DevToolsDigest: Issue #97

The Week in Developer Tools

LightStep: Signal, Noise, and a Service Diagram

Service Diagram helps you easily visualize complex system architecture, identify troublesome services, and narrow the search space of possible root causes.

The Secure Developer: Website Launched

The Secure Developer brings together the greatest security experts to share their knowledge and best practices in an open and collaborative way. If you're a security enthusiast and you want to learn more about how to be a more secure developer then these webinars are for you.

Google Docs Gets an API for Task Automation

The API has been in developer preview since last April’s Google Cloud Next 2018 and is now available to all developers. It's designed to help developers build workflow automation services for their users, build content management services and create documents in bulk.

OSS-SEC: CVE-2019-5736 Runc Container Breakout

The vulnerability allows a malicious container to overwrite the host runc binary and thus gain root-level code execution on the host. The level of user interaction is being able to run any command as root within a container.

GitHub: Introducing Draft Pull Requests

With draft pull requests, you can clearly tag when you’re coding a work in progress. Now when you open a pull request, a dropdown arrow appears next to the “Create pull request” button.

Performance Monitoring with OpenTracing, OpenCensus, and OpenMetrics

If you are familiar with instrumenting applications, you may have heard of OpenMetrics, OpenTracing, and OpenCensus. These projects aim to create standards for application performance monitoring and collecting metric data. 

CloudForecast: Send AWS Cost Reports via Slack and Other Shiny New Features

CloudForecast has released four new features: Slack Integration, PagerDuty & Opsgenie Integration, Frequency, and Historical Reports. 

Vitess: Scaling MySQL Through Distributed Sharding

Vitess is a sharding and scaling solution for MySQL that can make thousands of databases appear to be a single monolithic database.

Citus: Scale-Out Clustering and Sharding for PostgreSQL

Similar to Vitess, Citus is successfully being used to solve problems of scale and performance that have previously required a lot of custom-built middleware.

Normalized Units Information for Amazon EC2 Reservations in AWS Cost Explorer

AWS Cost Explorer allows you to visualize and monitor your reservations both at a high level or for highly-specific requests. You can now access information about the normalized units associated with your reservations in AWS Cost Explorer.

Industry Research

Lee Briggs: Why Are We Templating YAML?

Having the ability to hierarchically look up the variables of specific config needs is incredibly powerful and flexible, and has generally meant you don’t actually need to do any templating of yaml at all, except perhaps for embedding Puppet facts into the yaml.

What’s Next for SemVer

SemVer has its flaws, but it empirically works better than previous attempts at such a thing. That such a thing exists is far more important than how perfect it is.

These Are Not The Containers You're Looking For

Containers have represented and will continue to represent a dramatic shift in IT. However, if you're simply focusing on understanding the container package itself, you may miss the far more meaningful changes that are part of this movement, and are coming your way.

Cloud Programming Simplified: A Berkeley View on Serverless Computing

This paper gives a quick history of cloud computing, explains the motivation for serverless computing, describes applications that stretch the current limits of serverless, and then lists obstacles and research opportunities required for serverless computing to fulfill its full potential.

What We Got Wrong: Lessons from the Birth of Microservices

Ben Sigelman talks about what Google got wrong about microservices, the lessons learned along the way and how to apply those lessons today. This presentation was recorded at QCon San Francisco 2018.

Top 10 Learnings from the Redpoint Free Trial Survey

About 600 companies submitted data. They span single digit ARR businesses to publicly traded SaaS companies. These businesses sell at every price point and sell to every operational buyer. From product to sales, from legal to marketing.

2019 Annual SaaS Trends Report

It’s no surprise to report that SaaS spending and adoption have continued to rise. 2018 data revealed two major trends: One is that app turnover is very common. The other notable trend is that IT decentralization is increasingly leading to budgeting and security issues.

Developer Venture News

CMX is Joining Forces with Bevy

Bevy is a relatively new software platform in the community industry that’s already making big waves. They provide a service helping companies run distributed event programs

Datadog Goes Full-Stack with Front-End Web Tester Madumbo Acquisition

Infrastructure and application monitoring service Datadog has acquired the AI-powered website-testing tool Madumbo in a move that Madumbo CEO Gabriel-James Safar explains as the first step in expanding Datadog’s full-stack monitoring capabilities. 

InfluxData Secures $60M in Series D Funding to Bring the Value of Time Series to the Enterprise Mainstream

InfluxData has raised $60 million in Series D funding, led by Norwest Venture Partners and joined by Sorenson Capital and existing investors Sapphire Ventures, Battery Ventures, Mayfield Fund, Trinity Ventures and Harmony Partners.

Figma Gets $40M Series C to Put Design Tools in the Cloud

With more industries and organizations recognizing design as a pillar of business, a battle is brewing among makers of design tools. And with a fresh $40 million in Series C funding, Figma is ready to fight.

From The Heavybit Archive

DevGuild: Product Marketing

Whether you’re launching a new product, feature, or enterprise suite— there’s an art and science to the way you reach, engage, and delight your users. Join 200 founders and product leaders on Thurs May 2nd for a half-day of discussions on how they bring winning products to market again and again.

To kick-off the announcement of this year's DevGuild, we're sharing our favorite past DevGuild talks: 

Conversion & Metrics Panel w/ Twilio, Box, and MongoDB

Watch MongoDB CMO Meagen Eisenberg, Twilio’s Head of Content Devang Sachdev and VP of Marketing at Box Lauren Vaccarello in conversation with Reify founder Michael Bernstein as they discuss the metrics, tooling and decisions required to convert content audiences into paying customers.

Priced to Scale: The Only Constant is Change

This panel with SaaStr, DataStax, CircleCI and Fastly, features an honest discussion on the learnings of how to get discounting to work, how to roll out additional products, how to align a sales team on the company’s goal, and much more. 

Designing for Yourself vs. Designing for Millions

The founders of PagerDuty, HashiCorp and Meteor offer their early design assumptions, show how their products have scaled over time, and debate the merits of product auteurs vs. design-by-community.