2 minute read

Some weeks I spot a definite topic that links many of the posts and tools together. This week’s content is all over the place; human computer interaction, enterprise adoption, complex systems, small teams starting out with automation, containers, security testing and more. I hope people enjoy the variety as much as I do.

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News

It’s only relatively recently I’ve seen anyone talking about actually designing the alerts we receive from our monitoring systems. This post is a nice introduction with a few good ideas too. The statement “Sometimes the alerts do little more than tell us that something went bump” is definitely true.
http://ryanfrantz.com/posts/alert-design/

A great response to the post I included last week about the challenges of adopting devops practices in traditional enterprises. It’s still strange to see this playing out in the Wall Street Journal.
http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2014/05/22/enterprise-devops-adoption-isnt-mandatory-but-neither-is-survival/

A nice presentation extolling the benefits of instrumentation combined with documentation when operating complex systems.
http://www.slideshare.net/BrianTroutwine1/instrumentation-as-a-living-documentation-teaching-humans-about-complex-systems

A presentation all about Google’s use of containers. So mind blowing numbers (Google starts 2 billion containers every week). Also includes reference to some new tools and upcoming features of Google Compute Engine.
https://speakerdeck.com/jbeda/containers-at-scale

A good story of moving from a small team with mainly manual deployment processes to something more automated, and the advantages that brought.
http://www.localytics.com/blog/2014/on-the-road-to-continuous-delivery-at-localytics/

An interesting insight into the state of graphite backends. A good description of what an ideal backend might look light and some initial investigations using influxdb.
http://dieter.plaetinck.be/on-graphite-whisper-and-influxdb.html

A solid definition of what microservices are; based on ownership of a simple domain, a separate data store, running in separate processes and communicating via defined interfaces.
http://www.brunton-spall.co.uk/post/2014/05/21/what-is-a-microservice-and-why-does-it-matter/

A call to arms to ensure automated deployment pipelines do not ignore the manual process of code reviews. Some good arguments.
http://infiniteundo.com/post/80206050879/do-you-do-code-review

The second devops flavoured card game in a few weeks. Release! is a game looking to raise funds on Kickstarter. It’s intended to be a light hearted take on release engineering and continuous delivery.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/627324241/release-the-game

Jobs

Codility is looking for a System Administrator who will herd daemons and ward the Evil off our systems. It is a place for you if you want to join a growing and dynamic start-up, winner of Seedcamp competition, and contribute to our very active Dev Team that practices continuous delivery. We help companies test coders and we improve programming skills worldwide. Help us grow!
https://codility.com/jobs/?gh_jid=12502&src=dow

Tools

Container agent is a tool for launching a set of containers based on a simple manifest file. Although designed for Google Compute Engine it appears like it should work anywhere. The documentation contains lots of good examples.
https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/container-agent

Radial is described as being intended to help understand, record, and put into practice the intersection between Twelve-Factor App best-practices and Docker features. It’s provides a defined language as well as examples of how to compose a set of containers.
https://github.com/radial/docs

An OWASP project, Mantra is a browser for use when auditing the security of web applications. Under the hood it’s Firefox with a large number of very useful plugins, from traffic capture to XSS scanners.
http://www.getmantra.com/index.html

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