even more good news about our genocidal war against SARS-CoV-2

A company called "Moderna" has announced findings from their first study, that their vaccine likely works.  Also (today), a study was published claiming the immune systems of people who were infected have changed SARS-CoV-2's genome but we don't know what that means yet.

Compliance as Code in Terraform: behavior driven development (BDD)

Check out terraform-compliance on github and the author's slideshare presentation.  Very slick.  It concentrates on negative tests using behavior driven development (BDD) testing.

Helm 3: simplifying secrets

Helm is still clunky, young, and lacks most functionality we need from package managers.  But Kubernetes is bizarre and difficult, so we can't blame Helm for its slow evolution.  Helm v3 now has a fantastically elegant way to create and managing secrets that is very safe and easy to use.  This very-short tutorial is worth 3 minutes of your time.

DevSecOp: Information Security concepts

The rapid evolution, sophistication, economics, and political implications of "cyber" -- organized attacks against computing systems -- is forcing more DevOps specialists to branch into DevSecOps and InfoSec.

The folks at SpecterOps (Jared Atkinson) take us on this worthwhile three-part journey through a simple and clear way to conceptualize your defenses:

https://posts.specterops.io/capability-abstraction-fbeaeeb26384
https://posts.specterops.io/detection-spectrum-198a0bfb9302
https://posts.specterops.io/detection-in-depth-a2392b3a7e94

Observability (again)

Alexis Richardson (founder of Weaveworks) takes us on a deeply-insightful journey through principles of infrastructure automation, and the foundations of DevOps.  Great article! Don't fall for the hype.  Think.  Read his article on observability.

How not to apply machine learning (AI) to Ops: AI-Ops does not work

Danyel Fisher explains why the hype of AI for Operations (AIOps) does not work yet.

Why Your Private Cloud is a Terrible Idea

Sam Newman gives a devastating analysis of the suicidal trajectory of Enterprises that are late adopters of public cloud services.  Watch the video.  If you aspire to be a "high performing" team, you are 24X more likely to succeed against competitors if you accelerate your move to the public cloud.  In my "day job" we are watching our own slow motion train wreck.  I may write a sequel to In Search of Stupidity.

Dial Out -- Zoom Features you should be using (1 of 10)

TL;DR

1. On Windows type Alt-I ; on Mac type Command-I

2. Type invitee-name <tab> invitee-phone-number

3. Click "Call" button

Background

At my company we have standardized on the Zoom video conferencing software, replacing a handful of other expensive, bad, frustrating systems in our conference rooms, computers, and desktops.  Zoom has very many interesting features to explore that are not immediately obvious.  This article is part of a series I am writing to walk you through some of the most useful features.  (Screenshots in these articles are from a Mac.  The Windows and Mobile Zoom programs are almost identical.)

Dial out to a mobile phone

It is not hard to imagine you are in a Zoom meeting with a large number of people but someone with important information for a decision or action is not present.  No problem: add that person to your Zoom meeting by dial-out:

At the top of your Zoom application is a menu header called "Meeting:"

You can select the "Invite" option from the menu or use the keyboard shortcut (on a Mac the shortcut to add a participant to your meeting is command-I; on Windows it is Alt-I).

A dialog appears.  Fill in both the name and phone number.  Click the "Call" button.

The Reality Dysfunction by Peter F Hamilton

Great writing, terrible science, thrilling.  4/5 Stars.

Istio services mesh resource list

Here is a cool github repository for resources and learning about the Istio services mesh.  I worked with the developers of Istio during early beta testing before the v1.0 release. The Istio developers discussed features my teams needed and how they would like to use them.  I love the approaches and design patterns Istio uses.  In particular, if you have a complex mesh with performance sensitive micro-services that do not connect through Istio, you can align logging time stamps of your services by logging to the same prometheus / grafana system.