DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #132 - 14th July 2013

Back from a busy few days at RAMP in Budapest talking about all things scaling and just in time to catch up with everything from Devops Down Under. Conference season in full swing it seems so expect lots of presentations for the next several issues. If you’re at a great conference 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

The keynote presentation from the recent RAMP conference in Budapest, Open source and the destruction of jurisdiction make scalability possible. A great story of how and why we build scalable systems today and how that has changed in the last 10-15 years.
http://prezi.com/s4rlp0rhus14/ramp-keynote/

A presentation from last weeks Devops Down Under, entitled There is no Talent Shortage. Lots to take in about organisational learning, high performance teams and company culture.
http://www.slideshare.net/littleidea/there-is-no-talent-shortage-devopsdays-down-under-2013

Another Devops Down Under presentation, this one all about cognitive biases. A great primer on this area of phycology as it pertains to operations culture.
https://speakerdeck.com/auxesis/the-devops-field-guide-to-cognitive-biases

Nice blog post covering SSL configuration tips, including perfect forward security, content security policy and strict transport security.
https://blog.serverdensity.com/how-to-secure-your-webapp/

Another excellent chapter from the Architect of Open Source Applications book, this one on the release engineering setup for the Firefox browser. Lots of insights, and diagrams, of managing, testing and releasing source code.
http://www.aosabook.org/en/ffreleng.html

Tools like Graphite and Statsd have made collecting time series data incredibly easy. But getting useful information from individual metrics is often meaningless. This post explains why and how to take a more structured, question driven approach to using metrics.
https://vividcortex.com/blog/2013/07/10/time-series-charts-considered-meaningless/

Learning how to operate on the command line is a never ending journey of discovery. This freely downloadable 537 page ebook should have something for everyone.
http://linuxcommand.org/tlcl.php

Jobs

Abcam is looking for a Web Operations Engineer to join our growing team to help build, maintain and automate our global ecommerce web infrastructure. The ideal candidate will have commercial experience working with web infrastructure environments, puppet and powershell scripting in Windows Server. In addition to competitive salaries, we offer an attractive flexible benefits package which includes share options. Apply to join our Cambridge Web Operations team today
http://hire.jobvite.com/j/?cj=ocfCXfwK&s=Devops_newsletter

ps. table football and table tennis skills useful but not essential…

Tools

Amazon Cloud Formation is powerful but can result in some huge and unwieldy template files. Cumulus is a tool intended to make managing them easier, by introducing a layer above the raw Cloud Formation templates.
https://github.com/cotdsa/cumulus

Storm looks a nice way of managing SSH connection details. It basically gives you a nice command line interface to managing your ssh config.
http://emre.github.io/storm/