DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #210 - 11th January 2015

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News

An excellent presentation covering lots of security pitfalls common in fast moving devops environments and how to address them. Everythig from Git and GitHub tips to Jenkins, AWS, Vagrant and more.
http://www.slideshare.net/chrisgates/lascon-2014-devooops

Riemann has been around for a while but it’s power is sometimes difficult to take advantage of. These two posts cover installation and fault detection and are a great place to start.
http://kartar.net/2015/01/riemann-streams/
http://kartar.net/2014/12/an-introduction-to-riemann/

An indepth look at Facebook’s container platform called Tupperware. Explains some of the workflows used in such a large environment.
http://www.slideshare.net/Docker/aravindnarayanan-facebook140613153626phpapp02-37588997

A good reminder that devops practices are mainly about the day to day work, rather than some big-bang change.
http://radar.oreilly.com/2015/01/chop-wood-carry-water.html

If you’ve worked with AWS you’ll have realised just how big it is. This post provides lots of tips that the author wished they’d known when they started out.
https://wblinks.com/notes/aws-tips-i-wish-id-known-before-i-started/

Another set of tips for using AWS, this time specifically addressing security.
http://blog.botmetric.com/post/107293248044/top-5-security-tips-for-protecting-aws-cloud

A post suggesting 6 changes to ITIL to better accommodate devops practices. Good tips for anyone using ITIL or other service management frameworks too.
https://noelbruton.wordpress.com/2014/04/04/how-to-modify-itil-to-accommodate-devops/

A good post about discovering operations from a developers point of view. “If you don’t know much about what happens to your code after you write it, your code is probably not as good as it could be.”
http://www.mariopaolucci.com/puppet-thats-an-ops-thing-right/

A good call to action for the systems administration community to adopt more data science practices. If you’re not starting to apply statistics and machine learning to monitoring data you’re likely missing out on actionable intelligence.
http://redmonk.com/dberkholz/2015/01/06/time-for-sysadmins-to-learn-data-science/

If you’re wondering what use data science tools might be, then this post about anomaly detection using R should give you a good idea.
https://blog.twitter.com/2015/introducing-practical-and-robust-anomaly-detection-in-a-time-series

If you’re using SSH and interested in hardening your configuration this next post covers lots of details and tips.
https://stribika.github.io/2015/01/04/secure-secure-shell.html

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Tools

Novm is an interesting take on a hypervisor, mixing some of the benefits of virtualisation with some of the advantages of containers. The README does a good job of explaining the rationale.
https://github.com/google/novm

An attempt to write a Chef client in PowerShell. Adds new Chef resources and Knife commands which use PowerShell and DSC on the backend.
https://github.com/POSHChef/POSHChef

Cachet is an open source status page system that aims to be simple to use and easy to manage. A good starting point if you’d prefer to run your own status page.
https://cachethq.io/

A simple application which generates a Vagrantfile suitable for common Ruby on Rails development tasks.
https://railsbox.io/