A Massive Selection of Tools.
Another theme, not surprisingly, was tooling. Again a very generous exchange of tools evaluated, used and developed. Some of the notes below are in the expectation that people will follow the links and read the summaries. It’s not my job to type in yet another summary!
Overall the principal tools were Kubernetes with Docker. Really this grows from mind share and availability of expertise perspectives, rather than technical capabilities. Other tools are available.
Git also had a big following. As the version control jam holding the process cake together. It’s plethora of hooks aiding its use in integrating other tools.
The command line was very much the interface of choice. Scripts made a frequent appearance (bash not Powersh**).
Kubernetes has rolling UPDATE out the box, great. Role defined security – not so much 🙁
Devops seems to mean a quite different things to different people. “Devs doing ops”, “automation of ops”, “co-location of dev and ops”, “you build it you run it”, “automation of the build and deployment process”, “containers”
Routing and Service Discovery
OpenShift provides routing, Kubernetes presumes NGINX will handle that.
istio An open platform to connect, manage, and secure micro-services. https://github.com/istio
linkerd Resilient service mesh for cloud native apps – linkerd is a transparent proxy that adds service discovery, routing, failure handling, and visibility to modern software applications https://linkerd.io/
There was talk by one presenter of “Container Difference Exchange” Adaptive Action: Leveraging Uncertainty in Your Organization By Glenda H. Eoyang, Royce J. Holladay
Habitat – new tool
Habitat – easy Chef from the people who brought you Chef. New product. I picked up a sticker from the silver sponsor’s stand, of a cat hiding in a box.. whatever. It sounded interesting at first glance it looks like a bunch of generic config files, install/config scripts and wizards to use them.
Amazon Web Services – a bit intimidating – Open Guide to AWS is a good intro https://github.com/open-guides/og-aws
The Phoenix Project – recommended by several speakers as an accessible/fun into to the dynamic world of devops.
ElasticSearch
The Elastic man gave one of the more sales-y talks. Mostly concentrating on an “out of the box” look at databases. Some titbits though… From what I’ve seen ElasticSearch is very much a leader in Big Data Analytics. They have their own DB. As with Oracle and Microsoft the question is whether you end up making money for them. ElasticSearch provides its own official Docker images – the official ones on Docker hub are just “Docker official”. docker.elastic.co has the “Elasticsearch offical” images.https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/docker.html He mentioned X-pack is a free (or supported for money) Docker image for all of the ElasticSearch products pre-configured – for a generic scenario.
Weaveworks – a process case study
A great look at automating a process around git. After all everyone wants their build scripts, config files and test evidence under control too!
Gitops weaveworks https://www.weave.works/blog/gitops-operations-by-pull-request
Our provisioning of AWS resources and deployment of k8s is declarative Our entire system state is under version control and described in a single Git repository Operational changes are made by pull request (plus build & release pipelines) Diff tools detect any divergence and notify us via Slack alerts; and sync tools enable convergence Rollback and audit logs are also provided via Git Sweet… and with a https://www.weave.works/blog/provisioning-lifecycle-production-ready-kubernetes-cluster/
A Warning for History
As is very common with Docker meetups there was some intense technical detail… “Don’t mutate bind mounted directories.” was an assertion that was made and attracted nods from bearded blokes in T-Shirts around the room. “Hmm, I thought.” https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/198590/what-is-a-bind-mount
I think this came from Adrian’s sizzling Docker ignite – too fast to make notes it’s mostly available here https://blog.docker.com/2017/11/tips-tricks-docker-captains/
Consortium for service innovation