DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #206 - 14th December 2014

A short issue this week as I’ve mainly been offline or travelling since last Sunday. As luck would have it between Sysadvent and AWS Advent you should have lots to read.

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News

Sysadvent keeps putting out great content. This week we have articles on cryptocurrency, a move into management, development and operations collaboration, setting up a Chef server and more.
http://sysadvent.blogspot.co.uk/

AWS Advent is another December blogging extravaganza, focused on Amazon Web Services. So far we’ve seen posts on high availability setups, active directory, IAM, DynamoDB and more.
http://awsadvent.tumblr.com/

A mentioned New Directions in Operating systems quite a bit the last few weeks, and here are the videos from all of the talks at the conference. Everything from user space networking to unikernels to configuration management.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmRrx948XMnEUlzKOCYn3AzT8OAInP_5M

An excellent introduction to Kubernetes and Mesos, placing them both in the context of Docker and managing a high-utilization cluster.
http://www.slideshare.net/timothysc/apache-coneu

A good intro to some of the pressures driving the move towards more cloud-based infrastructure. In particular looks at ways of optimizing costs that are available in more dynamic and pay-as-you-go infrastructures.
http://www.slideshare.net/adriancockcroft/cost-optimization-ucc

Sysadmin Casts provides a wide range of screencasts for those learning aspects of systems administration. From LXC, cgroups and docker to ZFS, project management and SQL injection. All told it’s now up to 41 episodes.
https://sysadmincasts.com/

A nice introduction to using Consul alongside long-lived virtual machines and Puppet. Makes the point that new tools can be layered on-top of existing infrastructure without needing the big rewrite.
http://txt.fliglio.com/2014/10/consul-with-puppet/

Jobs

Systems Engineer at SeatGeek You’ll be in charge of designing and implementing the strategies and tools we use to automate our infrastructure and deploy our software. When you’re not thinking about infrastructure, you’ll be acting as a force multiplier for the developers at SeatGeek, writing code to enhance their development experience.
http://grnh.se/mdwic6

Tools

Everyone is using Markdown it seems for writing documentation, but one thing it doesn’t provide is diagram support. Enter mermaid - generate diagrams and flowcharts from text in a similar manner as markdown.
https://github.com/knsv/mermaid

Lambda launched at the recent AWS Re:Invent conference to lots of interest, but it takes a bit of getting started. Kappa aims to provide a workflow tool to make creating and managing Lambda functions easier.
https://github.com/garnaat/kappa

Atlas is another tool from Netflix for managing time-series data for operations. It’s main focus is managing huge volumes (By 2014, Netflix had 1.2 billion metrics) and allowing fast queries of that huge data set.
https://github.com/Netflix/atlas