#203 — February 13, 2019

Read on the Web

Web Operations Weekly

Server Hunter: A Tool to Browse the VPS and Dedicated Server Marketplace — An interesting new site that brings together information on over 10,000 different VPS and dedicated server offerings, all the way down to NAT-only VPSes at pennies per month.

Server Hunter

Overcoming RESTlessness — Have you, too, sensed a slight anti-REST sentiment out there? Newer protocols like GraphQL, gRPC and Kafka are chipping away at common REST use cases, but rather than just replacing REST, Matt McLarty argues we should evolve by building on top of REST’s mature ecosystem.

Matt McLarty

The Chaos Monkey Guide for Engineers: Tips, Tutorials & Training — This guide is a full how-to for Chaos Monkey, including what it is, its pros and cons, and how it relates to Chaos Engineering broadly. It includes tutorials for getting started along with tips and guides for those looking to go beyond the basics.

Gremlin sponsor

Make Your Site’s Pages 'Instant' in 1 Minute — This is a neat little project, and surprisingly simple. Include a small piece of JavaScript on your page to add just-in-time prefetching of links on your site when people hover over where they intend to go next. The Hacker News discussion this project provoked is also quite interesting.

Alexandre Dieulot

AresDB: Uber’s Go and GPU-Powered Real-Time Analytics Engine — Uber has built a pretty significant project using Go and CUDA which uses GPUs to enable real-time computation and data processing in parallel. GitHub repo.

Jian Shen, Ze Wang, David Wang, Jeremy Shi, and Steven Chen

Develop and Test AWS Step Functions Workflows Locally — You can now use a local version of AWS Step Functions (called AWS Step Functions Local) to develop/test your workflows - it’s available as a JAR package or a Docker image.

Amazon Web Services

Facebook Expands Support for Let’s Encrypt — The world’s leading certificate authority has just got a serious 3 year sponsorship commitment from Facebook who note 38% of HTTPS domains they observe use Let’s Encrypt.

Let's Encrypt

💻 Jobs

DevOps Engineer at X-Team (Remote) — Join the most energizing community for developers. Work from anywhere with the world's leading brands.

X-Team

Try Vettery — Vettery specializes in developer roles and is completely free for job seekers.

Vettery

📘 Tutorials

Principled GraphQL: Ten Principles for GraphQL Use — Inspired by the Twelve Factor App, Apollo lays out ten principles for building better GraphQL-oriented systems.

Apollo

Dissecting Kubernetes: An Intro to Its Main Components — A 46 minute talk complete with a handy diagram and demos.

Joshua Sheppard

Share Your Whole Stack with Your Team, on Any Cloud, with One Workflow 🤯

Manifold sponsor

Bandwidth or Latency? When to Optimise for Which — A simple way to quickly and roughly work out whether your assets would benefit most from an increase in bandwidth or a reduction in latency.

Harry Roberts

Understanding API-Based Platforms: A Guide For Product Managers

Smashing Magazine

Tips for Running Free Dynos on Heroku in 2019 — The somewhat convoluted rules around running stuff for free on Heroku. The short answer is free Heroku is for side projects and non-production environments.

Adam McCrea

💬 Stories & Opinions

Building Stable Systems with Load-Test Driven Development — Developers at one of the world’s biggest food ordering services show off how they use ‘load-test driven development’ while building their systems from a performance-first standpoint.

Just Eat

Using Docker and Kubernetes in High Security Environments

Christian Abdelmassih

Correlate Request Traces, Infrastructure Metrics, and Logs. Try Datadog Free

Datadog sponsor

New Relic, SignifAI and the Shifting View of Monitoring Technologies — Monitoring tool providers are integrating machine intelligence and AI into their services to better inform devops folks and SREs about the state of their systems.

Alex Williams

How PagerDuty Developed Its Postmortem Best Practices — We linked to PagerDuty’s recently opened incident response documents a few issues ago, but now you can learn just how they came up with them.

Rachael Byrne

▶  Discussing Making WordPress Faster with Patrick Meenan — A chat with Patrick Meenan of Cloudflare and founder of WebPageTest.org about making WordPress faster and technologies Cloudflare has been working on to help.

Webmaster Radio

📣 And some vendor-y related news items

Linode Introduces Dedicated CPU Instances — Still VPSes but you can get CPU cores dedicatedly solely for your instance at around a 50% premium.
Linode

What’s Coming Next on DigitalOcean in 2019 — DO looks set to get into managed databases, extend its Kubernetes product, and roll out new droplet types.
DigitalOcean

AWS Now Supports TLS Termination on Network Load Balancers — Benefits include AWS taking care of all those zero-day TLS-related patches, improved compliance, and simplified management.
Jeff Barr (Amazon)

Netlify Adds Akismet-Powered Spam Filtering to Its Users' Forms
Netlify

StackPath Introduces Containers and Virtual Machines 'at the Edge' — A fully managed environment offering low latency execution of complex logic as close to your end users as possible.
David Mytton