After kicking off our OSS Spotlight, the score-spec hit 1000 stars on GitHub. In two weeks!

It’s great to see the platform community rally around exciting new tools like Score.

Want to feature your OSS project in Platform Weekly? Shoot me an email with more details, and we’ll make it happen.

Let’s get bakin’ 🥐

3 IaC challenges and how to tackle them

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) can be a 🐕. Here are some common challenges and how to overcome them, courtesy of this article by Dewan Ahmed:

1️⃣ Resistance to learning: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it… right? Well, not quite. You don’t want to wait until your production database is down to implement better tooling.

2️⃣ Security issues: Bridgecrew’s State of Open Source Terraform Security Report found that nearly 1 in 2 public Terraform modules were misconfigured. This can lead to major security issues. Remember that public modules in Terraform are a lot like code you find on the internet. So if you don’t run code directly from stack overflow, you need to check configuration and security for public Terraform modules too.

3️⃣ Configuration drift and duplication of work: Sometimes, when engineers make manual changes or use custom scripts, you wind up with config drift and duplication of work. In the transitional period to IaC, this is completely normal. Just make sure that the same system isn’t handled by both an IaC tool and manual/scripts at the same time.

4️⃣ Handling relational databases. Almost every cloud provider requires some downtime when their managed databases undergo a major version upgrade. There are some things you can do to minimize downtime, but eliminating it entirely isn’t possible. But some IaC tools might allow you to prevent a sudden version upgrade. For major configuration changes, you’ll likely experience some downtime. It’s ideal to perform these changes during a maintenance cycle and inform users in advance.

Short on time? ⏳ We got you 🥐😋

🥐 The more microservices evolve, the greater the SRE role is for the engineering teams' success. This is a great example of how to build a resilient SRE process.

🥐 Cloudify's Nati Shalom does a great job of breaking down the heated debate over the state of DevOps in this article.

🥐 WTF is Platform as a Product? Paula Kennedy wraps it up 🎁 for you 👇

🥐 Podcast time. 🎙️ MongoDB's Andrew Davidson talks about MongoDB's evolution from a software company to a cloud services company (MongoDB Atlas), how developers traditionally interacted with databases, and the need for Developer Data Platforms going forward. Tune in here 👈

🥐 What do all of these new job titles even mean? This Reddit post might resonate with those of y'all confused about DevOps versus Platform Engineering titles.

🥐 I bet all the coffee ☕ addicts can relate👇

🥐 Have you joined the Platform Engineering Slack channel? If not, you're missing out. Here are this week's highlights:

• An interesting issue came up while building a platform, how did the community solved it?
• The Platform Engineering community met in Tel Aviv, thank you to our partner Ella @ Firefly!
• We discussed about possible service to use for outage and monitor reporting...
• How do you create a solid charter for a new platform engineering team?

On our r/platformengineers:

• Developers, I want to hear from you: have you handled Terraform at scale?

This newsletter is a community effort, so if you have anything awesome to share from the cloud-native world, send it our way. You can share your ideas here.

Cya next week!

Stay crunchy 🥐

Luca

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