A short holiday version of the newsletter this week. A big thanks to all the people who have spent the last week or so on-call keeping the internet running in some capacity.

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Making the Switch to Bare Metal and Open Networking

By decoupling the hardware and software and disaggregating the networking solution value chain, switch hardware vendors have the ability to separately compete and innovate in hardware and software solutions. Meaning, the network is no longer restricted by legacy solutions or cross-vendor compatibility.
http://go.cumulusnetworks.com/bare-metal-dov

News

A nice introduction to unikernels as alternatives to general purpose operating systems, where they might fit in and what makes them interesting for the future.
http://www.techrepublic.com/article/unikernels-offer-a-stripped-down-alternative-to-linux/

A nice 10 myths of devops post, covering misconceptions from devops teams, to certification to conference attendees to cloud computing.
https://sethvargo.com/the-ten-myths-of-devops/

An interesting interview with a VP from IBM about adopting agile and devops practices in a very large organisation. Some great numbers showing improvements over two years in build times, planning, deployment, time spent maintaining, etc.
http://www.sonatype.org/nexus/2014/12/11/dibbe-edwards-devops-and-open-source-at-ibm/

It feels like we’re seeing a lot more interest in the Windows world at the moment, so this post felt useful. It covers some of the cultural and philosophical differences between the Linux and Windows development with a nice focus on infrastructure automation.
http://www.hurryupandwait.io/blog/from-full-microsoft-stack-to-cross-platform-development

An interesting post placing the interest in Docker and systemd (and CoreOS, Rocket, Atomic, etc.) in the context of a fight for what is running as PID 1.
http://thenewstack.io/why-docker-containers-and-systemd-drive-a-wedge-through-the-concept-of-linux-distributions/

An interesting look at some of the under-the-hood security features of docker related to image security, with a number of recommendations for improvements.
https://titanous.com/posts/docker-insecurity

When learning the large number of topics required to build highly scalable applications it can be difficult to know where to begin. This post provides lots of links that aim to make getting started easier.
http://leandromoreira.com.br/2014/11/20/how-to-start-to-learn-high-scalability/

Events

Devopsdays Derby in the UK is coming up on the 7th and 8th of February and they still have a few speaking slots available. Submit your talks by January 11th.
http://www.devopsdays.org/events/2015-derby/propose/

Tools

Socketplane have released a technology preview of their container networking technology. The preview features things like ZeroConf multi-host networking for Docker, support for multiple networks and distributed IP Address Management (IPAM).
https://github.com/socketplane/socketplane

vCloud Air now has a nice looking open source command line interface. This post and repo cover the basic functionality.
http://blog.pacogomez.com/vcloud-air-command-line-interface/
https://github.com/vmware/vca-cli