DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #244 - 6th September 2015
I don’t know what it is about September and October but it feels like it’s wall-to-wall interesting events for pretty much the next couple of months. If you’re attending anything please do write up your thoughts or send links to the best talks my way for the newsletter.
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News
A look at lock-in, specifically describing a difference between operational lock-in and developer lock-in, and how and why they might affect different organisation differently.
http://www.eightypercent.net/post/types-of-lock-in.html
A good blog post on why it’s important to apply continuous delivery principles to infrastructure as well as applications. Constant change is the only way to avoid the fear of change setting in.
http://blog.ingineering.it/post/128343918584/why-we-should-continuously-break-everything
I’m not sold on the term Deep Container Inspection, but this is a solid post on some of the challenges of containers today and how we might solve them using metadata and vulnerability scans as part of our build pipelines.
http://rhelblog.redhat.com/2015/09/03/what-is-deep-container-inspection-dci-and-why-is-it-important/
Some ideas for different types of devops roles, as well as the concept of a Devops office, similar to a Project management office. Some good discussion in the comments too.
http://www.itskeptic.org/content/what-devops-role
Datadog’s excellent series continues, this time with in-depth details on how to monitor Redis.
https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/how-to-monitor-redis-performance-metrics/
https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/how-to-collect-redis-metrics/
An interesting look at different team topologies that organisations are using when embracing devops practices. It will be interesting to see which of these solidify and which turn out to be transitory.
http://www.infoq.com/articles/devops-team-topologies
Similar to last weeks set of links for systems administrators, awesome data engineering is a set of links filled with databases, batch processing tools, analysis toolkits and more.
https://github.com/igorbarinov/awesome-data-engineering
Interesting notes (and a full recording) from a session at ContainerCon about the relationship between containers and unikernels.
http://thenewstack.io/the-comparison-and-context-of-unikernels-and-containers/
A look at Azure Resource Manager Templates, which provide a way of describing an entire stack in code and launching it in Azure at the click of a button. The example shown builds a fully working Docker Swarm cluster.
http://rgardler.github.io/2015/08/28/simple-swarm-cluster-with-arm/
A quick set of handy examples of using DIG for looking up DNS information
https://ma.ttias.be/making-full-use-of-dig-in-linux/
Jobs
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Events
Automacon is only a few weeks away, on the 15th until the 17th of September in Portland, Oregon. An entire conference dedicated to all things infrastructure as code. Tickets are still available and the organisers have provided a discount for Devops Weekly readers:
https://ti.to/heavywater/automacon-2015/discount/PATRON50
WinOps is a new London event focused squarely on Devops in a Windows environment, a topic that’s been getting lots of interest in the last year. The event is on the 22nd of September, with a few early bird tickets still available.
http://winops.org/
Descale is a new meetup focused on discussions rather than talks, the first event is in London on Monday September 21st from 6pm. Suggestions for discussion topics are being sought.
http://descale.systems/
Tools
The problem of building Docker containers is definitely ripe for new tools to emerge, and dockramp looks interesting - it extends the Dockerfile syntax, makes smarter decisions about the creation of layers and aims to be faster than the standard docker build command.
https://github.com/jlhawn/dockramp
Many infrastructures will use an SSH jump box or two, rather than exposing all machines directly. SSHmuxd is an application which aims to make this easier to manage, at the same time as introducing some basic access control features.
https://github.com/joushou/sshmuxd
An interesting take on testing Puppet code, Puppet Spec uses the Puppet language to write tests for Puppet by adding a new assertion type to the language.
https://github.com/jolshevski/puppet-spec
Cloudsploit Scans is an interesting set of checks for scanning your AWS setup for potential security issues.
https://github.com/cloudsploit/scans
Devops Weekly is sponsored by Brightbox Cloud: the multi-zone cloud platform built for High Availability.
Try an SSD cloud server in 30 seconds with your £20 free credit…
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