DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #160 - 26th January 2014

Another pretty mixed issue this week, with new trends in infrastructure to devops in large organisations to software defined networks. If anyone has topics they think are interesting and don’t get much coverage let me know. And see everyone in Belgium next week for FOSDEM and Config Management Camp.

Sponsor

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

News

A lightning talk presentation about the current disruption happening around operating systems and hypervisors. Very briefly mentions ZeroVM, Docker and OSv and talks about the historical context.
http://sho.io/hypervise

A post on what hero culture can look like in operations teams and why it is both useful and dangerous in the long term. Introduced by a story that I’m sure is familiar to a few people.
http://www.activestate.com/blog/2014/01/devops-hero-culture

A nice response to a post I featured last week about Enterprise IT needing different things from devops. The example given, challenging existing change control processes using infrastructure as code, is a good one. We should document more of these patterns as a community.
http://goatcan.wordpress.com/2014/01/20/youre-not-a-beautiful-and-unique-snowflake/

Writing good Chef cookbooks involves lots of moving parts, and learning a few tools for unit or integration testing, linting, dependency management,etc. This post covers using a new tool called Meez to make getting started much easier.
http://theagileadmin.com/2014/01/20/clean-up-your-cookbook-mess-with-meez/

A detailed post about some of the changing patterns for infrastructure deployment, particularly looking at using entire machine images as build artefacts. It touches on some of the newly introduced complexity but more actual examples would be useful.
http://peter.gillardmoss.me.uk/blog/2013/12/20/machine-images-as-build-artefacts/

Nice short presentation going over some of the misconceptions that large organisations can have about devops.
http://www.slideshare.net/scriptrock/devops-vs-the-enterprise

Given the short history of the term devops I’m not sure I buy the need for a sort-of eulogy just yet, but if you think devops is just systems administration, or a name for a new set of tools, then you should read this post.
http://dave.cheney.net/2014/01/23/what-did-devops-mean

Events

QCon is coming back to London on the 5th to the 7th of March. The usual wide range of tracks, from scalable architectures, resilience and next generation cloud to devops and a track dedicated to people skills. Use the discount code devopsweekly for £100 off the conference price.
http://qconlondon.com/

The Call for Proposals is open for Pipeline, a conference dedicated to continuous delivery. The conference is scheduled for the 8th of April in London, with the CFP closing on the 21st of February.
http://web.pipelineconf.info/proposals/

Tools

Pyretic is combining software defined networks (SDN) with Python, building on top of Frenetic. It’s an academic project at the moment it seems to maybe of interest to anyone looking at the future of scripting languages and networks.
http://frenetic-lang.org/pyretic/

Another SDN post. Here is a Vagrant setup for experimenting with OpenDaylight. Vagrant has made experiments like this much easier than finding the relevant documentation.
http://fredhsu.wordpress.com/2013/11/04/vagrant-with-opendaylight/
https://github.com/fredhsu/odl-vagrant

Naxsi is a nice Nginx based web application firewall with a bunch of nice features. This tool lets you take the logs of XSS or other attempted attacks and stream them into ElasticSearch for easy visualisation.
https://github.com/buixor/naxsi-elastic