DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #274 - 27th March 2016

This is the first issue of this newsletter to go to more than 20,000 subscribers. Which is pretty amazing if you ask me. Thanks to everyone who sends me interesting content or provides feedback.

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News

Dealing with production problems is a regular occurrence for any operator, but little research has been done on how people work. This paper, on Trade-offs under pressure: Heuristics and observations of teams resolving internet service outages, is therefore worth reading by anyone interested or involved in operations.
http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&recordOId=8084520&fileOId=8084521

Some interesting data on how immutable some people’s immutable infrastructure really is. The problem? The only way to treat systems as immutable (the goal) without replacing them (because of risk) is to not upgrade them.
http://blog.threatstack.com/it-all-started-with-a-wager-about-system-upgrades

A great detailed discussion of the various networking models within AWS. Lots of different people’s opinions nicely condensed.
http://charity.wtf/2016/03/23/aws-networking-environments-and-you/

Some interesting observations about how IT organisations are changing in structure as they adopt more cloud centric and more product centric ways of working.
https://medium.com/@cote/crafting-the-cloud-native-organization-d565bd1b3aac#.9husxilu8

A useful side by side comparison for sysvinit and systemd commands.
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SysVinit_to_Systemd_Cheatsheet

A quick writeup of the recent pipeline conference. SOme interesting topics, from branching strategies to fixed cost development to testing.
https://labs.ig.com/pipeline-conference-2016-review

An interesting and detailed explanation of how one project looked at building tools to ease deployment. A good description of the various trade-offs involved, although it mainly focuses on provisioning rather than management.
http://www.onyxplatform.org/jekyll/update/2016/03/21/Engraver-A-Tool-for-Managing-Onyx-Clusters.html

An exploration of what it takes to run Chef on the new Microsoft server OS Nano.
http://www.hurryupandwait.io/blog/instal

I mentioned Dalmatiner DB last week as a new time series database. This post goes into some more details, including a docker container for getting started and some python tooling.
https://dataloopio.wordpress.com/2016/03/21/playing-with-dalmatiner-db/

Communication is critical in any organisation, but as more people or structure or projects exist the harder it can become. This post describes some good tips for improving communications in growing teams.
http://www.theeffectiveengineer.com/blog/communication-first-casualty-of-teams-growth

Events

Devopsdays Atlanta is coming up April 26th and 27th. Talks include case studies on test automation and microservices, along with the usual open spaces conversations.
http://www.devopsdays.org/events/2016-atlanta/

OSDC, or the Open Source Datacenter Conference, is also happening on April 26th to 28th. With tracks on infrastructure as code, container and more general tooling..
https://www.netways.de/en/events_trainings/osdc/overview/

Tools

Mas is a simple command line interface for the Mac App Store. Designed for scripting and automation.
https://github.com/argon/mas

Teleport is a tool for remotely accessing isolated clusters of Linux servers via SSH or HTTPS. It supports a number of team focused features as well as support for 2 factor authentication and auto-expiring keys.
https://www.lvh.io/posts/introducing-teleport.html
https://github.com/gravitational/teleport

An interesting new DNS server, CoreDNS is a fork of the Go based Caddy server which allows for writing middleware to influence DNS queries.
https://miek.nl/2016/March/18/announcing-coredns/
https://github.com/miekg/coredns

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