A bunch of interesting technology posts and tutorials this week along with a scattering of process and business content. In the tools section Minion (from Mozilla) and Wraith (from the BBC) are interesting new open source releases, it’s nice to see larger companies open sourcing quite substantial tools like these recently.

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News

Nice setup which can launch the required project dependencies when you cd into a directory. The example uses docker, but the secret sauce is the excellent Autoenv.
http://livingintheshell.com/docker-autoenv-super-magic-automated-development-environment.html

Good video discussion about enabling infrastructure optimisation and speeding up organisations. Focuses on the benefits of simplicity and the importance of applying that to organisations as well as IT systems.
http://redmonk.com/jgovernor/2013/08/01/do-we-need-to-radically-simplify-infrastructure-in-order-to-do-devops-goodness/

A nice discussion of the composable vs contextual argument applied to processes. Comparing Six-Sigma, ITIL, RUP, Scrum and the like as contextual vs composable patterns like version control, development environment automation and standups.
http://blog.ingineering.it/post/56439616564/are-your-it-practices-composable-or-contextual

Nice writeup of how Etsy rollout infrastructure changes with Chef to about 1000 nodes. Focuses on a continuous delivery pipeline and discusses the specific tools that make it safe for 30 or more people to make very frequent changes.
http://codeascraft.com/2013/08/02/infrastructure-upgrades-with-chef/

Where to start learning about systems administration and operations? This report card provides 32 questions you can ask to access the maturity of your organisation, along with an essay about each one.
http://www.opsreportcard.com/

An interesting interview about devops adoptions, focused on how things are changing in the largest traditional enterprises. It’s still incredibly interesting to me that the same thing is being discussed from startups to oil companies.
http://diginomica.com/2013/07/24/devops-cloud-pesky-it-business-gap/

CoreOS is describing itself as a new way to think about servers, or as Linux for the container world. Simply put it’s a very minimal locked down distro which integrates with docker and provides some useful distributed primitives. Baking raft based consensus into the OS is probably the thing that got my attention the most.
http://coreos.com/

A pretty comprehensive step-by-step walkthrough of automatically adding monitoring checks in Icinga to nodes managed by Puppet. Stored configs can be tricky so having a detailed tutorial could be handy.
http://solderintheveins.co.uk/2013/07/automated-node-monitoring-with-puppet-and-icinga/

Events

If you’re interested in learning how to use Chef and you can get to Munich on the 12th and 13th of September, this Chef Fundamentals cource might be of interest. The folks behind it are offering a 100 euro discount to Devops Weekly readers too.
http://www.eventbrite.de/event/7310169915?discount=DEVOPSWEEKLY

Tools

Automating testing of CSS is hard and little done outside syntax checking. Which makes wraith particularly interesting. It automates before and after screenshots, and creates a diff image which highlights changes. It’s intended to make testing across many devices and resolutions much faster.
https://github.com/BBC-News/wraith
http://responsivenews.co.uk/post/56884056177/wraith

Minion is a newish security testing framework. It provides the glue which ties together a number of testing tools (currently skipfish, nmap and owasp zap) to try and make things more visible across a development team.
https://github.com/mozilla/minion
https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2013/07/30/introducing-minion/