I’ll be in Amsterdam next week for Software Circus - a conference on all things cloud native. The conference is now free too, so if you happen to be in the area you might be able to make it along. Hopefully meet a few readers there.

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News

A good history of the evolution of a large infrastructure, looking in particular at efficiency gains in terms of hardware, the datacenter itself and scheduling and service discovery at the application end.
https://blog.twitter.com/2016/the-infrastructure-behind-twitter-efficiency-and-optimization

A good argument that, rather than a VM or a process, one way of looking at a container is as a function. From there the post goes on to consider the value of stricter interface definitions for containers and in the need for a type-checker.
https://glyph.twistedmatrix.com/2016/08/defcontainer.html

A short introduction to server hardening, covering permissions, file integrity, access control, host firewalls and more.
https://www.oreilly.com/learning/hardening-a-unix-application-server

An IT centric view of container and Docker adoption which makes some good points about cost, complexity and whether most applications in most organisations need any level of portability.
http://searchaws.techtarget.com/opinion/Docker-usage-rises-but-high-portability-pointless-for-most

A good discussion of some basic principles for anyone building a deployment pipeline, with a focus on immutable artefacts.
https://medium.com/@bruntonspall/build-pipelines-deployment-and-immutable-artifacts-48ae926178a5#.uqdyvmyx8

The combination of growing cloud adoption and the success of devops is having a big influence on how some organisations approach security. This post explains some of the reasons for this change.
http://cloudsentry.evident.io/the-marriage-of-devops-secops/

A talk on the context underpinning Devops. Getting at some of the common buzzwords and going back as far as the craft movement and lean manufacturing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIkbn2V5A40

A look at the pros and cons of different approaches to managing container configuration, and a look at one approach using startup hooks to load configuration at runtime.
http://blog.synchro.io/stashbox/

The number of frameworks in most programming languages purporting to support microservice-style architectures is growing. This post tries to distil what makes a good framework for building microservices.
http://unwrapped.notonthehighstreet.com/what-makes-a-good-microservice-framework

Tools

Riddler is a tool for converting a Docker container to the raw Open Container format, runnable with the lower-level runc.
https://github.com/jfrazelle/riddler

Visualising network traffic in a complex architecture can provide a simple way of understanding the live system. Enter Vizceral.
http://techblog.netflix.com/2016/08/vizceral-open-source.html
https://github.com/Netflix/vizceral
https://github.com/Netflix/vizceral-example

Manage and automate DevOps operations through group chat. Learn how in the free ChatOps book from VictorOps:
http://bit.ly/2bHZchq