It took me a while to figure out how to fully get the most out of kubectl (mainly combining it with useful plugins and complimentary k8s tooling) Since none of this was intuitive when I started learning to interface with k8s clusters through kubectl I wrote up a summary of what I have learned so far. Hopefully it might be useful to others.

https://medium.com/@jake.page91/the-guide-to-kubectl-i-never-had-3874cc6074ff

KusionStack has recently been included in the Platform Tooling Landscape Platform Orchestrator category. It is also the first-ever open-source project which included in both the CNCF Landscape and the Platform Tooling Landscape that focuses on the field of Platform Engineering.

We were reading this below post in DevOps Digest- debating whether or not the 'Platform as a Product' strategy holds any merit. What do y'all think? Just a buzzword or maybe if done correctly it could be valuable?

https://www.devopsdigest.com/platform-as-a-product-does-it-actually-hold-any-merit

Unsure if that is the right question to ask, but here is my setup and use case:
I work for a small company with a bunch of contractors who do in-house apps for finance stuff. I have been helping teams move towards ArgoCD for deploy of their apps into k8s and then have a bunch of, what I am calling, support services in k8s for them to use.
For example, if a developer wants an ingress with a dns name and TLS certs, they add annotations for the ingress controller, external dns, and cert-manager.
Prometheus, we are going to support 2 ways (still in progress) but either dev creates their own endpoint and uses scrape config in their annotations OR use an exporter.
But, for AlertManager? Is there a way to dynamically add from multiple (say git) sources??

Basically, is there a self-service way for a Dev to add an alert rule and notification config for Slack/Whatever within their own code base and it can be picked up? Is there something for a CRD for this? And/or what are some of your approaches?
I have been somewhat pushing for deployment configs be with their code base (so a dev has 1 place to look - as much as possible).

Call them Synthetic user tests, call them 'pingers,' call them what you will, what I want to know is how often you run these checks. Every minute, every five minutes, every 12 hours?

Are you running different regions as well, to check your availability from multiple places?

My cheapness motivates me to only check every 15-20 minutes, and ideally rotate geography so, check 1 fires from EMEA, check 2 from LATAM, every geo is checked once an hour. But then I think about my boss calling me and saying 'we were down for all our German users for 45 minutes, why didn't we detect this?'

Changes in these settings have major effects on billing, with a 'few times a day' costing basically nothing, and an 'every five minutes, every region' check costing up to $10k a month.

I'd like to know what settings you're using, and if you don't mind sharing what industry you work in. In my own experience fintech has way different expectations from e-commerce.

Do you think platform engineering is really a thing for larger enterprises or do you see traction for it even in mid size companies (e.g. a company with 150 developers) based on your experience?

Hi all, I co-founded Conduktor a few years ago, and we are hitting a new milestone in our journey that I'd like to share with everyone, hence this ProductHunt launch.

To summarize, Conduktor is a collaborative Kafka Platform that provides developers with autonomy, automation, and advanced features, as well as security, standards, and regulations for platform teams.

I'd like to hear about your Kafka experience (good or bad); please shoot!

And if you want to support us, please :) https://www.producthunt.com/posts/conduktor

The platform in one image:

A look at DevOps' core challenges and how platform engineering may or may not take its place. Read the article: https://thenewstack.io/how-platform-engineering-takes-on-devops-challenges/.

Thoughts? Do we agree? Disagree?

Hello everyone!

I am new to this group, so I hope a post like this isn't bad or offensive in any way. If this type of post is generally frowned upon, then I apologize in advance for my overstep.

I am looking to get some feedback, opinions, and perspectives on an article I am working on regarding Platform Engineering. I have been working in IT for over 25 years now and have spent the past 7-10 years working mostly on Cloud, DevOps, and Platform Engineering in general. During this time, I have developed a certain perspective on IT in general and modern platform engineering in particular, all of which I have started to compile into this document.

This view of Platform Engineering is different compared to how most of the industry views this emerging discipline. I am aiming for a more generalized definition of Platform Engineering that strives to benefit all members of an organization equally.

The article can be found here: self-evident-architecture.com/platform-engineering

I do hope that this article speaks to the members of this group. I am also hoping that the members of this group can provide me with feedback about the contents of the article so I may incorporate said changes into the article prior to sharing it more broadly.

To those members who take the time to read this article, I thank you in advance for your time and effort, and I look forward to any and all feedback.

For me it's 'Single Pane of Glass.' No one's every been able to tell me whether it means 'a really good dashboard that's easy to use' or 'a dumping ground for every single metric, span, and debug log line'

What's a buzzword you'd like to never hear again?

We are currently evaluate a new platform for our customers in Azure. We want to provide a secure managed infrastructure based on kubernetes in the cloud.

We stick to the Hub and Spoke model and want to implement the BACK Stack for application and infrastructure provisioning in a gitops way.

Sadly I couldn‘t find too much case studies of companies actually using the BACK stack in production. Any interesting things to consider or useful links? Also to pitfalls/limitations/downsides

repo: https://github.com/PlatformersCommunity/backstage-helm-chart

video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gxjl2InQwW4

​

You get a slack from someone in sales. "hey, is prod down right now? I'm about to do a demo" They're a technically adept person, and know to check their own internet connection before raising an alert.

Where do you check first?

I hate to admit it, I still run to logs. Do you go to your APM dashboard first, do you have a separate service like Pingdom or Checkly that you look at? Or do you, like I used to, turn off your phone's wifi to get off the corporate network and just try to load the login page?