DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #159 - 19th January 2014

It’s only a few weeks to go before FOSDEM, one of my favourite events of the year. Several days in Brussels, a huge range of talks on different subjects and lots of interesting folks to catch up with. If you’re in Europe you should definitely try and make it along.

Sponsor

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News

Nice article about scaling a common problem, counting actions across a system. This post talks though moving from a relational database to Redis, using OpenResty and Nging.
http://tech.ftbpro.com/post/73212710968/count-von-count-a-real-time-counting-database
https://github.com/FTBpro/count-von-count

I’m a big fan of the food fight show, the regular devops podcast. This post is from one of the hosts, encouraging everyone to get in on the community publishing act. I think it’s a pretty good sign that much of the devops content is community driven.
http://devopsanywhere.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/you-should-start-technical-podcast.html

I’m a big Test Kitchen (an integration testing framework for infrastructure code) fan but up until now it’s mainly been a tool for the Chef community. With the addition of a basic shell provisioner however it’s now possible to use Test Kitchen everywhere. Here’s a simple hello world example I got running last week.
http://www.morethanseven.net/2014/01/12/shell-provisioner-for-test-kitchen/

Cryto and TLS are often complex subjects, so it’s good to see posts like this one. Talking specifically about backwards compatibility and how long to support various ciphers for and a bunch of other tests on a wide range of sites.
https://jve.linuxwall.info/blog/index.php?post%2FTLS_Survey=

Ignoring the attempt to create a new buzzword at the end of the post this piece neatly summarises some of the challenges faced in large enterprises when adopting Devops approaches, I disagree with small parts but especially if your experience is in small environments it’s worth a read.
http://blogs.ca.com/innovation/2014/01/15/big-enterprises-need-big-devops/

A nice walkthrough of using Bento to build base boxes for vagrant. The provided templates in Bento make this incredibly easy to get started with as shown in the tutorial.
http://acairns.co.uk/2014/01/building-a-vagrant-base-box-with-bento/

Recruiters and buzzwords can be a dangerous mix, so I like the idea behind this presentation - which aims to be a quick introduction to Devops for recruitment folks. Hopefully a few people take note.
http://www.slideshare.net/devopsguys/dev-opsguys-devops-101-for-recruiters

Events

Scale12x is the 12th annual southern california Linux expo and this year the first day is taken over by Devops Day LA. The event runs from the 21st of February until the 23rd, and if you use the code DEVOP you’ll get a 50% discount on the full ticket.
https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale12x www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale12x/devops-day-la

FLOSS UK, the Free and Libre Open Source Software organisation in the UK has it’s Spring conference on the 18th until the 20th of March. Lots of good systems administration content, with this years event being held in Brighton.
http://www.flossuk.org/Events/Spring2014

Tools

FPM makes building operating system packages easy, but you then need a repository to take full advantage of them. PRM aims to make building Debian or RPM repos just as easy, and provides a simple S3 compatible sync facility.
https://github.com/dnbert/prm

Nugget is a simple HTTP and TCP integration testing tool. Provide it with a configuration file and it will constantly check the given endpoints, recording the results in Graphihte via the backstop interface.
https://github.com/joewilliams/nugget

Gollector is a nifty looking stats collection daemon which outputs it’s collected metrics as JSON. The docs demonstrate integrating this with Circonus and with a bundled command line app, but given the simple JSON format you could do anything.
https://github.com/erikh/gollector