DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #354 - 8th October 2017

Several posts this week with content from workshops, classes and training sessions. I know just how much effort it takes to put together high-quality learning material like that and I’m super appreciative and happy that folks are increasingly making this content freely available online.

Sponsor

Essential eBook for DevOps pros: The Dev and Ops Guide to Incident Management offers 25+ pages of insight into building teams and improving your response to downtime.
http://try.victorops.com/DevOpsWeekly/IM_eBook

Sponsored

Lessons learned while writing The DevOps Handbook

In a recent webinar, Gene Kim, co-author of The Phoenix Project, shared the top insights he discovered while co-authoring The DevOps Handbook. Read about the DevOps best practices he shared. As a bonus, you’ll also get lessons learned from Dynatrace’s own DevOps transformation – 26 major releases per year and 170 production deployments.
http://ow.ly/q22H30fm5Wh

News

Designing and building secure software is not easy, and few teams adopt a formal approach to solving the problem. The UK National Cyber Security Centre have published a handy set of 8 principles with which to test your development methodology.
https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/blog-post/secure-development-and-deployment
https://github.com/ukncsc/secure-development-and-deployment/

The STELLA report from the SNAFU catchers consortium was published this week and makes interesting reading for anyone working on incident response or running large-scale systems. It contains writeups of several failures involving common technologies, delves into the theory and provides useful recommendations.
http://stella.report

An excellent take on why monitoring is changing in the face of the adoption of cloud native platforms and microservice architectures. Nicely ties the co-evolution of the spaces together.
https://medium.com/@copyconstruct/monitoring-in-the-time-of-cloud-native-c87c7a5bfa3e

A good take on why Kubernetes is interesting. The point about having a single database of the state of all of your applications is super powerful in my view.
https://jvns.ca/blog/2017/10/05/reasons-kubernetes-is-cool/

An excellent set of resources for anyone wanting to understand distributed systems. A nice, and not overlong, list of important books, papers and blog posts.
https://caitiem.com/2017/09/07/getting-started-with-distributed-systems/

Detailed notes for a class on distributed systems. This is perfect if you already know some bits but maybe not the formal language and want to identify areas for more investigation.
https://github.com/aphyr/distsys-class

A good post on the tension between the desire to fix the problem when an outage occurs and the need to communicate with users and others about the problem.
http://www.joetheitguy.com/2017/09/27/service-management-isnt-one-job-two/

A good slide deck exploring practical things you and your team can do to improve the operability of your systems.
https://blog.robthatcher.net/2017/10/02/practical-operability-techniques-for-teams-operability-practical-tips/

Microservices typically present some interesting challenges for testing, which can easily result in expensive, slow and brittle tests to quickly dominate. This post has some good tips for unit testing services.
https://medium.com/@nathankpeck/microservice-testing-unit-tests-d795194fe14e

An interesting look at the numbers behind the growth of hyper-scale public cloud provider datacenters, and why the idea that everything will rapidly move to the public cloud might play out more slowly.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-adoption-public-cloud-likely-wont-exceed-17-percent-mark-thiele/?published=t

Assessing risk, and using that assessment to help design systems or processes, is a useful skill. It’s critical to avoid under (or over) investment in securing systems in particular. This freely available workshop content serves as a great introduction to risk assessment fundamentals.
https://medium.com/@seamustuohy/risk-assessment-fundamentals-1b7b1b9e103f

A nice detailed look at how docker handles failure of containers, looking at signals, exit codes, restart policies and health checks.
https://sreeninet.wordpress.com/2017/08/15/docker-features-for-handling-containers-death-and-resurrection/

The Linux Foundation

Free Your Metadata by joining this webinar w/ODPi, IBM, ING, and Hortonworks October 12, Online

We all use metadata every day. Metadata today has gravity, however, it should have the ability to be moved with the data and be augmented and processed through APIs for permitted usages. Join us and find out how we’re going to accomplish this.
https://goo.gl/yhqQtQ

CNCF - Cloud Native Computing Foundation

Free Webinar - Cloud Native Apps from Development to Production October 12, Online

Learn about the advantages and elements of a cloud-native approach, and how GitLab is making it simpler to deploy cloud-native applications to production using Kubernetes.
https://goo.gl/fsSpPE

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon - Join leading Kubernetes, Docker, and Cloud Native technologists, December 6-8, in Austin for a broad range of technical sessions on the cloud native ecosystem. We sold out in Berlin and are excited to see thousands of you from the community join us, this time in Austin!
http://goo.gl/wbdqve

Events

DevSecCon is back in London on the 19th and 20th of October. An interesting schedule of topics for operators, developers and security folks with talks on securing Apple laptops, making process secure by default, compliance in a continuous delivery world and more.
http://www.devseccon.com/

Tools

Kedge aims to provide a high-level data-centric interface for describing Kubernetes applications, with a focus on good defaults and familiarity for folks already using the lower-level APIs.
http://kedgeproject.org/
https://github.com/kedgeproject/kedge

The Docker Version Manager (dvm) is a cross-platform command-line tool that helps you install and switch between Docker clients. Handy if you’re working with a range of different server versions.
https://howtowhale.github.io/dvm/

Like DevOps? Register for All Day DevOps - a FREE online conference this October, offering 100 DevOps-focused sessions across six different tracks. Learn more & register:
http://bit.ly/2wLKpbV