DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #253 - 8th November 2015
A small but hopefully well formed issue this week with content ranging from the latest technology (unikernels, pester) to avoiding single points of failure in people. Also a reminder that you should definitely try and make Configuration Management Camp next year if you’re in Europe in February.
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News
Excellent looking talk focusing on how single points of failure often emerge from the people administering a system more than the underlying infrastructure.
http://www.slideshare.net/AlexandraRosenbaum/spof-single-person-of-failure
I’ve featured several unikernel articles over the last year, but deploying them can still require some work. This post describes how to get OSV up and running on Google Cloud Platform.
https://medium.com/google-cloud/unikernel-on-google-compute-engine-part-1-running-an-osv-unikernel-tomcat-server-45bd9816910
A good example of using testing tools to verify production infrastructure. In this post the author uses the Pester testing framework for Powershell to verify DNS configuration.
https://pshirwin.wordpress.com/2015/11/06/pester-script-to-test-dns-configuration/
A nice introduction to the chatops concept. I particularly like all the examples - from deploying applications and building infrastructure to ideas for sales/marketing and support.
http://www.jasonhand.com/chatops-the-new-interface-of-devops/
It’s easier to track buzz than actual adoption for software, so the data about actual Docker adoption in this roundup is interesting. Several facts and figures (from a specific sample) about container lifetime, containers per host, adoption rates and more.
https://www.datadoghq.com/docker-adoption/
A good rightup of failures which exhibit irreversible and cascading properties, specifically looking at the recent dynamodb outage and nicely breaking down the official postmortem.
http://blog.scalyr.com/2015/09/irreversible-failures-lessons-from-the-dynamodb-outage/
An interesting deck which makes the point testing is bad for catching unknown unknowns, and that extending testing with production monitoring is one approach to this problem.
http://www.slideshare.net/LeonFayer1/production-testing-through-monitoring
Events
Configuration Management Camp is back on the 1st and 2nd of February in Gent, in Belgium. The deadline for talk submissions is November 15th so get your thinking caps on.
http://cfgmgmtcamp.eu/
Tools
Inspec is a new infrastructure testing tool based on the rspec Ruby testing framework. It has some nifty ideas, from a solid separation of transport to simple custom resources and dedicated CLI tool.
https://github.com/chef/inspec
A handy tool for anyone using Redis in a clustered setup. Redis Cluster Tool is a CLI app for checking the status of the cluster, rebalancing and getting and setting configuration data.
https://github.com/deep011/redis-cluster-tool
If you’ve ever wanted to use Ruby natively in your shell, instead of Bash, then Rush might be for you. Some nice examples and rationale.
https://s-mage.github.io/2015/10/25/rush.html
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