DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #133 - 21st July 2013

It’s interesting to see ecosystems emerge around certain tools. Both Chef and Puppet have had an active community for a while not just using the core tool but building it into other products. And lately it feels like Vagrant is now seeing the same thing. More than just plugins we’re seeing Vagrant as something to build on - two more examples in the tools section of this issue.

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News

The excellent Monitorama conference is back in Berlin in September 19th and 20th, and the speakers have just been announced. Including the Director for Engineering for Obama for America, the Heroku CTO, the creator of collectd and lots more. $200 for a ticket is a steal. See anyone lucky enough to be going along in Berlin.
http://monitorama.eu/#speakers

A good set of problems that organisations often have with rolling out agile working patterns. The post makes the argument that exactly the same issues will occur when trying to bring a devops mindset to an organisation. Forewarned is forearmed it would seem.
http://www.virtualizationpractice.com/why-agile-initiatives-fail-and-why-devops-initiatives-should-worry-22365/

A nice writeup comparing ITIL and Devops approaches via a nice analogy. The comparison table in particular could be handy if you’re starting to have this sort of conversation inside an existing ITIL aware organisation.
http://blog.devopsguys.com/2013/07/17/devops-antifragility-and-the-borg-collective/

An interesting discussion of how risk management and operations management in terms of devops can be seen to work together. Some nice observations about what devops is as well that I completely agree with.
http://www.allymiller.info/blog/risk/2013/07/281/

Nice presentation about the evolution of Chef usage at Prezi as they have grown. Some nice numbers in their, currently 50 internal contributors to the Chef repository out of 60 engineers. Also explains the Chef data model pretty clearly too.
http://prezi.com/urjjss5dn2_b/chef-at-prezi/

If you’re in a large organisation then getting managers and colleagues to buy-in to devops can be tricky. This excellent presentation from the recent Devopsdays event provides lots of examples and lots of organisation design patterns to help with the culture shift.
http://vimeo.com/album/2435220/video/69079272

If you’re using or building IaaS products you should real this post, about the dangers of innovation within silos and the need for standards over a single dominant player in the open source market.
http://ibuildthecloud.tumblr.com/post/55632704038/the-honest-dangers-of-openstack-winning

A series of 10 blog posts, taking you through the creation and automating of a local development environment through to managing remote cloud servers with Chef. Pretty comprehensive learning resource, especially if you’re mainly interested in Chef, Rails and Rackspace.
http://chrislaco.com/devops-toolbox/introduction/

Jobs

We help Change the world every day. It’s really that simple. There aren’t a lot of technology jobs out there where your work will make it possible for a 5 year old hear or change the Boy Scouts’ policy on LGBT teens.

We’re looking for systems and tools engineers to help scale and create the platform powering that change. Work on continuous deployment, developer infrastructure, and scaling a platform with over 40 Million members using Chef, Ruby on Rails, Node.js, Dropwizard, Redis, and Mysql.

If this sounds like you let’s talk.
http://www.change.org/hiring/178
http://www.change.org/hiring/21

Tools

A really interesting online tool for PHP developers and a great idea for everyone else. PuPHPet is a generator for Vagrantfiles, allowing you to tick boxes or specifiy packages or databases in the online form, download a generated Vagrantfile and get up and running with a pretty comprehensive PHP development stack quickly.
https://puphpet.com/

Vagrant is growing a really nice ecosystem of tools. Vundler is a Vagrant plugin which makes managing Vagrant plugins easier. It’s modelled on Bundler from Ruby, so you specify the list of plugin dependencies in a text file and use vundler to keep them up to date. Handy for sharing plugins across a team.
https://github.com/fgrehm/vundler
http://fabiorehm.com/blog/2013/07/15/vundler-dead-easy-plugin-management-for-vagrant/