DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #288 - 3rd July 2016

It was great to make it to Devops Enterprise Summit this last week in London. This newsletter focuses on blog posts, conference talks and tools - which proportionally means it features less real enterprise content. So it was great to hear stories from Disney, Barclays, Zurich Insurance and others talking about the same topics and practices. I’ll try and track down some of the content for future issues.

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News

A great look at the benefits of and rationale for working in small batches, using the development of a monitoring system as an example.
http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2945077

Industry surveys are interesting, but often of small and technology specific groups. So this one piqued my interest. The data on container adoption is a good sample to sit alongside more container-centric surveys, and the CI numbers are interesting too.
http://redmonk.com/fryan/2016/06/21/container-trends-plans-orchestration-and-ci-a-dataset-from-bitnami/

A good overview of some interesting additions to a check-based monitoring system - looking at on-call aids, providing more contextual alerts and more.
https://speakerdeck.com/kdaniels/teaching-an-old-monitoring-system-new-tricks

A useful look at a few interesting topics, including how SRE at Google varies to the less specific devops practices, and how the size and type of organisation you work in is important context for what practices and processes are likely to work well.
https://charity.wtf/2016/06/30/devops-vs-sre-delayed-coverage-of-the-dumbest-war/

A detailed look at how Google have managed a single monolithic source code repository, and the benefits of keeping everything in one place.
http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204032-why-google-stores-billions-of-lines-of-code-in-a-single-repository/fulltext

Vox Pupuli is a group of Puppet users and community members that have been busy maintaining a growing number of high-quality Puppet modules. This post explains the benefits from the point of view of a typical Puppet user.
http://brenbriggs.com/2016/07/02/vox-pupuli-a-winning-team.html

Gatling is a handy load testing tool with a powerful DSL for writing tests. This post explores how to run Gatling from Docker containers with the aim of integrating into Jenkins.
http://agiletesting.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/running-gatling-load-tests-in-docker.html

A good description of the changing relationship between developers and security in some organisations, with the observation that new roles are emerging in security teams, bringing hands-on software development skills.
http://www.anniehedgie.com/inspec-basics-8

A wide-ranging overview of the various platform or container as-a-service stacks. A useful breakdown of the characteristics, and also a look at the range of opinionated to unstructured.
http://wikibon.com/architectural-considerations-for-open-source-paas-and-container-platforms/

Jobs

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Tools

Habitat is an interesting new tool which provides both a set of build tools and application runtime tools with the aim of making the automation move along with the application. It can output containers but also potentially VMs and other artefacts depending on your usecase.
https://www.habitat.sh/

osquery is a great way of asking questions about your infrastructure using SQL. Kolide takes that a step further, providing a web interface and remote API server to more easily integrate the power of osquery into your workflow.
https://kolide.co/
https://github.com/mephux/kolide

Netbox is a new IP address management (IPAM) and data center infrastructure management (DCIM) tool with a great looking dashboard.
https://github.com/digitalocean/netbox

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