DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #143 - 29th September 2013

A little late again today as I spent the morning travelling to Denmark for GOTO. If anyone is around for the next few days in the lovely town of Aarhus do let me know.

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News

A good break down of the pros and cons of completely automating your deployment pipeline. Sometimes it makes sense to remove people completely from deployment decisions and sometimes it doesn’t.
http://mayerdan.com/programming/2013/08/04/thoughts-on-continuous-deployment

Not all packages need to be present in the distro package repositories. A well argued case for why adhering to upstream guidelines isn’t always a good idea, and why monolithic packages that vendor everything are useful.
http://blog.lusis.org/blog/2013/09/23/stop-fighting-distros-part-2/

A code heavy introduction to ansible from the recent PyCon UK conference. Short, but shows the command line, YAML and Python sides to Ansible.
http://www.insom.me.uk/post/pycon-talk.html

Talk of software defined networks in the context of developers or operations folks is something I think we’ll see a lot more of. Here’s a good discussion from the latest devops cafe podcast.
http://devopscafe.org/show/2013/9/28/devops-cafe-episode-42.html

Docker is moving towards supporting other operating systems. This post describes experimental Fedora support, and walks though a few configuration tweaks as well as a basic introduction to docker.
http://goldmann.pl/blog/2013/09/25/docker-and-fedora/

Always good to see monitoring tools being discussed at developer conferences. This talk, all about Sensu comes from the recent Drupal conference in Prague. Lots of good exampes, especially if you’re a PHP or Drupal developer.
https://prague2013.drupal.org/session/agile-monitoring-sensu

A nice list of 7 habits of developers and operations teams that help with adopting a devops approach. Common themes but very succinctly put.
http://www.infoq.com/news/2013/09/7-devops-habits

An older post, but relevant to my Monitorama talk last week. This post describes using logstash and grok filters to provide a useful tool for interpreting OSSEC logs.
http://ddpbsd.blogspot.dk/2011/10/3woo-you-got-your-ossec-in-my-logstash_26.html

Tools

Structlog is an extension to the existing python logging infrastructure to provide more structure, in this case key/value pairs to log data, something that was much discussed at Monitorama.
http://www.structlog.org/