A pretty packed issue this week, if there is a theme it would be balancing adopting new technologies against tried and trusted approaches: with a few practical docker posts, discussion of choosing boring technology alongside more talk of unikernels.

It’s also your last chance to fill in the Devops Survey which closes on April 10th. The more people fill this in the more useful the results should be. https://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/1984283/4b0ea1afb087

Sponsor

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News

Viewing containers as just another packaging format leads you to miss the typical metadata available to tools like apt and yum. This post demonstrates a clever approach to fixing this problem, making containers much less of a black box.
https://www.devco.net/archives/2015/03/30/some-thoughts-on-operating-containers.php

MirageOS and more generally unikernels are an interesting potential future. These two posts demonstrate a simple deployment mechanism, and look at what future unikernel infrastructure might allow us to do.
http://amirchaudhry.com/heroku-for-unikernels-pt1/
http://amirchaudhry.com/heroku-for-unikernels-pt2/

I’ve always found choosing technology interesting, how, if and when to adopt newer technology is very contextual and knowing whether you got it right takes time. This post does a great job of both telling a story but also providing ideas for how to go about technology choice.
http://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology

A great rundown of some of the tools and capabilities available when building mobile applications and adopting devops practices.
http://www.slideshare.net/jedi4ever/mobile-development-with-a-devops-mindset

One of the things that came out of Chef conf (if you were there please send me links to things you found interesting) this week that I particularly liked was this take on describing some of the principals of Devops, taking a steer from the idea of a school of Kung Fu.
https://github.com/chef/devops-kungfu/blob/master/talk-notes.md

A pretty indepth walkthrough a data intensive system, with talk of read/write tradeoffs, partitioning, sharding, hardware selection and lots more.
http://highscalability.com/blog/2015/3/30/how-we-scale-vividcortexs-backend-systems.html

A post for anyone breaking down systems and teams, whether coming from a microservices or devops point of view. It focuses on the importance of configuration management debt as the first step in changing a large system.
http://www.managingsoftwaredebt.com/2015/04/04/focus-on-configuration-management-debt-first/

A good post on one of the advantages of using containers, that of improving utilisation and reducing costs, by making multi-tenant systems easier. It doesn’t touch on the increased network complexity in those situations but covers lots of other good points.
http://byterot.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/microservices-containerisation-in-light-of-cloud-utilisation-and-high-availability.html

A good call to action for security teams to adopt devops practices, highlighting some interesting data from a recent survey that shows security as a primary concern when adopting devops, but also that it’s happening anyway.
http://newcontext.com/security-should-be-the-top-driver-for-devops/

Jobs

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DataSift is a streaming and real-time data processing platform, dealing with over 1 Billion interactions a day. We’re looking for several Operations Engineers with a passion for using automation, monitoring and modern operations tools to solve big data problems. Our key principles are good automation and monitoring, and we use Chef, Graphite and Riemann at scale to help us with this. We offer competitive salaries, great benefits and awesome perks! We have offices in London and Reading.
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Events

Docker is awesome but doesn’t come with batteries included; once you go beyond the basics you’ll be searching the web for insights and having to decide between the old/new/hottest approach to do things. Pragmatic Docker is an event on April 21st in Belgium on what works today with only a brief focus on glimpses of the future.

For a limited time if you the code WE-ALL-LOVE-DEVOPS-WEEKLY you’ll get 50% off the ticket price.
http://www.eventbrite.com/e/pragmatic-docker-day-ghent-belgium-tickets-16395147327

DataSift are having an open house event at their Reading office in the UK on the 15th April, 6pm until 8pm. Mingle with the team, check out the awesome office and learn more about our new Pylon for Facebook product works. The event is free and there will be plenty of snacks, drinks and games.

bit.ly/DS2015OpenHouse

Box are hosting a Transform the Enterprise conference on April 22nd in San Francisco with talks and panels on security, open source and APIs. Using the code boxdevops will get you a complimentary pass too.
http://boxdev2015.com/sf

Tools

As containers become the unit of work in distributed systems, scheduling across hosts becomes increasingly important. Citadel is interesting because, rather than being just an out of the box solution it’s positioned as a toolkit for writing your own custom schedulers.
http://citadeltoolkit.org/
https://github.com/citadel/citadel

Shpec is an rspec-like testing framework for shell scripts. The README gives you an idea of the syntax, and show how easy it is to extend with your own matchers.
https://github.com/rylnd/shpec

A simple Rake library which allows building Debian packages using either git-buildpackage or fpm. It would be nice if this supported other package types like RPM as well.
https://github.com/jimdo/buildtasks

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