DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #245 - 13th September 2015
Conference season is in full swing, with container camp and software circus last week and operability, winops, automacon and more just in the next few weeks. If you’re attending any good events do send me links to slides or videos that you found interesting.
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News
A description of the tools, and categories of tools, that make up a modern production stack. Everything from the container engine to bootstrapping tools to orchestration.
http://www.eightypercent.net/post/layers-in-the-stack.html
An excellent article on how one team adopted a microservices architecture, focused on the process gains and an understanding of the value stream map of going from idea to production.
http://philcalcado.com/2015/09/08/how_we_ended_up_with_microservices.html
Keeping Docker images small can be tricky, especially for applications for lots of dependencies. This post shows how to create small images for Ruby applications, but the approach should be valid for similar runtimes.
https://medium.com/iron-io-blog/how-to-create-a-tiny-docker-image-for-your-ruby-app-f8d7d622d80b
An entire free textbook, entitled Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces. Covering virtualization, concurrency and persistence as they relate to operating systems, the book also goes into scheduling the CPU, memory management, persistent storage and more.
http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/
A good discussion piece on whether Docker brings anything to development environments. I think to a degree this depends on your development environment.
http://launchdarkly.com/blog/docker-local-development-environments/
A good reminder that adding more powerful management software comes at a cost of exposing those capabilities to attackers. Securing not just access but the capabilities of automation is going to become increasingly important.
https://blog.conjur.net/all-of-your-robots-belong-to-us
A presentation from this week’s Software Circus event, all about the interest in an operating system that spans multiple hosts.
https://speakerdeck.com/mhausenblas/distributed-operating-systems-evolution-or-revolution
An interesting observation about human error in typing our prose, and how that affects user input for things like command line applications which require long inputs. The article doesn’t mention writing tests or TDD as part of a possible solution.
http://www.tripwire.com/state-of-security/security-data-protection/security-configuration-management/its-time-for-security-to-embrace-devops-and-sdn/
CFN Flow is an opinionated CLI for building and using CloudFormation templates in AWS. It covers things like how to organize resources in templates, where to store templates, when to update existing stacks or launch new ones and red/black deployments.
https://github.com/kickstarter/cfn-flow
https://www.kickstarter.com/backing-and-hacking/introducing-cfn-flow-a-practical-workflow-for-aws-cloudformation
Jobs
Team Prime are currently looking for senior (multiple project experience, lead experience) devops people to join teams at FutureLearn, The People’s Operator and Yelp - all based in London with salaries ranging from £65-75k. If you’re keen to know more about the roles, team structure and opportunities please drop Thayer an email with your CV.
Tools
Whether the contents of a container present a security risk has been much discussed, and we’re starting to see tools emerge to help answer and automate parts of the problem. This example uses OpenSCAP to scan Docker containers, though this requires a SCAP profile for your chosen OS/image.
https://github.com/OpenSCAP/container-compliance
Dinit is a nice looking solution to running multiple processes inside a Docker container. It’s not a full init system which keeps things simple, and aims to fit well into a typical Docker build process.
https://github.com/miekg/dinit
Applikatoni looks like a nice, simple deployment server and provides a web based dashboard and CLI for a team to trigger and see software deployments.
http://applikatoni.com/
rtop-bot is a simple chat bot for bringing basic monitoring data to your Slack or HipChat room. Under the hood it simply SSH’s into machines to collect data on load, CPU and memory usage.
http://www.rtop-monitor.org/rtop-bot/
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…
http://brightbox.com/devopsweekly