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Good CI/CD and SRE Blogs

207 points by 100011_100001 ↗ HN
Are there any good blogs that focus on CI/CD pipelines and SRE without a ton of fluff?

I feel like the space moves fast, and I need a way to keep up with it better. In an ideal world I would want to see best practices for different tools, and pipelines so I can evaluate them and adopt what makes sense.

40 comments

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adamgordonbell
I'm not sure about SRE specific or CI specific writing but at risk of answering another question, here's what comes to mind for me.

In the Operations space my favorite writer is Charity Majors, although a lot of what she talks about isn't OPs specific:

https://charity.wtf/

Rachel by the Bay is also great:

https://rachelbythebay.com/w/

Totally not related, but Phil Eaton's posts on how databases work are super interesting and lack fluff.

https://notes.eatonphil.com/

In terms of CI and builds, I try to write some on this topic for the Earthly Blog. My Bazel article was recently on Hn. Here are my posts:

https://earthly.dev/blog/authors/adam/

Warning though, I also write about lots of other stuff. Are there specific CI topics you'd like to see covered?

eatonphil
Kind of you to share, Adam! You have awesome podcast episodes as well!
eliranw
Good question, would love to also know about some great blogs
excitednumber
Same.

Even just a maintained “start to finish” of what someone thinks is current best practice for project development would be a fantastic resource.

oneplane
The biggest issue (for me when writing about it) is that it's really hard to do this when most keys and values in any source or screenshot are internal to the company. I could go and clean it up with placeholder data, but at that point I'm essentially doing my work twice.
TotoHorner
- Quastor (https://www.quastor.org/) - Moreso focused on backend engineering but they have a lot of SRE content too. It's a newsletter that looks at all the big tech engineering blogs and sends out summaries of the interesting posts.

- SRE Weekly (https://sreweekly.com/) - Curation newsletter on interesting links in SRE

- SRE Prodcast (https://sre.google/prodcast/) - Good podcast by Google on SRE. They pick a specific topic and then interview an expert on that so each episode is well focused. They also provide transcripts so you can just read through it instead of listening.

- Resilience in Action (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/resilience-in-action/i...) - Another good podcast on SRE with interviews.

If you just want a listen of resources, then you should check out the Awesome SRE repo on github - https://github.com/dastergon/awesome-sre

100011_100001
Good stuff. Thanks. This seems to be along the lines of what I was looking for.
dev_0
No Martin Fowler please. He doesn't work on real projects now
411111111111111
Martin Fowler has never worked in ci/CD and SRE, nor has he ever written anything on the subject.
solarengineer
While it is true that Martin is not a full-time programmer, all his blog posts are reviewed in our software development mailing list. He solicits opinions, introduces amendments based on feedback and has on ocassion even stepped back from publishing an article.

(Source: I am a Thoughtworker since 2006).

dev_0
His blogs are marketing for Thoughtworks......How things are in theory is different from the actual practices....
solarengineer
Customers are intelligent enough to know that they are going to pay for those developers who are _not_ Martin Fowler.

Martin's articles are freely available and are referenced by practitioners around the world.

oxff
It seems always to be too specific to an org. to have a general transferable knowledge to share? Kind of.
100011_100001
Some specifics sure. I'm looking more into general trends like when creating a Docker image it's a good idea to X, Y, Z and we use this tool to satisfy X.

Or Docker images have K, L problems that Podman doesn't have. However Podman has W issue so you have to decide which pain you want to live with.

That kind of stuff.

tomfern
I write a lot about CI/CD at my job (unsurprising as we are a CI service). While we do have some articles about our platform itself, most of the articles you'll find are more general:

https://semaphoreci.com/category/engineering

We also have a podcast about engineering that frequently touches CI/CD as a topic:

https://semaphoreci.com/podcast

tomfern
You'll find that most articles touch CI/CD if they are not outright about CI/CD fundamentals.
brettanomyces
https://medium.com/wise-engineering/state-of-our-ci-cd-pipel...

Disclaimer: I work for Wise

100011_100001
Out of curiosity, I see that opening a PR triggers an automatic branch build, when the code is merge into master is your build process repeated?

If not, which is what the diagram implies, how do you handle two branches with two PRs trying to get merged in, since there is a chance that they will create conflicts with each other. Do you force branch tests sequentially?

brettanomyces
We don't allow stale merges so each branch must be fully up to date with master before it can be metged.

This is a bit of a pain in busy repos

riffic
on a related note, but are there good resources for DevOps/SRE specifically in the public sector (state/county/city/federal gov)?