DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #247 - 27th September 2015
I attended the first WinOps conference this week, focused on Devops practices in Windows environments. The interesting part was how much of the audience was new to everything Devops - it’s worth remembering that if you’re thinking about writing or talking about something and not sure what to cover. We still need lots more good introductory material out there.
Sponsor
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
Sponsored
[eBook] The Art of DevOps
Inspired by the famous 6th century Chinese manuscript: The Art of War, this eBook discusses DevOps in the form of a mission to continuously deliver assets to the operational battlegrounds safely, securely, and quickly.
http://ow.ly/SAQjT
News
VMware have been previewing a number of container based technologies recently, and for those already running a VMware stack this overview is likely very useful.
http://cloudarchitectmusings.com/2015/09/22/sorting-out-vmwares-container-technologies/
It’s often too easy for sensitive information to end up publicly accessible on GitHub, whether that’s git tokens, SSH private keys or AWS credentials. Gitrob is a tool aimed an internal security folk for finding that information before it can be used against you.
http://michenriksen.com/blog/gitrob-putting-the-open-source-in-osint/
https://github.com/michenriksen/gitrob
A nice description of the utility of the CoreOS toolbox, a pattern that’s applicable to any minimal OS/container combination. The idea that for debugging you can bring your own tools with you only when needed.
https://mlafeldt.github.io/blog/bring-your-tools-with-you/
The Goat Farm is a relatively new podcast focused on Devops practices in large enterprise organisations. 9 episodes in and it has some great interviews with people from IBM, Standard Bank, Target and more. If you have stories to share get in touch with the presenters.
http://goatcan.do/category/podcasts/
One of the talks from Operability this week, on common problems with logging and how to fix them. Some good points about why it’s important to log accurate and useful information too.
http://www.slideshare.net/SkeltonThatcher/unbroken-logging-operabilityio-2015-matthew-skelton
Another talk from Operability, this one by me entitled operations without the operating system. How does operations change as the OS becomes drastically simpler or disappears entirely?
https://speakerdeck.com/garethr/operations-without-the-operating-system
Confidentiality, integrity and availability is a common way of talking about information security. This handy presentation maps those concepts to devops practices, likely a great way of building bridges between ops and security.
https://speakerdeck.com/jamfish/securing-the-heart-of-automated-infrastructure-automacon-version
An impassioned plea to sell the business value of being able to deploy software early in a project. A good reminder that this isn’t a given everywhere.
https://medium.com/@drunkcod/ops-and-business-value-25ef0e5c2a0a
Recent versions of Linux have added improved low-level tracing and instrumentation tools. This post shows some useful tools useful for performance optimisation build on top of those capabilities.
http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2015-09-22/bcc-linux-4.3-tracing.html
Some good points about the utility vs cost of separate DR or performance testing environments.
http://techironic.com/post/129767406981/the-truth-behind-building-multiple-environments-to
Two notable conference in London this week, WinOps and Operability, both attracted some interesting conversations and note taking. Worth reading if you couldn’t make them.
https://skeltonthatcher.com/blog/operability-io-conference-2015-day-1/
http://hannahfoxwell.net/2015/09/25/review-of-winops-2015/
Jobs
Stelligent is searching for talented DevOps engineers to help bring Continuous Deployment automation in the AWS cloud to our growing customer base. If you are proficient with AWS, test frameworks, configuration management, build tools, and Git/SVN; but yearning to learn more, Stelligent is the place for you. Visit the link below for more details on available jobs and how to apply.
http://www.stelligent.com/devopsweekly/
Close.io is looking for a Lead DevOps / Infrastructure engineer. We’re a profitable fast-growing SaaS startup looking for great people to join our ~10 person team in Palo Alto or remotely. Come help us improve API performance, tune our databases, tighten up security, setup autoscaling, make deployments faster and safer, scale our Elasticsearch/MySQL/MongoDB/Redis data stores, setup centralized logging, instrument our app with metric collection, set up better monitoring, etc.
https://jobs.lever.co/close.io/38d0c4ac-c3eb-47e9-a49e-4611f96eef8d
Tools
Muxy looks like a pretty comprehensive tool for testing network activity, by introducing delays, bandwidth constraints or other issues. It works as a simple proxy with a configuration file to control the features.
https://github.com/mefellows/muxy
Traefik looks an interesting new reverse proxy with some modern capabilities like integration with service management frameworks, hot reloading of configuration, exposing metrics over HTTP and an API for configuration.
https://github.com/EmileVauge/traefik
At this point the AWS interface is huge, so SAWS might be a good alternative command line interface. In particular it provides command completion and shortcuts which should make things both quicker and more discoverable.
https://github.com/donnemartin/saws
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