DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #125 - 26th May 2013

A devops as a concept gets more widespread I’m coming across and increasing number of posts about company structure. These posts might be about looking at existing roles in a new light or talking about whole new ways of working. The devops community is certainly not short of ambition it seems.

Sponsor

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

News

Last years QCon in San Francisco had a Continuous Delivery track which I was lucky enough to spend some time in. All the videos are now up and this post puts them al in one place. The talks are excellent, as the post says they “get out into public the secret sauce of high performing organizations” including Etsy, Google and Facebook.
http://continuousdelivery.com/2013/05/videos-from-the-continuous-delivery-track-at-qcon-sf-2012/

I’ve acted as the product owner on a few projects at different times and it’s a critical, difficult and alas sometimes missing role within teams. This post is a great introduction to what being a product owner is all about and introduces it from the perspective of a devops minded organisation.
http://nic.ferrier.me.uk/blog/2013_05/the-product-owner

A video of a talk I gave at the last QCon conference in London, all about challenges to portability between different cloud environments and why doing this for complex systems is still hard.
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/cloud-government-portability

I’m not sure about the title of this post but the content is spot on. A good description of why a separate Devops team is just another silo and why that’s probably a bad idea.
http://diversity.net.nz/operations-is-dead-but-please-dont-replace-it-with-devops/2013/05/15/

A small free ebook (available in PDF, epub, mobi and on the web) all about the Riak datastore. It’s very much focused on the basics but it looks like a great place to get started with investigating Riak.
http://littleriakbook.com/

A good tale of statsd, netcat and some low level TCP debugging. If you’re making use of the statsd management port this is definitely of interest but for anyone else it’s a good tale of investigating a problem and learning about a tool in the process.
http://www.philandstuff.com/2013/05/17/statsd-netcat.html

A good walk through of using logstash to ship metrics to graphite. Goes from first principals starting with stdin and stdout and works through using grok filters and getting information from proc and eventually outputting to graphite.
http://devops.rackspace.com/using-logstash-to-push-metrics-to-graphite.html#.UaGziUBDskc

Jobs

Shazam Entertainment is looking to fill a number of Service Engineering roles in our London HQ and Palo Alto office. We’re looking for passionate individuals who enjoy building and operating highly reliable services by working closely with development to design and implement strong systems architectures, CI methodologies, and insane amounts of monitoring. We also have a number of positions in our Infrastructure Operations team for those less interested in development and more interested in network engineering, building and operating private clouds, and focusing on third party software.

For more details or to apply send on your CV/Resume or LinkedIn profile to [email protected]

Events

Cloudbau, as an official partner of Opscode, is delivering Chef Introductory Workshop in Berlin on May 29th right after devopsdays Berlin. It’s a one-day hands-on introduction to infrastructure automation with Chef. Readers of this newsletter can get a 20% discount by using the following link:
http://chef-berlin.eventbrite.de/?discount=DEVOPSWEEKLY

FlowCon is all about continuous delivery, continuous design, and lean product development. It’s being held in San Francisco on the 1st of November and along with some excellent already announced speakers the conference has a call for proposals out until 23rd June.
http://flowcon.org/flowcon-sanfran-2013/submit

Tools

A masterless puppet orchestration tool based around capistrano. Provides commands for running in noop mode, checking syntax and applying manifests to nodes in different environments.
https://github.com/pitluga/supply_drop

An interesting looking tool to visualise deployments across different hosts, environments and time slots, in this case using the Puppi tool. The about page covers what’s going on and how you can create your own dashboard.
http://puppi-deployments.meteor.com/#browser