DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #263 - 17th January 2015

A big mix of content this week covering interviewing and career development through team organisation and why flying an aircraft is similar to monitoring your infrastructure. Hopefully something for everyone, but if you think I’m regularly missing interesting topics do let me know.

Sponsor

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How to Use DevOps & APM to Release Better Software Faster Join us for a talk with Hasan Yasar, Technical Manager of Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute, to learn the benefits of DevOps, automation and CD, where APM fits in DevOps, and why you need to monitor. Finally, find out all about auto-provisioning and deployment with Docker, Vagrant, Ansible, and more.
http://ow.ly/U3JX0

News

An interesting post on the evolving role of the network engineer. Points about moving away from a fixation on individual hardware devices to a bigger picture view, and comparisons with the evolution of systems administration over the past few years.
http://siwdt.com/2016/01/16/the-evolving-role-of-the-network-engineer/

A great post looking at the basics of value-stream-mapping for organising teams, and focusing on minimising dependencies with some great real-world examples.
https://medium.com/scaling-teams/your-engineering-team-is-not-an-island-success-demands-a-holistic-view-of-the-business-bccd6116094b#.l1p5wvc9n

An interesting approach to managing versioned dependencies in Terraform, by introducing a Terrafile which defines all the dependencies in one place.
http://bensnape.com/2016/01/14/terraform-design-patterns-the-terrafile/

An interesting analogy, comparing flying by instrument to how infrastructure monitoring works at scale, and how reacting to individual stimuli without a broader context can be dangerous.
https://blog.raintank.io/the-monitoring-death-spiral/

A detailed walkthrough of using BOSH and concourse as a deployment pipeline for infrastructure, focusing specifically on the problem of secrets management (and using Vault to solve it).
https://blog.starkandwayne.com/2016/01/11/spruce-vault-concourse-you/

A detailed look at what it takes to write a good status update. Specific examples and guidance for those times when you need to let people know something if broken.
http://blog.statuspage.io/how-to-write-a-good-status-update

Building infrastructure out of many small open source parts can be tricky, as the surface area for integration can be under defined. Here’s a good example in why Kubernetes doesn’t use Docker’s libnetwork.
http://blog.kubernetes.io/2016/01/why-Kubernetes-doesnt-use-libnetwork.html

An interesting post on how to interview for engineers to work on cloud based systems. It’s biased towards Amazon terminology and practice, but containers some good advice for other stacks too.
https://medium.com/aws-activate-startup-blog/hiring-a-cloud-engineer-questions-to-ask-and-what-you-should-hear-12a960d97163#.jce0fjwsa

Jobs

The Student Room Group are on the lookout for a Site Reliability Engineer / DevOps Engineer to join us in our Brighton office. We’re in the process of rebuilding our entire infrastructure from the ground up within our own Private OpenStack Cloud, so it’s an exciting time to join us on this journey and be a key individual in the decisions and direction of our infrastructure and the technologies we will use.
http://tsrmatters.com/were-hiring-site-reliability-engineer-sre/

The New York Times is hiring a Site Reliability Engineer to join a small team within NYT Beta, the department responsible for developing NYT Now, Cooking, Crosswords and Real Estate. The ideal candidate enjoys a mix of software and system engineering, building tools/services, solving production problems, automation, and working with product engineers to design systems and features. The Site Reliability Engineering team helps support and jumpstart new products being built from the ground up, as well as scaling out new features on more mature products.
http://www.nytco.com/careers/Technology/#25704

Tools

ShellCheck is a static analysis tool for shell scripts. As well as providing hints on syntax it can also pick up on unused variables and in some cases suggest corrections for typos.
https://github.com/koalaman/shellcheck

Building on ShellCheck, Hadolint is a linter for Dockerfiles. As well as providing information based on Docker published guidelines it also picks up on issues with shell code using in RUN directives.
https://github.com/lukasmartinelli/hadolint

If you’re already familiar with Docker, but interested in runc, then the riddler tool is likely useful. It can inspect a running docker container and automatically generate the config and runtime files required to start the same container under runc.
https://github.com/jfrazelle/riddler

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