DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #320 - 12th February 2017

Several posts this week from last week’s Configuration Management Camp event. It’s always nice to catch up with folks from across the different communities and to talk about higher-level problems.

Sponsor

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Gene Kim shares top lessons learned [Webcast Replay]

DevOps researcher, Gene Kim, shares first-hand insights and lessons he learned while co-authoring The DevOps Handbook, including: DevOps transformation case studies around continuous integration and delivery, and concrete techniques to build a culture of continuous experimentation and learning – including those from Google, Etsy, Nordstrom, and Capital One. Check it out!
http://ow.ly/EXwE304sS1F

News

A comprehensive postmortem for the recent GitLab database outage. Read it to learn how to improve your processes not to criticise with the benefits of hindsight.
https://about.gitlab.com/2017/02/10/postmortem-of-database-outage-of-january-31/

My talk from Configuration Management Camp featuring research into what people are putting inside their containers, and why containers as black boxes pose operational challenges.
https://speakerdeck.com/garethr/whats-inside-that-container

A few nice folks had a great conversation at Configuration Management Camp about the role of the CMDB, and what a modern CMDB might look like. Some raw notes from that chat.
https://www.evernote.com/shard/s301/sh/ecfdc3b5-01be-4c85-80a6-600dfbe2b245/fc17e00e7d3277d5
https://gist.github.com/f3ew/1247b8fd656dd1e3c5b57268079d25c6

A nice walkthrough of setting up Jenkins to autoscale based on demand within Kubernetes. Lots of code samples and screenshots if you want to try it out.
http://www.monkeylittle.com/blog/2017/02/09/autoscaling-jenkins-with-kubernetes.html

A handy introduction to using inSpec for making test assertions around security and compliance activities.
https://www.10thmagnitude.com/tech-blog/compliance-code-introduction-inspec/

A presentation from Configuration Management Camp about how adopting SaaS and serverless approaches pushes the configuration to the edges, and how promise theory can be used to understand the problem.
http://www.slideshare.net/jedi4ever/code-will-come-servers-will-go-but-config-management-will-stay-forever

A good argument for shipping as small a diff as possible to production, based on visibility and operability.
https://blog.skyliner.io/ship-small-diffs-741308bec0d1#.xeevfm77f

A detailed walkthrough of using Terraform, Ansible, Packer and some custom Python code to build a highly-available Rancher cluster in AWS.
https://www.tastycidr.net/rancher-creating-a-highly-available-container-orchestration-cluster-on-ec2/

The guarantees provided by hashes are of critical importance for security. This post delves into some of the mathematics to give a better understanding of why and how.
https://diogomonica.com/2017/02/03/why-should-hard-be-secure-enough-information-and-non-invertibility-2/

Puppet has been around more than 10 years, and changed a lot during that time. This presentation takes us back to basics, showing some of the useful core functionality which is sometimes overlooked.
http://www.slideshare.net/roidelapluie/puppet-dsl-back-to-the-basics

The question of where Docker containers will be used is still often asked. This post takes a strong negative stance on using Docker for databases, but the comments balance some of the points out.
https://myopsblog.wordpress.com/2017/02/06/why-databases-is-not-for-containers/#comments

Jobs

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FreeAgent are looking for a UK-based (Edinburgh or remote) Senior Operations Engineer. FreeAgent is one of the UK’s leading SaaS accounting products. You’ll be working as part of our Infrastructure team, squashing single points of failure, fixing bottlenecks, profiling load and solving interesting scaling and automation problems. Some of the tech we use includes Puppet, SmartOS, Ruby and MySQL. You can read the full details on our website.
https://freeagent.workable.com/jobs/411292
http://engineering.freeagent.com/2017/02/06/ha-infrastructure-without-breaking-the-bank/

Tools

HubCommander is a new chatbox for GitHub organization management. You can create new repos, grant permissions, enable Travis all from your chat room.
https://github.com/Netflix/hubcommander
http://techblog.netflix.com/2017/02/introducing-hubcommander.html

Interested in ChatOps? Get the free 75 page O’Reilly report covering everything from basic concepts to deployment strategies.
http://try.victorops.com/DOWeekly/chatops