DevOps3 min read
Environment variables and configuration done properly
A missing environment variable should crash the app at startup, not produce a confusing bug three hours into production.
DevOps guides on containerising applications with Docker, running workloads on Kubernetes, building CI/CD pipelines and observability.
A missing environment variable should crash the app at startup, not produce a confusing bug three hours into production.
A 1.2GB Node image that runs as root and ignores SIGTERM is the default outcome. Every part of that is avoidable.
Most Dockerfiles are copied from a tutorial and never revisited. Twenty minutes of attention usually halves both build time and image size.
Kubernetes is excellent at problems most teams do not have yet. The cost of adopting it early is paid in engineering hours you needed elsewhere.
You do not need to run a cluster to ship to one. This is the subset of Kubernetes that appears in an application developer's day.
A pipeline that takes 25 minutes and fails randomly does not improve quality. It teaches the team to merge on red.
Zero downtime is not a deployment tool setting. It is a property of an application that can run two versions at once.
Observability is not more dashboards. It is being able to answer a question you did not anticipate, without shipping new code.
Clicking through a cloud console works right up until you need the same thing again, in another region, at 2am, from memory.
Container security starts with four lines in a Dockerfile and a scan in CI. Most breaches involve failures at that level, not exotic escapes.
During an incident, the instinct is to find the cause. The job is to restore service. Those are different activities and the order matters.
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