A selection of links this week from KubeCon, as well as a bunch of other non-Kubernetes related posts and tools for everyone else.

Sponsor

A robust mobile app is essential for on-call. See why VictorOps updated both native iOS and Android apps.
http://try.victorops.com/DevOpsWeekly/MobileBlog

KubeCon

One of my favourite talks from KubeCon, drawing comparisons between how Kubernetes could evolve with the management of the linux kernel and linux distributions.
https://speakerdeck.com/thockin/kubecon-2017-kernels-and-distros

A good overview of the current state of container build, describing the problem and then reviewing a number of tools all with different tradeoffs.
https://www.slideshare.net/MichaelDucy/survey-of-container-build-tools-83516254

A useful post with observations about Kubernetes from a Docker perspective. Useful if you’re investigating Kubernetes and are already familiar with Docker tooling.
https://jpetazzo.github.io/2017/12/06/letter-to-santa-kube/

I gave a talk at KubeCon on the need for developer tooling around Kubernetes configuration, in particular drawing on the mature testing practices from traditional configuration management tools and applying the same ideas to Kubernetes.
https://speakerdeck.com/garethr/developer-tooling-for-kubernetes-configurations

An important post for anyone looking at running a Kubernetes cluster. What makes for a production-grade experience? A quick rundown of various properties and some of the tools that do and don’t support them.
https://5pi.de/2017/12/15/production-grade-kubernetes/

A nice write-up of the KubeCon event from a first-time attendee. Links to some of the talks and pulls out community, stability and innovation as the main takeaways.
https://medium.com/@ryandotclair/reflecting-on-kubecon-2017-c6ef22ce4b21

News

A great post with tips for anyone working on a team which supports internal developers. Discussion of a free-market software culture, internal tools support, treating tools as products and more.
http://engineroom.ft.com/2017/12/01/tips-for-in-house-teams-in-a-free-market-software-culture/

With microservices and containers it’s a regular refrain that everyone now has distributed systems problems now. But what do we mean when we say something is a distributed system? This post provides a useful definition.
http://container-solutions.com/what-is-a-distributed-system/

A detailed introduction to Kafka, covering what Kafka is, how it scales out, where you might use it and a look at the new KSFL DSL for writing streaming jobs.
https://hackernoon.com/thorough-introduction-to-apache-kafka-6fbf2989bbc1

A detailed set of posts on monitoring PostgreSQL. The first post covers what metrics you should keep an eye on when running PostgreSQL, and the second post delves into a number of the tools for doing so.
https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/postgresql-monitoring/
https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/postgresql-monitoring-tools/

Interesting post on applying devops practices to large organisations. Some opinionated historical context and some discussion of similarities and differences between devops and matrix management, agile and digital transformation.
http://www.automationlogic.com/devops-make-sense-large-organisations-kris-saxton/

Tools

Kashti is a dashboard for anyone using Brigade, a tool I’ve mentioned previously for building elaborate pipelines composed of multiple containers running on Kubernetes.
https://open.microsoft.com/2017/12/06/kashti-kubernetes-open-source-microsoft/
https://github.com/Azure/kashti

Jo is a handy utility which can output JSON based on arguments to the CLI tool. Handy for API testing and other use cases.
https://github.com/jpmens/jo

Kitchen Terraform is a plugin for Test Kitchen to allow for testing resources provisioned by Terraform.
https://newcontext-oss.github.io/kitchen-terraform/

A robust mobile app is essential for on-call. See why VictorOps updated both native iOS and Android apps.
http://try.victorops.com/DevOpsWeekly/MobileBlog