DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #209 - 4th January 2015

The first issue of 2015 means we’re only a month away from FOSDEM and Configuration Management Camp in Belgium. If you’re going to be at either let me know.

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News

A quick introduction and example of using boxstarter and chocolatey to automate the setup of a Windows development environment.
http://www.morethanseven.net/2015/01/02/automating-windows-development-environments/

One of my favourite topics, how to integrate security into modern operations. This post covers four topics and presents a few areas for you to think about including rapid deployment and access to production systems.
http://blog.threatstack.com/4-steps-to-effectively-integrate-devops-workflows-with-cloud-security-practices

A good set of awkward questions to ask as you build out a microservices architecture. Some great questions about enforcing conventions, monitoring, reuse, API changes, etc.
http://blog.oshineye.com/2015/01/awkward-microservices-questions.html

An interesting writeup from a meetup in London all about the unified log. Some good pointers to software including Kafka, Samza and Luwak which can be used for data processing.
http://www.flax.co.uk/blog/2014/12/05/searching-monitoring-the-unified-log/

It’s sometimes useful to understand exactly what you’re Linux machine is doing at a low level, enter systems calls. This post provides a simple introduction, some code examples and a description of important calls.
http://sysdigcloud.com/fascinating-world-linux-system-calls/

A good distributed systems primer covering how we got here, fallacies of distributed systems and some of the important concepts.
http://www.bravenewgeek.com/from-mainframe-to-microservice-an-introduction-to-distributed-systems/

I’m a big fan of the nginx web server and proxy and this collection of links covers lots of beginner and more advanced material for learning more about it.
https://github.com/fcambus/nginx-resources

A nice walk-though of using Test Kitchen to test Puppet code using the Test Kitchen Docker support.
http://blog.grubernaut.com/kitchen-magic/

Tools

DeployDB is a tool for storing the state of deployments, and is designed to integrate with existing tools like Jenkins and RunDeck and actually do the deployment.
http://hackers.lookout.com/deploydb/
https://github.com/lookout/deploydb

RFC Reader does exactly what you expect, it provides a nice web interface for reading individual RFCs.
http://www.rfcreader.com/