Lots of content relevant to people working in large organisations this week. From risk management theatre to how to work devops into an ITIL minded organisation. Most interestingly of all is an entire journal of devops flavoured content from PWC. The rate which devops discussions have spread from the agile infrastructure days into mainstream organisations never ceases to amaze me.

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News

Shameless plug for something I wrote this week, about some why platform as a service products need to expose an interface to the underlying network infrastructure.
https://medium.com/p/817849715f0a

/mentoring is a distributed mentoring movement that looks like a great idea for anyone looking to learn from others. Paul Nasrat, who works as a Site Reliability Engineer in New York, is looking for anyone interested in a potential mentoring relation. More details below or email [email protected] for an initial chat.
http://pauln.truemesh.com/mentoring
http://mentoring.is/

The latest PWC technology forecast journal is all about devops. 65 pages or so of interviews, articles and explanations useful for everyone but in particular your boss.
http://www.pwc.com/us/en/technology-forecast/2013/issue2/assets/techforecast-2013-issue-2.pdf

Using Spot Price instances on AWS takes careful planning or a specific kind of workload. This posts explains how to use the API and Sensu to autoscale instances using spot prices, saving a good chunk of change in the process.
http://metabroadcast.com/blog/aws-auto-scaling-your-savings

Any discussion of changing processes within an organisation is bound to touch on risk management. Unfortunately in some companies that means risk management theatre. This post explains what that looks like and what alternative approaches might look like.
http://continuousdelivery.com/2013/08/risk-management-theatre/

If you work in a large company it’s quite likely you’ve come across ITIL or other process frameworks. If so, this free ebook should hopefully be of interest, aiming to provide a bridge between devops and ITIL.
https://www.scriptrock.com/blog/itil-guide-to-devops/

Ever wondered whether openresty is faster for single requests than go? Or whether finangle or nodejs are faster for writes? How does all of that differ if you’re running on AWS? These benchmarks cover 74 web frameworks and runtimes and might be of interest if you’re comparing lots of technologies.
http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/

Events

Registration and the call for proposals for devopsdays NYC are now open, with the event taking place on the 17th and 18th of October. Instead of printing yet another batch of conference t-shirts, devopsdays NYC is donating the cost of the t-shirts to the non-profit Lotus Outreach which is providing clean drinking water to rural villages in Cambodia. No excuses not to sign up if you’re in the area.
http://devopsdays.org/events/2013-newyork/

Tools

NFT looks like an interesting tool for writing tests againts network servers. It provides tools for testing against DNS, HTTP and low level sockets, as well as tools for running tests continuously and for storing and visualising results over time.
http://code.shutterstock.com/ntf/

Rockstack is an interesting approach to packaging up modern language runtimes around a consistent command line interface. So rather than remembering differences between say running tests on Perl or Ruby or Python you can just run rock test.
http://www.rockstack.org/

Treating Infrastructure as code means taking testing configuration management code seriously. Searchef is another piece of the puzzle if you’re using Chef, it allows for stubbing out calls to the Chef search server in your test code.
https://github.com/fnichol/searchef