DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #169 - 30th March 2014

Lots of tools this week compared to the past few weeks, and two events that nicely sum up the growth of the devops community. On one hand we have the international Velocity conference (the call for proposal closes tomorrow for New York) and on the other we have two smaller locally organised meetups in Leeds and Manchester in the UK. If you organise a small meetup do get in touch, especially with writeups from the events.

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News

A nice writeup of 6 things you should know about scaling that otherwise you’ll probably learn the hard way. Nice discussion of why load testing is hard and lots of problems with database.
http://martin.kleppmann.com/2014/03/26/six-things-about-scaling.html

A good argument for applying automation in the network space, followed by a great example of using Ansible to manage a Junos device.
http://www.jedelman.com/1/post/2014/03/ansible-for-networking.html

Lots of people are interested in so-called immutable infrastructure at the moment so this virtual panel discussion is timely. Three quite different opinions about the patterns and advantages of taking this approach.
http://www.infoq.com/articles/virtual-panel-immutable-infrastructure

I mentioned scale summit last week and a number of people have written up notes from the event, covering a good range of the sessions including highlights from the last year, monitoring, micro-services and hiring and mentoring.
http://tech.mattbostock.com/2014/03/23/scale-summit/
http://www.cryptocracy.com/blog/2014/03/23/scale-summit-2014
http://mudge.name/2014/03/22/a-summit-for-scaling.html
http://words.volant.is/articles/notes-scale-summit/

A post from some of my colleagues about migrating a reasonably large system to new infrastructure. Lots of good points about planning, communication, the importance of high level monitoring and improvements for next time.
https://gdstechnology.blog.gov.uk/2014/03/28/migrating-govuk-infrastructure/

Events

The Velocity New York Call for Proposals closes tomorrow, the 31st of March. The programme will include a wide range of topics across web performance, mobile, operations and culture. They are looking for short talks as well as longer tutorials. You still have time to submit if you have a good idea.
http://velocityconf.com/velocityny2014/public/cfp/314

As well as the large events like Velocity, there are lots of small local community events for people interested in devops, including these two events in Manchester and Leeds in the UK. The next Manchester event is on the 29th of April and still has tickets available. The next Leeds meetup is on the 15th of April, with only 5 tickets still available at the time of writing.
http://www.leedsdevops.org.uk/
http://www.devopsmanchester.co.uk/

Tools

Nearly everyone is a huge fan of nginx, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t things you might like to see improved. Tengine is a 100% compatible fork of Nginx which adds dynamic module loading, additional load balancing methods, syslog support and more.
http://tengine.taobao.org/

VERIS stands for Vocabulary for Event Recording and Incident Sharing and is a framework for collecting and sharing standardised security event data, even between organisations. VERIS also comes with a public database of incidents that anyone can contribute to, great for research purposes if it catches on.
http://veriscommunity.net/doku.php?id=start
https://github.com/vz-risk/VCDB

Grafana is a really impressive looking Graphite dashboard and graph editor. The editor side of things is particularly impressive, exposing lots of options to craft beautiful and useful graphs.
http://grafana.org/

PSDash is a dashboard application which can show the status of processes running across a number of machines. See the screenshots for an idea of it’s features.
https://github.com/Jahaja/psdash

If you’re using MongoDB you might find this single page web application admin tool useful. It’s easy to install, with simple instructions for running under Ruby or PHP and certainly looks very nice, including on a mobile screen.
http://genghisapp.com/