Posts on what the fundamentals of operations and the tradeoffs of automated vs manual testing, alongside technical posts on container clusters, continuous integration and application tracing. Hopefully something for everyone.

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 fantastic example of integrating GitHub with webpagetest, and allowing developers to ask for additional tests to be run by applying a label to a pull request.
https://medium.com/engineering-housing/continuous-integration-using-webpagetest-and-webpack-1f4465d95405#.jks29g9pm

Some great nuggets of hard-earned wisdom for anyone working in operations. Everything from tips on communication, empathy, design and more.
http://www.slideshare.net/MarkImbriaco/what-i-learned-leading-ops-at-github-heroku-digitalocean-and-more

A detailed multi-part series about monitoring Kubernetes. A good description of all the moving parts and how to get at useful metrics for all of them.
https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/monitoring-kubernetes-era/
https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/monitoring-kubernetes-performance-metrics/
https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/how-to-collect-and-graph-kubernetes-metrics/

Interesting look at the value of end-to-end-testing approaches, comparing automation with a more manual, crowdsourced approach.
http://www.slideshare.net/KatieChin3/comparing-agile-aq-approaches-to-endtoend-testing-68145860

A nice look at the benefits to updating to the latest version, in this case of PHP7. Some good tips on making sure everything will work after the upgrade as well as some impressive data around performance improvements.
https://engineering.tumblr.com/post/152998126990/php-7-at-tumblr

Some performance problems are relatively easy to find and fix, others are a lot more esoteric. This detailed write up is definitely the latter, but is an interesting read for anyone who likes low-level details.
http://digihippo.net/?p=241

A quick look at a few approaches to building static artefacts using Docker as the build system, and why you should be using docker cp rather than just bind mounting from the local file system.
http://blog.slashdeploy.com/2016/11/07/docker-build-container-pattern/

Tracing the traffic between services is becoming increasingly important with the explosion of microservice architectures. This post walks through such a setup.
https://tech.showmax.com/2016/10/tracing-distributed-systems-at-showmax/

Team formation and change are interesting areas so I found this post about a form of self organisation interesting, especially given the examples of proportions included.
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bharry/2015/07/24/self-forming-teams-at-scale/

A basic example of setting up a Nomad cluster behind a load balancer, in this case using Consul, HAProxy and DNSMasq.
https://medium.com/@mustwin/service-discovery-and-load-balancing-with-hashicorps-nomad-db435c590c26#.gbv1dzibr

Jobs

Flatiron Health in NYC is looking for Senior Technical Operations engineers of all types to help lead the fight on cancer with organized data. Enable secure, speedy, repeatable delivery and rapid iteration. Tools include AWS, Ansible, Python, Jenkins, Splunk (and more) in Linux and Windows environments.

Linux: http://grnh.se/3di78t1 Windows: http://grnh.se/pbiqs11

Tools

If you’re building your own dashboards it can be easier to start with some sort of framework. Enter this project, which provides a set of responsive templates specifically aimed at making dashboards quickly.
https://github.com/keen/dashboards

RackHD describes itself as a stack for enabling automated hardware management and orchestration. It’s an opinionated set of existing tools, bundled together with a high-level API server.
http://rackhd.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

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