DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #153 - 8th December 2013
I always write this introduction after writing the rest of the newsletter and often find it interesting if themes emerge in the included links. This week it seems to be tools for continuous integration/delivery and maturing tools for infrastructure testing. Whether that says more about what I was looking into this week I’m not sure.
Sponsor
Devops Weekly is sponsored by Brightbox Cloud - launch cloud servers in multiple UK datacentres in seconds…
http://brightbox.com
News
A new Devops podcast has launched. ArrestedDevops is aimed at people new to lots of the concepts and techniques around Devops, including talking to product owners and specialists outside systems engineers and administrators. Hopefully worth keeping an eye on.
http://arresteddevops.com/
A nice writeup of using different continuous integration systems for deployment. Describes some of the differences and requirements for a good deployment setup, then shows examples with Go, Bamboo, Jenkins and TeamCity.
http://www.vishalbiyani.com/ci-continuous-delivery/
Not everyone likes maintaining build scripts. One approach to making this easier and more visible is storing build scripts alongside the code. This post covers taking that one step further, describing your build in a literate style in your README in markdown. Interesting approach.
http://developer.cloudbees.com/bin/view/DEV/LiterateBuilds
Rspec-puppet is pretty much the de facto tool for testing puppet code, so the 1.0.0 release this week should be of interest to any Puppet users. Some nice new matchers and native support for hiera data in tests.
http://bombasticmonkey.com/2013/12/05/rspec-puppet-1.0.0/
Orchestration is often discussed when talking about managing service orientated services. This post points out we might be thinking about it incorrectly, and that choreography is a better analogy for what we should be doing.
http://nic.ferrier.me.uk/blog/2013_12/what-is-service-choreography
A nice simple approach to dealing with downtime of remote repositories, in this case focusing on recent issues with the node.js NPM repo. Uses a local caching proxy built from a very simple Nginx configuration.
http://eng.yammer.com/a-private-npm-cache/
An interesting presentation about how a pretty traditional organisation, in this case an investment fund, adopted a modern release management approach. Lots of discussion about problems common to big organisations, from security concerns to scheduling to a legacy technology base.
http://www.slideshare.net/serenasoftware/dev-ops-drive-in-eaton-vance-28607358/1
A description (more than a discussion) of the pattern of installing software by downloading shell scripts and piping then to sh. Even with the potential issues, this pattern does highlight the problems people still have with portable software installation.
http://output.chrissnell.com/post/69023793377/stop-piping-curl-1-to-sh-1
Tools
Test Kitchen 1.0 has been released along with a nice new documentation website. Test Kitchen is intended for test driven development of infrastructure (mainly using Chef), currently it supports a wide range of cloud providers and allows testing using Bats, shUnit2, RSpec or Serverspec.
http://kitchen.ci/
Lots of interesting things going on in the world of operating systems at the moment it seems. Boot2Docker claims to be the simplest operating system that can run docker, based on Tiny Core Linux.
https://github.com/steeve/boot2docker
A useful looking integration between the new Capistrano release and EC2, using EC2 metadata to specify roles. Useful for a dynamic infrastructure where keeping deployment scripts up-to-date isn’t really practical.
https://github.com/forward3d/cap-ec2
A nice looking Yum package server, designed for dynamic environments. Provides a nice HTTP API which allows for the creation of new repos.
https://github.com/ImmobilienScout24/yum-repo-server