I’m writing this quickly from San Jose airport before flying back to the UK, which is why most people will be receiving this issue 8 hours or so later that usual. Lots of content from Velocity and Devopsdays Silicon Valley this week (and probably next when I get more time to find some of the excellent presentations). It’s been great catching up with lots of folks, but a big shoutout to the organisers who put on two great events.

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Velocity and Devopsdays

Definitely one of the highlights of Velocity for me, this talk aimed to cover everything you need to know to be good at operations. Ambitious, entertaining and hugely useful.
http://adamhjk.github.io/good-at-ops/#/

Probably a tie for my favourite presentation, this next deck covers what the presenter called minimal viable bureaucracy. Lots of personal stories mixed with some wider observations. Lots to learn about organisation design in here.
https://speakerdeck.com/lauraxt/minimum-viable-bureaucracy-june-2014-edition

Opsweekly is a tool from Etsy for On call alert classification and reporting. The README could do with a screenshot but it’s a very interesting idea which brings together all the data from an on-call rota into one place for both personal tracking and bigger picture planning.
https://github.com/etsy/opsweekly

Another of the talks from Velocity I found interesting, what happens to the infrastructure when a large company buys a smaller one? In this case what and how did Instagrate migrate things over to Facebook?
http://instagram-engineering.tumblr.com/post/89992572022/migrating-aws-fb

One of the Velocity ignite talks providing a quickfire argument that you really really should be caring about security in your development and operations work.
https://speakerdeck.com/barnbarn/velocity-conference-santa-clara-2014-ignite

A topic close to my heart cropped up a few times at Devopsdays Silicon Valley, that of government. This post summaries one of the open spaces and makes a few suggestions for the US federal government.
http://www.mikemcgarr.com/blog/devops-in-the-federal-government.html

The traditional Devopsdays State of the Union was presented at both Amsterdam and at Silicon Valley this week. Riffing on the recent devops survey results, composability of systems and the move to software defined everything.
http://www.slideshare.net/botchagalupe/devopsdays-state-of-the-union-amsterdam-2014

News

This is a nice post from one of the organisers of Devopsdays Brisbane, explaining to people who haven’t come across the event what it is. Doing outreach to a local community like this is a great idea. Also, they have Sidney Dekker speaking!
http://mattcallanan.blogspot.com/2014/06/what-is-devops-days-brisbane-2014.html

Anomaly detection, and other applications of machine learning to monitoring, is a hot topic at the moment. This post is a good high level introduction, focusing on some of the tools you can try out right now.
http://blog.bigpanda.io/a-practical-guide-to-anomaly-detection/

A nice reminder that devops isn’t about killing off existing positions but about specialists working together. This post brings up the spectre of devops killing off the developer as we know it, and them debunks the idea.
http://cfengine.com/company/blog-detail/devops-killing/

Lots of large companies are getting interested in Devops and this next post should be useful to anyone working in such an enterprise. It collects common objections together along with a counter argument.
http://dev2ops.org/2014/06/adopting-devops-in-enterprise-operations/

Ever considered debugging database queries by dropping down to inspecting tcp packets? This next post makes this sound no-crazy with some great examples.
https://vividcortex.com/blog/2014/06/23/discovering-query-bugs-by-tcp-inspection/

Jobs

Having won a number of key customer accounts, Bashton are recruiting at both senior and junior levels to join our team of Linux operations experts. Based in the North West of the UK, we design, build and manage infrastructure primarily on Amazon Web Services, providing ultra reliable solutions to customers in a range of sectors. We can offer the ability to work on large-scale web facing infrastructure without the internal politics of working for a large organisation.
http://www.bashton.com/jobs/

Tools

Given our daily use of version control systems they contain an awful lot of data past just the source code. This tool allows for exporting a git repository into the solr search engine for data mining.
https://github.com/arafalov/git-to-solr

I’ve mentioned OSv previous as an interesting take on the operating system, but trying it out locally had required a lot of effort. Enter capstan, which provides a very nice command line interface to launch OSv instances locally on your machine.
https://github.com/cloudius-systems/capstan

Cayley is an open source Graph database. It supports multiple storage backends, an HTTP based API as well as a REPL and a built-in query editor and visualiser.
https://github.com/google/cayley