A bumper issue this week to see you through the holidays. Also lookout for a great discount on the excellent Lean Enterprise book. Oh and hopefully you’re still have a few Sysadvent articles to read http://sysadvent.blogspot.co.uk/.

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News

A good detailed walk-through of using Postgres as a full-text search engine. A good reminder as well that the answer isn’t always a new piece of technology.
http://blog.lostpropertyhq.com/postgres-full-text-search-is-good-enough/

With the recent NTP vulnerabilities this post makes an argument for replacing it rather than upgrading. Specifically it details tlsdate which takes a pretty different approach to the problem.
https://blog.hboeck.de/archives/863-Dont-update-NTP-stop-using-it.html

The question of code freezes to protect production environments often comes up in discussion, this post does a good job of explaining why this approach doesn’t worth as well as people think
http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2014/11/29/code-freezes-dont-prevent-outages/

The word NoOps appears to mainly have disappeared but just in case it does try and crop up again this post explains why it’s a bad idea.
http://www.itskeptic.org/content/there-no-such-thing-noops-it-awful-word

The recent announcement of Rocket and the App Container specification caused lots of comments not all of them useful. This post breaks down a few misconceptions and picks apart what’s interesting.
http://containerops.org/2014/12/19/docker-vs-rocket-gimme-a-break/

A good post all about the design and user experience of command line applications. Worth reading whether you’re developing command line tools or you’re a designer wondering why people use text based inputs.
https://medium.com/re-form/ux-for-wizards-e6ffaad577b4

A nice example of what Devops is and isn’t with a focus on what that means in Government environments.
http://davila.io/2014/10/14/devops-in-federal-government-a-high-level-approach/

The Rubinius ruby runtime is now exposing some interesting metrics and even has built-in support for exporting metrics via statsd. This post covers getting those metrics into influxDB.
http://rubini.us/2014/12/10/rubinius-metrics-meets-influxdb/

Configuring SSL correctly is somewhat time consuming and fiddly, this post does a good job of stepping through a good configuration with Nginx that scores A+ on the Qualys SSL tester.
https://sethvargo.com/getting-an-a-plus-on-qualys-ssl-labs-tester/

The growing interest in new languages is throwing up some interesting integration opportunities. Here’s a surprisingly simple way of integrating Rust with Ruby.
http://blog.skylight.io/bending-the-curve-writing-safe-fast-native-gems-with-rust/

Short tutorials are great for quickly learning something, so sometimes you want a fully working example. This post covers building a small but highly-available web infrastructure using Ansible on local virtual machines, Digital Ocean and on AWS.
https://servercheck.in/blog/highly-available-infrastructure-provisioning-ansible

Special offer

This week we have a free excerpt including 4 chapters from the new book Lean Enterprise. Lots of great devops case studies from interesting large organisations. If you like what you see you can use the discount code AUTHD to get 50% off the ebook or 40% off the dead tree version.
https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/leanenterprise/lean_enterprise_excerpt.pdf
http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920030355.do

Events

DevopsWorks is a new event happening January 28th and 29th in Amsterdam. It’s squarely focused on high quality tutorials rather than talks, which should make for a good way of learning about new topics.
http://www.devopsworks.io/

Tools

Spigio is an interesting tool for modelling gossip based communications in large networks. The output to both GraphML and graphJSON make visualising results easy.
https://github.com/adrianco/spigo