DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #151 - 24th November 2013

Nice to see some good Windows open source software this week. Opserver looks a really nice monitoring system, and not just a derivative of Nagios or similar, it even has a few ideas I’d love to see in Unixy alternative.

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News

A detailed post about what it takes to run stack overflow in terms of hardware and services. Lots of numbers about what all that means for request rates, performance and more. Interesting stuff.
http://nickcraver.com/blog/2013/11/22/what-it-takes-to-run-stack-overflow/

Good post describing how configuration management and linux container tools (like docker) can play nicely together. Raises a bunch of points I’ve seen lots of people miss when comparing apples to oranges.
http://kartar.net/2013/11/docker-and-configuration-management/

If the above post is mainly about different approaches to configuration management with docker, this next post is all details. In this case an example of running CFEngine inside a docker container.
http://cfengine.com/blog/cfengine-and-docker-ensure-application-availability-and-container-integrity

Interesting post about applying promise theory to the interaction of different teams. Stresses the advantages of small teams having relationships only with other teams that share promises.
http://blog.ingineering.it/post/67444144353/scaling-agile-projects-using-promises

One of the Velocity talks I missed last week, this one about embedding devops approaches within a large organisation, in this case the ING bank. Lots of good notes here, in particular about understanding that change takes time. Love the idea of internal devopsdays style events.
http://www.slideshare.net/KrisBuytaert/velocity2013-mh

Lots of quick fire tips for anyone using Graphite. Basically a collection of one liners for manipulating metrics, querying graphite APIs, fixing data in whisper and more.
https://speakerdeck.com/obfuscurity/stupid-graphite-tips

I’m a big Nginx fan, and also a fan of people sharing entire commented configuration files. This post covers a pretty good starting point for a typical nginx server, but more important explains what most of the options are.
http://blog.zachorr.com/nginx-setup/

Events

Mountainwest Devops is an interesting looking conference coming up next March in Salt Lake City. The interest bit it is it’s actually three conferences in one, with 2 days of Javascript, 1 days of devops flavoured content and 2 days or Ruby. The call for proposals is open until January 4th.
http://mtnwestdevops.org/

Tools

With all the interest in docker I’m finding lots of projects cropping up related to it. Shipyard is a nice looking web based interface for managing docker across multiple hosts. It has support for containers, hosts, applications and exposes a useful looking API.
http://shipyard-project.com/
https://github.com/shipyard/shipyard

Opserver is the very nice looking open source Windows monitoring system released by Stack Overflow. It already supports SQL Server, ElasticSearch, Haproxy, Redis and more and it’s nice to see good open source Windows software too.
https://github.com/opserver/Opserver

Seaborn is a tool for making attractive statistical plots, using matplotlib under the hood. It provides some nice high level functions for creating graphs, as well as making matplotlib output look lovely.
http://stanford.edu/~mwaskom/software/seaborn/index.html