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Building a Devops team, Part 2
A few months ago I wrote about Building a Devops team at Sony. I really enjoy leading a team, and have tremendous pride in those I’ve brought into Sony. When I was given additional head count recently, I was excited and went straight to work. When your screening process makes the front page of HackerNews however, you know you’re going to have to mix things up a bit. Here’s what was new:
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The first pillar: We alert on what we draw
In this episode of the Six Pillars of Monitoring, Stephen Nelson-Smith expands his thinking on the first pillar - We alert on what we draw.
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The Six Pillars of Monitoring
Monitoring is a hot subject in the devops world at the moment. The ‘Monitoring Sucks’ conversation has spawned some interesting and creative discussions, and as web operations matures as a discipline, people are starting to look at how they can improve they way they monitor their systems. Stephen Nelson-Smith introduces an 8 part series outlining his perspective on what he calls the six pillars of monitoring.
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Command-line cookbook dependency solving with knife exec
Machines built with Chef are configured by applying roles, which in turn define which cookbooks and recipes should be applied to meet a stated policy. Cookbooks and recipes have dependencies, which are solve by the Chef server, but which are tricky to extract after the fact. This short article shows you how to drive the Chef server API using knife exec to extract this information.
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Building a Devops team
As Devops grows in popularity and more and more organisations and teams are beginning to think about how they can start to apply some of the ideas and principles the movement advocates, a question that is often asked is “How do I build a Devops team?”. Brian Henerey, manager of operations engineering in the online technology group at Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, has succeeded, and in this article reveals how he did it.
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Kanban for Sysadmin
Last night I popped into the Extreme Tuesday Club (XTC) for the first time in ages. I got into a conversation with Katherine Kirk from the BBC about Kanban, which made me realise I’ve been using Kanban for over 18 months. Back in 2009 I wrote an article on Kanban for Sysadmin which was published on the excellent Sysadvent calendar. Reading it back now, I still think it’s highly relevant! Last night’s conversation prompted me to republish it here.
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Today's EC2 / EBS Outage: Lessons learned
Today Britain woke to the news that Amazon Web Services had suffered a major outage in its US East facility. This affected Heroku, Reddit, Foursquare, Quora and many more well-known internet services hosted on EC2. We look at the lessons we can learn from this very public failure.
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The Impact of Amazon's new CloudFormation service
Yesterday Amazon announced ‘CloudFormation’, to deserved commendation. Those of us who do systems integration for a living were understandably excited. But fairly soon the twitterverse started to resound with claims that this was the end of ‘simplistic tools’ like Chef and Puppet. So what’s behind all the hype?