DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #291 - 24th July 2016
A number of articles this week about devops in more traditional IT organisations. As time goes by It feels like devops is no-longer as strongly aligned with web operations as maybe it once way, a change I find interesting to watch.
Sponsor
Downtime is expensive - in more ways that one. Learn the costs of downtime and how to minimize them in the new eBook from VictorOps, “Making the Case for Real-Time Incident Management.”
http://try.victorops.com/downtimedata/devopsweekly
Sponsored
Verizon’s DevOps Transformation [webcast replay]
Check out this webcast replay to hear Nita Awatramani, Associate Director at Verizon Enterprise Solutions, share how Verizon was able to streamline operations, optimize business output and deliver more useful products faster to their consumers by using a DevOps approach. The results are amazing!
http://ow.ly/ooQd300TUwM
News
Change is really hard for most people and organisations, and devops is way past the crazy early adopter phase. A great reminder that starting somewhere, anywhere, is the best course of action.
https://besttech.io/the-scary-leap-from-sysops-to-devops-8a7ff91882dd#.4xn4ke9yy
Puppet 4 has added a lot of new features over the last year or so. This deck does a great job of summarising them - from the new types interface to iteration, native functions and more
http://www.slideshare.net/ripienaar/whirlwind-tour-of-puppet-4
A handy summary of how to write systemd unit files, going from simple hello world style examples to templates and other useful advanced features.
http://hokstadconsulting.com/devops/writing-systemd-units
I’ve also seen people surprised by how Docker labels, and in particular latest, work. So the following post is a useful reminder of what labels actually mean, as well as why other immutable metadata is also useful.
https://medium.com/microscaling-systems/using-docker-tags-to-mess-with-peoples-minds-367bb2c93bd0#.axxivoxej
An excellent summary of the current state of Serverless, with high-level details about the movement as well as brief summaries of important companies, products and technologies.
https://451research.com/report-short?entityId=89566
Container security has definitely gone from being a concern to being a feature over the last year or two/ This presentation is a good summary of the various capabilities added to the Kernel or to Docker which can be used to restrict container operations.
http://www.slideshare.net/PhilEstes/docker-london-container-security
A high-level overview of some of the changes happening in many an IT organisation as they adopt devops practices.
http://community.hpe.com/t5/Transforming-IT/IDC-s-Cushing-Anderson-quot-DevOps-Training-and-the-Changing/ba-p/6876746#.V5R5LpOANBc
Hadoop is a relatively complex system to manage, and knowing what to monitor without a thorough understanding can be tricky. This set of blog posts aims to solve that conundrum whether you’re a Hadoop expert already or not.
https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/hadoop-architecture-overview/
https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/monitor-hadoop-metrics/
Excellent and comprehensive notes from a recent talk about how Google runs Google. Tips on maintaining interest in operations from staff, team organisation, incentivising other teams and more.
http://highscalability.com/blog/2016/7/18/how-does-google-do-planet-scale-engineering-for-a-planet-sca.html
Designing good HTTP APIs is worth careful consideration as changing APIs which achieve widespread use can be tricky. So it’s interesting to see a comprehensive set of API guidelines from Microsoft.
https://github.com/Microsoft/api-guidelines/blob/master/Guidelines.md
Events
Operability was one of my favourite events last year. A conference squarely focused on the operations side of modern IT, this year it’s back in London on the 19th and 20th of September with talks on evolving architecture, the people side of chatops, the importance of communications and more.
http://operability.io/
Tools
Remote management of servers is a common problem, and Chopsticks is a new solution. Rather than focus on a command line interface and a data language, Chopsticks is just a Python library.
http://mauveweb.co.uk/posts/2016/07/chopsticks.html
https://github.com/lordmauve/chopsticks
Cli53 is a handy command line tool for managing Amazon Route53 DNS records. As well as the ability to list, create and delete records you can also import and export from BIND formatted records.
https://github.com/barnybug/cli53
Downtime is expensive - in more ways that one. Learn the costs of downtime and how to minimize them in the new eBook from VictorOps, “Making the Case for Real-Time Incident Management.”
http://try.victorops.com/downtimedata/devopsweekly