DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #164 - 23rd February 2014
A shout out to all the folks organising and attending Scale 12x this weekend in LA. I haven’t had chance to pick up any content from what sounds like a great event. so if you’re there do send me links to tools or presentations or interesting conversations.
Sponsor
Devops Weekly is sponsored by Brightbox Cloud - launch cloud servers in multiple UK datacentres in seconds…
http://brightbox.com/devopsweekly
News
The post I included about Nagios last week caused quite a good debate on the internet somewhere. Here’s a good response about why you might be best sticking with Nagios after all.
https://laur.ie/blog/2014/02/why-ill-be-letting-nagios-live-on-a-bit-longer-thank-you-very-much/
Lots of conversations around devops concern how to break down organisational silos. This post delves nicely into why they exist.
http://goatcan.wordpress.com/2014/02/19/you-build-kingdoms-because-your-mother-didnt-love-you/
LXC, the Linux Containers project, has shipped a 1.0 release, which comes with 5 years of long term support and a slew of new features. From the maintainers point of which this is now considered stable for production.
http://linuxcontainers.org/news/
Running your application inside a container is all the rage at the moment. But as this post points out, if you’re using docker you’re doing a lot more than that - you’re running a minimal OS, but without various expected services like syslog, cron, ssh, etc.
http://phusion.github.io/baseimage-docker/
An interesting attempt to build an online knowledge base for software configuration management, infrastructure orchestration and devops. The content is on GitHub so pull requested accepted.
http://scm-knowledge-base.readthedocs.org/en/latest/
A common pattern in organisations embracing devops is a move towards self-service. This post brings up a bit of history and outlines some of the advantages of a self-service operating model.
http://www.activestate.com/blog/2014/02/devops-self-service
I wrote a post last week about the buy vs build quandary when it comes to monitoring systems. This was based on conversations at the recent London Devops meetup. I’d like to see more conversations around cost and business topics as they apply to development and operations.
http://www.morethanseven.net/2014/02/16/buy-vs-build-your-monitoring-system/
Jobs
Workshare are looking for top notch Ops people to help us rule a hybrid space. You will get to design and build awesome infrastructure using Chef, Jenkins, AWS, Riak and your awesome scripting ability. You will have a natural flair for solving problems and given free reign to experiment with new technologies as you see fit.
http://www.workshare.com/company/careers/emea/senior-devops-engineer
DataSift is seeking a DevOps engineer with a passion for deploying and scaling distributed web applications. You will work on DataSift’s growing server infrastructure, and be responsible for monitoring and optimising our platform across multiple servers, networks and databases. You will use modern operations tools, and will work closely with developers to achieve high levels of scalability.
https://hire.jobvite.com/j?cj=oN4eYfwN&s=DevOpsWeekly
Events
DataSift are having an open house event at their Reading office in the UK on the 5th March, 6pm until 8pm. Meet the team, learn about future plans and listen to talks on vagrant and ansiblea as well as the DataSift platform. The event is free and there will be plenty of snacks, drinks and games.
https://march2014datasiftopenhouse.eventbrite.com
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/
Tools
Graylog2, the data analytics and log processing app has a new version out with a whole raft of new features. Powerful alerting, much simpler deployment, comprehensive API, lovely looking interface. Lots of big screenshots on the site should give you an idea.
http://graylog2.org/wow/such/0.20.0
Two of my favourite things combined into one. This Vagrant plugin makes it trivial to add serverspec tests to provisioning runs. Hugely useful if you’re sharing Vagrantfiles, you can now provide tests to check that everything works.
https://github.com/jvoorhis/vagrant-serverspec
Gulp is a streaming build system that combines a few nice features from other software components into one. Setup tasks you can run from the command line, or which run automatically when files change. The provided sample config should give you the idea.
https://github.com/gulpjs/gulp