Ep 49 .tech - SRE Engineering at Form3

There are three main options available to run containers on GCP: cloud functions, cloud run and GKE (Kubernetes). Which is the right fit for your workload and what factors should you consider upon making the decision? JB Jean-Baptiste Leroy a customer engineer from GCP and expert on running containers on GCP takes us through the container landscape on GCP. JB informs us on how powerful the three technologies are and how you can mix and match them according to your needs.

Micro service architectures are exploding in popularity, but a tough problem that is often overlooked is to ensure all of the services that depend on each other still work together after a change is made. One solution is to deploy them all to a test environment and run end to end tests which results in very slow feedback cycle and keeps the testing far away from the engineer. Enter Pact, which solves this problem by enabling you to test dependencies between services as part of your local testing. Pact acts as a super charged mock server, enabling you to test your software functions consumes an API in the way the provider expects. Pact also gives you the ability to test that the provider of the pact (server in this case) is actually serving the API in the way that is it contracted. This end to end testing enables your microservices to change with confidence that everything will work together and it brings the feedback cycle very close to the engineer. In this episode Yousaf Nabi from Smart Bear talks us through how pact solves all of these problems and how you can also use it to solve other dependencies between software such as events when you have an event driven architecture.

A common requirement for a modern technology company is to have a DR strategy and to prove that their DR strategy works. Often this is executed using a manual set of tests run annually. This approach has many pitfalls, the biggest of which being that your tests become out of date the minute a change is made to the system. In this episode our host Kevin Holditch interviewed Viktor Peacock Head: SRE and Mike Tonks: Staff SRE on how Form3 have approached DR testing with their multi-cloud platform. Listen to the episode to find out from Viktor and Mike how Form3 have automated their DR tests, so they can run them nightly, to catch bad changes before they make it to production.

Tech leadership is often something that people find themselves in because they have excelled as an individual contributor, when people first make the leap it is often very hard for them to adjust to the different work patterns and how to manage a team. Sean Hawkridge from Makers, runs leadership programs that teach people how to be great tech leaders. In this episode Sean takes me through the common problems that people face when stepping into tech leadership, how people need to think about changing their mindset as they make the transition and if a good leader can be trained?

Spacelift is a platform that adds workflows on top of infrastructure as code tooling. One of its USPs is that it is agnostic to the underlying infrastructure as code tool, so it can be used with Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulomi, to name but a few. This concept becomes super powerful in that you can combine stacks written for different infrastructure as code tools into dependency workflows, for example the output of a cloud formation stack could feed into a stack written in Terraform. Jean-Marc Fontaine, head of solutions & support at Spacelift, takes us through some of the possibilities that Spacelift enables and the different angle of attack they have in terms of solving infrastructure as code pipelines.

Bert Sinnema, expert in defensive security engineering leads us through the hacking landscape today. He answers why hacking groups are starting to target smaller companies and tells us what smaller companies can do to fight back. Bert takes us behind the curtain, in the arms race between the two sides of the hacking war. In a world where the weapons used by both sides are constantly getting stronger, what can we do to stay safe?

Head of mobile from NewDay, Tris Bates, joined Kevin Holditch to give us the grand tour of the world of mobile development, there is a lot more to think about than initially meets the eye. What is the best way to develop an application for both iOS and Android? Can you use a single code base or is the only option to rewrite the whole application for both platforms? How do you test for all of the device combinations? What about users who use accessibility settings such 2x font? Tris expertly guides us through how the industry is approaching these challenges. We round up the show on how you go about keeping your application up to date. Is it possible just to push code out and live update your app or do you have to push all releases through the official app stores. Tris shares his vast industry experience on all of these topics and many more.

When using infrastructure as code tools such as terraform engineers typically run into issues such as execution times, difficulty managing environment promotion and detecting drift when their code base reaches a certain size. Terramate is a tool that is designed to work with your infrastructure as code tool such as Terraform, to work with you and solve those problems. It also comes with a cloud based observability platform that gives you a lens into what is happening across all of your infrastructure as code environments, even if you are using GitHub runners or Jenkins for execution. Soren takes us through how you can get started with terramate, what benefits it brings and how it can help you solve some of your infrastructure as code issues.

Lead platform SRE, Viktor Peacock takes us through what is SRE Engineering and why is it important to have an SRE function? Viktor then goes on to explain how you can use SLOs and error budgets to build your alerts and decide what a team should work on.

In this engaging episode of the Form3.tech Engineering Podcast, we explore the essentials of serverless computing with AWS Serverless Ambassador Bojan Zivic. Our guest sheds light on the types of workloads best suited for serverless environments and dispels common myths, especially concerning long-running tasks. The conversation also dives into the comparison between serverless and Kubernetes, discussing their respective efficiencies in cloud computing. A key focus is the security aspect of serverless computing, where our expert outlines the unique challenges and best practices. We also touch upon the practical use of serverless in Kubernetes environments, with a special emphasis on KNative applications. Additionally, the discussion references a relevant AWS article that highlights how Prime Video leverages EC2 and ECS for cost and efficiency gains. This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in understanding the basics and nuances of serverless technology in a concise, easy-to-understand format.