Concepts in DevOps & Cloud, page 28
Distributed Model Training: Splitting the Workload
Don't wait for one GPU to finish; use many. Distributed training splits a model's workload across multiple processors to finish faster. It's essential for massive deep learning models.
Platform Engineering: Paving the Road for Developers
Platform engineering builds a paved road for developers, offering a standardized, self-service path to ship code. It's used to reduce developer cognitive load and enforce standards. The footgun is building a platform so rigid that nobody wants to use it.
Backpressure
Backpressure is a mechanism by which a slow consumer signals an upstream producer to slow down or stop, preventing unbounded queues and resource exhaustion. It keeps systems stable under overload by propagating capacity limits backward through a pipeline.
Control Plane vs. Data Plane: The Brain and the Brawn
Think of a system as having a brain and a body. The Control Plane is the brain, making decisions and setting rules. The Data Plane is the body, executing those rules on actual data or traffic, like in a service mesh's network of proxies.
Model Drift: When Good Models Go Bad
A model is a snapshot of the world; model drift is the alarm that fires when the world changes but your snapshot has not. It detects when production data no longer statistically matches the training data, a common issue for models predicting user behavior.
Internal Developer Platform: Your Org's 'Easy Button'
An Internal Developer Platform (IDP) is your company's internal 'PaaS,' offering a self-service 'easy button' for common developer tasks. It lets teams ship faster by abstracting away infrastructure complexity.
LitmusChaos
LitmusChaos is an open-source, Kubernetes-native chaos engineering platform that runs fault experiments as custom resources. It injects failures like pod kills, network latency, and resource stress to validate that services stay resilient under real-world…
The Sidecar Pattern: Your App's Helper Container
The Sidecar pattern attaches a helper container to your main application, like a sidecar on a motorcycle. It handles peripheral tasks like logging or networking, letting you add features without changing the app's code.
Explainable AI (XAI): Why Did the Model Do That?
Explainable AI (XAI) translates a model's 'black box' decision into a human-readable reason. Use it to debug predictions, build user trust, or meet regulatory needs. The footgun: explanations are approximations of the model's logic, not absolute truth.
Hiring for SRE
Hiring for SRE seeks engineers who blend software-development skill with systems and operations depth, plus strong debugging and incident temperament. The hardest part is finding people who can both write automation and reason about failure at scale under…
Service Mesh Ingress: The Doorkeeper for Your Mesh
A Service Mesh Ingress Gateway is the dedicated entry point for external traffic into your mesh. It lets you apply advanced routing, security, and observability policies at the boundary, like TLS termination or traffic splitting.
Cloud Adoption Framework: Your Org's Cloud Migration Playbook
A Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) is an organization's pre-flight checklist for moving to the cloud. It provides a structured path for strategy, planning, and governance, ensuring alignment during a large-scale migration.
Golden Paths: The Paved Road for Developers
A golden path is the company-supported 'paved road' for building and shipping software, offering pre-configured tools. It reduces developer cognitive load and enforces standards for CI/CD and security.
Normalization of Deviance
Normalization of deviance is the gradual process by which unsafe practices become accepted as normal because they have not yet caused a visible failure. Each tolerated shortcut lowers the bar, eroding safety margins until a catastrophe finally results.
SPIFFE: Cryptographic Identity for Services
SPIFFE gives every service a cryptographic passport instead of a static secret. It's used in zero-trust networks for services to authenticate each other, like in a Kubernetes service mesh.
The 6 R's: Your Playbook for Cloud Migration
The 6 R's are a strategic menu for migrating apps to the cloud. When planning a move, you use it to decide whether to simply 'Rehost' an app, 'Refactor' it for performance, or even 'Retire' it.
Software Catalog: Your Org's Engineering Map
A software catalog is a searchable map of your software ecosystem, tracking ownership and metadata for every service, library, and pipeline. It helps growing orgs discover services and find owners.
Mutual TLS (mTLS): When Services Need to Trust Each Other
mTLS is a two-way ID check for services. Both parties exchange certificates to prove their identity before communicating. Service meshes like Istio use it to secure traffic between microservices.
AWS Well-Architected Framework: A Blueprint for Cloud Health
Think of it as a pre-flight checklist for your cloud architecture. It provides a consistent way to evaluate your systems against six pillars—like security and cost optimization—to ensure they are sound.
Team Topologies: Organizing for a Fast Flow of Value
Team Topologies is an organizational design framework for accelerating value. As teams scale or adopt new tech, complexity often slows them down. This model structures teams to maintain a fast flow of delivery and innovation.
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