DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #121 - 28th April 2013

ChefConf was last week so lots of good conference links this week. The keynote videos are already online too at http://www.youtube.com/user/Opscode. So no excuses for missing out on some of the content.

Sponsor

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ChefConf

Entertaining configuration management and Chef issues. Why are packages good? Why should I test anything? Why not just drop in that bash script and run it? Good examples and tips on how to avoid them.
https://speakerdeck.com/sbates/doom-your-chef-in-3-easy-steps

ChefConf notes in tweet form. Epic live tweeting of lots of the ChefConf sessions, including lots of links and quotes from both days of talks.
http://scribes.tweetscriber.com/RealGeneKim/126
http://scribes.tweetscriber.com/RealGeneKim/127

Good looking talk on managing Java applications with Chef. Good summary of some of the problems, as well as how to solve them. Covers everything from Java packages to JMX, managing lots of XML, dealing with Java options and more.
https://speakerdeck.com/bryanwb/managing-java-applications-with-chef

Not sure if this was new but I saw it via some ChefConf discussions. If you plan on using Chef you need to know at least a little Ruby. This page from the Chef documentation tries to identify just enough Ruby to at least get you started.
http://docs.opscode.com/just_enough_ruby_for_chef.html

Presentation from ChefConf on managing resources and providers. It’s a nice short walk though of the different approaches to cookbook design, stepping through three generations of the same cookbook, showing the pitfalls along the way.
https://docs.google.com/a/digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk/presentation/d/1gQj_QNbzIecZQtbb4oVNMZKlPqiO1q6d08g5l8BqWOI/edit

Jobs

Want to manage large scale systems that serve millions of users? Spotify is hiring site reliability engineers in New York and Stockholm. Join the band!
https://www.spotify.com/se/jobs/view/owcSWfwg/

News

The topic of ITIL occasionally raises it’s head as devops gets more traction in larger organisations. This post summaries a few recent discussions and links to a number of posts on the subject. A good starting place if you’re asking similar questions.
http://www.infoq.com/news/2013/04/integrate-devops-itil

As we build more and more tools, how we integrate them together becomes increasingly important. Stopping to actually design the API you plan to expose is something lots of projects would benefit from, this post covers a few common pitfalls and has some tips for avoiding fragile APIs.
http://mathieu.fenniak.net/stop-designing-fragile-web-apis/

Good detailed post about the running of a single engineering team at Spotify. Takes lots of devops ideas and applies them to management in an agile environment.
http://www.infoq.com/articles/monthly-devops-03-spotify

One of the many areas using a proper package manager helps with is security. This post talks about some of the security benefits of using RPM, including identifying CVE compliance from changelogs and a discussion of signed packages.
http://developerblog.redhat.com/2013/04/25/the-security-benefits-of-rpm-packaging/

Wikipedia has swapped a patched version of MySQL 5.1 for MariaDB 5.5 and this blog post covers some of the why and how. Lots of interesting detail about performance testing and about making technology choices.
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/04/22/wikipedia-adopts-mariadb/

Presentation from Devopsdays Paris all about using the stream of events from your systems and applications to measure the health of your business. Talks briefly about growing complexity and the need for better tooling.
https://speakerdeck.com/pyr/map-and-territory-a-story-of-visibility

Razor, the bare metal provisioner tool, can be used to build Openstack with Chef, as well as Puppet. This slide deck from OpenStack Spring 2013 Summit shows you how.
http://www.slideshare.net/mattray/bare-metal-to-openstack-with-razor-and-chef

Posts defining devops are still useful, especially as so many people have yet to come across the term at all. This one talks from recent experience working with IT organisations and has some nice examples and focuses on the mutual understanding needed to move quickly.
http://www.activestate.com/blog/2013/04/elusiveness-devops

Tools

Using chat bots is becoming increasingly popular for organising or even executing deployments. This bot from Etsy is all about organising a queue of activities, the example in the README does a good job of explaining how.
https://github.com/etsy/PushBot

Chef Zero is a simple, easy-run, fast-start in-memory Chef server for testing and solo purpose. The short talk from ChefConf describes the problem and the approach taken, looks useful in a few cases including testing.
http://johnkeiser.com/presentation/chef-zero/#/
https://github.com/jkeiser/chef-zero