Config Management Camp is definitely one of my favourite events of the year. If nothing else the number of links in this weeks newsletter should reveal that. Thanks again to all the organisers and speakers.

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FOSDEM and Config Management Camp

My talk from #cfgmgmtcamp, entitled The future of configuration management and how to stop it. Looks at what configuration we’ll be providing to our infrastructure in the future - with the rise of autonomous systems, SDN, containers, unikernels and more.
https://speakerdeck.com/garethr/the-future-of-configuration-management-and-how-to-stop-it

Another #cfgmgmtcamp, succinctly bringing together Lean and Devops, showing the drivers for different parts of an organisation along with lots of numbers from high performance organisations like Amazon and Google.
http://www.slideshare.net/jezhumble/lean-configuration-management

A good call to action for the ITSM and Devops communities to talk and share more around configuration management. As a discipline and toolset it’s something both groups of people care about.
http://evolvingitsm.com/2015/02/02/thoughts-on-cfgmgmgtcamp-and-why-itsm-should-take-note-of-devops-trends/

A nice write-up from #cfgmgmtcamp, including lots of links to presentations or tools mentioned in various talks. I like the large todo list.
http://f5n.org/blog/2015/fosdem-cfgmgmtcamp-2015/

A good call for monitoring to be presented as much more of a service to others within your organisation. Some tips for building a modern monitoring stack in order to get there too.
http://www.slideshare.net/jamtur01/maas-44123084

Notes from a talk at FOSDEM about what’s new in SystemD. Lots of pointers to interesting things from the last year and new upcoming features. Don’t read the comments.
http://ma.ttias.be/whats-new-systemd-2015-edition/

An interesting talk on the workflow requirements of having multiple projects but one source code repository (CFEngine in this case). The insight into the command line interface is interesting.
https://speakerdeck.com/brontolinux/many-projects-one-code

An interesting look at a new Configuration Management tool called Impera that takes a slightly more abstract approach.
http://www.slideshare.net/bartvanbrabant/cfgmgmtcamp2015-v2

Jobs

Expensify is hiring Operations Engineers to develop and support our growing infrastructure. Help us keep our high-availability, distributed, transactional environment running smoothly and securely. At Expensify, we do our best every day to ensure your expense reports don’t suck!
http://we.are.expensify.com/

News

A nice balanced comparison of the open source search engines Solr and ElasticSearch. Takes in a few technical details as well as community metrics, especially useful if you’re just starting to look at search engines.
http://blog.sematext.com/2015/01/30/solr-elasticsearch-comparison/

A detailed look at what it means for internal IT teams to move further towards being service organisations for internal stakeholders. The strong terminology and diagrams help make for a good argument.
http://crunchtools.com/core-builds-service/

An interesting approach to solving some of the problems with monitoring, looking at a gossip-enabled monitoring service which aims to avoid a single point of failure.
http://voormedia.com/blog/2014/12/distributed-server-monitoring-using-gossiping

A good presentation (PDF) delving into security automation from the point of view of the security community. A good insight into the types of problems that would be good to solve.
http://www.rationalsurvivability.com/presentations/DuelingBanjos.pdf

A collected set of key papers, blog posts and other reading material around service engineering, with a focus on cloud infrastructure services.
https://github.com/mmcgrana/services-engineering

Riemann is a very interesting addition to a monitoring setup, but it can be difficult to work out what problem to solve with it. This effort to collect sample configurations should help.
http://kartar.net/2015/02/riemann-sample-configurations/

A nice write-up of using the recently released Prometheus monitoring tool to monitor Docker containers. Some good tips for anyone else trying it out.
https://5pi.de/2015/01/26/monitor-docker-containers-with-prometheus/

If you’re having trouble explaining to colleagues how a multi-disciplinary team that trusts each others judgement and instincts might work then maybe Star Trek has the answer.
https://medium.com/@jpaulreed/trouble-with-devops-try-trekops-fb69f7e554fd

Events

Container Days is an un-conference style gathering meant to discuss the revolution of Docker, CoreOS and other lightweight virtualization technologies and their applications. March 27th and 28th in Austin.
http://containerdaysaustin.com/2015/

Tools

Debops is a collection of ansible playbooks and supporting scripts intended to make administering debian easier.
http://debops.org/
https://github.com/debops/debops

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