DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #137 - 18th August 2013

I’m in San Francisco this coming week for PuppetConf. If anyone is around and wants to meetup let me know at @garethr on Twitter. If I’ve got the timing right next weeks issue should be written from San Francisco airport, if not it might be late Monday for the next instalment of Devops Weekly.

A quick correction from last week. The email to get in touch with Paul if you’re interested in mentoring in New York should have been [email protected].

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News

Good post about the benefits and technicalities of building a continuous delivery pipeline. Some useful diagrams about tooling, I was particularly interesting in the automation of a confidence score for canary builds.
http://techblog.netflix.com/2013/08/deploying-netflix-api.html

A nice post entitled Production is all that matters. Goes into quite a bit of detail about why logging, statistics collection and and error handling are important from a developers point of view.
http://www.naildrivin5.com/blog/2013/06/16/production-is-all-that-matters.html

Ease of deployment is a nice property of any software, and this post explains why Go makes building software without dependencies easy, and why that makes it perfect for systems administration and automation.
http://blog.lusis.org/blog/2013/08/11/go-for-system-administrators/

A tale of scaling log processing at Travis CI. Lots of thorny problems and how to solve them, focusing on the importance of ordering and database design.
http://about.travis-ci.org/blog/2013-08-08-solving-the-puzzle-of-scalable-log-processing/

A nice collection of 14 short interviews from a range of people on the topic of how devops and application security fit together.
http://trustedsoftwarealliance.com/resources-surveys-and-papers/devops-and-application-security-infographic/

I’ve seen quite a bit of interest recently about measuring community engagement. This post pulls lots of numbers from the Chef community, in particular showing the growth of the Chef community cookbooks site and mailing list and IRC chatter.
http://ranjib.com/2013/03/05/community-cookbooks-at-a-glance/

FuzzDB is an open source database of attack patterns, predictable resource names, regex patterns for identifying interesting server responses, and documentation resources from Mozilla. Useful for anyone building security tooling.
https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2013/08/16/introducing-fuzzdb/
https://code.google.com/p/fuzzdb/

Events

Devops days is coming to Atlanta on October 3rd and 4th at the Academy of Medicine at Georgia Tech. Tickets are already on sale and the programme should be announced soon.
http://devopsdays.org/events/2013-atlanta/

Tools

If you’re like me you often have several Vagrant managed boxes around for different projects. The vagrant global status plugin might therefore be useful, it tracks all your vagrant machines state, making it easier to track which boxes are currently running.
https://github.com/fgrehm/vagrant-global-status

Marelle is a new configuration management and systems administration framework written in Prolog. It’s not designed to be as large as Chef or Puppet, but the logic based programming approach is certainly interesting.
http://larsyencken.github.io/marelle/

Lots of tooling around docker at the moment. Maestro allows for describing multiple docker containers and their dependencies, and then managing them via a simple command line interface.
https://github.com/toscanini/maestro

Vegeta is a command line load testing tool written in Go. It allows you to specify a constant request rate, and can output results as text or SVG. The interface is certainly simpler than similar tools like ab or httperf.
https://github.com/tsenart/vegeta

Nginx is an incredibly useful and powerful piece of software, but I find you often want to roll your own packages to include one module or another. This omnibus installer helps with automating building those packages, and already includes lots of nginx modules including the openresty distribution.
https://github.com/bakins/omnibus-nginx