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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. ...

It has been a very busy week for me. I have been in Scotland since Tuesday. Jet lag is a real thing but, I have to say I have met some of the nicest people here (and I am a Southerner). As far as DevOps this week, I have been head down DevOps’ing. I have also been building bridges between teams in our global company. It is very exciting and despite constantly being tired the connections are happening. Department of Choice Concepts The OpenShift Developer Evangelist Team announced this week that they are releasing OpenShift tutorials targeting developers. They have teamed up with Katacoda and the first tutorial is Getting Started with OpenShift for Developers. philippta has released a handful or two of great *Go Web Examples. *The goal is to show simple code snippets to handle common functions with Go. Department of Data Defense GitLab released their detailed postmortem on last week’s outage. Two big takeaways: 1) they freely admit their database infrastructure is lacking. 2) A GitLab engineer accidentally started to delete the primary database. Their openness is a breath of fresh air. ...

What a week in DevOps ! There is so much news to share this week it took me an hour to collect it all! I also went to the Open Source 101 conference this week to pick up some knowledge on communities. It was a very good conference. If the future of open source software was represented there it will definitely not be a white male dominated field. Department of Choice Concepts Like a lot of sysadmin and DevOps teams, I bet you have some random cron jobs that are critical to your daily/weekly/monthly workflows. The problem with these jobs is that they always seem to never have a great place to live. Marc Cuva and the Serverless movement might have given us a solution to consider. Make SELinux Enforcing Again! We all do it… To some extent. Let’s try to stop disabling SELinux in 2017. 18F at GSA ran a small experiment in September and it turned out that working more hours did not net more productivity. Confining work schedules and after hours phone checking actually made a team more effective. The crazy thing is this analysis came from a US government agency. Kudos to The U.S. Digital Service! ...

Oh look! There’s a 666 in the epoch this week… Great! But, as one of my co-workers and I always say, we’re going to “will it” to be a good week in DevOps . It usually works out too. Department of Choice Concepts Nitin Agarwal breaks down the Docker filesystem (AUFS). It is a rather simplistic presentation. If you know someone struggling with the concepts it’s definitely worth a read. Brendan Gregg built out a very simple page containing ALL his works on Linux Performance. I do not think you could bookmark this page enough. Department of Data Defense There is some pretty insane stuff happening in Russia. Some pretty senior cybersecurity folks are being held by a military tribunal. Keep an eye on this one. Department of Refreshment and Refurbishment DZone recently released their Guide to DevOps: Continuous Delivery and Automation. Lots of cool concepts and stories for you to ponder over. Department of Happy Little Clouds Did you hear that SoftLayer was handing over the reigns to BlueMix? Me neither (sorry, not sorry). The transition appears to be going over like a fart in church. Big Blue where are you? ...

What a busy week in the land of DevOps! It seems like everyone has shaken off the holidays and snow days. So without further adieu let’s get to it! Department of Choice Concepts Breanne Boland has a great piece on lessons learned during her first year as a software engineer. “Timing is everything” as always but her point on curiosity is spot on. The Cloudcast had a fantastic episode titled, “Balancing Monolithic Apps and Microservices”. I had a lightbulb click on for one of the products I support while listening to this episode. Everyone has legacy infrastructure. This episode discusses a strategy to deal with the older parts of your applications. Grant Shipley shared how to get a full blown OpenShift cluster up and running in thirty minutes. OpenShift is looking more and more appealing. Jessie Frazelle hacked the bejesus out of CoreOS’ Container Linux. She put graphics drivers in CoreOS, y’all… Graphics drivers! Jess is a glutton for punishment and I admire the hell out of her for it. ...