DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #278 - 24th April 2016

Devopsdays London this week was a great event, in many ways it felt like Devopsdays Enterprise. The audience of people from banks, financial services as well as the wider UK tech community really made it clear how wide the devops conversation is reaching.

Sponsor

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News

My talk from Devopsdays London about microservices, adoption of platforms and devops; at the coevolutionary processes that bind them together.
https://speakerdeck.com/garethr/rate-of-change-microservices-and-platforms-a-tale-of-devops-coevolution

An excellent post on adopting HTTPS for a large public facing application. Lots of details about the involvement of different teams and suggestions for making the whole thing easier.
https://blog.yell.com/2016/03/https-is-hard/

The ideas behind bi-modal IT were hot topics at the recent Devopsdays London event, with some strong opinions that the model leads to all sorts of problems, including formalising silos. This talk summed up some of the issues.
http://www.automationlogic.com/bimodal-it-and-other-snakeoil/

A useful review of the recent SRE book. The review does focus on some negative issues, which I think are important to discuss. A useful reminder of the importance of shared language, and silos that can emerge without it.
http://blog.lusis.org/blog/2016/04/17/review-site-reliability-engineering/

A discussion of the potential challenges ahead for standards and general agreement around containers, in particular looking at the OCI work.
https://thoughts.krishworld.com/can-oci-specs-protect-against-balkanization-of-containers-3f058fe01bfe#.qkvtrt27c

If you’re using public cloud then making use of autoscaling groups is essential in my view. This post does a good job of explaining why and how.
https://medium.com/@alexbmeng/auto-scale-everything-5c99a512db62#.pkdhluz92

Interesting post on making real-time scaling decisions based on constant feedback from the running system. Useful comparison to other approaches, including simply using queues for transport.
http://blog.microscaling.com/2016/04/microscaling-with-nsq-queue.html

A great deal of the infrastructure software we use and rely on is open source, so I think it’s useful and important to discuss the models under which contributions are licensed. This post is a discussion around CLAs vs the newer Developer Certificate of Origin.
https://julien.ponge.org/blog/developer-certificate-of-origin-versus-contributor-license-agreements/

Another reason for being skeptical about the curl pipe bash approach to software installation. It’s possible to detect on the server side, and hence to serve different content.
https://www.idontplaydarts.com/2016/04/detecting-curl-pipe-bash-server-side/

Jobs

Is Chef more to you than a character on South Park? Find new DevOps opportunities on Hired.
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Tools

Cloud Custodian is a rules engine for AWS resource management. Lots of useful features including compliance to security policies, tag policies, garbage collection of unused resources, and cost management via off-hours resource management
https://github.com/capitalone/cloud-custodian

Debezium is an open source distributed platform for change data capture. Version 0.1 currently only supports MySQL, but then allows for streaming all database interactions. The tutorial shows this in more details.
http://debezium.io/

Another MySQL tool, Shift is fully-featured tool for maintaining and running schema migrations. The post explains the problem of scaling database management, and how Shift tries to help.
https://corner.squareup.com/2016/04/shift.html
https://github.com/square/shift

Runbooks are essential to DevOps. Learn to maximize their value in the upcoming Minimum Viable Runbooks webinar from VictorOps.
http://try.victorops.com/MVR_Webinar