DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #127 - 9th June 2013

Much of the evidence we have at present for the benefits of Devops is personal or anecdotal. So it’s good to see more surveys and numbers from lots of projects about successes and failures. What I’d love to see however is real hard research - if anyone knows about any interesting ongoing research projects do let me know.

Sponsor

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

News

If you’re at all interested in designing or building distributed systems you owe it to yourself to read this post. It covers lots of real world experiences in large systems an points to reports and academic papers to continue reading.
http://aphyr.com/posts/288-the-network-is-reliable

A call to people who feel that Devops is a job title to define what it is that makes that role different, and not just another silo. As well as that useful call to action, it’s a good old rant that I happen to agree with.
http://blog.lusis.org/blog/2013/06/04/devops-the-title-match

I’m a little bit obsessed with both dashboards and with the raspberrypi computer so this post caught my eye. It shows how to setup a raspberrypi as a wireless dashboard, using the dashing framework. Lots of good examples and the low level instructions. Ripe for someone to script all of this too.
https://gocardless.com/blog/raspberry-pi-metric-dashboards/

An interesting set of survey results, looking at time spent on various activities within teams that self describe as taking a Devops approach and those that don’t. Some interesting conclusions and analysis.
http://devops.com/2013/06/04/fresh-stats-comparing-traditional-it-and-devops-oriented-productivity/

A post counter to the argument that Devops as a role is always a bad think. Personally I don’t buy the argument. The claim that “Instead, the mandate should be to focus on people and goals” is to me what management is about, not a need for a Devops team.
http://www.activestate.com/blog/2013/06/devops-job-title-so-bad

Vagrant now has a book all about it, called Vagrant: Up and Running from O’Reilly and written by the author of Vagrant, Mitchell Hashimoto. Especially if you’re helping introduce Vagrant into a new team having an official publication should make this easier.
http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920026358.do

The topics around Devops seem to be much discussed in the world of Network Engineering at the moment, this post discussing how the traditional network roles might change as more things are automated. I still think the Network arena is likely to see some really interesting technology come out in the next year or so.
http://www.plexxi.com/2013/06/the-death-of-network-engineer-long-live-network-engineers/

A nice argument for using configuration management tools to manage your application stack. The post then goes on to discuss different ways of using Chef, and is a good starting point for anyone starting to research the problem.
https://www.bluebox.net/about/blog/2013/06/responsive-infrastructure-with-opscode-chef-an-introduction/

Jobs

Sky Betting & Gaming are looking for DevOps engineers for roles in Leeds. We have lots to do and need good people to come and join us. We’ve got a very fast-moving environment and we’re trying to automate and grow to meet the pace of change. We have a mixture of sysadmins and developers in our team. Take a look and see if it’s for you:
https://bskyb.taleo.net/careersection/corporate/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=11924

Events

If you’re in London and can make the Shorditch area then a new event, Devops in the ditch, is due to kick off on Tuesday the 18th of June at Strongroom Bar and Kitchen. This event is mainly an informal meetup to find out what topics people are interested in for future talk events.
http://www.meetup.com/DevOps-in-the-ditch/

Tools

If you want to try out the latest version of CloudFoundry and are familiar with Vagrant then this project may be of interest. As well as installing all the individual components it provides several scripts to make getting started easier.
https://github.com/Altoros/cf-vagrant-installer