Platform Engineering Monthly — August 2024

Welcome to the ninth edition of Platform Engineering Monthly, thanks for being here! I’ve slightly tweaked the structure of this, any feedback on this, let me know! P.S. Suggestions or ideas for the next edition? Let me know!

📰 News

• My IRC client runs on Kubernetes — Sometimes we were so focused on whether we could, we never stopped to ask if we should. Super cool project though, I love ideas that leverage Kubernetes for self-hosting!

• Thank You to the Stack Overflow Community for Ranking Docker the Most Used, Desired, and Admired Developer Tool — Docker continues to dominate as a crucial tool in the developer ecosystem.

• AWS Shield vs WAF: A Complete Guide in 2024 - Cloudwards — A comprehensive comparison to help you choose the right AWS security solution.

• Cloud Functions is now Cloud Run functions — event-driven programming in one unified serverless platform — Some more Google Cloud rebranding that’s worth being aware of.

• Coming soon: the Certified Backstage Associate certification for developers and platform engineers — CNFC is releasing a new certification! Backstage seems to have the mindshare (right now) and it’s a complex enough offering to warrant a new certification.

• How AWS powered Prime Day 2024 for record-breaking sales — Some pretty cool insights (with data) into the scale and capabilities of AWS infrastructure.

• How developers want to use AI tools — Abi Noda’s review of a paper on how developers view AI, how they want to use it, and what their top concerns are in adopting it.

• Score accepted as a CNCF Sandbox Project — Score is an open source workload spec that is the newest project to join the CNCF ecosystem.

• 5 Hacks Learned by Writing Thousands of Lines of IaC — Some solid foundational tips for Infrastructure as Code practitioners.

• Are Shared Service Platforms Too Restrictive? - The New Stack — This article explores the balance between standardisation and flexibility in platform engineering. It’s a common tension in organisations and doesn’t have a “one-size fits all approach”, so I imagine this topic will continue to dominate for the foreseeable future.

• New Study Finds 93% of Enterprise Platform Teams Face Major Challenges With Cloud Cost Management, Kubernetes Complexity and Boosting Developer Productivity - Business Wire — Not all smooth sailing managing Kubernetes clusters in Platform Engineering teams, it’s a fairly comprehensive study highlighting the current challenges in platform engineering.

📅 Events

• "The Hows & Whats of DORA" — August 27, 2024

• Discussion on Reliability challenges in Production LLMs. — August 29, 2024

• Kubefirst Live episode 42 with Matt Gowie, CEO/CTO of Masterpoint — August 29, 2024 at 3PM EST

• Pints with Pulumi featuring Pulumi Founder Eric Rudder — September 4, 2024 at Williamsons's Tavern, London

• K8s Resilience workshop — September 9-11, 2024

• How to build a slack chatbot for auto-RCA — September 19, 2024

• CNCF inaugural San Francisco meetup featuring a panel discussion on cloud native tech future with Dagger, Wiz, Pulumi and CloudFlare — August 29th in San Francisco

Webinars and Roundtables

• GenAI for observability in the serverless world — August 27, 2024, 45 min

• How to drive a successful platform engineering initiative in the enterprise — August 29, 2024, 45 min

• Backstage is not enough to build your platform — September 4, 2024, 45 min

• How to build your Minimum Viable Platform (MVP) in 2hrs — September 5, 2024, 2hrs

• How to design your platform backend — September 11, 2024, 45 min

• How to master your Minimum Viable Platform (MVP) — September 24, 2024, 45 min

🦮 Tutorials / How-tos

• Ambient mesh: can sidecar-less Istio make your application faster? — For anyone in K8s world, Istio without a sidecar looks to have some promising looking performance benefits.

• Docker Best Practices: Understanding the Differences Between ADD and COPY Instructions in Dockerfiles — It’s some welcome clarity on the technical differences in some common Dockerfile instructions, which hopefully help with better container builds.

• SSO and RBAC: a secure access strategy for your Kubernetes — A well-structured guide on how you can deploy Kubernetes security with Single Sign-On and Role-Based Access Control.

• Explain infrastructure as code (alternatives to IaC) — Exploring options beyond traditional IaC approaches, specifically Infrastructure from Code. I’m not sure if I’m convinced, but it’s interesting to see what alternatives are out there.

• Master Prometheus on Kubernetes: Spotting every issue without alert fatigue — A helpful topic, it’s often tricky to get the balance of alerting right, and this video shows an approach to effective monitoring with Prometheus.

📁 Interesting Projects

• GitOpper: GitOps Without Kubernetes — A tool for applying GitOps principles outside of Kubernetes environments.

• See the impact on your cloud costs as you code — A really neat idea to highlight the environmental and cost impact of your project.

• Meet OpenShift Lightspeed, Red Hat's AI tool for Kubernetes admins - ZDNet — Red Hat's new AI-powered tool for Kubernetes administration.

• Neon: A serverless open-source alternative to AWS Aurora Postgres — A very interesting approach to highly scalable databases, without the Cloud. I hope more projects like this come about, as we need more genuine open source competition in this area.

• Dokku — Another excellent open source project, Dokku self-hosted Platform-as-a-Service that helps developers focus on their applications. Basically Heroku, self-hosted.

Have insights, stories, projects, feedback, or tips on platform engineering you'd like to share? I’ll share them in the Reader's Corner! Drop me a line by replying to this email for a chance to be featured in our next edition, or connect with me on LinkedIn.