep dive inside the technology powering AWS Lambda.

• Announcing custom widgets for CloudWatch dashboards

• Amazon ElastiCache for Redis now supports auto scaling

• AWS CloudFormation: Quickly Retry Stack Operations from the Point of Failure

• Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling now lets you control which instances to terminate on scale-in

• Search all AWS IAM actions

GCP

• Google Cloud products in 4 words or less (2021 edition) 

Article version: 1.0.0

Written on September 8, 2021