DevOps

cross-posted from: https://feddit.nl/post/47882275

https://fhoekstra.eu/posts/cks-tips/

Hi all,

I'm on a team right now that is converting a lot of apps that are running on ec2 over to eks, and we're starting with apps that make the most sense for eks. Apps like LGTM stack which have lots of distributed components, Airflow, etc.

We're setting up flux and renovate which really streamlines maintenance, and I like it so much that I'm wondering about converting apps that aren't particularly well suited for kubernetes over to eks just to use the same toolset.

We have some apps on ec2 that are essentially just a single docker container, they can be run in parallel but they don't have to talk to each other.

Some of these apps don't require many resources, so the $70 / month control plane cost of EKS is significant, which I imagine is the biggest reason we wouldn't convert over.

Just curious what thoughts are on this.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.nl/post/43404968

How-to: Cloudnative PG serving MongoDB with Automated Recovery from Continuous Backups

First post on my personal blog!

I recently completed a project that involved a lot of deep diving into some newer k8s-related tools. I'd like to document my findings so that they may help others, but I don't know where to put them. Years ago, Medium seemed like an option, but it sucks now with all the monetization. Substack supports nazis, so not there either. Where do I post?

Hi DevOps, how do you think your ideal programming language would look like? I mean a language in which you would write pipeline logic, like Python or Bash, not define pipeline steps itself, like YAML.

I think for me it would have:

• very clean and readable syntax
• immutable state by default
• strong typing
• strong tooling and IDE support
• focus on DevOps-need things, like JSON and files manipulation
• absence of danger things like pointers

What are your preferred strategies when a MySQL/MariaDB database server grows to have too much traffic for a single host to handle, i.e. scaling CPU/RAM or using regular replication is not an option anymore? Do you deploy ProxySQL to start splitting the traffic according to some rule to two different hosts?

Has anyone migrated to TiDB? In that case, what was the strategy to detect if the SQL your app uses is fully compatible with TiDB?

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?