Just a reminder that I’ll be in Portland for next weeks issue, so the newsletter will be arriving about 8 hours later that usual. Don’t panic. Also if you’re out in Portland do drop me an email to say Hi.

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News

A nice list of 8 organisation characteristics that enable a devops way of working. Nicely illustrated with examples from a real large organisation.
http://seroter.wordpress.com/2014/08/28/8-characteristics-of-our-devops-organization-2/

A good post looking at a study into alarm fatigue in a hospital and what can be learned and applied to alert fatigue in monitoring. A call to actions too for companies to publish studies analysing different alert management techniques.
http://fractio.nl/2014/08/26/cardiac-alarms-and-ops/

Most developers or operations people will be familiar with an annoying number of similar but different package management tools. This post tries to outline the fundamental problem, and highlights a few common approaches.
http://blog.ezyang.com/2014/08/the-fundamental-problem-of-programming-language-package-management/

An interesting insight into the costs of bandwidth around the world. A good overview of how the internet works at the network level too.
http://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-around-the-world

Some good points about the real benefit of microservices being in how organisations and teams work. Also a good reminder that if you’re building for the web you’re already being distributed systems whether you like it or not.
http://boundary.com/blog/2014/08/27/microservices-conways-law/

An interesting perspective on the different ways to reach a devops culture. I’m not sure I agree completely, for instance event attendees vary wildly from event to event or between geographies, but some good observations.
http://www.activestate.com/blog/2014/08/road-devops

A new infrastructure focused podcast, Software Defined Talk. Quite an industry focus, with observations about identity and access management and VMware’s cloud moves.
http://softwaredefinedtalk.com/

Jobs

We thought the process of finding a new DevOps job needed to be shaken up. So we built Hired, the first true marketplace for engineers. Join a Hired one-week auction and let 1,000+ companies compete for you.
http://be.hired.com/devopsweekly3

DataSift is seeking operations engineers with a passion and flair for deploying and scaling distributed web applications. You will work on DataSift’s growing server infrastructure, and be responsible for monitoring and optimising our platform across multiple servers, networks and databases. You will use modern operations tools, and will work closely with developers to achieve high levels of scalability.
http://jobvite.com/m?3ouPDgw5

FreshBooks, the cloud accounting solution for small businesses, is looking for experienced Ops Engineers to join their team in Toronto. You’ll keep FreshBooks available, fast and secure for our customers, and collaborate with the development team to improve our deployment, provisioning and testing infrastructure and processes. If this sounds like you and you’ve done this before, we’d love to talk to you!
http://www.freshbooks.com/jobs/job.php?jobid=o3DjZfwI&jr=dw

Events

New Directions in Operating Systems is a one day event taking place in London on the 25th of November. Currently looking for talk proposals and sponsors.
http://operatingsystems.io/

Tools

If you’re using Test Kitchen then you might find the kitchen-sync plugin useful. It provides alternative file sync strategies which should be faster than the defaults for certain setups.
https://github.com/coderanger/kitchen-sync

An interesting DNS server which connects to the AWS API and returns DNS records based on instance names or roles.
https://github.com/ConradIrwin/aws-name-server

Scumblr is an interesting tool for keeping an eye on potential exploits or discussions of your company/application elsewhere on the internet. All sorts of potential monitoring applications for this.
https://github.com/netflix/scumblr
http://techblog.netflix.com/2014/08/announcing-scumblr-and-sketchy-search.html

Dockersh is a user shell for isolated, containerized environments and is designed to be used as a login shell on machines with multiple interactive users.
http://engineeringblog.yelp.com/2014/08/hack209-dockersh.html
https://github.com/Yelp/dockersh

Helios is another docker orchestration platform designed for managing containers across a large fleet. Instructive documentation, debian packages and a vagrant setup for trying it out are all plus points.
https://github.com/spotify/helios