DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #285 - 12th June 2016
Monitoring is one of those recurring topics for Devops Weekly, so I’m hugely happy to see the new book The Art of Monitoring is now available. https://www.artofmonitoring.com/. At nearly 800 pages this should be worth reading for monitoring newbies and experts alike.
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News
A great presentation about the state of containers, orchestrators, microservices and more. Lots of data showing direction of travel, and some useful speculation about the future.
https://speakerdeck.com/acolyer/making-sense-of-it-all
It’s not just me who things that metadata is powerful and underused when it comes to docker containers and images. This post has some ideas, a round-up of interesting usage and some new tooling.
http://blog.microscaling.com/2016/06/the-joy-of-organising-container-image_6.html
Not a new problem, but a good description and demonstration of the perils of arbitrary code execution when installing packaging from third-party repositories.
http://incolumitas.com/2016/06/08/typosquatting-package-managers/
We often talk about blameless postmortems, but this post does a good job of convincing that blame is an important part of learning and that we should strive for blame aware rather than wholly blameless.
http://techbeacon.com/blameless-postmortems-dont-work-heres-what-does
A useful overview of the term Platform as a Service, it’s evolution and relationship to more recent trends like containers and serverless architectures.
http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2016/06/10/paas-the-term/
A handy side-by-side comparison of the Kubernetes API and kubectl command line tool, and when you should use each.
http://k8s.uk/kubectl-vs-http-api.html
An excellent series of posts on techniques and the maths behind reducing noise in monitoring alerts.
https://signalfx.com/blog/reducing-alert-noise-transformations-dynamic-thresholds/
https://signalfx.com/blog/reducing-alert-noise-ranges-firing-clearing/
https://signalfx.com/blog/reducing-alert-noise-rates-change/
https://signalfx.com/blog/reducing-alert-noise-static-thresholds-durations-transformations/
I quite don’t agree with all the analysis, but the topic of the increasing role developers and practitioners play in the procurement process is worthy of more discussion.
https://medium.com/@JoeEmison/vendors-must-cater-to-developers-or-die-7af7559dca70#.8pthxxgr4
Two similar posts about the serverless movement, how the name can lead to confusion (but is just a name), that it’s not the answer to everything but that the approach does have merits worth investigating.
https://whaletech.co/2016/06/07/serverless-whats-in-a-name.html
https://medium.com/@PaulDJohnston/serverless-is-just-a-name-we-could-have-called-it-jeff-1958dd4c63d7#.f1aj8bwk8
Some changes in Docker 1.10 changed how the docker build cache could be distributed across hosts. This post shows what changed and some alternative solutions to the problem.
http://blog.runnable.com/post/145362675491/distributing-docker-cache-across-hosts
A solid set of books to read if you’re interested in some of the underpinnings of devops like lean, agile and XP.
https://langerman.co.za/2016/05/17/32-best-reads-for-lean-agile-and-devops/
With most of the buzz out of the way, work continues to build out some of the libraries required to make unikernels useful. Here’s a quick description of ongoing work to support syslog.
http://www.gina.codes/ocaml/2016/06/06/syslog-a-tale-of-specifications.html
An opinionated look at the challenges to the evolution of the traditional hardware network router.
https://medium.com/hyperscale-routing/the-end-of-the-router-e4d769aea60f#.343hj86x7
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Events
Devops Enterprise Summit is coming to London on the 30th of June and 1st of July. The full lineup has been announced with some great looking topics including enterprise transformation, mainframes, accounting and lots of case studies.
http://events.itrevolution.com/eu/schedule/
Devopsdays Amsterdam is also taking place on June 30th and July 1st with the usual mix of talks and open spaces. The discount code DODAMS_LOVES_DEVOPSWEEKLY should get you 15% off the ticket price.
http://www.devopsdays.org/events/2016-amsterdam/program/
Tools
SwarmKit is a new toolkit from Docker for orchestrating distributed systems. It includes primitives for node discovery, raft-based consensus, task scheduling and more.
https://github.com/docker/swarmkit
Cake is an open source and cross platform build automation system with a C# DSL, particularly handy for building NuGet packages.
http://cakebuild.net/
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