DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #306 - 6th November 2016
A mix of content this week covering individual tools, technical underpinnings, more general practices and lots of interesting looking events coming up to attend or present at.
Sponsor
Downtime sucks. Learn how leading minds in tech respond to outages on the Nov. 16th “Ask Me Anything” from Catchpoint & O’Reilly Media.
http://try.victorops.com/AMA
Sponsored
Transforming 6 Months Waterfall to 1 Hour Code Deploys [Webinar]
On November 17th, Anita Engleder, DevOps Lead at Dynatrace, will present the challenges she and her team faced transforming 6 Months Waterfall to 1 Hour Code Deploys. Topics include: how to align key stakeholders and teams, the cultural and mindset shift all engineering teams had to make to achieve “NoOps”, and the criticality of having a continuous feedback loop. Register today.
http://ow.ly/MCBs305RKsM
News
A good look at the history of the remote procedure call pattern for building distributed systems. Useful low-level context for anyone building modern applications.
https://speakerdeck.com/caitiem20/a-brief-history-of-distributed-programming-rpc
A good introduction to Consul for service discovery which goes on to discuss two years worth of best practices learned from running in production.
https://stripe.com/blog/service-discovery-at-stripe
A practice like continuous delivery is less a technical change and more a process and practice one, and as such you’ll likely benefit from the tips in this slidedeck for selling continuous delivery to the rest of your organisation.
https://speakerdeck.com/suziejprince/tips-for-selling-continuous-delivery-to-your-business
Talk about applying test driven development to infrastructure as code, with Puppet, Docker, Test Kitchen and Serverspec. Interesting approach to mocking binaries.
https://www.cedric-meury.ch/2016/10/test-driven-infrastructure-with-puppet-docker-test-kitchen-and-serverspec-yury-tsarev-gooddata/
http://www.slideshare.net/YuryTsarev/containercon-test-driven-infrastructure
An in-depth look at deploying a multi-service application to Kubernetes, looking in particular at consumer driven contracts using Pact to ensure everything works as intended.
https://medium.com/@enxebre/gitlab-consumer-driven-contracts-helm-and-kubernetes-b7235a60a1cb#.qvwn29mwl
A useful developer-centric post on what a container actually is under the hood.
https://glyph.twistedmatrix.com/2016/10/what-am-container.html
Developing software for Windows likely means testing across more than one version of Windows. This post explains some best practices for building and maintaining Windows virtual machine images using Packer.
https://hodgkins.io/best-practices-with-packer-and-windows
Systemd is now on most of the main Linux distributions so learning some of the supporting tools is a useful activity. This post covers coredumpctl, bootctl, systemd-cgtop and a few other recent additions.
https://www.linux.com/learn/5-systemd-tools-you-should-start-using-now
An interesting post on how to setup a private maven repository on Amazon S3. Discussed in the context of Android development but useful for anyone developing in Java or other JVM languages.
http://ryanharter.com/blog/2015/06/18/hosting-a-private-maven-repo-on-amazon-s3/
A recent addition to Puppet is the Puppet Query Language or PQL. This post explores some of the syntax, how to use it and where it might be useful.
https://www.devco.net/archives/2016/11/01/puppet-query-language.php
Somewhat simplistic but still useful reminder to not place all of your EC2 instances or other servers in a public subnet.
https://thepassionatecraftsman.com/where-to-put-your-server-in-a-private-or-public-subnet-ab1fa971269c#.vbkz6n8ai
Events
Config Management Camp is back in Gent on February 6th and 7th next year, as always it’s the days following FOSDEM. The CFP is open now and the organisers are seeking talks on all things automation and operations.
http://cfgmgmtcamp.eu/gent-2017/
Monitorama has announced their next event taking place May 22nd to 24th 2017 in Portland, OR. As usual you can expect a ton of fantastic talks about monitoring, alerting and related DevOps topics. This is a single-track event that you won’t want to miss. Devops Weekly readers can use the code ‘DEVOPSWEEKLY’ through December 31st, 2016 for a $50 discount off General Admission tickets.
https://ti.to/monitorama/pdx2017/discount/DEVOPSWEEKLY
CITCON brings together people from every corner of the software development industry to discuss Continuous Delivery. Everything from Test Driven Development to Continuous Deployment, from code metrics to post-release monitoring. CITCON New York is coming up on the 9th and 10th of December and registration is open now.
http://citconf.com/newyork2016/
All Day Devops is an online event spanning 15 time zones, 15 hours and a whopping 54 sessions. All Day Devops is taking place on the 15th of November and registration is free for all.
http://www.alldaydevops.com/
Downtime sucks. Learn how leading minds in tech respond to outages on the Nov. 16th “Ask Me Anything” from Catchpoint & O’Reilly Media.
http://try.victorops.com/AMA