DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #140 - 8th September 2013

The broad range of things under the Devops banner is becoming more and more apparent to me as I read everything from articles in Wired to white papers from enterprise consultancy firms to code on GitHub. The fact a genuine community still exists around things like Devops Days and small personal blogs is pretty impressive if you ask me. Thanks to everyone who makes that happen.

Sponsor

Devops Weekly is sponsored by Brightbox Cloud - launch cloud servers in multiple UK datacentres in seconds…
http://brightbox.com

News

Devops is increasingly being mentioned in notable places away from it’s humble beginnings. Here’s a good article in Wired no-less. Useful for those cases where someone suggests you’re just making all of this stuff up.
http://www.wired.com/insights/2013/06/building-a-healthy-devops-culture/

A nice overview of tools and dashboards that the team at Stack Exchange have developed. Of particular interest is that many of these are build for running and managing Windows environments.
http://blog.serverfault.com/2013/09/05/homegrown-devops-tools-at-stack-exchange/

A good argument that for Devops approaches to succeed across large organisations we need to adjust how we consider certain aspects, in light of looking at the difference between utility and value added services.
http://niek.bartholomeus.be/2013/07/09/why-we-need-a-special-flavor-of-devops-for-mature-it/

Good write-up of instrumenting a new application using StatsD and Graphite. Examples of dashboards, and how they changed over time, as well as some more specific python and django hints and tips.
http://blog.jupo.org/2013/08/29/devops-eye-for-the-coding-guy-metrics/

With all the interest around building tools on top of Docker at the moment a new repository has been created to try and list all of them in once place. If you’re interested in Docker then take a look at the Dockerforge.
https://github.com/dockerforge

A good critique of the recent Facebook paper about how they deliver software to production. It’s opinionated in a few places but does a good job of highlighting some of the main areas of interest.
http://swreflections.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/this-is-how-facebook-develops-and.html

Events

Another upcoming Devops Days events, this one in Portland on November 4th and 5th. Registration and a call for proposals are both open, with the CFP closing on October 1st.
http://devopsdays.org/events/2013-portland/

More of the community orientated PuppetCamp events coming up in Washington, Berlin, London and Munich over the next few months. You can get all the details, and submit proposals for many of them at the moment.
http://puppetlabs.com/blog/fall-puppet-camps-are-coming-and-were-looking-speakers

Tools

Sovereign is an integrated set of components for building your own self-hosted replacement for popular cloud services. So email, calendars, file storage, text hosting, vpn, irc, etc. It’s also a nice example of using Ansible which might be a good way of learning the tool.
https://github.com/al3x/sovereign

Sparkey is a simple constant key/value storage library, for read-heavy systems with infrequent large bulk inserts. It’s basically a very fast low overhead disk-backed hashtable and has been developed at Spotify for some interesting usecases.
https://github.com/spotify/sparkey

Travis has become a really useful part of the open source ecosystem, but if you have a powerful local machine anyway it can be useful to run a full matrix build locally before pushing your code. Enter wwtd, or what would travis do.
https://github.com/grosser/wwtd