3 minute read

A packed issue this week with a scattering of presentations, examples of people adopting systems like Mesos and CoreOS, discussion of the changing role of the IT department and an excellent post about recruitment for operations. Hopefully something for everyone.

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News

Microsoft made two big announcements this week, with Nano server (a tiny Windows for server deployments) and first class containers for Windows Server and Hyper-V. Not available to use yet, but this opens up Windows to much more automation.
http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2015/04/08/microsoft-unveils-new-container-technologies-for-the-next-generation-cloud/

A very interesting article on the pressures on a typical IT team, and how those pressures are leading to different structures - away from project focus towards a product focused organisation.
http://www.fiercedevops.com/story/software-defined-businesses-need-software-defined-it-departments/2015-04-07

I have a talk just yesterday on the intersection of configuration management and service discovery, and why you need two speeds of configuration. The examples use Puppet and Consul, but the ideas should apply more generally.
https://speakerdeck.com/garethr/service-discovery-and-configuration-management

Containers, and the accompanying ecosystem of tools are often finding a first use in testing pipelines. This example covers using CoreOS and Docker alongside Jenkins for simpe cross-platform testing.
https://www.brightbox.com/blog/2015/04/09/jenkins-nodes-with-coreos/

Last week I mentioned Chef Conf and I’ve found a few good writeups of the conference in general and a number of the talks. Lots of links from these two (and if you’ve not seen the eggs video yet…)
https://victorops.com/blog/chefconf-2015/
http://pietroshannon.com/posts/2015/04/chefconf2015/

Recruitment and recruiters often get a bad press, so this blog post all about hiring people into operations roles (mainly in startups) from the recruiter perspective is worth reading, or passing on to your in-house recruiters.
https://medium.com/@samcnix/ops-recruitment-sh-d5c20302a12e

A nice walkthrough of creating a continuous deployment pipeline using Mesos and Marathon. Shows each step, from what to put into source control to the TeamCity configuration.
https://mesosphere.com/blog/2015/04/02/continuous-deployment-with-mesos-marathon-docker/

Another good detailed post about Mesos, and how to setup an initial cluster with a pair of load balancers to service application traffic.
http://www.ivoverberk.nl/towards-docker-in-production-with-apache-mesos/

Audit mode is one of the interesting new additions to Chef, allowing you to write custom checks as part of your Chef runs. This post is a good introduction and has a bunch of easy-to-follow examples.
http://jtimberman.housepub.org/blog/2015/04/03/chef-audit-mode-introduction/

A good reading list for anyone interesting in operations or infrastructure, it nicely focuses on system thinking and higher level issues over lots of books about tools.
https://github.com/stack72/ops-books

A presentation deck describing some of the issues with common monitoring software, and then digging into how Prometheus solves some of those, and how best to approach monitoring system design.
http://www.slideshare.net/brianbrazil/devops-ireland-systems-monitoring-with-prometheus

If you find yourself building software for ARM chips this article will help you setup a CI system on Travis or similar using QEMU and chroot.
http://www.tomaz.me/2013/12/02/running-travis-ci-tests-on-arm.html

An interesting way of seeing the inner workings of an open source project is to follow the often weekly call to discuss the project. The notes from a recent Kubernetes meeting make for an interesting insight into project priorities.
http://kubernetesio.blogspot.be/2015/04/weekly-kubernetes-community-hangout_11.html

A brief side-by-side comparison of ITSM and Devops practices, positioning ITSM as a quest for stability, and Devops primarily of use in achieving agility on top of that stability.
http://www.vigilantguy.com/itsm-vs-devops-agility-vs-control-is-this-really-battle-royale/

Jobs

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.
https://hire.jobvite.com/j?cj=oRqt0fwu&s=DevOpsWeekly

Events

Devopsdays Amsterdam is coming up on the 24th until the 26th of June. The CFP is open, and the organisers are looking for submissions for talks, ignites and workshops.
http://www.devopsdays.org/events/2015-amsterdam/

Tools

Vega is a distributed mailbox, with an HTTP API and plans for AMQP and STOMP support. It’s designed to be durable and resilient under failure, and uses Consul under the hood. It’s intended as the backbone for how other components communicate with each other.
https://github.com/vektra/vega

Hub release is a handy utility for automatically populating release notes on github based on commit messages and closed issues.
https://github.com/zestia/hubrelease

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