DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #148 - 3rd November 2013

Lots of content for larger and more traditional organisations this week. From an open letter to an enterprise software vendor to talk of involving security colleagues and rearchitecting away from a monolithic application.

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News

Debugging distributed systems is hard, and requires a few new tools in your toolbox. This presentation deck from the recent Strata conference demonstrates a few approaches and some interesting looking new tools like SysSQL.
https://speakerdeck.com/philz/debugging-distributed-systems-strata-ny-2013

Good post describing a view of devops from the point of view of a large enterprise organisation. Describes some of the similarities and some of the differences from the typical startup or technology company and focuses on things that large organisations can learn.
http://www.javacodegeeks.com/2013/10/making-devops-work-outside-of-webops.html

A nice, detailed, post about how Groupon rebuilt their web application from scratch to get away from a monolithic architecture originally grown by buying companies. Lots of good tips and a host of nice diagrams explaining the approach taken.
https://engineering.groupon.com/2013/misc/i-tier-dismantling-the-monoliths/

A good call to arms for security specialists to get involved with devops. A few myths called out as well as pitching devops as a way for security practitioners to get involved in the development process earlier.
http://www.wired.com/insights/2013/10/mythbusting-devops-and-security/

I included the Knight Capital findings from the SEC last week, this post covers the same document but points out fundamental differences between it and what is required in a post-mortem focused on explaining what happened and preventing future occurences.
http://www.kitchensoap.com/2013/10/29/counterfactuals-knight-capital/

A nice post about designing your monitoring checks, focusing on context and what is important to your organisation, rather than collecting all the metrics available.
http://blog.dataloop.io/2013/10/29/what-do-i-need-to-know/

A good introduction to why companies can benefit from taking a devops approach, with 3 practices to get you started; shared environments that look like production, involving the entire team in on-call activities and automating application deployment.
http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2013/07/why-every-company-needs-a-devops-team-now.html

An interesting open letter to the SAP community about how it can make it’s popular tools more compatible with more web-native tools. Interesting to see pressure like this on traditional enterprise software vendors.
http://scn.sap.com/community/netweaver/blog/2013/10/28/an-open-letter-to-sap-regarding-devops-and-infrastructure-as-code

Jobs

Cambridge, UK, based startup Neurence is looking to fill a devops role to lead the operation of our server side architecture supporting our innovative mobile based technology. More details can be found at http://www.neurence.com/jobs or by contacting us at [email protected]

Triggit a San Francisco based start-up is looking for two operations engineers to join our small team. We really want to talk to you if you can speak C or Golang or can explain techniques to work around the Dining Philosophers problem.
http://triggit.com/careers

Tools

Curdling is a new package management tool for Python with a few interesting features. It’s designed mainly to be much faster than Pip, by using a distributed binary cache and by doing many operations in parallel.
http://clarete.github.io/curdling/

Docopt describes itself as a command-line interface description language. It provides a DSL for describing a command line tool which can then be used in Ruby, Python, Javascript, Bash and more.
http://docopt.org/

Lots of interesting improvements coming in the new Graylog2 release, including the ability to create field extractors from the UI, better metric browsing, node connection status information and more.
http://blog.torch.sh/graylog2-v0-20-0-preview-5-has-been-released/