DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #189 - 17th August 2014
Seeing the speakers being announced for the The DevOps Enterprise Summit makes me realise just how much interest there is in the approaches, philosophy and tooling that have emerged in the last few years under the Devops banner. With the 5 year Devopsdays event in Belgium in October, I’m wondering what the next 5 years will look like.
Sponsor
Devops Weekly is sponsored by Brightbox Cloud - serious UK-based cloud infrastructure from only 1.5p per hour (£10.95/month)
Start your £20 free trial now: http://brightbox.com/devopsweekly
Sponsored event
Velocity conf is coming Save 10% with discount code DEVOPSWEEKLY
The Velocity conference is coming up on September 15th to 17th in New York and November 17th to 19th in Barcelona. Velocity has become a who’s who for thought leaders in Devops, mobile, performance and operations. Join your peers, reserve your seat before Velocity sells out.
http://oreil.ly/DEVOPSWEEKLY
News
A great blog post going over the evolution of the postmortem process for a growing startup. Some good tips to help get started collecting data and holding postmortems for your outages, however much firefighting you’re doing.
http://tech.blog.box.com/2014/08/a-tale-of-postmortems/
A post giving some useful information for anyone shifting into engineering management for the first time. Lots of nice tips and observations.
http://blog.d3in.org/post/74917727213/learnings-from-six-months-as-a-first-time-engineering
It feels like there is a growing interest in networks amongst people who have adopted infrastructure as code approaches. This post introduces a new Chef cookbook for Cumulus Linux, along with some examples.
http://engineering.ooyala.com/blog/network-management-and-automation-chef
A good post on why culture change is difficult, especially in a large enterprise, and what relation the tools have with that culture. I particular like the phrase Culture Is A Compass.
http://www.activestate.com/blog/2014/08/devops-tools-vs-culture
A paper from Amazon on the Use of Formal Methods at Amazon Web Services. Covers using formal methods, in this case with TLA+ to specify the design of the low level distributed systems that underpin AWS. Some interesting points about testing such systems in there as well.
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/tla/formal-methods-amazon.pdf
Having a single place where commands can be run against an infrastructure is handy for visibility and auditing, but access control becomes an issue. Here’s how one team solved that problem with Rundeck.
http://www.ixis.co.uk/blog/restricted-operations-using-rundeck
Ever wondered what it’s like attending a Devopsdays event? Well the folks behind Deevopsdays Minneapolis conducted a survey of attendees and gathered some great data. I’d love to see this from more events, we definitely should have done something similar in London.
http://devopsdaysmsp.org/blog/2014/08/15/survey-results/
A nice observation about the differences in API design between a local API, where many calls are fine, and something crossing a network boundary, when you probably want fewer coarse-grained calls.
http://martinfowler.com/articles/distributed-objects-microservices.html
Jobs
How much do companies pay for DevOps engineers? Find out in a Hired auction where 1,000+ companies in SF, NYC, LA, & SEA send you offers with salary & equity up front. Join today!
http://be.hired.com/devopsweekly2
Events
The DevOps Enterprise Summit is assembling enterprise success stories of DevOps, showing horses that it’s not just for unicorns. Announced speakers include organisations such as GE Energy, Macy’s, Disney, Blackboard, Ticketmaster/LiveNation, Barclays Capital, US Department of Homeland Security, Nordstrom, Capital One, Raytheon and more.
For the next week, DevOps Weekly subscribers can get a 20% discount off of registration, just use promotional code DOC20.
http://devopsenterprise.io/speakers/
Devopsdays Berlin is coming up on the 23rd and 24th of October with the usual mix of talks and open spaces. The call for proposals is open until the 1st of September so get submitting if you’re going to be in the area.
http://devopsdays.org/events/2014-berlin/propose/
Tools
Cloud Foundry is a pretty complex distributed system, and running the entire thing locally when all you want to do is develop apps to run on it isn’t ideal. Enter Cloud Focker, which combines Docker with Cloud Foundry buildpacks under a nice command line interface.
https://github.com/CloudCredo/cloudfocker