Devops Drop 022

Gartner Cites Application Release Automation Tools as Key to DevOps

http://blog.noliosoft.com/gartner-cites-application-release-automation-tools-as-key-to-devops/

So many things wrong with this...   (ARA) Nolio 

 As an emerging movement, DevOps may have improved communication and collaboration between development and IT operations teams but it still hasn’t absolutely mastered its ultimate goal of unifying their work. 

 In his report, Ronni J. Colville argues that DevOps can be greatly enhanced by the use of application release automation (ARA) tools and specifically cites Nolio as one such solution.

Can tools help “Cuture”  this question was asked at Puppetconf w/Luke... 

Visibility also requires the establishment of a model of the application and its configuration for each environment. ARA tools can provide a mechanism to create application models for each environment, with externalized configuration settings that typically vary by environment.

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Selenium and Nagios

http://devops-abyss.blogspot.com/2010/06/selenium-and-nagios.html

I've implemented a Nagios check for Selenium test cases. With this check it is possible to put your recorded test cases from your Selenium IDE into Nagios to use them for monitoring.

Test-->Selenium IDE-->Export-->check_selenium (nagios plugin)-->Selenium Remote Control

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DevOps in Milliseconds

http://techblog.appnexus.com/2011/devops-in-milliseconds/

AppNexus engineers have it good. 

They don’t lie awake at night wondering if we can handle the next increase of impressions. 

They don’t worry that our systems are down and we don’t know it. 

They don’t develop in a bubble, toss their code over the wall to a mysterious group of people, and wash their hands clean.

Monitoring: Nagios - 1200 services

Metrics: Graphite - 1 million datapoints every minute.

Nagios plugin that queries Graphite and alerts if values of certain metrics go above or below specified thresholds.

Deployment: Puppet and Maestro

Puppet backed by a MySQL database and fronted by an in-house application we call Maestro.

At AppNexus there is no wall between engineers and operations, and automation is crucial to scaling our infrasctructure. 

Engineers control their own destiny, and we give them the tools to dive deep into production problems and give them tools to dive deep into production problems, make fixes, and improve their products as quickly as they can code.

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CI vs Zombies 

http://www.build-doctor.com/2011/09/26/ci-vs-zombies/

Runaway builds.

--A runaway build occurs when not all processes created by the build exit cleanly. 

--Zombies – may hang the build, or simply stay around in the background waiting to wreak havoc. 

--They interfere with test isolation. If processes can hang around from an earlier build (or earlier test within the same build) they may affect unrelated tests.

--difficult-to-diagnose failures.

-- eventually leading to exhaustion.

--Manual intervention is required to kill them and clean up. 

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Openstack Compute API v1.1 support

https://github.com/geemus/fog/pull/525

Implement fog support for the Openstack Compute API v1.1. Includes support for legacy v1.0 style auth and v2.0 keystone auth.

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Mean time to pretty chart- DevOps meets data porn

http://gigaom.com/cloud/mean-time-to-pretty-chart-devops-meets-data-porn/

Alex Benik is a principal at Battery Ventures. Battery Ventures is an investor in DataDog and Tracelytics. 

The current mantra in Web operations is to track, record and monitor everything. Data is valuable and storage is cheap.

Favorite Velocity  John Rauser at Amazon and Kellan Elliot-McCrea from Etsy.

Mean Time to Pretty Chart (MTPC). For full buzzword compliance, let’s say that WebOps + BigData + Information/Graphic Design = MTPC.

MTPC attempts to quantify the amount of time required to determine the root cause of an operational issue and depict it in an eye-catching way. The MTPC metric is challenging because it encompasses a number of challenges spanning large volumes of data acquisition, storage, correlation and design/representation.

http://tracelytics.com/

http://www.datadoghq.com/

http://www.nodeable.com/

A highly incomplete list of relevant commercial and open source tools would include Ganglia, Nagios, Cati, Graphite, Munin, Splunk, New Relic, Tracelytics (see disclosure), DataDog (see disclosure), and AppDynamics.

Enter the Data Scientist. While correlation doesn’t imply causation, with large enough sample sizes the old adage “where there is smoke there is usually fire” often applies. When you can visualize that smoke in a pretty chart, it’s easier to pinpoint the fire.

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Jesse Robbins interview on DevOps Cafe #19 (w/ full transcript!)

http://www.opscode.com/blog/2011/09/22/jesse-robbins-interview-on-devops-cafe-19-w-full-transcript/