Blog - Skyworkz

Jengo: A Homebrew-distributed Golang-based Jenkins API Wrapper

by Tom Kennes on Nov 26, 2020

Since I am about to start at a new client as DevOps engineer, I have been busy digging through some of the tools they use. Unsurprisingly, one of those tools is Jenkins. In order to catch up, I found myself back zifting through articles and documentation regarding old and newer versions of Jenkins. Although reading the documentation before starting is a sometimes forgotten best practice, I also want to be able to hit the ground running from day 1.

HashiCorp Waypoint! What point?

by Tom Kennes on Nov 3, 2020

In October 2020, HashiCorp re-entered the space of DevOps and CI/CD by releasing the first version (v0.1) of Waypoint. The tool focuses heavily on developers, claiming that: "Developers just want to deploy!". In this blog post, the primary value of DevOps and CI/CD is explained as a better balancing of agile development efforts and stability-focused SRE efforts. Holding on to this train of though, there currently are a couple of caveats that either need to be addressed by organisations looking to adopt Waypoint v0.1, or require some attention from HashiCorp.

Nuances around centralized platform teams

by Sander Knape on Oct 26, 2020

The popularity of centralized platform teams is rising. The latest Puppet State of DevOps Report shows that 63% of the respondents have at least one internal platform. Platforms are vital enablers for a more DevOps way of working as they provide self-service capabilities that development teams can autonomously utilize. The definition of a “platform” isn’t set in stone though. Many organizations still struggle to put together a platform team that is really able to add value to the development teams.

Using Amazon Cognito JWT tokens to authenticate with an Amazon HTTP API

by Sander Knape on Aug 10, 2020

Last year AWS released a new iteration of their API Gateway product: HTTP APIs. This new version promises lower prices, improved performance and some new features. Some features that are available in the older REST API are not (yet) available for HTTP APIs, though. The official comparison page gives a good overview of which features are available in both products. My favorite new feature available for HTTPs APIs is JWT Authorizers.