The European Union | ✉️ #37

Promotional graphic for MKDEV Dispatch #37 featuring an illustrated portrait of a man, the title "The European Union," and abstract geometric shapes in the background.

Hey! 👋

Since 1986, Spain has been part of the European Union, and many good things have happened to my country since then. We have transitioned from a country that was emerging from a dictatorship to a modern nation that, like many others, has its share of both bad and good aspects; at least the sun is always with us.

I have heard many opinions about the union over these 36 years, debating whether it was a good or bad idea. However, for us in the IT community, I have only good words. For companies like mkdev, with all their workers remote and clients in Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, and many other European Union countries, I can't imagine this situation in a non-EU environment.

We work as equals and even benefit from business transactions between two countries because we save on some taxes, such as VAT. We are able to hire contractors in any EU country, and they can pay taxes in the place where they work, so for me, it's a system that works.

There have been many issues, mostly related to politicians—those who often don't seem to think about the people they represent. But overall, the good outweighs the bad; what I gain is more than what I have to pay for.

I know there will always be voices against it, laws that will affect us negatively, but overall, I am happy. Just as I was proud to be an EU citizen when I was a teenager, I still am today.

What We've Shared

On our Youtube channel we learn to optimize our costs, both for AWS and GCP:

Keep AWS Costs down: 5 steps to start with on your infrastructure. What does your company need to do to start reducing AWS costs, by leveraging built-in tools like Cost Optimization Hub, Cost Explorer, Compute Optimizer and others.
Understand your Google Cloud Costs: Billing, Cost Management and Budgets. In this tutorial, we’ll cover everything you need to know about billing, cost management and budgets for Google Cloud. Learn how to optimize your spending and stay within your budget.
DevOps Accents #29: Is there a Cloud cost scam? Availability zones, egress fees & background jobs.

And on the website Kirill dives deep into processing background jobs in his new big article, and also our Argo CD Lightning Course starts as a series of articles.

Processing Background Jobs on AWS: Lambda vs ECS vs ECS Fargate. Discover how to leverage AWS Lambda and other serverless services for background jobs to boost efficiency and cut costs. This article dives into the nuances of processing background jobs in the cloud, comparing traditional methods with fully serverless solutions, and pros and cons of both ways.
What is Argo CD, and why would you need GitOps? Dive into the introductory lesson of our ArgoCD Lightning Course. Designed for Kubernetes and Helm users, this article outlines ArgoCD's basics, explaining its role as a declarative GitOps deployment tool. Understand the difference between imperative and declarative approaches in Kubernetes, and get a glimpse of how ArgoCD streamlines your Kubernetes operations.

What We've Discovered

pgxman - npm for PostgreSQL: PostgreSQL extensions are so many and powerful, that there seems to be a need for a proper package manager for them. Enter pgxman - the package manager for PG extensions. Not sure "npm for PostgreSQL" is a nice tagline though, if anything, "npm" can scary people away.
Dynamic Environment: Streamlining Testing and Development in Microservices. Riskfield shares their internal tool, that helps them to provision new environments in a setup of 1000+ microservies, involving Istio and Kubernetes.
Vanna AI: An Open Source tool that let's you communicate with your SQL database using any LLM.
Using LocalStack and GitHub Actions to Test Terraform AWS Deployments: Not a bad idea at all, as long as you are only using AWS services that LocalStack supports!
Terraform As A Service: Google Infrastructure Manager. It's refreshing to have a built-in way to do infrastructure as code that is not CloudFormation. Google embracing Terraform as the industry-standard IaC tool definitely feels like a good choice - though one can only wonder how it works in the light of 2023 Hashicorp license changes.

A random reminder

Are you an avid DEV.to reader? You can follow mkdev on dev.to and get our articles and videos there!

The 38th mkdev dispatch will arrive on Friday, February 16th. See you next time!