Alexander Graham Bell Birthplace, Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom
My apologies for the delay in this week’s DevOps’ish newsletter. When I opened the ole MacBook last night to hammer it out it dawned on me how exhausted I was. Instead of this newsletter I spent time with family and went to bed early. Sorry, not sorry. It was an eventful week in the world of DevOps though.
Department of Choice Concepts
Google Spanner was introduced as, “The first horizontally scalable, globally consistent, relational database service.” After some initial reading on Wired about Spanner my interest has piqued. There is a white paper in regards to CAP Theorem and Spanner that is like reading a sci-fi novel in which laws of physics are bent to humanity’s will. But the true gem in Spanner is Google’s handling of time (dubbed TrueTime) to create consistency.
Software licensing is becoming an incredibly important factor in DevOps. You might have cobbled together some tools and some code to solve a problem but can your employer legally use it? Tom Callaway is the person behind making Fedora legally legit. The story about his work in the Fedora teams is a must read.
Department of Data Defense
OpenSSL 1.1.0 received an update this week to mitigate CVE-2017–3733. Not a show stopper for most people. Has the Heartbleed stress finally gone its course surrounding OpenSSL updates?
Instapaper published their recent outage postmortem this week. It reminded me of an ever present problem in DevOps; who owns state? As much as we want to abstract state further away from development, we have to maintain state in a very hands on way or we’re doomed. Instapaper offloaded their state to Amazon RDS. An unknown and undocumented (by Amazon) 2TB limit in ext3 doomed the Instapaper RDS instance.
I am a sucker for a good cheatsheet or command reference. Bobbin Zachariah created a good Docker cheatsheet (albeit aesthetically awful) that is worth keeping around.
Department of Discussion
Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel, made some headlines this week at Open Source Leadership Summit. But, the real story is not Linus’ gruff attitude it’s the fact that he acknowledged that process (not code) is the real problem in large projects.
Department of Next Year’s Old Tech
Anne Currie reminds us that strictly Operations jobs are an outmoded profession. Automation will eventually eliminate tier 2 type positions and those folks will need to either become DevOps thinking people or change professions entirely. Technology is evolving around us, what are you doing to keep up?
Not DevOps But Still Cool
Brian Krebs had some news on folks that have messed with him personally. Justice is being served and some of the attackers are apologetic to Krebs.
DevOps’ish One-Liner of the Week
This week’s one-liner is pretty simple but one that I actually used this week. We needed to run pt-query-digest against a week’s worth of MySQL slow query logs. The problem was the logs were rotated daily and I needed a single file for input.
ls -1rt /var/lib/mysqllogs/*-slow-log-* | tail -n 7 | while read N ; do cat $N >> /tmp/slow-query.log ; done