- The Future of Open Source (Allison Randal) — Inexperienced companies can cause a great deal of harm as they blunder around blindly in a collaborative project, throwing resources in ways that ultimately benefit no one, not even themselves. It is in our best interest as a community to actively engage with companies and teach them how to participate effectively, how to succeed at free software and open source. Their success feeds the success of free software and open source, which feeds the self-reinforcing cycle of accelerating software innovation.
- Puppet Labs’ State of DevOps Report (PDF) — Westrum’s model gives us the language to define and measure culture. Perhaps most interesting, Westrum’s model also predicts IT performance. This shows that information flow isn’t just essential to safety, it’s also a critical success factor for rapidly building and evolving resilient systems at scale.
- Beyond Conversation — tracing the history of the link from Memex to Web.
- Detecting Vote Rings in Product Hunt — worth implementing in every system that processes votes. Who are the jerks in a circle?
"devops" entries
Four short links: 23 July 2015
Open Source, State of DevOps, History of Links, and Vote Rings
Four short links: 21 July 2015
Web Future, GCE vs Amazon, Scammy eBooks, and Container Clusters
- Web Design: The First 100 Years (Maciej Ceglowski) — There’s a William Gibson quote that Tim O’Reilly likes to repeat: “the future is here; it’s just not evenly distributed yet.” O’Reilly takes this to mean that if we surround ourselves with the right people, it can give us a sneak peek at coming attractions. I like to interpret this quote differently, as a call to action. Rather than waiting passively for technology to change the world, let’s see how much we can do with what we already have. Let’s reclaim the Web from technologists who tell us that the future they’ve imagined is inevitable, and that our role in it is as consumers.
- Comparing Cassandra Write Performance on Google Compute Engine and AWS — tl;dr – We achieved better Cassandra performance on GCE vs. Amazon, at close to half the cost. Also interesting for how they built the benchmark.
- The Scammy Underground World of Kindle eBooks — The biggest issue here isn’t that scammers are raking in cash from low-quality content; it’s that Amazon is allowing this to happen. Publisher brand value is the reliable expectation that buyers have of the book quality. Amazon’s publishing arm is spending the good brand value built by its distribution arm.
- Empire — a 12-factor-compatible, Docker-based container cluster built on top of Amazon’s robust EC2 Container Service (ECS), complete with a full-featured command line interface. Open source.
Four short links: 15 July 2015
OpeNSAurce, Multimaterial Printing, Functional Javascript, and Outlier Detection
- System Integrity Management Platform (Github) — NSA releases security compliance tool for government departments.
- 3D-Printed Explosive Jumping Robot Combines Firm and Squishy Parts (IEEE Spectrum) — Different parts of the robot grade over three orders of magnitude from stiff like plastic to squishy like rubber, through the use of nine different layers of 3D printed materials.
- Professor Frisby’s Mostly Adequate Guide to Functional Programming — a book on functional programming, using Javascript as the programming language.
- Tracking Down Villains — the software and algorithms that Netflix uses to detect outliers in their infrastructure monitoring.
Four short links: 23 June 2015
Irregular Periodicity, Facebook Beacons, Industry 4.0, and Universal Container
- Fast Lomb-Scargle Periodograms in Python — a classic method for finding periodicity in irregularly-sampled data.
- Facebook Bluetooth Beacons — free for you to use and help people see more information about your business whenever they use Facebook during their visit.
- Industry 4.0 — stop gagging at the term. Interesting examples of connectivity and data improving manufacturing. Human-machine interfaces: Logistics company Knapp AG developed a picking technology using augmented reality. Pickers wear a headset that presents vital information on a see-through display, helping them locate items more quickly and precisely. And with both hands free, they can build stronger and more efficient pallets, with fragile items safeguarded. An integrated camera captures serial and lot ID numbers for real-time stock tracking. Error rates are down by 40%, among many other benefits. Digital-to-physical transfer: Local Motors builds cars almost entirely through 3-D printing, with a design crowdsourced from an online community. It can build a new model from scratch in a year, far less than the industry average of six. Vauxhall and GM, among others, still bend a lot of metal, but also use 3-D printing and rapid prototyping to minimize their time to market. (via Quartz)
- runC — a lightweight universal runtime container, by the Open Container Project. (OCP = multi-vendor initiative in hands of Linux Foundation)
Four short links: 17 June 2015
Academic Publishing Concentration, Hardware Independence, Exception Monitoring, and Negotiating Tactics
- The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era (PLoSone) — Combined, the top five most prolific publishers account for more than 50% of all papers published in 2013. (via CBC)
- LLVM Bitcode Gives Apple Hardware Independence (Medium) — Bob [Mansfield] has been quietly building a silicon team with the skills to rival all other players in the industry. Bob works for one of 15 companies with an ARM architecture license, giving his team carte blanche to modify and extend ARM in any way they see fit. And Bob’s CPUs only have to satisfy a single customer.
- Github Exception Monitoring and Response — I need another word than “porn” to describe something that makes me sigh fervently with desire to achieve at that level.
- 31 Negotiation Tactics (Nick Kolenda) — he mysteriously omitted my power tactics of (a) crying, (b) greeting my opposite number with the wrong name, and (c) passing a napkin covered with random scrawls as I say, “what do you make of this?”
An introduction to immutable infrastructure
Why you should stop managing infrastructure and start really programming it.
Immutable infrastructure (II) provides stability, efficiency, and fidelity to your applications through automation and the use of successful patterns from programming. No rigorous or standardized definition of immutable infrastructure exists yet, but the basic idea is that you create and operate your infrastructure using the programming concept of immutability: once you instantiate something, you never change it. Instead, you replace it with another instance to make changes or ensure proper behavior.
