DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #292 - 31st July 2016
From containers and cloud to managing COTS products and a reminder that devops is much more than just technology. Enjoy.
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News
I don’t see the wider devops movement as a cult, but I do sometimes see the fetishisation of the technical aspects and the downplaying of the cultural, service management or transformation parts. Hopefully a useful reminder to some folks.
http://www.itskeptic.org/content/cult-devops
An excellent talk from the recent Monitorama conference, all about building a culture of observability. How do you go technically having logs, metrics and traces to making them a fundamental part of how you operate?
http://onemogin.com/observability/stripe/culture/monitoring/monitorama/creating-a-culture-of-observability.html
An interesting look under the hood of a moderately complex tech stack from Uber. Covers everything from programming language choices to data infrastructure to systems management and more.
https://eng.uber.com/tech-stack-part-one/
Kubernetes ships with a robust default scheduler, but it’s relatively simple to write your own for specific use cases. You can do this using the HTTP API too, which means schedulers can be implemented in whatever language you prefer. Here’s an example in elixir which acts as a nice hello world.
https://deis.com/blog/2016/scheduling-your-kubernetes-pods-with-elixir/
COTS (Commercial Off the Shelf) products are a reality in most if not all large organisations. This post is an interesting look at the difficulties of managing them in a modern IT world and how you can embrace devops practices for doing so.
https://www.infoq.com/articles/cots-in-devops-world
An interesting and detailed look at how different cloud providers do instance provisioning. Looking at two key themes in particular, a metadata service and cloud-init.
https://ahmetalpbalkan.com/blog/cloud-instance-provisioning
A good getting started example for anyone wanting to write Lambda functions in Javascript.
http://veewee.github.io/blog/writing-your-first-nodjs-lambda-function/
A brief introduction to the Riemann monitoring tool, extracted from the recent The Art of Monitoring book. Explains the basics of events and streams.
http://thenewstack.io/introducing-riemann/
Jobs
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Tools
Hubblestack is a security auditing tool build on top of SaltStack. It provides tools for file integrity scanning, integration with osquery and a reporting engine.
http://hubblestack.io/
Fabio is a fast, modern, zero-conf load balancing HTTP(S) router for deploying microservices managed by consul. Also provides integration with AWS ELB and API Gateway, and natively outputs graphite metrics.
https://github.com/eBay/fabio
Test Kitchen is a popular acceptance testing framework for infrastructure, and kitchen-terraform provides a plugin using Terraform to provision the infrastructure under test.
https://github.com/newcontext/kitchen-terraform
In pursuit of everything as code, Mermaid is a DSL for generating a wide variety of charts and diagrams, from gantt charts and flowcharts to sequence diagrams and more. It provides a powerful online editor and output to SVG too.
http://knsv.github.io/mermaid/index.html#mermaid
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