A couple of handy low-level Linux tools included this week for logging and auditing. It’s interesting to see continued improvements on well-worn themes, alongside posts espousing serverless and public cloud.

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News

A good exploration of why you probably shouldn’t be focusing your efforts (as an organisation or I’d say as an individual) on build private clouds.
https://m.subbu.org/dont-build-private-clouds-9a54b3d30c8b#.3k711kybp

The co-evolution of technical systems and operational practices is a common theme on this newsletter. This post takes a close look at how serverless emerged and why it’s going to be important.
https://hackernoon.com/why-the-fuss-about-serverless-4370b1596da0#.ot36il2sd

The Linux audit subsystem is pretty great and this post explores some of it’s capabilities and the reasons why you might want to audit syscalls. It also has some interesting discussions about different applicable tools.
https://slack.engineering/syscall-auditing-at-scale-e6a3ca8ac1b8#.s2qk5i5l5

An interesting example of wrapping existing application code and packaging it up as a container. In this case talking a COBOL application and allowing you to integrate it into your Docker stack.
https://articles.microservices.com/writing-docker-microservices-in-cobol-de72d5947b4f#.wcseh6t7n

Kubernetes is definitely gathering steam, and lots of organisations are looking to provide a Kubernetes distribution. This post explores what this means for the likely consumers.
http://www.morethanseven.net/2016/11/23/the-coming-of-the-kubernetes-distributions/

An exploration of implementing a green/blue deployment scheme for Lambda based serverless applications. No perfect approach yet it seems but some useful ideas.
https://blog.mitocgroup.com/blue-green-deployments-for-serverless-powered-applications-on-aws-22a08447aa72#.tql1ng6jo

A quick look at best practices for testing Ansible playbooks on Windows using Test Kitchen.
https://hodgkins.io/testing-ansible-roles-windows-test-kitchen

Logging is an area that can benefit from improvements in most organisations, and this post does a good job of coming to that realisation and then lots of code examples of implementing a robust logging setup.
https://juxt.pro/blog/posts/logging.html

Tools

mtail looks handy for anyone with a set of logs that would like to get that information into a time series database of your choice. A simple DSL for parsing logs and incrementing counters, and sending the data to Prometheus, collectd, StatsD, or Graphite.
https://github.com/google/mtail

Mentioned in one of the posts above, go-audit is a tool for streaming Linux audit events into a centralised monitoring infrastructure, rather than processing the events locally.
https://github.com/slackhq/go-audit

2016/17 State of On-Call Webinar (with DevOps.com): Register to learn what 800+ survey respondents have to say about life on-call.
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