DevOps

CI/CD is one of those quintessential mindset shifts that helps developers automate away the toil of deploying apps. Especially in the realm of serverless, where the whole idea is to focus on the things that matter and let the undifferentiated heavy lifting be handled by others, automating as much as possible is paramount. It helps developers focus on what matters, code, and it helps business focus on what matters, getting quality software to market faster. So how does that work in Akka Serverless?

With everything going on in DevOps, I think we can safely say that building pipelines is the way to deploy your applications to production. But knowing what you deploy to production and whether it is actually okay needs more data, like security checks, performance checks, and budget checks. We’ve come up with a process for that, which we call Continuous Verification “A process of querying external systems and using information from the response to make decisions to improve the development and deployment process.” In this session, we’ll look at extending an existing CI/CD pipeline with checks for security, performance, and cost to make a decision on whether we want to deploy our app or not.

In a nutshell, Continuous Verification comes down to making sure that DevOps teams put as many checks as possible into their CI/CD pipelines. These checks use external systems to validate the performance, security, and cost of your app without asking your engineers to do that manually. The systems that provide the data which decided whether your deployment goes to production or not, can also be used to help your engineers understand where the bottlenecks are in the process. With more checks in your automated pipeline, you have fewer manual tasks, less overhead, and better decisions to deploy to production or not. All that together means you get to spend more time at the beach!

If you’ve read the blog posts on CloudJourney.io before, you’ve likely read the term “Continuous Verification”. If you haven’t that’s okay too. There’s an amazing article from Dan Illson and Bill Shetti on The New Stack explaining in detail what Continuous Verification is. In a nutshell, the Continuous Verification comes down to making sure that DevOps teams put as many checks as possible into their CI/CD pipelines. Adding checks into a pipeline means there are fewer manual tasks and that means you have access to more data tot smooth out and improve your development and deployment process.

So far we covered the tools and technologies, Continuous Integration, and Infrastructure as Code aspects of the ACME Serverless Fitness Shop. Now, it’s time to dive into observability!

If you’ve read the blog posts on CloudJourney.io before, you’ve likely read the term “Continuous Verification”. If you haven’t that’s okay too. There’s an amazing article from Dan Illson and Bill Shetti on The New Stack explaining in detail what Continuous Verification is. In a nutshell, the Continuous Verification comes down to making sure that DevOps teams put as many checks as possible into their CI/CD pipelines. Adding checks into a pipeline means there are fewer manual tasks and that means you have access to more data tot smooth out and improve your development and deployment process.

In part one we covered the tools and technologies and in part two we covered the Continuous Integration aspect of the ACME Serverless Fitness Shop. Now, it’s time to dive into Infrastructure as Code!

If you’ve read the blog posts on CloudJourney.io before, you’ve likely read the term “Continuous Verification”. If you haven’t that’s okay too. There’s an amazing article from Dan Illson and Bill Shetti on The New Stack explaining in detail what Continuous Verification is. In a nutshell, the Continuous Verification comes down to making sure that DevOps teams put as many checks as possible into their CI/CD pipelines. Adding checks into a pipeline means there are fewer manual tasks and that means you have access to more data tot smooth out and improve your development and deployment process.

DevOps, as a practice to build and deliver software, has been around for over a decade. What about adding security to that, though? After all, security is one of the cornerstones of today’s information technology. As it turns out, one of the first mentions of adding security was a Gartner blog post in 2012. Neil MacDonald wrote,

“DevOps must evolve to a new vision of DevOpsSec that balances the need for speed and agility of enterprise IT capabilities (…)”.

Going into the series on creating Infrastructure as Code on AWS using Pulumi, I knew the team there was actively working on improving and expanding the Go support in Pulumi. What I didn’t realize is that it would be so quick and would be such a great improvement to the underlying code I needed to write. In this post, I’ll go over some of the code from my previous blog posts and update them to match the new SDK.

I’ve looked at Pulumi to do a bunch of things, including creating subnets in a VPC, building EKS clusters, and DynamoDB tables. The one thing I hadn’t explored yet was how to deploy AWS Lambda functions using Pulumi, so that’s exactly what this blog is about.

In previous posts, I looked at Pulumi to do all sorts of things with infrastructure. Most apps, though, will need some form of datastore so in this post I’ll go over the steps to create a DynamoDB table in AWS using Pulumi.