DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #166 - 9th March 2014

Lots of real world stories this week, including details of money and people and organisational structure. The devops community suddenly feels like it’s more focused on culture and sharing at the moment rather than automation, which in my view is a good thing.

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News

An impassioned call for ITSM and Devops people to get along and learn from each other. A good introduction to Devops for anyone coming to it from an ITSM or ITIL background.
http://www.theitsmreview.com/2014/03/trust-devops-movement-fits-perfectly-itsm/

An excellent piece about the practicalities and hurdles around adopting devops practices. Lots of honest points about how hard building teams and changing organisations is.
http://developerblog.redhat.com/2014/03/05/rh-devops-journey-harder/

A great security talk, focused on how to communicate between developers and security groups. Lots of recognisable situations and good approaches to making everyone happy (and the system as a whole more secure).
http://www.slideshare.net/FrankBreedijk/qcon-london-help-my-security-officer-is-allergic-to-devops

Along with cloud automation comes the ability to spend money very quickly, especially around things like automated testing jobs. This post covers a number of ways of reducing this cost based on a sizable project at Mozilla.
http://taras.glek.net/blog/2014/02/06/cost-efficient-continious-integration/

Some good points about balancing automation and collaboration, and in particular looking at the complexity of automation tools and suggesting that is likely to have a negative impact on collaboration. Some good warning signs to look out for.
https://www.scriptrock.com/blog/zero-sum-devops-automation-collaboration-killer/

A nice short talk about practical features that make Postgres such a useful database. Covers tips for schemamigration, examples of using the native json storage, getting Javascript in your SQL and more.
http://russ.garrett.co.uk/talks/postgres-gds

A good talk on complex systems and and how to make them less fragile. Discussion of postmortems, real world examples and the 49,000 core system at Weta Digital, the visual effects company.
https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa13/drifting-fragility

Mesos, the fault-tolerant cluster manage, is pretty interesting but I’ve spoken to lots of people who haven’t seen it yet and only a handful who have actually had a closer look. This short post is a great introduction.
http://iankent.co.uk/2014/02/26/a-quick-introduction-to-apache-mesos/

Jobs

Guardian News and Media are looking for a Senior Systems Integrator. Hopefully you’ve been following our NSA/GCHQ revelations and if you want to help ensure we continue to have the best platform to deliver and report such news then have a look here:
http://jobs.theguardian.com/job/4791673/senior-systems-integrator/

Events

Monitorama is having their next event from May 5th through the 7th in Portland, Oregon. As usual you can expect a ton of fantastic speakers and DevOps practitioners from all over the world. This is a single-track event you won’t want to miss. Devops Weekly readers can use the discount code DEVOPSWEEKLY for a 25% discount.
http://monitorama.com/

Next weekend, on the 15th of March, is the first Devopsdays event in Africa, in Nairobi. They are looking for speakers, sponsors and attendees. If you’re anywhere near the area you should try and make it along.
http://devopsdays.org/events/2014-nairobi/

Tools

Pleaserun describes itself as “an attempt to abstract this init script madness.” I’m guessing just from the description you can guess what it does? It currently supports launchd, upstart, systemd, runit and sysv init.
https://github.com/jordansissel/pleaserun

JMeter is a pretty powerful load and performance testing tool but configuration can have a very steep learning curve. This project provides a very nice Ruby based DSL for writing tests both for a local JMeter install or for use with the Flood.io hosted service.
http://flood-io.github.io/ruby-jmeter/