DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #179 - 8th June 2014

A couple of Devopsdays related posts this week made me head over to the Devopsdays site to see just how many events are happening. The map currently has 11, from Brisbane to Walsaw, via Chicago and Belgium. Ghent in October is going to be some 5 year celebration.

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News

A conversation about burnout has happened at more than one devopsdays event, and while it might not be exclusive to IT roles it certainly feels common enough that doing something and talking about it is useful. This new site is a great starting place.
http://burnout.io/

A nice writeup from the recent Devopsdays Pittsburgh event, focusing on how well the organisers and attendees did at being approachable. This is my experience of devopsdays events too, a great gathering of people wanting to learn from each other.
https://grubernaut.github.io/the-effects-of-a-devops-community/

The results of the 2014 Devops report have been published by Puppetlabs. Based on a survey of nearly 10,000 people it contains lots of good observations, especially useful if you’re convincing senior colleagues of the benefits.
http://puppetlabs.com/2014-devops-report

An interesting opinion piece about the above mentioned report, and where some of the conversation about devops might be moving to. I think we’re already seeing some of the this happening in business journals and similar publications.
http://www.standalone-sysadmin.com/blog/2014/06/sick-of-hearing-about-devops-it-hasnt-even-started/

Whether you’re working with web applications or behind the scenes services, you’ll probably be using HTTP somewhere. So it’s worth noting that the HTTP/1.1 RFC has just been replaced, by a series of clearer and less ambiguous documents. Worth reading.
https://www.mnot.net/blog/2014/06/07/rfc2616_is_dead

Ansible attempts to be very data centric, with the playbook files being described in YAML. This makes testing a little different from unit testing the Chef or Puppet DSL. This post shows one approach for testing Ansible roles using Travis.
https://servercheck.in/blog/testing-ansible-roles-travis-ci-github

A nice set of strong cipher settings for Apache, Nginx and Lighttpd. Designed to be copy and pasted by people who know what they are doing, but a good example to study if you’re just looking at SSL.
https://cipherli.st/

Detailed instructions for getting a development environment setup for infrastructure work, in this case using Chef, AWS, Vagrant, Test Kitchen and Serverspec on OSX. The comments on workflow are particularly interesting.
https://medium.com/@pereiragoncalo/setting-up-for-infrastructure-development-1ab67b721ff9

Another good writeup of a Chef development process. Some similarities to the above post. The diagram in particular makes the intention nice and clear.
http://devopslove.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/cookbook-development-process.html

A nice walkthrough of some of the advantages of using containers for managing a service based architecture. From rollbacks and canary releases to standardisation and speed. Hopefully future parts in the series will contain the technical implementation details.
http://contino.co.uk/use-docker-continuously-deliver-microservices-part-1/

Devops is most certainly not all about the tools, but our tools definitely play a part. This post breaks down the choices in a few different common areas; configuration management, deployment, monitoring, version control and build systems. It’s a nice introduction to things to consider.
http://blog.newrelic.com/2014/06/02/devops-tools/

Jobs

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http://hired.com/devopsweekly

EyeEm, the photo app and marketplace for a new generation of photographers, is hiring engineers in Berlin. With 40 employees and growing, the company is especially on the hunt for infrastructure engineers and backend developers to help the team scale and enhance the product to new heights. EyeEm has a dedicated and fun team and works with technologies like Elasticsearch, PHP, puppet and MySQL in the AWS cloud. The studio loft is located in Kreuzberg.
http://www.eyeem.com/careers

Friday is looking to hire an experienced DevOps engineer. We create complex N-tier web applications. The technologies vary from application to application including both proprietary and open-source software. As part of the DevOps team, you’ll be responsible for ensuring the delivery and ongoing operational effectiveness of our infrastructure. The candidate must be able to demonstrate past experience of building infrastructure as code.
http://www.wearefriday.com/join#!devops-engineer-permanent

Events

Devopsdays Amsterdam is fast approaching on the 19th to 21st of June. The programme has a day of workshops, lots of talks and the popular open spaces. There’s a 20% discount code waiting for Devops Weekly subscribers too: DOD_LOVES_DEVOPSWEEKLY.
http://www.devopsdays.org/events/2014-amsterdam/registration/

All your Base is that interesting thing, a database conference aimed at developers and operations folk. Being held on the 17th of October in Oxford in the UK. The speakers lineup is online and tickets are available now.
http://allyourbaseconf.com/2014/

Tools

Following on from a recent blog post about alert design, Nagios Herald is a notification application designed to help add context to monitoring alerts. The included examples should give you lots of ideas.
http://codeascraft.com/2014/06/06/introducing-nagios-herald/
https://github.com/etsy/nagios-herald

Logstash has always been very much about the plugins. This project aims to make writing those plugins much easier. Still early days but it looks to automate some of the common tasks.
https://github.com/coolacid/logstash-pluginbase