Chad Fowler coined the term “immutable infrastructure” in a 2013 blog post, “Trash Your Servers and Burn Your Code: Immutable Infrastructure and Disposable Components,” but others have spoken about similar ideas. Martin Fowler described phoenix servers in 2012. Greg Orzell, James Carr, Kief Morris, and Ben Butler-Cole, to name a few, have contributed significant thought and work as well.
II requires full automation of your runtime environment. This is only possible in compute environments that have an API over all aspects of configuration and monitoring. Therefore, II can be fully realized only in true cloud environments. It is possible to realize some benefits of II with partial implementations, but the true benefits of efficiency and resiliency are realized with thorough implementation.
Four short links: 4 June 2015
DARPA Robotics Challenge, Math Instruction, Microservices Construction, and Crypto Hardware Sans Spooks
- Pocket Guide to DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals (Robohub) — The robots will start in a vehicle, drive to a simulated disaster building, and then they’ll have to open doors, walk on rubble, and use tools. Finally, they’ll have to climb a flight of stairs. The fastest team with the same amount of points for completing tasks will win. The main issues teams will face are communications with their robot and battery life: “Even the best batteries are still roughly 10 times less energy-dense than the kinds of fuels we all use to get around,” said Pratt.
- Dan Meyer’s Dissertation — Dan came up with a way to make math class social and the vocabulary sticky.
- Monolith First — echoes the idea that platforms should come from successful apps (the way AWS emerged from operating the Amazon store) rather than be designed before use.
- Building a More Assured Hardware Security Module (PDF) — proposal for An open source reference design for HSMs; Scalable, first cut in an FPGA and CPU, later allow higher speed options; Composable, e.g. “Give me a key store and signer suitable for DNSsec”; Reasonable assurance by being open, diverse design team, and an increasingly assured tool-chain. See cryptech.is for more info.
A “have-coffee” culture
Tending the DevOps victory garden.
Download Building an Optimized Business.
Download a free copy of Building an Optimized Business, a curated collection of chapters from the O’Reilly Web Operations and Performance library. This post is an excerpt by J. Paul Reed from DevOps in Practice, one of the selections included in the curated collection.
Any discussion surrounding DevOps and its methodologies quickly comes to the often delicate issue of organizational dynamics and culture, at least if it’s an accurate treatment of the topic. There is often a tendency to downplay or gloss over these issues precisely because culture is thought of as a “squishy” thing, difficult to shape and change, and in some cases, to even address directly. But it doesn’t need to be this way.
Sam Hogenson, Vice President of Technology at Nordstrom, works hard to make sure it’s exactly the opposite: “At Nordstrom, we value these different experiences and we value the core of how you work, how you build relationships much more than whether or not you have subject matter expertise. It’s a successful formula.” Another part of that formula, Hogenson notes, is the ethos of the organization: “It’s a very empowered workforce, a very decentralized organization; I always remember the Nordstroms telling us ‘Treat this as if it were your name over the door: how would you run your business and take care of your customers?'” [Nordstrom infrastructure engineer Doug] Ireton described it as a “have-coffee culture: if you need to talk to someone, you go have coffee with them.”
Four short links: 21 May 2015
Font Design, Pro Go, ICANN Foolishness, and Bad Organisations
- On Font Design (Kris Sowersby) — The many pairs of hands and eyes involved have made this typeface special for me. For the first time I don’t feel I have ownership of a typeface I have ostensibly “created.” Lovely to read about the design journey for a font.
- Why We Use Go — We use Go because it’s boring. Previously, we worked almost exclusively with Python, and after a certain point, it becomes a nightmare. You can bend Python to your will. You can hack it, you can monkey patch it, and you can write remarkably expressive, terse code. It’s also remarkably difficult to maintain and slow.
- Unfortunately We Have Renewed Our ICANN Accreditation — You can thank ICANN for this policy, because if it were up to us, and you tasked us with coming up with the most idiotic, damaging, phish-friendly, disaster-prone policy that accomplishes less than nothing and is utterly pointless, I question whether we would have been able to pull it off at this level. We’re simply out of our league here.
- Why Good Developers Write Bad Code (PDF) — trigger warning: software development pathologies from the real world.
Four short links: 19 May 2015
Wrist Interactions, Kubernetes Open Source Success, Product Quality, and Value of Privacy
- Android Wear vs Apple Watch (Luke Wroblewski) — comparison of interactions and experiences.
- Eric Brewer on Kubernetes — interesting not only for insights into Google’s efforts around Kubernetes but for: There’s so much excitement we can hardly handle all the pull requests. I think we’re committing, based on the GitHub log, something like 40 per day right now, and the demand is higher than that. Each of those takes reviews and, of course, there’s a wide variety of quality on those. Some are easy to review and some are quite hard to review. It’s a success problem, and we’re happy to have it. We did scale up the team to try and improve its velocity, but also just improve our ability to interact with all of the open source world that legitimately wants to contribute and has a lot to contribute. I’m very excited that the velocity is here, but it’s moving so fast it’s hard to even know all the things that change day to day. Makes a welcome change from the code dumps that are some of Google’s other high-profile projects.
- We Don’t Sell Saddles Here — Stewart Butterfield, to his team, on product development and quality. Every word of this is true for every other product, too.
- What is Privacy Worth? (PDF) — When endowed with the $10 untrackable card, 60.0% of subjects claimed they would keep it; however, when endowed with the $12 trackable card only 33.3% of subjects claimed they would switch to the untrackable card. […] This research raises doubts about individuals’ abilities to rationally navigate issues of privacy. From choosing whether or not to join a grocery loyalty program, to posting embarrassing personal information on a public website, individuals constantly make privacy-relevant decisions which impact their well-being. The finding that non-normative factors powerfully influence individual privacy valuations may signal the appropriateness of policy interventions.