DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #118 - 7th April 2013

A busy week. Lots of interesting posts, jobs, events and tools to read up on. The recent release of Vagrant 1.1 with the new plugin and provider model appears to have had the desired effect, I’m seeing lots of interesting middleware and a few new providers which should make Vagrant even more of an essential tool. If you’ve not upgraded it’s well worth doing so.

Sponsor

Devops Weekly is sponsored by Brightbox Cloud - launch cloud servers in multiple UK datacentres in seconds…
http://brightbox.com

News

The usages of the word devops are still evolving, and this post echoes lot of my opinions on the matter. What is devops consulting and why might it be the wrong description for various activities.
http://blog.brattyredhead.com/blog/2013/04/05/devops-consulting-why-i-don-slash-t/

So much of devops is about communication between different disciplines. This post covers the need for technical literacy in more traditional areas of a business. But much more than that it provides some concrete ways of going about building that literacy and explains why it’s a good idea for everyone.
https://medium.com/about-work/1b416524b519

Ansible, the configuration management tool, sees a 1.1 release out this last week with lots of new modules and new features. It looks like a regular 2 month release cycle should see lots of quick fire improvements.
http://blog.ansibleworks.com/2013/04/02/ansible-1-1-released/

Large organisations can benefit from devops just as much, or even more so, than startups and small companies. But lots of enterprises have existing processes, often based around ITIL. This post outlines a simple set of steps to start having the devops conversation in an ITIL context.
https://www.scriptrock.com/blog/introducing-devops-itil-rules-enterprise-2/

Video and slides from the recent Big Ruby conference, this talk covers test driven development for chef cookbooks. It’s a good starting point if you’re new to testing Chef, or want to catch up with the latest tooling.
http://confreaks.com/videos/2309-bigruby2013-testing-your-automation-ttd-for-chef-cookbooks
https://speakerdeck.com/nathenharvey/testing-your-automation

Puppetlabs have released the results from the state of devops survey. As well as the infographics the full report is 10 pages of data and analysis. Makes for an interesting read if you’re interested in how devops is seen and what benefits people are seeing.
https://puppetlabs.com/2013-state-of-devops-infographic/

A nice follow up to the monitorama conference last week, this post covers one of the focuses of the conference, what does a modern monitoring stack look like. This is part snippets from different talks, part personal experience report and part notes about types of problems faced by Openstack and where different tools might fit in. Interesting read.
http://www.sandywalsh.com/2013/04/the-monitoring-stack-state-of-art.html

Jobs

Passionate about continuous delivery, chaos monkeys and the mean time to graph? Podio is a collaborative work platform that helps you escape email overload and document chaos. We are looking for a passionate DevOps engineer to help us scale, make Podio faster and more resilient and the team happier and more productive.
https://company.podio.com/seniordevopsengineer

We’re big, we’re growing and we’re levelling up. We’re looking for a Web Infrastructure Architect to work closely with our software architect to design and build software and infrastructure that work as a single, seamless system. As we grow, you’ll help shape our infrastructure and maintain our strong devops culture. If you’re passionate about infrastructure and you’re a nice person, you can find more details at:
http://techjobs.envato.com/roles/web-infrastructure-architect.html

Events

RICON | East is the upcoming conference in New York on May 13th and 14th on all things distributed systems. It’s organised by the nice folks at Basho, who make Riak, and covers everything from academic research to hard won production experience of running all sorts of distributed systems. The organisers have even been nice enough to provide a 25% discount to devopsweekly readers, just register using the second link below.
http://ricon.io/east.html
https://ricon-east-2013.eventbrite.com/?discount=devopsweekly25

Tools

Simmetrica is a data colection and visualisation tool for time series data. It’s Python and Redis based, and provides an HTTP, command line and library based mechanism of entering data, along with and API and dashboard application for getting it back out. The documentation covers all the features nicely too.
https://github.com/import/simmetrica

Vagrant 1.1 shipped with the ability to have multiple providers, for instance for different cloud providers. Brightbox, who sponsor this newsletter, have quickly shipped a provider for their IaaS platform. A few useful tricks here for anyone else building providers - like using rsync for the shared folder support, meaning the shell, puppet and chef provisioner’s should just work.
https://github.com/NeilW/vagrant-brightbox

A very useful looking vagrant plugin for Chef users. This middleware ensures that Chef is installed at the specified version, particularly handy if using a provider and/or basebox that doesn’t have Chef installed.
https://github.com/schisamo/vagrant-omnibus