DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #301 - 2nd October 2016
A quick shout-out to all the people who send me links for the newsletter. Devops as a topic is very wide ranging and there is always more interesting content out there, so if you write anything or see anything please do email or ping me at @garethr on Twitter.
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News
The pets vs cattle analogy has been common when talking about infrastructure for a while, but have you ever wondered where it came from? And what the original meaning was?
http://cloudscaling.com/blog/cloud-computing/the-history-of-pets-vs-cattle/
A pretty indepth hands-on guide to running Rancher as your container platform of choice. Lots of code examples for installation and using Compose to define your applications.
http://agiletesting.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/docker-orchestration-with-rancher.html
InSpec is a handy tool for writing infrastructure acceptance tests, and the following post is a nice hands-on example of how to write your own custom resources to make your controls simpler.
https://tech.spaceapegames.com/2016/09/23/custom-inspec-resources/
With all the interesting technology around it’s easy to forget that automation is but one part of the devops story. This post is a good reminder, focusing instead on the culture, measurement and sharing aspects.
https://devopscollective.org/2016/04/19/automation-is-not-devops/
With the release of Windows Server 2016 we also have a full release of Nano to play with. Here’s a post which contains instructions for running Chef on Nano, but is a pretty good getting started guide too.
http://www.hurryupandwait.io/blog/creating-a-docker-container-host-on-windows-nano-server-with-chef
A nice explanation of the evolution of Docker from the point of view of the process tree. A solid rationale for the engine as intermediary process and where containerd fits in.
https://gist.github.com/jpetazzo/f1beba1dfd4c38e8daf2ebf2dcf3cdeb
ElasticSearch is a popular backend for various search and monitoring applications, so understanding how to collect metrics and monitor its performance is a useful skill to have. Enter this excellent set of posts.
https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/elasticsearch-performance-scaling-problems/
https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/collect-elasticsearch-metrics/
https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/monitor-elasticsearch-performance-metrics/
A post with lots of tips for incident response, focusing on a formal communicate, learn, act loop.
http://blog.scalyr.com/2016/09/so-youve-been-paged/
Events
KubeCon is coming up in Seattle on the 8th and 9th of November. The schedule is packed with low level technical talks as well as lots of production case studies. Something for Kubernetes experts and those just getting started.
https://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/kubecon?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=devopsweekly&utm_source=newsletter&utm_content=a
Jobs
Are you a Puppet master? Hired gives top DevOps Engineers more power in their job search. Join today!
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Tools
Doorman is a very interesting approach to rate limiting for internal services, pushing some of the authority to the client but providing a central service knowledgable about the needs and wants to the different clients.
https://github.com/youtube/doorman
Babushka is a tool for automating systems administration tasks which makes explicit the configuration change and the test to verify the change.
http://babushka.me/
[WEBINAR] The Do’s and Dont’s of Post-Incident Analysis. Join VictorOps and Datadog to get an inside look at how to conduct modern post-incident analysis.
Sign up now: http://bit.ly/2d0Ejyk