DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #271 - 6th March 2016
A pretty packed issue this week with some great longform pieces on deployment, metrics visualisation and the evolution of container management as well as introductions to new technology, how large IT organisations are changing and more. Enjoy.
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News
I’m nearly always happy to help promote surveys as the more folks who complete them the more interesting the results tend to be. This survey from The New Stack is covering a wide breadth of real-world container usage.
http://thenewstack.io/container-orchestration-survey/
There are a wide range of different ways of presenting timeseries metrics, and it’s easy to just rely on obvious presentations. This post digs into lots of different ways of presenting timeseries data, and why you might use each of them.
https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/timeseries-metric-graphs-101/
A detailed post on everything to do with deploying software. Everything from branching strategies to monitoring to feature flags and queuing and locks to audit trails.
https://zachholman.com/posts/deploying-software
A paper on Borg, Omega, and Kubernetes - Lessons learned from three container-management systems over a decade. Focused on the evolution of container management software within Google with some notes on hard, open problems.
http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2898444
A great post showing how to use the rkt container runtime. Lots of examples and just enough context, a useful read with rkt having just hit 1.0./
http://blog.codeship.com/getting-started-rkt/
A side-by-side comparison of configuring the same piece of software (Sensu in this case) using Puppet, Chef, Salt and Ansible.
http://www.xkyle.com/a-configuration-management-rosetta-stone-configuring-sensu-with-puppet-chef-ansible-and-salt/
An excellent example of using audit logs and a chat interface to provide effective security monitoring around sensitive activity on your servers.
https://slack.engineering/distributed-security-alerting-c89414c992d6#.5m0qo2ie4
A high level look at four things which are shaping the future of IT; from the idea that software is eating the world to open source and the challenge for the typical enterprise of becoming a software company.
http://www.cio.com/article/3040853/software/4-principles-that-will-shape-the-future-of-it.html
A post focusing on the business benefits for adopting containers (focused on Docker) focused on cost reduction, standardisation, time to market and resource consolidation.
https://www.brianchristner.io/how-to-create-a-docker-business-case/
A low level look at how strace works, including examining the ptrace system call.
http://blog.packagecloud.io/eng/2016/02/29/how-does-strace-work/
A nice reminder that problems with deployments often start with a different in how production and development environments are managed. Some interesting points about scale differences for data-intensive infrastructures as well.
http://www.svds.com/crossing-the-development-to-production-divide/
If you’re doing anything with relational databases it’s important to have a good understanding of indexes if you want things to work well. This post is a nice introduction from first principles to indexes using PostgreSQL.
http://eftimov.net/postgresql-indexes-first-principles
A nice, very visual, introduction to unikernels and the problems they aim to solve.
http://www.slideshare.net/JakubJermar/unikernels-the-new-kids-on-the-block
Jobs
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Tools
CPUStat describes itself as a “fancy top”. It’s an interactive tool for analysing CPU utilization and saturation in a helpful way, focusing on taking highly granular samples every 200ms.
https://github.com/uber-common/cpustat
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