DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #203 - 23rd November 2014

I’m really looking forward to the New Directions in Operating Systems conference this week in London. If you’re going to be along let me know, I’d love to say Hi and talk future infrastructure stuff.

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News

A good comparison of docker and build packs as the unit of application for platform as a service. Does a good job of comparing operational properties and the user interface.
http://www.activestate.com/blog/2014/11/docker-right-abstraction-paas

A good case study of a docker production deployment. Lots of good tips on subjects like logging, hostnames, container styles and more.
http://www.shopify.com/technology/15934308-docker-at-shopify-how-we-built-containers-that-power-over-100-000-online-shops

Some interesting observations from a series of conversations with companies about devops. Discussion of hiring, monitoring, agile adoption, taking full advantage of cloud infrastructure and more.
http://contino.co.uk/devops-learnings/

An excerpt from the excellent The Practice of Cloud System Administration book, this post covers a method of organising an operations team, taking into account the competing pressures.
http://www.druva.com/blog/organizing-strategy-operational-teams/

If you’re working in operations, then getting involved with the development of new applications early can help everyone involved. This deck presents lots of good ideas for design reviews ahead of launching new applications.
http://www.slideshare.net/lnxchk/design-reviews-for-operations-velocity-europe-2014

A good step-by-step example of using a service discovery tool for a common problem, in this case using consul to manage the configuration of a web application proxy.
http://agiletesting.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/service-discovery-with-consul-and.html

A writeup of how Twitter built a search service which deals with roughly half a trillion documents and serves queries with an average latency of under 100ms.
https://blog.twitter.com/2014/building-a-complete-tweet-index

If you’re running Graphite then Stresser might be of interest. This blog post demonstrates using the tool to understand how Graphite performs under load, generating a range of metrics to analyse.
http://www.franklinangulo.com/blog/2014/5/25/graphite-series-5-stress-testing-carbon-caches

A quick recap of the last 5 years of the devops story; focusing on culture, automation, measurement and sharing.
http://www.slideshare.net/cm6051/london-devops-31-5-years-of-devops

Jobs

KAYAK Software Company is looking for goal oriented Automation and Operations Engineers who love removing bottlenecks in the SDLC and being the heros of the company. KAYAK is a tech company focusing on making travel search better. If you love coding in puppet, ruby, Java, managing Linux systems, Apache and MySQL databases and bringing smiles to the QA team, we want to talk to you.
http://www.kayak.com/careers

One iota help some of the UK’s biggest high street retailers delight their customers on the web, on their mobile devices, and in-store. We process over £5,000,000 in orders every month, with much more to come. We’re looking for a talented operations engineer to support and empower our developers to move fast without breaking things. If you’re well-versed in cloud infrastructure, preferably AWS, and have a burning desire to AUTOMATE ALL THE THINGS, we’d love to hear from you.

Our offices are in Rossendale, Lancashire (near Manchester, but nicer) and Pembroke Dock, Pembrokeshire (like Cornwall, but with fewer tourists).

bit.ly/oneiotaops

MediaMath is looking for an SRE to help build and manage our infrastructure and data centers across four continents. Our SREs are front-and-center in the effort to design, build, and keep our distributed services fast and reliable, 100% of the time. If the stability and performance of real-time, global systems sounds like an exciting challenge, join our team.
https://careers-mediamath.icims.com/jobs/1538/site-reliability-engineer—techops/job

Tools

Rancher is an attempt to bring AWS-like functions, such as EBS, VPC, ELB and Security Groups, and make them available across any servers, using docker under the hood.
http://www.rancher.io/
https://github.com/rancherio/rancher

VclFiddle is an online tool for experimenting with the Varnish Cache HTTP reverse-proxy in a sandboxed environment. The hosted version gives you a really easy way of debugging Varnish configuration.
https://github.com/vclfiddle/vclfiddle
http://www.vclfiddle.net/