DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #185 - 20th July 2014

Some big personal news from me this week. After 3 years working for the UK government I’m leaving to work for Puppet Labs out of London from September. With regards Devops Weekly, nothing will change, the newsletter remains a fun hobby rather than part of my new job. A shoutout to all the nice Puppet Labs folks reading this newsletter, I’ll see lots of you in Portland in September.

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News

Last week saw the first Devopsdays Minneapolis and from the rest of this newsletter you’ll see it looked like a great event. This blog post from one of the organisers talks nicely about how to arrange one yourself.
http://bridgetkromhout.com/blog/2014/07/20/all-that-sparkles-is-not-magic/

A great presentation entitled “how to debug anything”. Lots of examples stepping through issues mainly using strace.
http://www.slideshare.net/jamesgolick/how-to-debug-anything

We see lots of discussion of devops from the point of view of engineers, and often from the point of view of the organisation, but this next post covers what it means for the role of product owner. I’ve played this role a few times and lots of this post matches my own experience.
https://blog.codecentric.de/en/2014/07/devops-product-ownership/

One of the presentation from Devopsdays Minneapolis, placing devops on the hype cycle. Lots of examples placed on the peak of inflated expectations through the trough of disillusionment and out the other side.
https://speakerdeck.com/kdaniels/devops-is-dead-1

Another of the presentation from Devopsdays Minneapolis on devops as a theory and on what Conway’s law means for devops.
http://www.slideshare.net/danslimmon/conways-law-the-skeleton-of-devops

A tongue-in-cheek presentation about “how to hire your first devop”. A few good points and a few jokes in there, probably not one to share if you’re just working out what this movement is about.
http://www.slideshare.net/mattstratton/dodmspignitestratton

A nice set of principles for of metric driven development, talking about Instrumentation-as-Code, Single Source of Truth, Developers Curate Visualizations and Alerts, Alert onwhat you see, show me the Graph and Don’t Measure Everything.
http://blog.librato.com/posts/2014/7/16/metrics-driven-development

The increasing hype around microservices is interesting, and I think one thing that leads to a focus on operations as some of the complexity is moved around. So this post is interesting, comparing the evolution of object orientated programming and interfaces to some of the challenges of microservices.
http://blog.osgi.org/2014/07/the-big-ball-of-mud.html

A nice insight into how Etsy does security. I think the main takeaway here is that it’s not (only) about web application attacks, side channels, lateral movement and your laptop are increasingly the a big attack vector.
https://speakerdeck.com/barnbarn/handmade-security-at-etsy

Jobs

Box is currently seeking a highly motivated, self-driven, experienced Build and Release Engineer. This position will be located in Los Altos, California. The candidate will architect and orchestrate the underlying infrastructure which powers our continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) pipeline for desktop products. This is a unique opportunity to work in a pre-IPO company with the chance to 10x innovation by solving some difficult challenges with cross platform CI and CD.
https://jobs.lever.co/box/65c77e62-b2ff-4110-810c-506fd187de0c

Tools

MaestroNG is an orchestration tool for multi-host docker environments. The examples in the README give the best idea, showing YAML files describing the entire environment.
https://github.com/signalfuse/maestro-ng

Anode is a utility for analyzing graphite metrics. It’s currently quite experimental, containing a single three sigma analyzer that takes a time series from graphite and creates new metrics alongside.
https://github.com/mattrco/anode.exp

Log File Navigator is an advanced log file viewer for the small-scale. It’s only really useful for a single host but provides some impressive command line visualisation tools as well as a powerful SQL query engine.
http://lnav.org/