Devops for Growth

Programming is about writing code. You take a task and write code to solve it.

Software engineering is when you take that piece of code and consider:

How will this task evolve?
How will this code adapt to those changes?
What does this code encourage others to do?
How does this code encourage other programmers to use it?
How will I understand this code in 5 months?
How will a busy team member jumping around grok this?
What happens when the business becomes bigger?
When will this code stop being good enough?
How does it scale?
How does it generalize?
What hidden dependencies are there?

That's engineering � considering the long-term effects of your code. Both direct and indirect.

You always face the underlying concern of "What's the expected life span of this code?". How you approach a black friday marketing site is different from how you approach your company's payment system.

Jamstack’s core ideas are not something new. If you go back to the origins of the web, you’ll recap how developers used to create static HTML content manually, page by page, to serve the clients.

The whole cycle from development to deployment was simpler for everyone involved. Obviously, with the complexities required for the systems nowadays, we can not go back to the way it used to be.

However, Jamstack’s not focused on simply serving manually-created static HTML contents to gain in page load speed. It’s goal is on extracting the best out of these experiences to improve performance, productivity, and flexibility while keeping maintenance simpler.

Aside from that, there’s a famous article from AWS known as The 5 Pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework, which the company wrote to share with the community their extensive experience in making great architectures. They are:

Operational Excellence
Security
Reliability
Efficiency (in terms of performance)
Optimization (in terms of costs)

When looking at a Jamstack architecture, you can spot each one of these pillars well implemented through:

Reducing the number of internal architectural pieces that move within the systems to decrease the need for Ops people and, therefore, have better operational excellence.
Making sure the app follows the consolidated best practices for security means which increases the overall security.
Providing endless scalability to the various nodes in which your app may be running so that it’s reliable.
Delivering the fastest experience possible due to the static nature of all website resources, including CDN.
Decreasing costs since there are only static resources to host .

The AWS Well-Architected Framework helps cloud architects build the most secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructure possible for their applications. The framework provides a consistent approach for customers and AWS Partner Network (APN) Partners to evaluate architectures, and provides guidance to implement designs that scale with your application needs over time.

In this post, we provide an overview of the Well-Architected Framework’s five pillars and explore design principles and best practices. You can find more details—including definitions, FAQs, and resources—in each pillar’s whitepaper we link to below.

Read the full Well-Architected whitepaper >>
1. Operational Excellence

Among the most fundamental of distributed computing concepts is the endpoint. We know every piece of software – objects, microservices, applications, you name it – by its inputs and outputs, and we call such points of interaction endpoints.

Over the history of distributed computing, endpoints have come in many flavors: sockets, IP addresses, interfaces, Web Services, and ingress, to name a few. Regardless of their nature, other pieces of software must be able to find the appropriate endpoints, connect (or bind) to them, and interact with them.

Endpoints also represent holes in our attack surface, so securing them is always of tantamount importance. At their most basic, endpoints are part of our physical distributed computing architecture. However, if all we had to work with were physical endpoints, we’d have little to no flexibility, and hence, limited programmability and severe limitations to their usability. For these reasons, we’ve implemented many approaches to abstracting endpoints over the years. Today we must continue this trend as we build out our cloud-native infrastructure.

Within the new cloud-native computing paradigm, however, abstracted endpoints take on a new meaning.

Sélection des meilleurs tutoriels, exercices et cours de formation gratuits pour apprendre le cloud computing du niveau débutant à expert

Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. This cloud model is composed of five essential characteristics, three service models, and four deployment models.

If there was one book this year that it was hard to avoid hearing about, it was “Software Engineering at Google”. As such, it was only a matter of time before I jumped on the bandwagon and decided to give it a read, but I’m happy I finally did!
I track my highlights and notes through my kindle / goodreads, and ended up with about 80 of them. In this blogpost, I’ll just go over some of what that I thought stood out in the book in one way or another.

Google Cloud apologized for the service outage and any inconvenience caused its downstream customers. The organization specified the root cause as “a latent bug in a network configuration service which was triggered during a leader election charge.” The cloud giant has assured customers there are now “two forms of safeguards protecting against the issue happening in the future.”

With the massive adoption of public cloud, this latest incident (in a long year of outages) illustrates how significant the impact a public cloud vendor outage can be downstream. It also illustrates how vulnerable enterprises are to third-party vendor outages.

You can clearly see that many enterprises rely on public Internet, services, and infrastructure to conduct their business and deliver digital experiences to their clients. While there are many positives to this situation, the challenge is that those same businesses have little to no control over the underlying infrastructure on which their organizations run.
Three Key Lessons for Any Company

Below are three critical lessons that we took away from this outage, which you can apply to your own business:

While failure is bound to happen, don’t overlook the importance of communicating to the end user through a proper error page. Don’t assume your users will find your status page or go to Twitter to see your communications. They will have already moved on to your next competitor, and will eventually read about it in the news. If there was one thing that confused the end users in this instance, it was the Google error page that greeted people. Most people would have expected an error message from the company they were trying to reach, not the hosting company. It’s a little unclear if Google Cloud allows folks to modify this. Perhaps it’s not possible. However, any company should be ready for such failures, and implement a process where they are able to change the DNS or CDN configuration to point people to a proper error page with their own branding and messaging to apologize for the failure in their own words. And ideally, make it fun. Don’t be afraid to be human and relate to the end users. A proper error page is always better than confusing error pages (as in this instance), obscure errors (such as “the server failed to respond”), or worse, nothing at all and hanging on into infinity to connect to the server.

Key Takeaways

The multi-cloud journey is often a long, complex one. Adaptable tooling is key to deal with current heterogeneous systems, and accommodate future change.
Team buy in is key. The transformation will touch many organizations and require leadership and a well communicated vision to succeed.
Measure the current state of IT utilization. A successful transformation not only needs a clear vision of the future, but also a clear understanding of the present.
Cloud selection must be driven by current and anticipated business needs. This can include differentiators such as security, performance, reliability, cost for anticipated usage, etc.
Avoid large scale sudden transformation; favor incrementalism initially. The journey to multi-cloud is one of organizational learning as well as execution. Incremental transformation allows internal systems to adjust to new realities and absorb the shock of change. Later, when experience and confidence is gained with new technology and operational models, the change can accelerate.

Dans le Cloud computing - le tutoriel pour débutant

In particular, as I pointed out, the cloud and DevOps let you make decisions based on marginal costs and marginal returns. You can also do the equivalent of activity-based costing within a digital transaction.