I only included one tool link last week, but I’ve found five this week from handy utilities to entire applications or core infrastructure. One thing I still like about the whole devops community is a good balance between tool making and culture/organisation change - hopefully people find this newsletter gets the balance about right.

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News

Great presentation about the software and infrastructure behind a large online game. Lots of graphs, discussions of architecture trade-offs and tales of what works and what’s still hard.
http://gdcvault.com/play/1016640/Guild-Wars-2-Programming-the

Nice write up about developing a real time log stream processing pipeline for DNS data. Interesting choices around real time vs batch and lots of details.
http://labs.umbrella.com/2013/10/04/zeromq-helping-us-block-malicious-domains/

A tale of starting out with a job title with the word devops and why the author changed it. Saying devops isn’t a job title isn’t enough, this is a great reason why.
http://blog.petecheslock.com/2013/05/03/devops-in-your-job-title-is-doing-you-harm/

There are a bunch of HTTP headers which have useful security implications, especially in modern browsers. This site lists them, provides background details and lets you check how you’re doing.
https://securityheaders.com/index.php

A few people (myself included) spoke at PuppetConf about wanting private classes in Puppet. This post explains a trick which gets you some of the way there now.
http://www.unixdaemon.net/tools/puppet/protect-internal-puppet-classes.html

A good list of milestones and checklists for evolving processes based on the three ways model of devops. Good structured ways of looking at improving your organisation.
http://everythingsysadmin.com/2013/09/devops-lookfors.html

A nice tale of profiling, and using data to argue against common myths, in this case it’s always the database that’s the performance bottleneck.
http://blog.iconfinder.com/when-the-database-is-fast-enough/

Devopsdays Atlanta was only a few days ago but the videos from the talks are already up, including talks on ITIL, SadOps, devops in large enterprises and more.
http://vimeo.com/album/2555095

Tools

lmctfy is the open source version of Google’s container stack, which provides Linux application containers. The main focus appears to be a high-level user-centric API.
https://github.com/google/lmctfy

Ansible provides a powerful but simple orchestration engine. Ansible shell builds upon that to provide an interactive shell for running commands, including handy things like tab completion.
https://github.com/dominis/ansible-shell

Kochiku is an entire continuous integrate platform, designed for long running test suites and for distribution across many nodes. I’d love to see a Puppet/Chef and Vagrant setup for trying this out as it looks excellent.
http://corner.squareup.com/2013/09/kochiku.html
https://github.com/square/kochiku

The concept of feature flags or toggles is increasingly used for rolling out application features. Why not apply this to configuration management code too? Enter chef-whitelist.
https://github.com/etsy/chef-whitelist

A set of utility scripts for managing ssh configuration for EC2, aimed mainly at people who make use of more than one EC2 account.
https://github.com/astrostl/aws