DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #194 - 21st September 2014
I’m out in San Francisco this week for PuppetConf, if anyone happens to be around do let me know. Because of all the travel this was going to be a short issue but I found too much good content.
Sponsor
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Start your £20 free trial now: http://brightbox.com/devopsweekly
Sponsored event
DevOps Master Class in San Francisco on Friday, Sept. 26th
Talks will be delivered by Instagram co-founder, Mike Krieger, in addition to ex-Spotify CTO & Wrapp co-founder, Andreas Ehn, and Heroku Product Manager, Michael Friis. Hosted by Opbeat, an integrated ops platform for developers, this DevOps meetup has limited seats, so make sure to RSVP. The talks will be followed by Opbeat’s official launch out of beta and attendees are invited to happy hour and an open bar after-party at The Alchemist. Come network with entrepreneurs, developers and fellow devops peers!
http://opbeatlaunch.eventbrite.com
News
A great post on the importance of management, in particular picking up the over-emphasis on technical skills in technical environments at the expense of understanding the importance of management.
http://fractio.nl/2014/09/19/not-a-promotion-a-career-change/
A good exposition of things you need in place to take advantage of a microservices style architecture. Lots of focus on operations here, including provisioning, monitoring, deployment and product centric teams.
http://martinfowler.com/bliki/MicroservicePrerequisites.html
A useful post on the concept of technical debt, applied to infrastructure and operations. Lots of good observations about how to spot debt and what to do about it.
http://www.slideshare.net/kka7/operational-costs-of-technical-debt
8 laws to help you build better dashboards, including solid advice to not build dashboards just because you can.
http://attackwithnumbers.com/the-laws-of-shitty-dashboard
Last week was Velocity New York, from which a view of the posts this week are taken from. Lots of the keynote videos are already up too, with talks on team organisation to monitoring and data storage to low level network optimisation.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL055Epbe6d5YDU6sikjqcd_YM9XT4OehD
A nice detailed look at the HTTP Vary header. Explains why Vary is so powerful and how to avoid common configuration problems.
http://www.fastly.com/blog/best-practices-for-using-the-vary-header/
A nice short post on application architecture, a reminder that it’s as much an organisation design problem as about software, and that different size teams might need to make different trade-offs.
http://bitmonkey.net/2014/09/16/answers-about-web-app-architecture/
Jobs
We’re looking for a seasoned DevOps / SRE engineer to manage our technical infrastructure. Built to foster collaboration and iteration, InVision helps our clients design, review and user-test a product before writing a single line of code, with tools for design prototyping, feedback, task management and version control. We’re well-funded and venture-backed by prominent investors including FirstMark Capital and Tiger Global Management.
http://invision.workable.com/jobs/15795
Cloudreach’s Systems Engineers work with challenging technical solutions for industry leading clients. We love all things cloud related and believe passionately in the innovation it can drive.We’re Europe’s only top-tier partner for both Amazon Web Services and Google - two giants of the cloud computing industry. We are looking for Windows or Linux engineers who are capable of delivering awesomeness on cloud engineering projects. Not if. When will you join the best Cloud engineering team in the industry?
https://cloudreach.recruiterbox.com/jobs/fk0fd6
Tools
Blender is a modular remote command execution framework. It provides a few basic primitives to automate cross server workflows, with those workflows expressed in a ruby DSL and executed using the provided command line tools.
https://github.com/PagerDuty/blender
Mcrouter is a tool for those running large memcached clusters. It’s a memcached protocol router designed to shard data across a cluster of memcached instances, with uses for load balancing, cache distribution and a number of other failure cases.
https://github.com/facebook/mcrouter
https://code.facebook.com/posts/296442737213493/introducing-mcrouter-a-memcached-protocol-router-for-scaling-memcached-deployments/
Vitess is a project to provide servers and tools which facilitate scaling of MySQL databases for large scale web services. Comprehensive user documentation is provided if you want to try it out.
https://github.com/youtube/vitess
Urknall is an interesting looking remote execution framework written in Go. Much of the functions make use of standard shell commands, which makes getting started very simple.
http://urknall.dynport.de/
https://github.com/dynport/urknall