The sheer variety of interesting content under the devops banner is still what keeps me putting together this email every week. Case in point, this week I found a devops themed card game. All that’s missing is a Devops Weekly card.

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News

The link title says it all. Devops against humanity. If you’re already familiar with the card game you’ll know what this is already. I can see this getting an open space slot at the next Devopsdays event.
https://github.com/bridgetkromhout/devops-against-humanity

Hopefully just in time for more people to get involved with this. ReadOps is an online book group all about technical operations. The first book to read for May is In Search of Certainty, with a the first discussion group set for the 10th of May.
http://readops.com/

The next post stresses the importance of environment portability and scalability, from development to production and everything in between. Some nice diagrams and ideas around a (Groovy) DSL for describing environment characteristics.
http://continuous-delivery-and-more.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/environment-portability.html

If you’re using Jenkins but configuring it via the web interface then Jenkins Job Builder is for you. But once you start you want to automate everything, which means writing Jenkins Job Builder plugins. This post covers how.
http://larrycaiyu.com/blog/2014/01/14/extend-jenkins-job-builder/

A nice talk introducing monitoring with metrics and Graphite, talking about what to monitor, what to ignore, the importance of percentiles, tips for scaling and lots of useful links.
http://markcrossfield.co.uk/2014-05-01-devops-manchester-monitoring-graphite-and-friends.html

Site Reliability Engineering is a good description of some technical operations roles and the following site is the unofficial blog for Google Site Reliability Engineering. It’s just getting started, with a detailed interview about what being an SRE is all about.
http://www.site-reliability-engineering.info/

A nice post with the view that while devops is of interest to both startup and large enterprises, what it looks like might well be different because the challenges are different. Obvious when you think about it but worth stating anyway.
http://blogs.technet.com/b/devops/archive/2014/04/18/the-three-musketeers-of-devops.aspx

Jobs

Squirro is hiring a Senior DevOps Engineer to join the team in Zurich or London. At Squirro we build a service that helps our clients to understand and analyze vast amounts of unstructured data. We’ve already built a great foundation using AWS, Puppet, elasticsearch, Kafka, Redis and more. Are you the champion to take our technical operations to the next level?
http://go.squirro.com/devops

FTBpro is the largest user-generated media site in world football. We are growing fast and looking for a top notch lead ruby developer to join our team. If you are passionate about code quality, testing, open-source and cutting edge technologies then your place is with us. Working here is fun and challenging - you are more than welcome to pay our offices in Tel-Aviv a visit and see for yourself ;)
http://bit.ly/1mTCMZP

Flipboard in Palo Alto, CA is looking for a site reliability engineer to help us manage, maintain and monitor all aspects of the Flipboard production environment. Our environment is a modern combination of application stacks and data stores including HBase, ElasticSearch, and MySQL all within Amazon Web Services. You’ll be challenged dealing with the growth of a highly trafficked mobile application with concurrency in the millions coupled with services that consume the world of content and social signals constantly. Remote employees welcome.
http://jobvite.com/m?3CIRngwj

Events

Devopsdays Silicon Valley is next month, on the 27th and 28th of June at the Computer Museum in Mountain View. Tickets are now on sale and a call for proposals is open until the 16th of May. All being well I’m going to be at this one too.
http://devopsdays.org/events/2014-siliconvalley/

Before then, on the 29th and 30th of May, is Devopsdays Pittsburgh at the University of Pittsburgh. The programme is already announced with some super interesting looking talks and the usual open spaces, but tickets are still abailable to attend.
http://devopsdays.org/events/2014-pittsburgh/

Tools

I’ve been starting to think about more dynamic load balancing recently and projects like Vulcand are very interesting. It combining a custom HTTP Proxy with configuration stored in Etcd, with the configuration updating automatically as the config changes.
https://github.com/mailgun/vulcand

A very simple but powerful deployment user interface based around Git and a simple YAML configuration file.
https://github.com/gengo/goship

Kamon is a nice, opinionated, distribution of tools designed to make collecting metrics from scala applications easier. It uses Graphite or New Relic as the backend and provides modules for monitoring actors, tracing application requests and logging.
http://kamon.io/