ISSUE 177: CI/CD/CV?

“If you are still writing loops — you’re not a bad person. Just think about whether you need to write loops or if there’s a better alternative.”

In this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, we speak with two DigitalOcean alumni and co-chairs of SREcon 2020 Americas conference who have led two very different journeys to become one of the most wanted roles in tech — site reliability engineer. As the name suggests, an SRE is someone focused on the reliability of an organization’s most important systems.

Emil Stolarsky is a frontend-turned-infrastructure engineer who has built scriptable load balancers for Shopify, built an internal Kubernetes platform for DigitalOcean, and is now writing a book on how the enterprise SRE role can be adapted to smaller orgs. Tammy Bütow began with disaster recovery testing in banking over a decade ago, then went over to DigitalOcean in incident response, before she joined Dropbox for an official SRE role. Finally, in 2017, she joined Chaos as a Service provider Gremlin as its principal SRE.

CI/CD/CV?

We cover quite a bit on setting up and running continuous integration and continuous deployment pipelines, which are necessary to update code and stay competitive in this day and age. But many organizations are finding that there are additional steps needed to truly get the application code into production.

This week on The New Stack, two VMware engineers introduced a new concept to help IT managers bridge this divide, called “Continuous Verification.” In this post, Dan Illson and Bahubali (Bill) Shetti define continuous verification as “A process of querying external system(s) and using information from the response to make decision(s) to improve the development and deployment process.”

It’s a new term, but addresses the age-old issue that developers have of making sure that the production environment that they are deploying into is ready for their new program. The idea with CV is that it can augment the CI/CD process by moving many of the post-deployment steps into feedback loop(s) within the pipeline. The tools are already there. In fact, any monitoring or security tool that can report on its work by way of an API can be fit into an existing pipeline (depending on how flexible the CI/CD server is at handling APIs, of course), Illson further explained in this week’s The New Stack Context podcast, which will be posted later today.

Time will tell if CV becomes an accepted term, though the challenge of managing external resources is here with us today, and will need to be addressed in some fashion for cloud native computing to be truly programmable.

What Is Robotic Processing Automation?

The ongoing push to make companies as efficient as possible helped create the need for a technology called Robotic Processing Automation (RPA). RPA involves using specialized software that’s capable of evaluating data and dealing with it appropriately according to the task at hand. The software features artificial intelligence (AI) components that facilitate computers handling high-volume and repetitive tasks previously done by humans. Unlike static tools that perform linearly, RPA software is dynamic. It looks for patterns in the inputted data and makes decisions about how to treat similar kinds of information in the future.

Pipe: How the System Call That Ties Unix Together Came About

It’s remarkable to remember that Unix’s pipe command was implemented in a single day by Bell Labs’ Doug McIlroy. It represents not only a great moment in computing history, but also a uniquely important moment for its profound impact on the culture of Unix. And it has changed the way we’ve programmed ever since. A look back from our Sunday cultural reporter David Cassel.

Primer: How Kubernetes Came to Be, What It Is, and Why You Should Care

When Catherine Paganini took on a job as run marketing for Kublr, an enterprise-grade Kubernetes platform, she needed to learn what Kubernetes was, which is a tall order for any professional walking into the cloud native landscape. She is a fast learner, however, and gathered what she learned in this excellent primer of what Kubernetes is, the value proposition it provides, and even the challenges it portends for the enterprise.