DevOps&SRE Library

Slack handles billions of inbound network requests per day, all of which traverse through our edge network and ingress load balancing tiers. In this blog post, we’ll talk about how a request flows — from a Slack’s user perspective — across the vast ether of the network to reach AWS and then Slack’s internal services. Let’s dive in!

We dive into one of Terraform's most recent features to leverage infrastructure validation.

What if Kubernetes was idiot-proof?

I have been the first Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) several times as a consultant or full-time employee. I’ve been the tech lead on three SRE teams and the only SRE on two others. I’ve succeeded (growing from one SRE to a team of five twice) and failed (quitting without another SRE being found). Here’s what I’ve learned about being the first SRE.

Site Reliability Engineering has emerged as one of the hottest career paths in tech in the recent years. SREs get to tackle technical challenges on complex systems at scale, and are well-compensated for their specialized skillset.

From the outside, the life of an SRE might seem prestige and full of opportunity. But behind the curtain you can often find reality full of chronic stress, career stagnation, and occupational hazards.

By exploring the flip side of SRE, we can make more informed decisions about our engineering careers and have realistic expectations. Whether you're an aspiring or current SRE, let's discuss darker aspects of things.

Terravision visualises Terraform code as live Professional Cloud Architecture Diagrams by analysing the code dynamically. Supports AWS, Google and Azure.

This is purely my perspective as a practitioner with firsthand visibility into several working solutions in my career as a software consultant. Much of the vocabulary used in this series is of my own imagination and will surely cede to better nomenclature from the community. Moreover, many implementations I have seen in practice include multiple types of patterns discussed in this series.

A guide to map transformation using for loops in Terraform.

A step-by-step guide on how to provision highly scalable specific runners in AWS using Packer, Ansible, and Terraform

Secret management in IaC: Learn how to manage secrets using the time_rotating resource.

TLDR: On some cloud providers, you get half the CPU you expect due to burstable nodes. Without burstable nodes, overhead is improved but still significant.

TL;DR: Should you have a Kubernetes cluster with fewer larger nodes or many smaller nodes? This article discusses the pros and cons.