3 minute read

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.

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] 7 Performance Metrics to Release Better Software, Faster

Get real-life examples of application failures and how to avoid them by using 7 key metrics to find problems early on. Also, learn how stuff really works in “the life of a metric” and how to integrate performance metrics into automation tools throughout your application delivery chain.
http://ow.ly/U3BJ7

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

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

Updated: