DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #332 - 7th May 2017
Lots of talk of multi-cloud and lock-in this week it seemed, although mainly coming from proponents of certain technologies. Some interesting architecture posts as well this week; from event driven serverless architectures to a simpler approach to microservices with SCS.
Sponsor
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News
There are lots of arguments for the various practices often seen with devops. This post makes a strong economic argument focused on learning quickly in small batches.
https://barryoreilly.com/2016/08/29/the-most-important-metric-youll-ever-need/
A solid argument that multi-cloud approaches should probably not be the default for the majority of users when considering either lock-in or disaster recovery.
https://blog.symphonia.io/on-serverless-multi-cloud-and-vendor-lock-in-da930b3993f
A similar conclusion to the issue of lock-in for serverless, but with a different rationale. Lock-in is fairly dependent on context in my experience, and more important in some areas and organisations than others which isn’t mentioned here.
https://medium.com/@PaulDJohnston/why-vendor-lock-in-with-serverless-isnt-what-you-think-it-is-d6be40fa9ca9
Linuxkit was one of the announcements at the recent DockerCon event, and this post demonstrates how to get started building your own Linux-based VM on OS X, running on xhyve.
http://www.nebulaworks.com/blog/2017/04/23/getting-started-linuxkit-mac-os-x-xhyve/
Some folks have very strong opinions when it comes to continuous integration. This post derives a scoring system you can use as a health check for teams, if you agree with the philosophy around trunk-based development.
https://paulhammant.com/2017/05/01/scoring-continuous-integration/
A nice example of the power of event driven infrastructure, using CloudWatch as the trigger and Lambda, in this case to create DNS records for autoscaling instances.
https://engineering.yoyowallet.com/the-power-of-cloudwatch-events-33c2f65814b9
An interesting proposal for a slightly different take on microservice architectures, named Self Contained Systems (or SCS). The idea appears to be to sacrifice some tenets of microservices to make deployment simpler.
https://www.infoq.com/articles/scs-microservices-done-right
This post makes the case that there are lots of hello-world Kubernetes examples but few real-world ones, and promptly shows a nice example and then walks through the design decisions.
https://engineering.bitnami.com/2017/05/02/an-example-of-real-kubernetes-bitnami.html
https://github.com/bitnami/kube-manifests
A good comparison of the pros and cons of structured logging and having applications emit events, and why one doesn’t really replace the other for comprehensive monitoring.
https://hackernoon.com/caveats-in-metric-collection-b92e31c39f3d
Onboarding engineers and systems administrators to a complex system can take time. This new project is collecting hints and tips to make that quicker and more useful.
https://github.com/actionjack/so-you-want-to-recruit-a-devops-engineer
CNCF - Cloud Native Computing Foundation
Free Webinar – Cloud Native Storage with Clint Kitson, Eric Han, and Mark Balch
Bringing all of your applications to a cloud native environment is going to be critical in ensuring you are taking full advantage of what containers can deliver. These environments present an opportunity to optimize your applications, including ones that need persistent data, for any cloud.
Join our webcast and hear from industry leaders about both traditional and modern applications and how they use data. Learn the basics of cloud native storage and how you might make choices about cloud and storage platforms supporting your applications.
https://goo.gl/qrVddo
KubeCon / CloudNativeCon Austin - Join leading Kubernetes and Cloud Native technologists in Austin for a full range of technology sessions on the cloud native ecosystem.
We sold out in Berlin and are excited to see thousands of you from the community in Austin! Call for papers and registration information linked.
https://goo.gl/yKCHvh
Jobs
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http://hrd.cm/2jHrf1B
Events
Configuration Management Camp has been a highlight of the events calendar in Europe for years and is finally making it to Portland in the US on August 3rd. The CFP is open now.
https://github.com/cfgmgmtcamp/2017-pdx-cfp/
Tools
If you’re using lots of Kubernetes you might have different contexts you want to manage. Enter kubectx, a handy tool for flipping backwards and forward, with support for aliases and shell completion.
https://ahmet.im/blog/kubectx/
BeePing is a service to allow for HTTP Monitoring via API. When running BeePing you can hit it’s API and it will confirm various properties like performance or SSL cert expiry for the requested domain.
https://github.com/yanc0/beeping
JSONNET is a handy programming language for creating JSON, useful for all sorts of configuration tasks. Kube.libjsonnet is a library for helping manage Kubernetes configs in a sane manner.
https://github.com/heptio/kube.libsonnet
Resolving DevOps and IT incidents is not enough. Download the eBook: “Blameless Post Mortems (and how to do them)”, and start learning from them.
http://try.victorops.com/BlamelessPostMortems/DevOpsWeekly