We’re nearly to the end of 2016, which means at least a few people will be thinking back over the year, and about what 2017 will bring for the devops community. If you write, or come across, any good year-in-review posts do drop me a line and I’ll include the best ones I find.

Sponsor

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News

Support is an important part of the majority of IT organisations. This post argues that the typical structure in IT support teams is an impediment to achieving some of the successes that devops promises, and suggests swarming as an alternatives method.
https://medium.com/@JonHall_/itsm-devops-and-why-the-three-tier-structure-must-be-replaced-with-swarming-91e76ba22304#.r606rx2ce

A useful post on using a deployment pipeline to manage the code that describes your infrastructure environment, as well as your application code.
https://medium.com/@kief/https-medium-com-kief-using-pipelines-to-manage-environments- with-infrastructure-as-code-b37285a1cbf5#.ani23xa13

A nice real-world example of integrating AWS lambda and AWS codebuild to create a serverless workflow for backing up Route53 DNS records.
https://dashsoft.dk/da/blog/Route53_Lambda_Backups/
https://github.com/dashsoftaps/lambda-roadworker

Docker annoucned containerd this week, along with an accompanying open governance model. This post explains why that’s important to the wider container community.
https://integratedcode.us/2016/12/14/the-new-containerd-an-open-governance-driven-embeddable-container-runtime/

A good reminder that just having an SSH jump server isn’t enought, ultimately it opens up new risks and well as helping to address others.
https://donjones.com/2016/12/15/you-need-to-rethink-that-jump-server/

Monitoring systems often use statistical methods to display information, and lots of people will be familiar with percentiles in this context. But do you understand how they work? And when and where they are useful?
https://www.vividcortex.com/blog/why-percentiles-dont-work-the-way-you-think

We probably all use various package managers on a regular basis, for anyone who has considered how these work at a low level this paper, on the NP-completeness of the dependency problem, is an interesting read.
https://research.swtch.com/version-sat

There are different viewpoints on why containers are rapidly becoming the unit of software. This post looks specifically at packaging, effcientcy and security as the three main drivers of the change.
https://blog.heptio.com/cloud-native-part-4-79dc3875e03c#.4nfh9dvrh

Operations is a large discipline, with a lot of tribal knowledge and hard-earned wisdom. If you’re coming from a development background knowing where to start can be tricky. Operations For Developers aims to solve that problem, with content written for developers around common ops topics.
http://some.ops4devs.info/

The version of systemd in Centos7 is nearly 2 years old, which makes sense for PID1 in many cases but given the rapid development of systemd it might be useful to run something more recent. This post explains how.
https://maciej.lasyk.info/2016/Dec/16/systemd-231-latest-in-centos-7-thx-to-facebook/

Special offer

Terraform has featured regularly in this newsletter since it’s release, and the Terraform Book is an excellent introduction for beginners with enough solid material for old hands. The author has kindly provided a discount code for newsletter readers which will see 20% of the price of any of the bundles. Just use DEVOPSWEEKLYTF at checkout.
https://terraformbook.com/

Tools

A lot of information is stored in a github repository as it’s used, and the git CLI tools provide one interface to that information. GitQL provides a more SQL like read-only view, handy for repository anaylsis.
https://github.com/cloudson/gitql

The “2016/17 State of On-Call” report from VictorOps is now available to download. Learn what 800+ respondents have to say about life on-call, and steps they’re taking to make it better. Get your free copy here:
https://victorops.com/state-of-on-call-2016/