DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #221 - 29th March 2015
I was lucky enough to attend the latest Scale Summit event in London last week and had lots of good conversations about all things infrastructure. Thanks to everyone who went along and made it such a good event. If anyone writes up notes from any of the sessions please do sent me the links.
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News
Lattice is a container management platform combining web load-balancing, a cluster scheduler, log aggregation and health management. It’s build on some of the new Cloud Foundry components including the Diego runtime.
http://lattice.cf/
https://github.com/cloudfoundry-incubator/lattice
The amount of freely available infrastructure services that are useful for personal projects or bootstrapping is pretty impressive. Here’s a crowdsourced list of useful services, just fork the repo to suggest more.
https://www.devco.net/archives/2015/03/19/collecting-links-to-free-services-for-developers.php
https://github.com/ripienaar/free-for-dev
An interesting slide deck about the rise of the search engine, and in particular Lucene and Solr. Some interesting points about search engines as systems of record (eventually) and about testing search at scale.
http://www.slideshare.net/markrmiller1/dev-bigdatasearchengine
Monitoring is definitely a hot topic around running containers at the moment, and this post describing a monitoring/integration testing approach using a small amount of python, datadog and pagerduty is interesting.
https://mesosphere.com/2015/03/26/integration-testing-with-mesos-chronos-docker/
An argument that you’re probably not going to adopt microservices, at least in the way you think. Comparisons with other trends (SOA, ESB, etc.) and a realisation that most organisations probably don’t have all the prerequisites in terms of people and structure.
http://blog.christianposta.com/microservices/youre-not-going-to-do-microservices/
Some notes from a few of the sessions at last weeks Scale Summit open spaces event in London. Conversations on Docker, security, team organising and service discovery.
https://github.com/bazbremner/scalesummit-2015-notes
An interesting tale of debugging a problem along with a clear introduction to the concept of transparent huge pages and alternative memory allocators.
https://shk.io/2015/03/22/transparent-huge-pages/
A good post demonstrating how to test drive the configuration of an infrastructure component, in this case a web server. I particular like the point about dependency injection and viewing the infrastructure under test as just a component in your wider software system.
https://gdstechnology.blog.gov.uk/2015/03/25/test-driving-web-server-configuration/
One of the interesting use cases for unikernel projects like MirageOS is to be able to boot an entire kernel in request. Here’s an example of doing just that for a DNS server.
http://www.skjegstad.com/blog/2015/03/25/mirageos-vm-per-url-experiment/
Jobs
Wandera has pioneered the Secure Mobile Gateway to help businesses tackle the next generation of enterprise mobility challenges. We are looking to hire a DevOps engineer to join our growing team of technologists and to help build and run our rapidly growing cloud services platform. If you are mad about all things DevOps and have experience of Python and Ruby, config management and cloud orchestration, rapid deployment, automation, cloud services provided by AWS, Rackspace and Softlayer, SQL/NoSQL databases, monitoring and networks then please apply via the below link.
https://www.wandera.com/careers/
Tools
Graphite beacon is a very simple alerting system for Graphite metrics. Just install the app and describe your alerts in JSON. Can alert via SMTP, Hipchat, Slack or HTTP.
https://github.com/klen/graphite-beacon
A nifty little tool, httpdiff allows you to diff two HTTP requests and show any differences in the headers. Useful for exploration or building testing tools on top of.
https://github.com/jgrahamc/httpdiff
Bazel is a new build tool from Google, it’s able to build a wide range of software quickly and is particularly suited to organisation using a single very large monolithic repository.
http://bazel.io/
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