This issue of the newsletter is dedicated to all the people spending a least some of the Christmas period on-call keeping everything running smoothly. Thanks everyone.

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

Goodbye War Room, Hello DevOps 2.0 If you’re ready to take your DevOps processes to the next level, this eBook is for you. You’ll learn about the most important metrics based on shared goals and collaboration, how to integrate continuous quality metrics as gates in the delivery pipeline, and the benefits of automation in DevOps.
http://ow.ly/U3K1e

News

Structured logging is the idea that log messages should be well structured for both human and machine parsing, rather than a long line requiring a sprinkle of regular expressions. This post is an excellent introduction to the idea, along with lots of examples.
http://kartar.net/2015/12/structured-logging/

A great post on various operational anti-patterns when using containers. Neglecting management-over-time and forgetting the hard-won wisdom of many init scripts in favour of some bash. Good examples too of application patterns to address some of these issues.
https://medium.com/@kelseyhightower/12-fractured-apps-1080c73d481c#.q522ru5ia

A somewhat shameless inclusion of some recent work I’ve been doing around using Puppet to manage Pods, Services, ReplicationControllers, etc. in Kubernetes. If anyone has any feedback or ideas around this do let me know.
http://thenewstack.io/puppet-labs-automates-kubernetes-accessibility-admins/
https://puppetlabs.com/blog/building-your-own-abstractions-kubernetes-puppet
https://puppetlabs.com/blog/kubernetes-guestbook-example-puppet
https://puppetlabs.com/blog/managing-kubernetes-configuration-with-puppet

Recent versions of the Puppet language support iteration and a few syntactic tricks which make various usecases involving using external data to define resources easier. This post shows a few examples.
https://www.devco.net/archives/2015/12/16/iterating-in-puppet.php

An overview of a particular infrastructure architecture using Docker, Kubernetes and Yesod (a Haskell based web framework) - showing examples of configuration and talking about issues found.
http://www.yesodweb.com/blog/2015/12/yesod-hosting-docker-kubernetes

An interesting argument for using microservices even in a small team, focused on the visibility benefits provided by a highly granular architecture.
https://segment.com/blog/why-microservices/

A nice post on a reasonably low-dependency way of building out graphs and dashboards on your own infrastructure. A nice reminder that higher-level or powerful tools aren’t always the answer for personal projects.
https://unwiredcouch.com/2015/12/17/chef-driven-dashboards.html

A very-much business focused article about why exploring Devops is a good idea, and some observations about how adoption often takes place.
http://www.cio.com/article/3015237/application-development/why-are-we-racing-to-devops.html

A good write-up from a recent container-centric meetup, describing three interesting talks on nulecule (a container packaging/distribution format), using docker and serverspec for infrastructure testing and a talk on using ceph to provide container storage.
http://www.projectatomic.io/blog/2015/11/docker-brno-meetup-2/

Another post extolling the benefits of structure logging, and looking at how that structured data can then be used by Elasticsearch and pushed into Graphite by Logstash.
http://engineering.laterooms.com/structured-logging-with-elk-part-2/

Events

The DevOps Connect event is being held at the upcoming RSA conference on February 29th in San Francisco. The organisers are looking for talks on the intersection of Devops practices and Security, the CFP deadline is January 8th.
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1EqnUIlS2e5PkpsduQ83Bg3GIi8cuVouR7_JXGo0MyMU/viewform

Tools

AWSspec is a set of rspec matchers for testing AWS. The library supports a wide range of AWS resources and has nicely documented matchers for testing everything from whether an EC2 instance is in the correct VPC to whether an autoscaling group has been setup with a load balancer.
https://github.com/k1LoW/awspec

Containerd is daemon with an API and a command line client, intended to manage runc based containers on single machine. It from Docker, aimed specifically at high density and performance.
https://containerd.tools/

Git-appraise is a git plugin which implements a code review workflow for distributed teams, storing the review data in the fit repository itself.
https://github.com/google/git-appraise

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