DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #287 - 26th June 2016

This issue might be a bit heavy on content from Velocity and DockerCon, but luckily both events were excellent and contained lots of great talks. Normal service will resume next week.

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Velocity

I managed to somehow do a talk at Velocity where I debated myself on the topic of software adoption, focusing on the Google Infrastructure for Everyone Else meme.
https://speakerdeck.com/garethr/the-two-sides-to-google-infrastructure-for-everyone-else

We’re all individually and collectively making technical decisions all the time. But are they the right ones? This excellent presentation presents some handy tips for making better decisions.
https://speakerdeck.com/charity/a-young-ladys-primer-to-technical-decision-making

A tale of running Nagios in production for 10 years. A tale of constant improvement and learning, and the addition and building of tools to improve the operator experience.
http://www.slideshare.net/lozzd/leveling-up-monitoring-a-decade-of-automating-and-scaling-nagios

This talk covered the importance of design to building an effective security organisation. Lots of good tips and a good reminder that security is a wide ranging multi-disciplinary activity.
https://dymaxion.org/talks/2016-Velocity-SantaClara-YouGotYourSecurityTeamInMyDesignTeam.pdf

Similar to the Nagios talk above, this one covers the evolution of ElasticSearch, Logstash and Kibana in the same organisation. I like this format.
http://www.slideshare.net/avleenvig/elk-mooseively-scaling-your-log-system

DockerCon

One of the announcements that got the most interest at DockerCon was the new swarm integration. This post explores the new service model and the built-in load balancer.
http://container-solutions.com/hail-new-docker-swarm/

I also got to speak at DockerCon, on The Dockerfile explosion and the need for higher level tools. All about scaling image build, with some ideas for the future and a run through various community tools.
https://speakerdeck.com/garethr/the-dockerfile-explosion-and-the-need-for-higher-level-tools

A handy set of blog posts with notes from both DockerCon keynotes. The first covers new software or updates to docker. Day 2 focused on partnerships and the ecosystem.
http://blog.scottlowe.org/2016/06/20/dockercon-2016-day-1-keynote/
http://blog.scottlowe.org/2016/06/21/dockercon-2016-day-2-keynote/

Inspired by the closing demos at DockerCon, this post demonstrates an approach to using docker to provide a function as a service/serverless framework this time in Go.
https://medium.com/@chanwit/function-as-a-service-for-docker-609677b9ba3b#.9ztg9a3e6

An opinion about what the integration of swarm into docker engine means for other orchestrators, and the various companies in the space.
https://medium.com/@cloud_opinion/container-orchestration-market-gets-exciting-37e29ae0d069#.8fyz4no70

News

The Pets vs Cattle metaphor is oft-used. This post makes the case that it’s no longer a useful way of talking about our systems, in particular because the reality is a blur of state of converged systems.
http://bitmason.blogspot.com/2016/06/the-end-of-cattle-vs-pets.html

If you’ve ever wanted to monitor or tune the linux networking stack then this epic and incredibly detailed post is for you.Fantastically detailed low-level information.
http://blog.packagecloud.io/eng/2016/06/22/monitoring-tuning-linux-networking-stack-receiving-data/

A good post exploring the AWS ElasticSearch service. Interesting to read even if you’re not an ES user as it has a number of good points for anyone designing SaaS interfaces for existing software.
http://www.havingatinker.uk/aws-elasticsearch-service-woes.html

Tools

There’s been an explosion of tools recently for bootstrapping a Kubernetes or Docker cluster. Spread is one such tool, but with a few nice looking features around reproducibility.
https://github.com/redspread/spread

Entropy is a fault injection system for Docker based systems. Define a policy and point it at your docker endpoints to trigger failures of containers to aid with building resilient systems.
https://github.com/buildertools/entropy

If you already have a reasonable size AWS setup, adopting a tool like CloudFormation can mean a lot of re-work. Bellerophon aims to generate CF templates automatically from existing AWS resources by querying the API.
https://github.com/arminhammer/bellerophon

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