DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #264 - 24th January 2015
Next weekend is FOSDEM which means a explosion of related events in and around Belgium. As well as the main conference I’m aware of the FLOSS Community Metrics meetup, the CentOS dojo, Monkigras in London and Configuration Management Camp in Gent to name a few. Hopefully meet some readers there.
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[OnDemand Webinar] DevOps from Adoption to Performance featuring Gene Kim
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News
An example of how recent research into failure modes in distributed systems can help automate the detection of problems, even in the largest systems.
http://techblog.netflix.com/2016/01/automated-failure-testing.html
The history of how Devops became a thing often starts with Devopsdays, because that’s where the word originates. But the ideas of agile systems administration had been around longer. An interesting post from back in 2001.
http://nextgendevops.com/2015/10/18/extreme-systems-administration/
Some interesting ideas about a new configuration management tool. mgmt focuses on allowing for parallel execution, reacting to systems events and using a distributed architecture under the hood.
https://ttboj.wordpress.com/2016/01/18/next-generation-configuration-mgmt/
A quick overview of the state of the LibCloud project, also contains some observations relevant to anyone interesting in multi-vendor cloud abstractions.
http://www.slideshare.net/AnthonyShaw5/apache-libcloud-keeping-up-with-the-cloud-market-in-2016
A nice detailed look at using Chef Vault to store secrets for your Chef installation. Good diagrams explain the theory and then into code showing how to use it in your recipes.
https://www.chef.io/blog/2016/01/21/chef-vault-what-is-it-and-what-can-it-do-for-you/
Interesting article looking at configuration as a service. Specifically exposing an API to drive some system configuration, allowing the management of that configuration to be pushed down to the teams building the various components.
http://codevoyagers.com/2016/01/08/configuration-as-a-service/
Whether you like the use of Devops in job titles or not discussing skills and career paths for people interesting in the area is useful. This post does just that, with recommendations for things to learn around programming and systems administration
http://brassy.net/articles/getting-in-to-devops/
A familiar discussion of how bringing operational issues into focus earlier in a development lifecycle can make things easier. Some interesting points about how the move to cloud computing can act as a forcing function or opportunity to adopt devops practices.
https://medium.com/@drew.firment/devops-shift-left-or-be-left-out-6b2755bd7ee9#.ftf7da2az
Some discussion and a recorded talk focusing on the increasing role of anomaly detection in monitoring systems.
http://www.coscale.com/blog/anomaly-detection-for-monitoring-web-performance-does-it-do-what-it-says-on-the-box
Versioning is a surprisingly tricky topic so any writing on it is a good thing in my view. This post looks at why using semantic versioning might not be suitable for some software, in particular for the main thing you release to end users.
https://davehall.com.au/blog/dave/2016/01/19/internal-applications-when-semantic-versioning-doesnt-make-sense
Jobs
Is Chef more to you than a character on South Park? Find new DevOps opportunities on Hired.
http://hrd.cm/1Ln3YwY
Tools
The debate about init systems and PID 1 inside a container has spawned a number of projects. S6 overlay looks particularly interesting, and makes some good arguments about why one thing, rather than one process, per container is a useful distinction.
https://github.com/just-containers/s6-overlay
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