Lots of tools this week, from infrastructure testing and development environments to log file parsing and monitoring dashboards. I’ve also included an academic paper (on TLS security) for the first time I think - if anyone has good publicly available papers on relevant topics do send me links.

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Sponsored event

All Your Base is a curated database conference for DevOps and system architects, taking place in Oxford this October. Speakers include MySQL creator Monty Widenius and more. Early Bird tickets end this Friday!
http://allyourbaseconf.com/2014/?source=devops

News

Understanding how audits and auditors work is surprisingly useful knowledge if you work in a large organisation. This post covers tips for scoping audits so they have the most impact and what that means for collaboration and automation.
http://itrevolution.com/audit-101-for-devops-resource-guide-for-the-phoenix-project-part-3-correctly-scoping-it-using-gait-and-gait-r/

A good talk (slides, video and a transcript) all about the inevitability of failure and why and how you should design your organisations and teams to deal with it.
http://www.indecorous.com/fallible_humans/

With the potential cost of even a minor outage in some organisations being so high, the fallout afterwards could result in someone losing their job. Is this ever reasonable? And what other effects does that have on a team trying to build a learning culture?
http://asheepapart.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/hey-dont-fire-that-guy.html

Lots of opinions and recommendations exist for securing TLS configurations but this paper from Cornell is both bang up-to-date and goes into all the details. I’d like to include more papers, so if anyone comes across good ones let me know.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1407.2168

A good story of evolving an infrastructure, in this case mixing Chef with AWS CloudFormation and a new tool called Cloudbank. Some interesting code samples and ideas.
https://www.simple.com/engineering/infrastructure-as-code

A good slide deck on the evolution of a devops culture at Target. Lots of good numbers, along with tips for getting through the required change. Another of the great talks from Devopsdays Minneapolis.
https://speakerdeck.com/hmmickman/devops-at-tgt

One area that differs between Windows and Unix like environments is remote management. This Powershell module contains most of what you need to manage systems over SSH from within Powershell, lots of cross platform management options here.
http://www.powershellmagazine.com/2014/07/03/posh-ssh-open-source-ssh-powershell-module/

A good walkthrough of taking a fairly verbose Puppet manifest and using R10K to manage external dependencies and Hiera to better model the resulting infrastructure as data rather tha code.
http://rnelson0.com/2014/07/21/hiera-r10k-and-the-end-of-manifests-as-we-know-them/

Jobs

Clever is looking for a distributed systems engineer. Clever is a 30-person San Francisco startup that is building the data platform needed to get great software into the classroom. We’re in 1 in 6 schools in America, and we sync data for 8 million students every day. If you’re passionate about improving education and excited to build on and contribute to bleeding-edge tools like Docker, Packer, Deis, Synapse, Heka, kubernetes, and Drone, we’d love to hear from you.
https://clever.com/about/jobs#distributed-systems-engineer

Tools

Devstep is described as a development environment builder powered by Docker and buildpacks. The getting started docs give you a flavour of the workflow and a list of the current buildpacks.
https://github.com/fgrehm/devstep
http://fgrehm.viewdocs.io/devstep

Infrataster is another tool for writing unit tests for infrastructure. It’s designed to complement serverspec, by focusing on running tests from outside the virtual machine to test external interfaces like HTTP or SSH.
https://speakerdeck.com/ryotarai/infrataster-infra-behavior-testing-framework-number-oedo04
http://infrataster.net/

Uchiwa looks like a great addition to the Sensu monitoring framework. The screenshots give you an idea about it’s capabilities. It’s also packaged as a docker container which I think is something we’ll see more and more of.
https://github.com/sensu/uchiwa

Goiardi is a Chef server written in Go with the ability to run entirely in memory, with optional persistence saving the in-memory data to disk or using MySQL or Postgres. I’m not sure of the why in this case, but having open integration test suites make this an interesting possibility.
https://github.com/ctdk/goiardi

Another log parsing tool, Petit has a number of impressive features from hashing, graphing and discovering important repeated items in log files.
http://crunchtools.com/software/petit/