DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #198 - 19th October 2014

I normally read the weeks links and pick out a theme, maybe something that a number of the posts or presentations discuss. This week the topics are all over the place, another example of how broad the devops banner is at this point.

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News

A great post putting all things containers in a historical context. Not just where they came from, but what’s happening to drive innovation in cgroups and namespaces, and why containers on virtual machines might be the future for most.
http://thenewstack.io/containers-whats-new-what-isnt-what-matters/

A nice run through of various ways of having nodes in a cluster share information. Compares Chef search with PuppetDB and demonstrates confd and etcd.
http://www.slideshare.net/m_richardson/node-collaboration-sharing-information-between-your-systems

A thorough example of managing Windows with Chef and DSC, and then testing with Pester (a Powershell test framework) and Test Kitchen.
http://www.hurryupandwait.io/blog/configure-and-test-windows-infrastructure-using-powershell-technologies-dsc-and-pester-running-from-chef-and-test-kitchen

A good post on the ongoing enterprise devops debate, making the point that talking about application and practices that work is a good thing, and doing so with empathy for all involved is important.
http://blog.ingineering.it/post/100180001529/we-get-the-enterprise-devops-we-deserve

If you’re running Kafka then this next post, about load testing Kafka on AWS, will definitely be essential reading. Even if you’re not the details and approach to load testing are interesting.
http://grey-boundary.com/load-testing-apache-kafka-on-aws/

Wiring well behaved unix command line tools doesn’t take lots of work, but you do need to know the basics. This presentation demonstrates catching signals, dealing with stdin and stdout and more using Ruby.
http://www.slideshare.net/bigfishdesign/well-behaved-unix

A good set of notes from this weeks Chef Community Summit in London, highlighting some of the topics discussed including config management and containers, orchestration and versioning resources.
http://www.flexiant.com/2014/10/16/flexiant-notes-from-chef-community-summit-london/

A story explaining why small incremental releases make for a safer approach to releasing web based software.
http://blog.opbeat.com/posts/staying-sane-with-small-incremental-releases/

Events

Config Management Camp is happening again next year on the 2nd and 3rd of February in Gent, just after FOSDEM. The call for proposals is open now and will close on the 1st of December.
http://cfgmgmtcamp.eu/

Tools

Boxstarter is a tool for bootstrapping a new Windows machine. It makes heavy use of Choclately packages and provides a number of very simple ways of getting started. Great documentation too.
http://boxstarter.org/

Carbonate is a set of command line tools for managing a Graphite cluster. It packages tools for listing and finding metrics, synchronizing metrics between nodes, backfilling whisper data from other files and more.
https://github.com/jssjr/carbonate

If you’re building software on GitHub and want an easy way of managing GitHub releases then look no further than this simple command line tool. The main features are around setting release metadata and uploading binary files as part of the release.
https://github.com/aktau/github-release