DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #286 - 19th June 2016

Devops weekly is on US time for the next few issues as I’m out in Seattle for DockerCon and then onto Santa Clara for Velocity and Devops Days. If you’re around any of those events do come and say Hi.

Sponsor

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News

A quick overview of the announcements from the recent Hashiconf EU event, covering new versions and features of Terraform, Vault, Nomad and more.
http://blog.contino.io/blog/hashiconf-2016-all-you-need-to-know

I think metadata for containers has the potential to unlock lots of useful shared tooling. So I’m super happy to see MicroBadger launch. It provides a simple way of visualising DOcker labels from images on Hub, as well as providing badges for use elsewhere.
http://microbadger.com/#/

A solid post on the state of systems operations today. Covering a focus on scalability, operations as a core skillset, a move away from dedicated operations teams in some smaller endeavours and other observations.
http://www.somic.org/2016/04/12/rise-of-new-operations/

Installers based on the curl pipe bash technique continue to be popular and oft-criticised. This post explores some of the potential attacks they expose you to, and approaches to minise the impact of an attack.
https://sysdig.com/blog/making-curl-bash-safer/

A handy set of notes for anyone working with a large scale elasticsearch cluster. Details of capacity planning, cluster design, managing updates and more.
https://grey-boundary.io/field-notes-elasticsearch-at-petabyte-scale-on-aws/

A biased, but interesting view on the value of distribution package maintainer, in particular with a view to universal packages or containers as a distribution mechanism for upstream vendors.
http://kmkeen.com/maintainers-matter/2016-06-15-11-51-16-472.html

I’m all for people rediscovering make, it’s still a great tool to learn in my view. This blog post contains a set of notes aimed at hipsters, in this case people more familiar with the javascript build tool chain.
https://mattandre.ws/2016/05/make-for-hipsters/

A nice walkthrough of using Kubernetes on Google Container Engine. Includes examples of some utility helpers if you’re powering everything via the kubectl command line interface.
https://travix.io/deploying-your-application-to-kubernetes-2abaee6db222#.57t0jt5cl

A nice look at the problem with debugging tools that require you to update the source code (in particular pry for Ruby or pdb for Python) and an investigation into approaches using gdb.
http://jvns.ca/blog/2016/06/12/a-weird-system-call-process-vm-readv/

A quick writeup of why the dev-sec project, which is providing configuration management code as well as test suites for hardening infrastructure, is interesting and important.
http://swreflections.blogspot.com/2016/06/dev-secio-automated-hardening-framework.html

A nice detailed look at what serverless applications look like, and the first time I’ve seen the term function as a service used instead of the more controversial serverless moniker.
http://martinfowler.com/articles/serverless.html

Two different survey results around container adoption were published this week, both with interesting data. As always, the samples tend to be weighted towards certain vendor combinations or early adopters. But useful nonetheless.
https://www.cloudfoundry.org/nearly-two-thirds-of-it-users-plan-to-mainstream-containers-in-a-year-global-survey-reveals/
https://clusterhq.com/assets/pdfs/state-of-container-usage-june-2016.pdf

Jobs

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The Environment Agency are looking for a Web-Ops Engineer to be based in either Bristol, Warrington or Weybridge. We are constantly evolving to improve how we meet our customers’ diverse needs online, which calls for new thinking and bold innovation. Joining us on this significant journey of change, your ideas will be valued and your voice heard as you deliver impactful solutions that will build a digital future for Defra and our customers.
https://environmentagencyjobs.tal.net/vx/lang-en-GB/mobile-0/appcentre-1/brand-2/xf-9defdd872d9d/candidate/so/pm/1/pl/1/opp/1107-Digital-Recruitment-Campaign/en-GB

Events

MongoDB World is coming up on June 28-29 in NYC. Learn from the engineers who build MongoDB and from the users running the largest implementations in the world. Walk away with immediately applicable skills – like performance tuning, how set up a multi-data center system, and containerizing MongoDB. You can grab a 25% discount with the code DevOpsWeekly too.
https://www.mongodb.com/world16

Tools

dploy is an interesting looking opinionated deployment tool that leverages DC/OS and GitHub.
https://medium.com/@mhausenblas/introducing-dploy-f112f6a6bbdf#.br5feah1g

The cost of downtime is growing but DevOps practices & real-time incident management solutions can help to reduce MTTR.

Learn more: http://try.victorops.com/downtime_data/DevOpsWeekly