DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #328 - 9th April 2017
More operations content this week, with great posts on the importance of documentation, practical points about the four pillars of devops, what developers can do to make operations easier and on the importance of safety when building effective teams.
Sponsor
Are your incident management skills sharp, or are you continuously fighting fires? Take the free, online incident management assessment from VictorOps and compare your practices against leading DevOps methodologies.
http://try.victorops.com/ima/devopsweekly
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DevOps Journey Series: End User Monitoring [replay]
When measuring DevOps success, it’s not just about feature delivery speed, but how end users respond to your innovation. Watch part 3 of our DevOps Journey Series and get practical tips for end user monitoring that you can implement quickly.
http://ow.ly/Ug4A309wkmC
News
A solid argument for why you shouldn’t use environment variables for secrets, in particular that the use of ENV for secrets provides lots of opportunities for secrets to be accidentally leaked.
https://diogomonica.com/2017/03/27/why-you-shouldnt-use-env-variables-for-secret-data/
An interesting presentation looking at the role of developers in enabling good operations and self-service platforms.
https://www.slideshare.net/Rundeck/helping-ops-help-you-developments-role-in-enabling-selfservice-operations
An indepth look at the use of good old DNS, covering monitoring and management as well as the use of DNS for service discovery.
https://labs.spotify.com/2017/03/31/spotifys-lovehate-relationship-with-dns/
A good look at the importance of process and documentation when it comes to operations at scale, with some great real-world examples and takeaways.
https://zwischenzugs.wordpress.com/2017/04/04/things-i-learned-managing-site-reliability-for-some-of-the-worlds-busiest-gambling-sites/
A post on the critical importance of safety in building effective teams. Contains a list of pathologies and how they impact on the formation of agile, self-organising groups of people.
https://theitriskmanager.wordpress.com/2017/04/01/executives-and-safety/
Many readers of this newsletter probably spend a fair amount of time at the command line, so this criticism of how we view this user interface is likely worth reading (although it would have been interesting to get a view of PowerShell in there too.)
http://mkremins.github.io/blog/unix-not-acceptable-unix/
Many systems expose some sort of API for other systems to consume, but what makes an API fit-for-purpose? This post looks at the importance of monitoring, acceptance tests, generated documentation and other good ideas.
https://medium.com/salesforce-engineering/setting-up-a-web-api-for-success-ff039f76d322
A good recap on the main principles of Devops, with some of the organisation and cultural antipatterns explained, and some interesting points on repeating some of this errors when adopting containers.
https://www.slideshare.net/KrisBuytaert/run-stuff-deploy-stuff-jax-london-2017-edition
Jobs
CL seeks a UNIX/Linux systems administrator to join a small (~50), tech-driven, laid-back workplace to assist in maintaining a stable and scalable platform where milliseconds matter. Come help us save the world, or at least our corner of the Internet.
https://www.craigslist.org/about/craigslist_is_hiring
DevOps has come a long way. So has job hunting. Try Hired
http://hrd.cm/2jHrf1B
Tools
springboard is a cli utility to help get your secrets into vault. It allows for storing encrypted files in source control, and publishing those secrets securely in Vault.
https://github.com/benschw/springboard
One of the issues for some with the unikernel approach is the need to use specific programming languages. This demonstration shows a possible alternative, in this case transpiling PHP.
https://github.com/tfjmp/php2uni
https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/srg/opera/publications/papers/2017ic2ePHP2Uni.pdf
Are your incident management skills sharp, or are you continuously fighting fires? Take the free, online incident management assessment from VictorOps and compare your practices against leading DevOps methodologies.
http://try.victorops.com/ima/devopsweekly