DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #252 - 1st November 2015
Lots of content from the Velocity Conference this last week in Amsterdam. A big thanks to everyone who presented, helped organise or who I had interesting conversations with.
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Velocity
An excellent example packed presentation on adopting devops in your organisation. Focuses on giving everyone a sense of and experience of operations.
https://speakerdeck.com/kdaniels/we-are-all-devops
Great recommendations for running retrospectives of incidents, including a call to focus on what and how rather than who and why and to better understand various bias’ that are in play.
http://fractio.nl/2015/10/30/blame-language-sharing/
Excellent Velocity presentation on technology transitions, talking about both adopting new technologies and more interestingly getting rid of old ones. Lots of excellent examples and generalised points.
https://speakerdeck.com/zmagg/surviving-technology-transitions-adding-and-more-importantl
y-removing-tools-from-an-existing-stack
Many readers of this newsletter will have heard mention of Conway’s Law, but this presentation delves deeper into the original paper to talk about some of the other points made. A full set of references is provided too for further reading.
http://mamund.site44.com/talks/2015-10-velocity-teams/
Presentation on defining chaos engineering patterns covering tips on introducing controlled failures, separating your control plain, designing for fall backs and more.
http://www.slideshare.net/jiboumans/chaos-patterns-architecting-for-failure-in-distributed-systems
News
Fullerite is a new tool for metrics collection, similar to diamond or to collectd. This post serves as a nice introduction and explanation of why to build a new tool.
http://engineeringblog.yelp.com/2015/10/fullerite-a-new-mineral-to-collect-metrics.html
Nice write-up of a new infrastructure testing tool called Goss. Goss focuses on a purely declarative, data driven testing tool with JSON as the input format.
http://www.unixdaemon.net/tools/testing-with-goss.html
A nice article introducing a new build tool implemented using a F-Sharp based DSL. The post also explains why moving build logic into a tool like this is preferable to having it locked away in your CI system of choice.
http://blog.2mas.xyz/take-control-of-your-build-ci-and-deployment-with-fsharp-fake/
A good explanation of why a service discovery mechanism is an important part of a microservices based architecture, and an introduction to a new high level .NET framework for service discovery called Microphone.
http://blog.nethouse.se/2015/10/19/introducing-microphone-microservices-with-service-discovery-for-net/
Jobs
Is Chef more to you than a character on South Park? Find new DevOps opportunities on Hired.
http://hrd.cm/1Ln3YwY
Events
Scaleconf 2016 is coming up in March next year in Cape Town, South Africa. The organisers are on the lookout for talk proposals around scaling internet systems, with a deadline for submissions of January.
http://scaleconf.org/speak/
Tools
Helm is an interesting new project which aims to provide a package manager for Kubernetes, along with a shared community repository modelled after homebrew called Charts.
https://github.com/deis/helm
https://github.com/deis/charts
Sops is an editor of encrypted files that supports YAML, JSON and TEXT formats and encrypts with AWS KMS and PGP. Another useful tool for secrets management with excellent documentation.
https://github.com/mozilla/sops
Credstash is another tool for secrets management, specifically making use of AWS Kye Management Service but providing a nice clear user interface.
https://github.com/fugue/credstash
Snyk is a new tool aimed at discovering and fixing security vulnerabilities in third party packages included in your node.js project.
https://github.com/Snyk/snyk
Vegur is the newly opensourced reverse proxy library in use by Heroku. Provided as an Erlang library, this means you can implement custom routing yourself as a callback.
https://github.com/heroku/vegur
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