- Docker Secure Deployment Guidelines — deployment checklist for securely deploying Docker.
- The Devops Identity Crisis (Baron Schwartz) — I saw one framework-retailing bozo saying that devops was the art of ensuring there were no flaws in software. I didn’t know whether to cry or keep firing until the gun clicked.
- Apache Giraph — an iterative graph processing system built for high scalability. For example, it is currently used at Facebook to analyze the social graph formed by users and their connections.
- Apache Flink — a data processing system and an alternative to Hadoop’s MapReduce component. It comes with its own runtime, rather than building on top of MapReduce. As such, it can work completely independently of the Hadoop ecosystem. However, Flink can also access Hadoop’s distributed file system (HDFS) to read and write data, and Hadoop’s next-generation resource manager (YARN) to provision cluster resources. Since most Flink users are using Hadoop HDFS to store their data, we ship already the required libraries to access HDFS.
"devops" entries
What containers can do for you
Docker, Rocket, and big industry changes are making it a great time to seriously consider using containers.
If you read any IT news these days it’s hard to miss a headline about “the container revolution.” Docker’s year-and-a-half-old engine had a monopoly on the buzz until CoreOS launched its own project, Rocket, in December.
The technology behind containers can seem esoteric, but the advantages of bringing containers to your organization are more compelling than ever. And containers’ inherent portability opens up exciting new opportunities for how organizations host their applications.
Containerization is having its moment and there’s never been a better time to check it out for yourself.
DevOps keeps it cool with ICE
How inclusivity, complexity, and empathy are shaping DevOps.
Over the next five years, three ideas will be central to DevOps: the need for the DevOps community to become more Inclusive; the realization that increasing Complexity of systems is the underlying reason for DevOps; and the critical role of Empathy in the growth and adoption of DevOps. Channeling John Willis, I’ll coin my own DevOps acronym, ICE, which is shorthand for Inclusivity, Complexity, Empathy.
Inclusivity
There is a major expansion of the DevOps community underway, and it’s taking DevOps far beyond its roots in agile systems administration at “unicorn” companies (e.g., Etsy or Netflix). For instance, a significant majority (80-90%) of participants at the Ghent conference were first-time attendees, and this was also the case for many of the devopsdays in 2014 (NYC, Chicago, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, and others). Moreover, although areas outside development and operations were still underrepresented, there was a more even split between developers and operations folks than at previous events. It’s also not an accident that the DevOps Enterprise conference took place the week prior to the fifth anniversary devopsdays and included talks about the DevOps journeys at large “traditional” organizations like Blackboard, Disney, GE, Macy’s, Nordstrom, Raytheon, Target, UK.gov, US DHS, and many others.
The DevOps community has always been open and inclusive, and that’s one of the reasons why in the five years since the word “DevOps” was coined, no single, widely accepted definition or practice has emerged. The lack of definition is more of a blessing than a curse, as DevOps continues to be an open conversation about ways of making our organizations better. Within the DevOps community, old-time practitioners and “newbies” have much to learn from each other.
Four short links: 15 January 2015
Secure Docker Deployment, Devops Identity, Graph Processing, and Hadoop Alternative
The DevOps identity crisis
Why DevOps needs a manifesto after all, but may never get one.
DevOps is everywhere! The growth and mindshare of the movement is remarkable. But if you care deeply about DevOps, you might agree with me when I say that although its moment has “arrived,” DevOps is in serious trouble. The movement is fragmented and weakly defined, and is being usurped by those who care more about short-term opportunities than the long-term viability of DevOps.
They are the ninety-nine percent, and nobody cares
How bad could it be? Travel back in time. It is mid-November 2011, and Occupy Wall Street is occupying the headlines. One of the major reasons is that the protestors are targeting shipping ports on the West Coast, causing shutdowns and even violence. As things are getting out of hand, parts of the movement start condemning these actions as counter-productive, hurting the 99% instead of the intended 1%. Spokespeople for the movement are quoted in the media as saying the instigators “don’t represent the movement.”
Why did the Occupy movement become a footnote in history so fast? There were several reasons: there was no cohesive agreement on its identity, values, goals, and mission; in an effort to be unlike “them,” the OWS proponents avoided anything that looked like centralized leadership; and it seemed to be entirely negative, advocating nothing to replace what it wanted to remove.
I believe a similar thing is happening to DevOps right now, for many of the same reasons. Let’s talk about some of these problems.
Chop wood, carry water
The daily work of building and deploying complex software.
You are desperate to communicate, to edify or entertain, to preserve moments of grace or joy or transcendence, to make real or imagined events come alive. But you cannot will this to happen. It is a matter of persistence and faith and hard work. So you might as well just go ahead and get started. — Anne Lamott, bird by bird
Words like ‘persistence’ and ‘work’ rarely show up in the same sentence as DevOps. It is more likely to be characterized as that One Weird Trick that will suddenly make your entire software development and deployment pipeline work faster and without failure every time. There are DevOps consultants and entrepreneurs — people and companies promising jetpacks and hovercrafts delivered on schedule and with cost savings. This is the software equivalent of the legendary savant writer struck by divine genius, churning out perfect page after page without fail and swimming in millions from her bestselling novels.
