DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #139 - 1st September 2013

If you’re going to be in London in November then you should be planning for a week of devops events. Devops Days (11th and 12th), followed by Velocity (13th to 15th) and last but not least PuppetConf on the 18th. If you’re not in London you still have time to work out how to get here for November.

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News

A fantastic presentation entitled attack driven defence, about why current approaches to application security and penetration testing are not sufficient. Lots of hints, tips and practical advice for both web applications and importantly internal IT systems that could be a vector for attack.
http://www.slideshare.net/zanelackey/attackdriven-defense

A good discussion of how frameworks like ITIL fit in with devops approaches. Some interesting points about how devops is simply an implementation detail on the road to a more service based model of operations.
http://blog.ingineering.it/post/59414765140/itil-vs-devops-slugfest-or-lovefest

Interesting interview with a number of GitHubbers about how they manage and scale elasticsearch. Lots of advice and collected wisdom about operational issues if you’re running a large search cluster.
http://exploringelasticsearch.com/book/elasticsearch-at-scale-interviews/interview-with-the-github-elasticsearch-team.html

There’s quite a lot of interest at the moment in containers in general and docker in particular. This post covers some of the security concerns, mainly around what the change in model actually means if you’re used to virtual machines.
http://blog.docker.io/2013/08/containers-docker-how-secure-are-they/

A detailed writeup of a talk from Velocity London last year, all about the business transformation at Etsy. Worth reading alongside the slides.
http://itrevolution.com/one-of-the-best-devops-talks-on-it-transformation-continuously-deploying-culture-by-rembetsy-and-mcdonnell-velocity-london-2012/

A good article on the background and reasons behind the CoreOS project. A discussion of read-only file systems, where etcd fits in, automatic updates to the core operating system and more.
http://www.activestate.com/blog/2013/08/alex-polvi-explains-coreos

A description of the steps required to build a virtual appliance, useful for those times when you have a complex application to provide to end users and where the best approach is a fully working virtual machine, rather than code and configuration scripts.
http://spin.atomicobject.com/2013/06/04/virtual-appliance-repeatably/#.UiLlXpTNtcw.twitter

Events

Devops Days is back in London, November 11th and 12th just before Velocity. So if you’re based in the UK, or just visiting for the larger Velocity conference, you have no excuses not to come along. Registration and a call for talk proposals are both open.
http://devopsdays.org/events/2013-london/registration/

Tools

Blueflood is a new multi-tenant distributed metric processing system build for use in Rackspaces monitoring system. It appears to be backed by Cassandra and (optionally) Zookeeper, and currently ships with an HTTP interface.
http://blueflood.io/
https://github.com/rackerlabs/blueflood

Teleport is a new tool which aims to make dropping network connections (whether inside your datacentre or for things like ssh) less of a problem. In essence it trades errors for time for TCP connections.
http://blog.gocircuit.org/teleport-tool
https://github.com/petar/GoTeleport