DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #330 - 23rd April 2017
A packed issue this week with everything from service management to new container tools and views of devops as a movement to in-depth incident reports.
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News
Management tools tend to need a great deal of access to your systems to do there job, so protecting the interfaces to those management tools should be a priority. Some good advice and discussion of common patterns.
https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/blog-post/protect-your-management-interfaces
A nice look at the new LinuxKit project announced at DockerCon. This post delves into running the build tools and demonstrating how testing works, as a way to understand the potential of the tool.
https://gianarb.it/blog/linuxkit-operating-system-build-for-containers
An excellent writeup of issues with not securing a Kubernetes infrastructure during a recent CTF exercise. The issues are well explained, and nicely demonstrate the new attack surface areas with new tools.
https://hackernoon.com/capturing-all-the-flags-in-bsidessf-ctf-by-pwning-our-infrastructure-3570b99b4dd0
A detailed set of slides from DockerCon, covering how to analyse the performance of your applications running in containers.
https://www.slideshare.net/brendangregg/container-performance-analysis
Building systems automatically based on metadata is a lot less effort than describing them upfront. This post provides a great example of this looking at configuring monitoring and logging for applications running on Kubernetes.
https://medium.com/@micahhausler/compose-your-infrastructure-dont-micromanage-it-5cb2062946c
A quick introduction to the challenges of Windows server automation, and a look at the Chocolatey package manager, including the DSC integration.
https://www.slideshare.net/ferventcoder/software-management-with-powershell-dsc-and-chocolatey-powershell-summit-2017
I included a wide ranging infrastructure survey a few months back, and the results of that survey have just been published. Data on the adoption of configuration management tools, deployment pipelines, container adoption and more.
https://medium.com/@rothgar/infrastructure-survey-results-ec6ab950c5b
A nice summary of why ITIL and Devops are not incompatible. I like the statement “ITSM is Devops best practice.”
http://blog.queueload.com/2017/04/19/itil-devops-the-clash-that-shouldnt-be/
It’s always interesting to read people’s views of devops and this post makes some good observations about the changing role of developers and operators. I don’t buy all of it, and it’s too San Francisco centric, but a worthwhile read.
https://medium.com/@cindysridharan/what-is-devops-5b0181fdb953
Another good view of devops, again not one I completely buy into. The argument here is the operability is a clearer thing to aim for that the less easily measured devops.
http://www.alwaysagileconsulting.com/articles/aim-for-operability-not-devops-as-a-cult/
A good explanation of why you might want to turn over infrastructure on a regular basis, in this case terminating and restarting containers and hosts every day. No mention of dealing with forensics in this model of operations though.
https://blog.edgemesh.com/edgemeshs-clean-slate-protocol-782fa00eb3c6
Some good tips for anyone maintaining a Chef infrastructure (or really any large codebase) in particular focused on good naming practices and building for collaboration.
https://blog.dnsimple.com/2017/04/cookbook_maintenance/
An interesting way of explaining AWS VPC networking via a town planning analogy. Useful given the large number of concepts in the VPC APIs.
http://start.jcolemorrison.com/aws-vpc-core-concepts-analogy-guide/
A good first-hand report of dealing with an incident at scale, and the importance of holding a postmortem.
https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/02/Incident-management-at-Google-adventures-in-SRE-land.html
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Tools
Kubemr is a mapreduce framework for data processing on Kubernetes. It’s an interesting example of using the various Kubernetes primitives to build higher-level systems.
http://www.sajalkayan.com/post/kubemr.html
https://github.com/turbobytes/kubemr
Vaul UI is a user interface for the Vault secrets management application. It’s neatly packaged as either a local application or a shared web app, and supports a number of backends for authentication.
https://github.com/djenriquez/vault-ui
Deputize neatly integrates PagerDuty and LDAP, by exporting on-call information from a PagerDuty schedule to a configurable LDAP group.
https://blog.threatstack.com/balancing-security-and-your-on-call-rotation-using-deputize
https://github.com/threatstack/deputize
Weathervane is a new application for conducting a performance benchmark against a virtualized or cloud environment.
https://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2017/04/weathervane-performance-benchmarking-now-open-source.html
https://github.com/vmware/weathervane
Incident management is essential to modern DevOps environments. Learn why in the eBook, “Making the Case for Real-time Incident Management” from your friends at VictorOps.
http://try.victorops.com/realtime_incident_mgmt/devopsweekly