I think the reason I still look forward to putting together this newsletter each week is the variety, I do hope everyone else feels the same. This week we have everything from IT Service Management and Auditing to interesting new tools or arguments that we’re doing system integration wrong.

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News

Sysdig is a pretty awesome tool for debugging pretty much anything. This post covers a few new features, including the ability to tail any log file on the system without needing to configure anything.
http://draios.com/sysdig-plus-logs/

Some important work is going on at the moment on the Devops Audit toolkit, basically examples and guidance for doing useful audits in organisations using devops practices. This presentation is a good introduction to the work and to what an audit might involve.
http://www.slideshare.net/realgenekim/keeping-the-auditor-away

A pretty good argument that integrating systems via discrete APIs is an “unsalvageable anachronism“ when it comes to the complexity of today’s distributed systems. Worth reading for anyone building large systems.
http://writings.quilt.org/2014/05/12/distributed-systems-and-the-end-of-the-api/

A good post describing a simple but powerful continuous integration setup with Jenkins, Github and Docker. Just enough detail to recreate this flow if you’re just getting started.
https://zapier.com/engineering/continuous-integration-jenkins-docker-github/

This paper, entitled Security of OS-level virtualization technologies, goes into lots of detail about various virtualization approaches (including LXC containers) and the security characteristics of each.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1407.4245

A quick slide deck introducing some of the common patterns when combining microservices and cloud infrastructure. Discussion of availability, orchestration and scheduling amongst other topics.
http://www.slideshare.net/lynxmanuk/microservices-and-the-cloud-devops-cardiff-meetup

A simple example of using Puppet to manage Maven artefacts from a Nexus repository.
http://blog.akquinet.de/2011/11/01/provisioning-maven-artifacts-with-puppet/

Mesos is super interesting, but like many distributed systems getting started locally can be tricky. This post covers using Chef and Vagrant to create a local mesos cluster.
http://edcanhack.com/2014/07/a-virtual-mesos-cluster-with-vagrant-and-chef/

An interested and detailed look at more traditional IT service management and devops. I don’t agree with a bunch of points here (I don’t think they are opposing forces) but the post makes a few good points.
http://www.itnews.com.au/Feature/390611,what-it-service-management-can-learn-from-devops.aspx/0

I love the fact modern configuration management is spreading into the Windows world. Here’s a very simple getting started guide for Puppet on Windows using the Chocolatey package manager.
http://codebetter.com/robreynolds/2014/08/07/puppet-getting-started-on-windows/

Tools

Kibana-rack embeds the Kibana ElasticSearch interface into a Rack middleware, making running it alongside existing ruby apps simpler. The example showing authentication integration with Devise shows why this might be a good idea for some.
https://github.com/tabolario/kibana-rack

An interesting curated set of Go libraries for common operations and automation tasks. Everything from DNS and consensus protocols to load testing and metrics collection.
https://github.com/mindreframer/golang-devops-stuff

This packer provisioner allows for running provisioning command on the host rather than the new machine being built. I can imagine a few uses for this, from black box testing to recording the results of packer builds.
https://github.com/shaunduncan/packer-provisioner-host-command

Diplomat is an mechanism for integrating Ruby applications with the Consul service discovery tool. The blog post nicely covers some of the advantages of this approach.
https://github.com/WeAreFarmGeek/diplomat
http://johnhamelink.com/distributed-web-systems-with-consul-haproxy-and-envoy.html