Lots of everything this week; several tools, upcoming events, new jobs, blog posts and entire series of posts should keep everyone busy. If you would like to see any type of content that’s not often featured in Devops Weekly do let me know.

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News

A nice 4 part series on testing infrastructure as code. The latest post covers adding ServerSpec tests which I’ve been using recently. The example integration with TestKitchen and Guard is nice too.
https://micgo.net/serverspec-guard-and-test-kitchen-testing-servers-like-a-boss/

A nice presentation introducing the flapjack monitoring router, including lots of diagrams of how it fits into an existing monitoring stack. I’d love to see someone pick up the simple execution engine part of the stack to use with this.
https://speakerdeck.com/auxesis/finding-signal-in-the-monitoring-noise-with-flapjack

Another blog post series, this one up to 6 posts so far covering everything that’s going into LXC 1.0. A good getting started guide, plus more advanced usage.
https://www.stgraber.org/2013/12/20/lxc-1-0-blog-post-series/

An interesting post about the seemingly parallel worlds of devops events and cloud events. I’m not sure I agree completely, as someone who doesn’t self identify with being ops or dev and who was at some of the mentioned events I think the breaking down of barriers makes it hard to tell. Worth reading.
http://redmonk.com/dberkholz/2014/01/08/the-parallel-universes-of-devops-and-cloud-developers/

One area where Docker appears to be really useful is disposable test environments, for instance as part of a continuous integration build. This post shows a fairly involved example running a long-running ruby test suite, including how to configure Jenkins.
http://www.activestate.com/blog/2014/01/using-docker-run-ruby-rspec-ci-jenkins

We see lots of talk about how Devops is about increasing collaboration, but less about how that can be done or what it means for people who are asked to collaborate. This post picks out one important part of that journey, empathy, both for those you’re collaborating with and ultimately for end users of services.
http://blog.ingineering.it/post/72964480807/empathy-the-essence-of-devops

In my experience most people are using Git for source control, partly driven by the ubiquity of GitHub I’d bet. Facebook chose to use Mercurial, mainly to work around problems at the huge scale they operate at. This post explains some of the why, and also some of the improvements they made to deal with a huge repository.
https://code.facebook.com/posts/218678814984400/scaling-mercurial-at-facebook/

A nice post about one approach to setting up connectivity between data two centres, in this case using OpenVPN and Vyatta.
http://blog.tempo-db.com/post/50442490065/architectural-primitives-inter-datacenter-tunnels

Events

#ChefConf is coming up on April 15th to 17th in San Francisco. The call for proposals is currently open until the 17th of January so you have less than a week to get your talk proposals in.
https://chefconf2014.busyconf.com/proposals/new

Jobs

GoCardless, one of London’s fastest-growing startups, is looking for a web operations engineer to help design, build, and maintain their infrastructure. If you automate by default, appreciate the need for metrics, and protest the idea that developers don’t need to understand infrastructure, you’d be a great fit for GoCardless.

To apply, email [email protected] More details are available at gocardless.com/jobs.

Operative Media is looking for a DevOps Engineer/Infrastructure Developer. We are a SaaS company based in NYC, you can learn more about us at operative.com. We are looking for someone strong in Linux, Chef, AWS, MySQL, monitoring tools, as well as Java or Ruby coding skills. Open to remote candidates who can travel to NYC occasionally. Please apply at http://ch.tbe.taleo.net/CH09/ats/careers/requisition.jsp?org=OPERATIVE&cws=1&rid=155 If you don’t like long forms, please send your resume and a summary of your experience to [email protected]

Tools

Cabot is a new open source monitoring system. Written in Python it aims to provide checks of Graphite, basic HTTP statuses and Jenkins jobs, as well as sending SMS via Twilio. The docs make setting up easy too.
https://github.com/arachnys/cabot

A very nice looking cross browser testing tool. Dalek.js launches browsers, takes screenshots, runs automated tests and more. Would be interesting to integrate into a continuous integration pipeline.
http://dalekjs.com/

An interesting way of exposing a web API based on a directory of scripts. PyJoJo turns a collection of bash scripts into commands that can be called with a simple HTTP POST and which automatically return JSON, including stdout, stderr and the return code.
https://github.com/atarola/pyjojo