DevTalk LA

 
 
 

This week's topic: Kaniko

As described in Thoughtworks Technology Radar Vol. #27.

Most of today’s CI/CD pipeline tools and platforms are built on containers as runtimes. Many of our teams are using Kaniko to build container images from within those container-based pipelines. This comes as part of a trend away from Docker as the de facto standard for container runtimes. With Kaniko, you can build your images without using a Docker daemon. This helps avoid the security issue of Docker’s “privileged” mode, which would be necessary for any “Docker-in-Docker” activity. Moreover, you don’t have to assume that your pipeline has access to a Docker daemon in the first place, which cannot be taken for granted anymore and often requires extra configuration.

Zoom link will be added just before the event starts.

Discussion Resources :

TBD Soon

 
 
 

This week's topic: io-ts

As described in Thoughtworks Technology Radar Vol. #27.

Our teams developing in TypeScript are finding io-ts invaluable, especially when interacting with APIs that ultimately result in the creation of objects with specific types. When working with TypeScript, getting data into the bounds of the type system (i.e., from the aforementioned APIs) can lead to run-time errors that can be hard to find and debug. io-ts bridges the gap between compile-time type checking and run-time consumption of external data by providing encode and decode functions. Given the experiences of our teams and the elegance of its approach, we think io-ts is worth adopting.

Zoom link will be added just before the event starts.

Discussion Resources :

TBD Soon

 
 
 

This week's topic: Observability for CI/CD pipelines

As described in Thoughtworks Technology Radar Vol. #27.

Observability practices have shifted the conversation from monitoring for well-understood problems to helping troubleshoot unknown problems in distributed systems. We’ve seen success taking that perspective outside of the traditional production environment by applying observability for CI/CD pipelines to help optimize testing and deployment bottlenecks. Complex pipelines create developer friction when they run too slow or suffer from nondeterminism, reducing important feedback loops and hindering developer effectiveness. Additionally, their role as critical deployment infrastructure creates stress points during periods of rapid deployments, as happened to several organizations responding to the recent log4shell vulnerability. The concept of traces translates nicely to pipelines: instead of capturing the cascade of service calls, child spans capture information about each stage of the build. The same waterfall charts used to analyze a call flow in a distributed architecture can also be effective in helping us to identify bottlenecks in pipelines, even complex ones with fan-in and fan-out. This enables far more focused optimization efforts. While the technique should work with any tracing tool, Honeycomb supports a tool called buildevents that helps capture pipeline trace information. An alternative approach of capturing information already exposed by CI/CD platforms, taken by the open-source buildviz (built and maintained by a Thoughtworker), allows for a similar investigation without changing the step configurations themselves.

Zoom link will be added just before the event starts.

Discussion Resources :

TBD Soon

 
 
 

This week's topic: Apache Superset

As described in Thoughtworks Technology Radar Vol. #27.

Apache Superset is a great business intelligence (BI) tool for data exploration and visualization to work with large data lake and data warehouse setups. It supports several data sources — including AWS Redshift, BigQuery, Azure MS SQL, Snowflake and ClickHouse. Moreover, you don’t have to be a data engineer to use it; it’s meant to benefit all engineers exploring data in their everyday work. For demanding use cases, we found it easy to scale Superset by deploying it in a Kubernetes cluster. Since we last talked about it in the Radar, Superset has graduated as an Apache product, and we’ve seen great success in several projects.

Zoom link will be added just before the event starts.

Discussion Resources :

TBD Soon