DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #152 - 1st December 2013

With it being Thanksgiving in the US lots of readers should hopefully be having a relaxing weekend (unless you work in online retail I guess). A nice idea I saw this week was to say what you’re thankful for in the devops community with the tag #devopsthanksgiving.

Sponsor

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

News

It’s that time of year again, the first of December marking the start of sysadvent. Expect an interesting blog post every day from a range of different authors. The first one talks about APIs for infrastructure.
http://sysadvent.blogspot.co.uk/

A great security talk from the recent Devops Days London aimed at an audience of developers and systems administrators. Lots of good examples and discussions of phishing, attack simulations
http://www.slideshare.net/beehooze/devopsday-london-ben-hughes-security

I’m seeing more posts about how docker fits in with configuration management recently and the following post is worth reading, including some of the comments. I’d like to see more code examples and working demos in this area.
http://www.krisbuytaert.be/blog/docker-vs-reality-0-1

Something I’ve been seeing more this year I think is applying statistics to common monitoring problems. Here’s a good post about the problem of outliers and why detecting shifts in probability density functions is more useful.
http://abe.is/outliers-vs-probability-density-function-shifts/

Nice presentation from the folks behind League of Legends about different approaches to infrastructure in AWS using Chef. Discusses the role of golden images, chef-solo vs chef-server and more.
http://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices/arc205-28615575

Lots of interesting videos from the recent FutureStack conference - including insights into New Relics own infrastructure deployment, monitoring, web performance, security, the importance of latency and continuous delivery.
http://futurestack.io/videos

A nice list of 7 habits for adopting devops, taken from a Forrester report. Probably a good list to start management colleagues with, especially as only one or two of the points are to do with technology.
http://www.infoq.com/news/2013/09/7-devops-habits

Tools

Prodder is a little tool I’ve been working on recently. It’s a set of opinionated tests for common web application security features, starting with tests for SSL configuration, open ports and common HTTP security headers.
https://github.com/garethr/prodder

Sky is an open source, behavioral analytics database. It is designed to make querying large volumes of clickstreams data, logs or information from sensors fast and simple. I’d love to see an example applied to system monitoring.
https://github.com/skydb/sky
http://skydb.io/