3 minute read

Lots of interesting and varied tools this week, including novel or new approaches to well trod problems in the way of a new reverse proxy and load balancer in Traefik and BLESS, an interesting solution to the age-old problem of SSH access via trusted keys.

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News

A very well argued piece that containers will displace hypervisors in the future for the majority of workloads. Solid details about what hypervisors are, why arguments against don’t stack up and why it will take time anyway.
http://cloudscaling.com/blog/cloud-computing/will-containers-replace-hypervisors-almost-certainly/

A nice reminder of some of the fundamentals underpinning devops, and a look at how as-a-service models are just outsourcing done right.
https://blog.opsee.com/devops-is-undead-ad128c543165#.q49m7medc

An interesting article on some of the underpinnings of devops and agile practices, with a focus on application in Big IT environments.
https://medium.com/@josef_89142/big-it-rising-b98826b68364#.pw4n9bcng

Lots of tools and writing exist around the running of large numbers of containers, but comparatively little about the building of containers at scale. This post explores some approaches to creating a manageable supply chain model.
http://rhelblog.redhat.com/2016/05/18/architecting-containers-part-5-building-a-secure-and-manageable-container-software-supply-chain/

A presentation with a focus on applying and embracing devops practices if you work in a traditional enterprise. Lots of silos and workflows and on the importance of trust and patience.
http://www.slideshare.net/lnxchk/transforming-enterprise-teams-to-devops-workflows

A nice overview of various messaging services, particular Kafka, RabbitMQ and NATS. Focuses on their use as an integration platform, and some of the differences to more traditional message bus applications.
https://seroter.wordpress.com/2016/05/16/modern-open-source-messaging-apache-kafka-rabbitmq-and-nats-in-action/

A presentation on what succeeding with devops practices can look like. Some good underpinning references to sociotechnical systems research and some specific tips around managing change.
http://www.slideshare.net/john.clapham/succeeding-with-devops-mk2

With more and more services comes a greater need for runtime visibility. But instrumenting all those services might be a costly endeavour. This post explains how to use the linkerd proxy to get information into the Zipkin tracing tool for all your services in one go.
https://blog.buoyant.io/2016/05/17/distributed-tracing-for-polyglot-microservices/index.html

Events

The WinOps event is back in London this coming week, on the 24th and 25th of May. Some great speakers and topics around devops practices in a Windows world and a few tickets still available.
http://www.winops.org/

Tools

Falco is a new tool using the sysdig codebase which allows for writing rules for behavioral activity monitoring. Falco is designed to make it easy to to detect anomalous activity in your applications and infrastructure.
http://www.sysdig.org/falco/
https://github.com/draios/falco

BLESS is an SSH Certificate Authority that runs as a AWS Lambda function and is used to sign ssh public keys. An interesting approach to the problem of managing SSH access to machines in a time limited but still useful way.
https://github.com/Netflix/bless

Traefik is a new reverse proxy and load balancer with backend support for Swarm, Mesos, Kubernetes, Consul, etcd and more. A nice UI, metrics available via an API and SSL out-of-the-box with Let’s Encrypt make an interesting offer.
https://traefik.io/

Apex is an interesting looking toolkit for building and running serverless functions in AWS Lambda. It supports a shim for non-JS languages, as well as tools for a dry-run mode and accessing metrics/
http://apex.run/

Need help communicating during an outage? We’re partnering with StatusPage.io to share lessons learned about crisis communication in a webinar on Tuesday. Sign up to reserve your spot!
http://try.victorops.com/l/44432/2016-05-20/czmk8z

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