2 minute read

Some great posts this week on teams, both structuring development and operations teams, communications and working together. It’s also only 2 weeks until the 5th anniversary Devopsdays event, hopefully see lots of you there.

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News

A great practical post on team organisation, bridging both development and operations work, as well as planned and ad-hoc tasks. Lots of good points and observations, if you’re organising or working on a team you should read this.
http://theagileadmin.com/2014/09/30/scrum-for-operations-just-add-devops/

A Gartner piece entitled Seven Steps to Start Your DevOps Initiative. Lots of good observations in here, and the key challenges picked out are interesting if you’re talking with your CIO or similar level execs.
http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?ct=140925&id=1-22AAXZR&st=sb

An interesting talk from the recent Devopsdays Chicago, entitled Rules of DevOops, all about making mistakes. Lots of observations about how teams work and communicate, and why abstractions can hurt team work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eq1v_3dQC00

A nice quick example of writing a test to confirm you’ve really fixed a bug, this test checks for a recent bash vulnerability using ServerSpec.
https://shk.io/2014/10/09/security-verifications-serverspec/

Lots of people are building microservice based systems at the moment so this post, with a number of techniques that worked and a few that didn’t, should be useful for anyone getting started.
http://techblog.realestate.com.au/a-microservices-implementation-retrospective/

A quick presentation with 4 strategies for avoiding scheduled maintenance. Good tips if you’re regularly taking evenings to deploy your services.
https://speakerdeck.com/dougbarth/living-without-scheduled-maintenance

A great looking presentation all about how to ship software faster. Lots of good examples and code samples on a/b testing, giving feedback, collecting metrics, code ownership and more.
http://zachholman.com/talk/move-fast-break-nothing/

CoreOS takes a number of different approaches to common system management tasks and, as such, how to design a product cluster compared to a traditional OS changes. This guide covers common cluster architectures for different size installs.
https://coreos.com/docs/cluster-management/setup/cluster-architectures/

A comprehensive write-up of the recent PuppetConf event, with detailed notes about the various keynotes and some of the track sessions, and links to all the videos from each day.
http://tech.opentable.co.uk/blog/2014/10/06/puppetconf-2014-part-1/
http://tech.opentable.co.uk/blog/2014/10/06/puppetconf-2014-part-2/
http://tech.opentable.co.uk/blog/2014/10/06/puppetconf-2014-part-3/

A great slide deck about the evolution of Chef within an infrastructure. Talks about growing the node count over time, as well as showing various workflow tools and monitoring integration.
http://www.slideshare.net/jonlives/chef-at-etsy

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Events

Devopsdays Berlin is coming up on the 23rd and 24th of October (just before the 5th anniversary event in Belgium) and has a pretty impressive looking line-up of talks on community, security and what devops means for the traditional sysadmin.
http://devopsdays.org/events/2014-berlin/program/

Tools

Taste tester is another workflow tool for Chef, it launches a Chef-Zero instance locally and then checks what changes would happen to a remote machine with your local changes.
https://github.com/facebook/taste-tester

A set of scripts useful for hardening a typical Linux system. Partly useful for learning about a good practices, I’d also love to see this converted into various config management code flavours.
https://github.com/marshyski/quick-secure

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