In reality, DevOps is quite similar to writing — it requires concerted, daily effort — but instead of sitting down to write every day, the principles look something more like:
- Release regularly
- Release in small chunks
- Test in production (or, less provocatively: do not expect to release something perfect all the time)
- Collect system/performance data and user feedback
- Refine, optimize, repeat
There is no mad genius about writing, just as there is no secret sauce of DevOps. Read more…
Four short links: 30 December 2014
DevOps Security, Bit Twiddling, Design Debates, and Chinese IP
- DevOoops (Slideshare) — many ways in which your devops efforts can undermine your security efforts.
- Matters Computational (PDF) — low-level bit-twiddling and algorithms with source code. (via Jarkko Hietaniemi)
- Top 5 Game Design Debates I Ignored in 2014 (Daniel Cook) — Stretch your humanity.
- From Gongkai to Open Source (Bunnie Huang) — The West has a “broadcast” view of IP and ownership: good ideas and innovation are credited to a clearly specified set of authors or inventors, and society pays them a royalty for their initiative and good works. China has a “network” view of IP and ownership: the far-sight necessary to create good ideas and innovations is attained by standing on the shoulders of others, and as such there is a network of people who trade these ideas as favors among each other. In a system with such a loose attitude toward IP, sharing with the network is necessary as tomorrow it could be your friend standing on your shoulders, and you’ll be looking to them for favors. This is unlike the West, where rule of law enables IP to be amassed over a long period of time, creating impenetrable monopoly positions. It’s good for the guys on top, but tough for the upstarts.
Four short links: 24 December 2014
DRMed Objects, Eventual Consistency, Complex Systems, and Machine Learning Papers
- DRMed Cat Litter Box — the future is when you don’t own what you buy, and it’s illegal to make it work better. (via BoingBoing)
- Are We Consistent Yet? — the eventuality of consistency on different cloud platforms.
- How Complex Systems Fail (YouTube) — Richard Cook’s Velocity 2012 keynote.
- Interesting papers from NIPS 2014 — machine learning holiday reading.
Four short links: 23 December 2014
Useful Metrics, Trouble at Mill, Drug R&D, and Disruptive Opportunities
- Metrics for Operational Performance — you’d be surprised how many places around your business you can meaningfully and productively track time-to-detection and time-to-resolution.
- Steel Mill Hacked — damage includes a blast furnace that couldn’t be shut down properly.
- Cerebros — drug-smuggling’s equivalent of corporate R&D. (via Regine Debatty)
- Ramble About Bitcoin (Matt Webb) — the meta I’m trying to figure out is: when you spot that one of these deep value chains is at the beginning of a big reconfiguration, what do you do? How do you enter it as a small business? How, as a national economy, do you help it along and make sure the transition happens healthily?
7 takeaways from Velocity Europe
Taking a look at the current issues affecting the Web operations and performance space.
Editor’s note: The European edition of our Velocity conference wrapped up a few weeks ago, and now that the jet lag has passed I’ve had a chance to reflect on the talks and excellent hallway conversations I had throughout. And while I thoroughly enjoyed all the sessions I introduced, one of the downsides to being a chair is that I can’t attend all the other sessions at the same time. As such, I always look around for excellent dissections of the conference from other people; this summary by Peter Arijs from CoScale closely reflects some of the themes I saw, including a few of the standout talks.
November in Barcelona was full of action for web and big data practitioners, with the Velocity and Strata-Hadoop conferences and side events such as WebPerfDays and Papis.io. As a startup in the web application monitoring and analytics space, it was the perfect time to get a pulse on the state of the art, and talk to some of our clients and prospects. Below is a summary of personal take-away points from selected Velocity sessions and personal interactions.
Four short links: 15 December 2014
Transferable Learning, At-Scale Telemetry, Ugly DRM, and Fast Packet Processing
- How Transferable Are Features in Deep Neural Networks? — (answer: “very”). A final surprising result is that initializing a network with transferred features from almost any number of layers can produce a boost to generalization that lingers even after fine-tuning to the target dataset. (via Pete Warden)
- Introducing Atlas: Netflix’s Primary Telemetry Platform — nice solution to the problems that many have, at a scale that few have.
- The Many Facades of DRM (PDF) — Modular software systems are designed to be broken into independent pieces. Each piece has a clear boundary and well-defined interface for ‘hooking’ into other pieces. Progress in most technologies accelerates once systems have achieved this state. But clear boundaries and well-defined interfaces also make a technology easier to attack, break, and reverse-engineer. Well-designed DRMs have very fuzzy boundaries and are designed to have very non-standard interfaces. The examples of the uglified DRM code are inspiring.
- DPDK — a set of libraries and drivers for fast packet processing […] to: receive and send packets within the minimum number of CPU cycles (usually less than 80 cycles); develop fast packet capture algorithms (tcpdump-like); run third-party fast path stacks.