DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #114 - 10th March 2013

Fewer tools but an awful lot to read this week, including a few short books available for free online. If you skip everything else or just skim the outlines I’d definitely read the first article in full. Then read it again and think about how it applies to our domain of fast moving technology, and more importantly how we avoid the need for too much devops archaeology in the future.

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News

This first article doesn’t appear to have anything to do with devops. It’s about institutional memory, engineering archaeology, documentation and document management. It’s about a chemical engineering plant. But I bet most people can read this and see it either in their past or future when it comes to the computer system we build.
http://wrttn.in/04af1a

A Platform as a Service is generally made up of quite a few interesting moving parts. This free book (available online or to download) covers some of the dotcloud details, but much of the software discussed is open source. Some good low level resource management and file system stuff.
https://www.dotcloud.com/ebook_download_now.html

Nice write-up of continuous deployment from an individual developers perspective. I particularly liked the like “The real secret to the success of continuous deployment is that code is pushed before it’s done”.
http://rc3.org/2013/03/03/dont-get-stuck/

Anyone running real life systems will get reports of errors from users or the code itself at some point, and not all error reports are useful (to put it politely). This post covers a manifesto for error reporting, with several good tips worth considering next time you write error handling code.
http://www.drmaciver.com/2013/03/a-rewritten-manifesto-for-error-reporting/

Chef 11 has some awesome new features, but unless you’ve been following along closely you might have some work to do to resolve some breaking changes. Here’s a good walk though of a few of the gotchas that should see you on Chef 11 in no time.
http://www.ducea.com/2013/03/05/howto-migrate-to-chef-11/

Understanding the potential security risks of browser based applications can be quite a challenge, their are quite a few odd attack vectors and things people place too much trust in (third party javascript anyone?). This excellent on-line book has a wealth of information about all things browser and security. Well worth a read. I just wish I could find a good ebook version.
https://code.google.com/p/browsersec/wiki/Main

Logging is a source of lots of interesting and useful information, but getting the right setup for you can take time. Here’s five simple steps to make your application logging better.
http://www.miyagijournal.com/articles/five-steps-application-logging/

Armatures is a new community project from Puppetlabs which aims to provide a way for people to suggest proposals to enhance or add features to Puppet or something in the Puppet ecosystem. It’s just a GitHub repo and the first armature documents the process to follow to make proposals. Interesting idea.
https://github.com/puppetlabs/armatures

A few videos from the recent San Francisco Metrics meetup featuring a Sensu talk by Nick Stielau (Pantheon) and Jeremy Carroll (Pinterest) and an OpenTSDB talk by Benoit Sigoure (Arista Networks) & Jonathan Creasy (Box).
http://blog.librato.com/2013/02/january-sf-metrics-meetup-presentations.html

Jobs

Sphonic is looking for a passionate and skilled UK based, Operations Engineer. We are fast growing startup and are planning significant global growth over the next year. We are commited to delivering scalable solutions in the cloud over a SAAS model. You should be on the line between developer and sysadmin, delivering infrastructure through automation, and monitoring as the foundation of responsive infrastructure. If you’re a hybrid of sysadmin and a developer, with a depth of understanding of how the latest technology can deliver at scale, and can help shape a startup company, then go and help them build it. Simply send your CV and cover letter to apply.
http://bit.ly/15Y0lX2

State are looking for a Lead DevOps Architect to join a young but fast-moving startup in west London. Think about the goal of connecting the world’s opinions and you’ll get some idea of the scale of the ambition, and take a look at some of the people involved at https://state.com/about/people. If you’re an advocate of code-as-configuration, automation, continuous delivery, expert with AWS and Puppet or Chef and have managed rapidly scaling consumer web environments please get in touch.
http://jobs.state.com/apply/fVSxzW/Lead-DevOps-Architect.html

Events

Puppetconf is back, this time in San Francisco on August 22nd and 23rd. Early bird tickets, call for proposals and sponsorship opportunities all available now. 
http://puppetconf.com/

Tools

As vagrant becomes more and more useful and powerful you can spend too long typing in those commands. Fear not, here is a much improved set of scripts for bash completion for vagrant.
https://github.com/rjw1/vagrant-bash-completion

Slaughter is a configuration management system written in Perl, with a pretty comprehensive set of documentation. it was inspired by CFEngine, with the supplied primitives being very similar, but with the client-server model replaced by a more flexible system of transports.
http://www.steve.org.uk/Software/slaughter/guide/