2 minute read

Happy new year everyone. A big thank you to all the people who read Devops Weekly, everyone who built or wrote something I included in the newsletter last year, and a huge thank you to the current sponsors VictorOps and Dynatrace. Let me know what you’ll like to see more of in 2017.

Sponsor

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/

Sponsored

Practical Tips to Start Your DevOps Journey

Join Andreas Grabner, Chief DevOps Activist at Dynatrace on January 12th at 1:00 PM EST, to learn practical tips that all IT groups from Dev to Ops can use to start their DevOps journey quickly. With experience from hundreds of DevOps deployments, Andi will provide insights it would take your team months or years to learn firsthand.
http://ow.ly/yJpv306Zlyy

News

Some good practical tips for involving operations staff and teams within a sprint-based delivery model like Scrum.
http://agilopedia.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/how-to-continuously-involve-ops-stuff_6.html

It turns out Docker already has support for multi-architecture images, but it’s not yet fully exposed in the official tooling. This post explains how to create your own manifests to support ARM and X86 from the same Hub address.
http://container-solutions.com/multi-arch-docker-images/

A good argument for more specialisation in teams, with devops as the glue that ties a development team together.
http://www.informationweek.com/devops/project-management/the-devops-engineer-is-an-optical-illusion/a/d-id/1327647

An interesting attempt at a standard for HTTP service endpoints, for things like healthchecks, status endpoints, configuration and more.
https://github.com/beamly/SE4

Some good tips for any developer writing tests for there software, which hopefully should be everyone.
https://blog.nelhage.com/2016/12/how-i-test/

A good post for anyone looking at Docker for the first time. Lots of references and diagrams explaining what’s going on.
https://mhdzaherghaibeh.name/2016/12/30/what-i-have-learned-about-docker-in-the-past-few-days/

A good reminder that running databases (or any internal service) public on the internet without some sort of authentication is a terrible default.
https://medium.com/@shahinism/for-gods-sake-secure-your-mongo-redis-etc-4f310cf1bed2#.t5d5f3zku

Tools

Conductor is a new microservices orchestration engine. It provides a blueprint DSL to describe a process flow, and then wires up individual microservices as well as providing a useful visualisation of the topology.
https://github.com/Netflix/conductor
https://netflix.github.io/conductor/

Burry is a backup and recovery tool for etcd and zookeeper. As these tools are often used as critical components of some systems being able to use backups to recover from some failure modes is likely to be critical.
https://github.com/mhausenblas/burry.sh

Alerta is a powerful addition to a monitoring setup, providing a single place to manage alerts. It integrates with a wide range of monitoring systems and does simple de-duplication and correlation.
http://alerta.io/

Banshee is a real-time anomaly detection system for periodic metrics. It integrates nicely with statsd and can issue alerts as well as providing a nice dashboard.
https://github.com/eleme/banshee

Ostent collects metrics (memory, CPU, network IO, disk space, etc.) and forwards them to tools like InfluxDB, Graphite or Librato. It also features a simple user interface.
https://github.com/ostrost/ostent

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/

Updated: