DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #163 - 16th February 2014
As an example of just how far the whole devops movement has come you need to look no further than the two job posts we have this week. One is for a US based startup you may have heard of, Chef. The other is for a UK based school taking a pretty innovative approach to internal IT.
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News
Really good introduction to lots of devops practices from a Microsoft view point. Includes some examples of pretty neat IDE integration, Visual Studio Online features and integration with open source tools like Chef, Puppet and Jenkins. Even if you’re not a Microsoft shop you should have a look at this.
http://www.slideshare.net/chanezon/devops-the-microsoft-way
Everyone is still using Nagios, or so this talk claims, and we need to move to other tools in order to advance the state of monitoring. A well argued presentation with lots of good examples of why Nagios is still popular, why it shouldn’t be and what we can do about it.
http://www.slideshare.net/superdupersheep/stop-using-nagios-so-it-can-die-peacefully
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9BagdHGopg
Another follow up to a post I included a few weeks back on devops practices in traditional enterprise environments. Lots of good counter arguments here about misunderstandings and more interestingly about the difficulty of changing culture.
http://goatcan.wordpress.com/2014/02/12/what-if-everything-weve-been-doing-is-wrong/
More and more I’m seeing people really embrace the code part of infrastructure as code. To me it’s always been about adopting programming techniques. Here’s a good example, showing how to use stubs and test doubles when testing Chef cookbooks with ChefSpec
http://www.agilesysadmin.net/stubs-and-doubles-in-chefspec
Good presentation and slides introducing Flapjack, the monitoring notification router, and in particular demoing some nice integration with Puppet via some new puppet types.
http://fractio.nl/2014/02/12/data-driven-alerting-with-flapjack-puppet-hiera/
Jobs
New DevOps Role at Dr Challoner’s Grammar School, Amersham. We pride ourselves on ensuring that our students have the very best in technology to enhance their learning. Our innovative approach means that our tech environment is not that of a typical school. This new and exciting senior position within our Technology Support Team has been created to ensure that we can continue to innovate in this area and stay at the cutting edge.
http://www.challoners.com/about/vacancies
Chef is looking for a Senior Systems Administrator to join the Operations team. You’ll be responsible for planning, coordinating, managing, and troubleshooting Hosted Enterprise Chef’s multi-tenant SaaS environment. Experience with Chef is a big plus but awesomeness trumps all other requirements.
http://www.getchef.com/careers/ozniYfwW/
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/
Scale Summit, in London on the 21st of March, is an unconference all about operating at scale. Tickets are now on sale and they are on the lookout for a few more sponsors.
http://www.scalesummit.org/
Tools
Aptly is a powerful Apt repository management tool. It makes mirroring repositories, as well as keeping them up-to-date or backporting packages trivial. Lots of documentation with lots of other interesting use-cases as well.
http://www.aptly.info/
Testing applications under slow or flaky network conditions can be difficult and time consuming. Blockade aims to make that easier. A config file defines a number of docker containers and a command line tool makes introducing controlled network problems simple. Very interesting.
https://github.com/dcm-oss/blockade
If you’re like me you spend quite a lot of time interacting with Git. Well Gitsh aims to make that interaction easier, providing a dedicated shell for working with the version control system. Shorter commands, autocompletion, color based feedback and some clever defaults make this worth a look.
http://robots.thoughtbot.com/announcing-gitsh
https://github.com/thoughtbot/gitsh