Dependencies

Vol. 16 No. 4 – July-August 2018

Dependencies

Tracking and Controlling Microservice Dependencies:
Dependency management is a crucial part of system and software design.

Dependency cycles will be familiar to you if you have ever locked your keys inside your house or car. You can’t open the lock without the key, but you can’t get the key without opening the lock. Some cycles are obvious, but more complex dependency cycles can be challenging to find before they lead to outages. Strategies for tracking and controlling dependencies are necessary for maintaining reliable systems.

by Silvia Esparrachiari, Tanya Reilly, Ashleigh Rentz

How to Get Things Done When You Don’t Feel Like It:
Five strategies for pushing through

If you want to be successful, then it serves you better to rise to the occasion no matter what. That means learning how to push through challenges and deliver valuable results.

by Kate Matsudaira

A Chance Gardener:
Harvesting open-source products and planting the next crop

It is a very natural progression for a company to go from being a pure consumer of open source, to interacting with the project via patch submission, and then becoming a direct contributor. No one would expect a company to be a direct contributor to all the open-source projects it consumes, as most companies consume far more software than they would ever produce, which is the bounty of the open-source garden. It ought to be the goal of every company consuming open source to contribute something back, however, so that its garden continues to bear fruit, instead of rotting vegetables.

by George Neville-Neil

Using Remote Cache Service for Bazel:
Save time by sharing and reusing build and test output

Remote cache service is a new development that significantly saves time in running builds and tests. It is particularly useful for a large code base and any size of development team. Bazel is an actively developed open-source build and test system that aims to increase productivity in software development. It has a growing number of optimizations to improve the performance of daily development tasks.

by Alpha Lam

Why SRE Documents Matter:
How documentation enables SRE teams to manage new and existing services

SRE (site reliability engineering) is a job function, a mindset, and a set of engineering approaches for making web products and services run reliably. SREs operate at the intersection of software development and systems engineering to solve operational problems and engineer solutions to design, build, and run large-scale distributed systems scalably, reliably, and efficiently. A mature SRE team likely has well-defined bodies of documentation associated with many SRE functions. If you manage an SRE team or intend to start one, this article will help you understand the types of documents your team needs to write and why each type is needed, allowing you to plan for and prioritize documentation work along with other team projects.

by Shylaja Nukala, Vivek Rau

How to Live in a Post-Meltdown and -Spectre World:
Learn from the past to prepare for the next battle.

Spectre and Meltdown create a risk landscape that has more questions than answers. This article addresses how these vulnerabilities were triaged when they were announced and the practical defenses that are available. Ultimately, these vulnerabilities present a unique set of circumstances, but for the vulnerability management program at Goldman Sachs, the response was just another day at the office.

by Rich Bennett, Craig Callahan, Stacy Jones, Matt Levine, Merrill Miller, Andy Ozment