DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #224 - 19th April 2015
One thing that has made putting together this newsletter relatively easy is just how open the community is, from Google publishing the Borg paper this week to Square open sourcing the secret management tool Keywhiz. Thanks to every individual and company that puts code or research or options out there, it makes it easier for everyone else to learn.
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News
Google’s Borg cluster management software has been the inspiration for lots of tools, and Google this week published the paper Large-scale cluster management at Google with Borg. Lots of takeaways for anyone building distributed architectures.
http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/43438.pdf
Infrastructure secret management is a hard problem. This post explains the characteristics of a good solution, and then introduces a new open source application called Keywhiz to help solve it.
https://corner.squareup.com/2015/04/keywhiz.html
An interesting deck tying together design thinking, lead, agile and devops into a spectrum, and placing that in the context of the changing face of IT.
http://www.slideshare.net/ingineeringit/from-design-thinking-to-devops-and-back-again-unifying-design-and-operations
A really good in-depth look at using HAProxy everywhere; for internal and external load balancing and for high-availability traffic routing.
http://engineeringblog.yelp.com/2015/04/true-zero-downtime-haproxy-reloads.html
A response to the above post, this next blog post is a similarly detailed look at an alternative way of dealing with HAProxy, the main difference being when HAProxy is also used for SSL offloading.
http://inside.unbounce.com/product-dev/haproxy-reloads/
This article explains why, if you’re an enterprise organisation, you should be having a conversation about how you might use containers now and in the future. A good overview of the current tech and how it interacts with security, existing vendors, cloud migrations and more.
http://premium.wikibon.com/time-for-the-enterprise-container-conversation/
Vector is the recently announced performance monitoring stack from Netflix. This blog post helps you get up and running, and has some nice blog posts with what you can expect if you start using it.
https://ma.ttias.be/taking-netflixs-vector-performance-monitoring-tool-for-a-spin/
Repeatable builds are an important concept when building software. This post acts as a good reminder that it’s virtually impossible to achieve without taking into account time and the state of the entire internet.
http://steveloughran.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/build-tools-as-proof-engines.html
Keeping up with the best practices around SSL certificate configuration can be difficult, so a big thanks to Mozilla for publishing a quick generator based on their research.
https://mozilla.github.io/server-side-tls/ssl-config-generator/
A good discussion of the place of the dedicated staging environment in modern software deployments. Some good points, although I think it does depend on the context.
http://blog.takipi.com/your-staging-environment-sucks-5-reasons-why-you-should-drop-it/
Jobs
Is Chef more to you than a character on South Park? Find new DevOps opportunities on Hired.
http://hrd.cm/1IDr1xC
Yoyo Wallet, a mobile payments and loyalty platform, is looking for a DevOps engineer with solid AWS experience. We’ve just raised a $10m Series A and need a sharp engineer to help design and run our infrastructure. Come and join a great team:
https://yoyo.workable.com/jobs/33112
Events
The Cloud Foundry Summit is coming up on May 11th and 12th in Santa Clara. The organisers have kindly offered a 25% discount to Devops Weekly readers. The schedule looks a good mix of new technology and operations topics. Just use the code DOW25CFS15 at checkout.
http://www.cfsummit.com/
Tools
Sometimes you just want a lo-fi dashboard. A browser window to refresh and reload as needed. Page Refreshr solves that problem nice and simply.
https://github.com/Jimdo/page-refreshr
Smolder is a simple tool for testing API endpoints. Describe the URLs, headers and required responses in JSON and run tests against your API. I’d probably prefer something more human
https://github.com/sky-shiny/smolder
Devops Weekly is sponsored by Brightbox Cloud - serious UK-based cloud infrastructure from only 1.5p per hour (£10.95/month)
Start your £20 free trial now: http://brightbox.com/devopsweekly