DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #205 - 7th December 2014

Quite a bit of variety this week, from some sad news to something purely comedic. Plus lots of talk of monitoring, documentation, on-call practices and academic literature, events and more.

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News

Ezra Zygmuntowicz passed away this last week. Not everyone will know of him, but lots of you will have been influenced by his work. This is a lovely reminder of some of that work, and a call to support others in our community striving to build things.
https://medium.com/@adamhjk/remembering-ezra-zygmuntowicz-a9864a2229d3

I don’t normally feature things purely because they’re funny, but the combination of the Puppet documentation, the works of H.P. Lovecraft and a Markov generator made me laugh quite a lot this week.
http://thedoomthatcametopuppet.tumblr.com/

It’s the first week of December which means at least one thing, it’s time for SysAdvent again. A great community affair, so far we’ve had posts on Docker; Sysdig, osquery and facter; Debuggers, Kafka and more.
http://sysadvent.blogspot.co.uk/

Whatever the project, providing good quality documentation is essential. This new section of Write the docs is a great starting point for anyone wanting to improve project documentation.
http://docs.writethedocs.org/

An interesting presentation investigating using Riemann, InfluxDB and Grafana in place of Graphite for time series monitoring.
http://www.slideshare.net/nickchappell/pdx-devops-graphite-replacement

One of the problems you quickly run into if you try and run more than one process in a container is that the main init system is unlikely to work as expected. This post is a good introduction to one solution using the S6 init system.
http://blog.tutum.co/2014/12/02/docker-and-s6-my-new-favorite-process-supervisor/

Some interesting and useful data from a recent survey relating to being on-call. Details about the impact of monitoring and automation tools, average rotation times, communication during incidents and more.
http://victorops.com/knowledge-drop/reports/state-of-on-call-2014/

When talking about the latest tools is easy to forget that lots of people are just getting started. Especially if you work for a small company getting over early hurdles can be pretty painful. This next post is a nice introduction to the basics of deployment.
http://24ways.org/2014/developing-robust-deployment-procedures/

One of the things that came up a few times at the recent New Directions in Operating Systems conference was the Rump Kernel. This post does a nice job of introducing the basics and providing a few links for more information.
http://samthursfield.wordpress.com/2014/11/25/the-hypercall-api-of-the-rump-kernel-project/

Another post from the New Directions in Operating Systems conference, this time delving into one of the other recurring themes; the end of the general purpose OS. Includes some details of the DIOS research project.
http://blog.acolyer.org/2014/12/02/the-case-for-distributed-operating-systems-in-the-data-center/

And a final related bit of content from the New Directions conference, this paper, entitled Unikernels: Rise of the Virtual Library Operating System, covers what Unikernels are and why they might solve some of our problems around light-weight operating systems and large attack surfaces.
http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2566628

Jobs

RSA Insurance Plc is hiring a DevOps Engineer to help us get our new cloud infrastructure right and get our legacy environments in shape. It’s a great opportunity to bring DevOps culture and technology to a FTSE 100 financial services company, especially if you already love Django, SaltStack and AWS.
http://www.rsagroup.com/rsagroup/en/ukvacancies/all-vacancies?jobref=535

DataSift is a streaming and real-time data processing platform, dealing with over 1 Billion tweets, posts and news articles a day. We’re looking for Operations Engineers with a passion for using automation, monitoring and modern operations tools to solve big data problems. Our key principles are good automation and monitoring, and we use Chef, Graphite and Riemann at scale to help us with this. We offer competitive salaries, great benefits and awesome perks!
https://hire.jobvite.com/j?cj=oN4eYfwN&s=DevOpsWeekly

Events

Monitorama has announced their next event taking place June 15-17 2015 in Portland, OR. As usual you can expect a ton of fantastic talks about monitoring, alerting and related DevOps topics. This is a single-track event that you won’t want to miss. Devops Weekly readers can use the code ‘DEVOPSWEEKLY’ through December 31, 2014 for a $50 discount off general admission.
https://ti.to/monitorama/pdx2015?discount_code=DEVOPSWEEKLY

Scale Summit is a one-day unconference event in London on Friday 27th March 2015, bringing together professionals from the operations and software development communities who have a particular interest in scalable, high performance systems.
http://www.scalesummit.org/signup/

Tools

Conn Check is a new tool for verifying software deployments, things like can a service talk to a database or another service, or is authentication setup correctly. It can also auto-generate tests for some types of applications.
http://1stvamp.org/verifying-post-deploy-connections-with-conn-check

Dockerana is a packaged version of Graphite and Grafana, specifically targeted at metrics from Docker.
http://dockerana.com/

Seagull is another monitoring tool aimed at Docker environments. It provides a dashboard containing information about the images and containers, and allows simple actions like deleting an image or stopping a container.
https://github.com/tobegit3hub/seagull