DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #284 - 5th June 2016
The usual wide range of devops related content this week - distributed systems to remembering devops isn’t about change for it’s own sake, the meaning of operations to goings on in the Windows infrastructure community. Enjoy.
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News
The concept of what operations is makes for a great topic of conversation. My experience is that with the renewed interest in operations coming from the devops movement too many people think it’s just the technical aspects of systems administration.
https://charity.wtf/2016/05/31/wtf-is-operations-serverless/
The increasing awareness of distributed systems doesn’t make those systems any less complex. Runway is a new tool which aims to combine specification, model checking, simulation, and visualization to make the design of these types of systems easier.
https://medium.com/salesforce-open-source/runway-intro-dc0d9578e248#.vcdy5t31d
https://runway.systems
A handy reminder that adopting devops practices should be driven by improving customer experience or some other organisational goal, beyond just doing devops.
https://www.sysaid.com/blog/entry/please-don-t-just-do-devops
WinOps is one of the few events focused on the applying devops and modern infrastructure practices to Windows environments. Here are several writeups from the recent conference.
https://skeltonthatcher.com/blog/winops-conf-2016-devops-ification-of-windows-server/
https://sammart.in/winops-conference-london-2/
http://thetestlabs.com/winops-a-brave-new-world/
A nice mainstream press piece focusing on devops as cultural movement.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/chriscancialosi/2016/05/23/devops-and-culture-the-evolution-of-devops-in-the-tech-industry/#6dffc6804f2e
Shell scripts are often simple enough to make even style-obsessed programmers throw caution to the wind. But in a large organisation they still add up to a great deal of critical code. This style guide is therefore a pretty good idea.
https://google.github.io/styleguide/shell.xml
A nice demonstration of MSBuild Structured Log, which is an MSBuild addon which helps to visualise a build based on logs which go way beyond just a flat text file.
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/MSBuildStructuredLogRecordAndVisualizeYourBuilds.aspx
I think this tcpdump docker container is a neat example of a pattern I’m seeing, that of containers not just as a packaging format, but as a guide to common usage as well.
http://jerrygamblin.com/2016/05/28/a-docker-container-to-capture-all-traffic-from-host/
Part of the power of Mesos is that you can create and run your own frameworks on it. However framework development can appear a daunting prospect. Enter mesos-starter, a sprint-boot Java library which aims to make creating your own Mesos framework easier.
http://container-solutions.com/state-future-mesos-starter/
Jobs
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http://hrd.cm/23r2ok5
The New York Times is hiring a Site Reliability Engineer to join a small team within NYT Beta. The NYT Beta team sits at the intersection of our technology organization and our newsroom. As a member of the team, you will not only interact with exceptional engineers, designers and product managers, but also members of the best editorial operation in the world. If you are interested, please apply here:
http://www.nytco.com/careers/technology/site-reliability-engineer-nyt-beta/#25704
Events
Devopsdays Silicon Valley is coming up on June 24th and 25th and tickets are still available. The program is looking great too. I’m really looking forward to seeing folks as well as it coincides with a trip to the US.
www.devopsdays.org/events/2016-siliconvalley/program/
Tools
Snapcraft is the packaging tool for the snappy Ubuntu Core transactional packaging system. It allows for composing software from multiple other package formats into a single tree.
https://github.com/ubuntu-core/snapcraft
Torus is an open source project for distributed storage coordinated through etcd. It ships with a simple block-device volume plugin, but is extensible to more and is seeing lots of development at the moment.
https://github.com/coreos/torus
SQL is one of those powerful and widely used common tools. KSQL brings the power of SQL to Kubernetes, allowing for querying resources like pods and services using SQL.
https://github.com/brendandburns/ksql
Are you learning anything important from your monitoring & alerting? You should be. Join Jason Hand as he talks about how to make better use of your IT Operational metrics.
http://try.victorops.com/devops_webinar