DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #116 - 24th March 2013
Next weeks devopsweekly might be a little late. It might also be jam-packed with monitoring content. I’m heading over to Boston for the amazing looking Monitorama for most of next week, but for most of Sunday I’ll be on a plane. If you’re going to be in Boston too then come say Hi.
Sponsor
Devops Weekly is sponsored by Brightbox Cloud - launch cloud servers in multiple UK datacentres in seconds…
http://brightbox.com
News
The concept of building up a monitoring stack from many individual components and a pipeline isn’t new, but this is the best explanation for why this is probably the best approach to take. Explains the pros and cons in a clear way, along with good diagrams explaining the how.
http://holmwood.id.au/~lindsay/2013/03/22/monitoring-pipelines/
Recent scares around RubyGems have increased awareness of a little used feature, signed gems. Bundler, the popular ruby gem dependency manager has added a feature to make using signed gems easier, and this post explains how to use it. The state of signing on ruby gems isn’t great, but it might be something to bug people upstream about.
http://blog.meldium.com/home/2013/3/3/signed-rubygems-part
One of the talks that got lots of people talking at Devopsdays London was “Devops in the hell of a thousand different platforms”. It’s part case study about software development in a large, fragmented organisation and part hints and tips for making it better. In particular the presentation talks about the power of message queues to power interoperability and standardisation.
https://speakerdeck.com/sameaton/devops-in-the-hell-of-a-thousand-different-platforms
Open space sessions are a great place to have important conversations, and this session on Women in DevOps from Devopsdays London was definitely one of those. These notes touch on some of the points discussed, and have a few suggestions for future Devopsdays (and other) events.
https://gist.github.com/tomduckering/5185986
Two more blog posts covering Devopsdays London, featuring notes from the open spaces and general thoughts and opinions.
http://matstace.me.uk/blog/2013/03/devopsdayslondonmarch2013/
http://technicaltally.wordpress.com/2013/03/18/devopsdays-london-2013/
A detailed getting started with Chef post, taking you from first install to running a wordpress instance powered by Chef. A good starting point, or a good way of catching up if you haven’t looked at Chef for a while.
http://gettingstartedwithchef.com/
Interesting article about some of the resistance to automation ad devops in some organisations. Covers a few possible issues and talks about how it really is all about getting the culture right.
http://newtoniannuggets.com/2013/03/14/3-reasons-why-devops-isnt-changing-it-faster/
Nice write-up of getting started with Ansible, the Python based configuration management tool. A good first use experience is important and it looks like Ansible makes getting started fast and simple.
http://kafecho.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/using-ansible-for-configuration.html
Events
If you’re in London on April 9th then you might be interested in MongoDB London. The schedule is already available and includes 5 tracks of introductory and advanced talks. The London Sharded Pub Crawl is back from last year too.
http://www.10gen.com/events/mongodb-london-2013
Tools
Riak Cloud Storage is an object storage system built on top of Riak with an S3-compatible interface. If you’ve been looking for a way to run your own object store this might be something worth looking into.
http://basho.com/riak-cs-is-now-open-source/
https://github.com/basho/riak_cs
Lots of people are using Vagrant and configuration management tools now to power development environments, and Opskeleton aims to be an opinionated packaging of some of these tools (vagrant, puppet, librarian-puppet, git) into an off-the-shelf development environment.
https://github.com/narkisr/opskeleton