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zkybase devops projects and notes

Zkybase / devops field notes

Devops, documented from the inside.

Welcome to Zkybase, home of Willie Wheeler's devops projects. Field notes on configuration management, deployment pipelines, resilience and the work of running software in production.

Read the field notes See the Kite project
25
field notes
03
projects
2011
first entry

01 / The short version

Devops is a management problem solved with software.

Read the full argument

Devops is the push to bring the development, test, infrastructure and operations domains under software management and control.

It does this through the aggressive pursuit of integration, standardization and automation. The result is a shorter systems development life cycle, continuous delivery and higher software quality.

Zkybase began in 2011 as a place to work through those ideas in public: a CMDB built on a graph database, a resilience library for Spring, and notes from the build pipeline.

Start with the definition

  1. AutomationAutomate builds, tests and deployments to move faster and reduce errors.
  2. Continuous integration and deliveryIntegrate code into a shared repository, then test and deploy it many times a day.
  3. CollaborationAlign development and operations so problems are solved by the team that owns them.
  4. Monitoring and loggingWatch the whole system so issues surface before they become incidents.
  5. SecurityUse vulnerability scans and automated testing to keep code secure and compliant.
  6. Cloud computingScale capacity up or down as demand changes.

02 / From the notebook

The most recent entries.

All 25 field notes
Jan 22, 2013 Top ten pops and drops with Splunk, part 2In our previous post, we looked at how to use Splunk to identify the most volatile event codes over the past day. In this post we’ll revisit that topic in light of some good feedback, and then look at how to get the… Jan 5, 2013 Top ten pops and drops with Splunk, part 1In real time operational contexts, it’s important to monitor system metrics for major swings in value. Such swings, whether upward (“pops”) or downward (“drops”), often indicate a problem either on the horizon or else… Dec 2, 2012 Pushing twice daily: our conversation with Facebook's Chuck RossiAt my new job we’re reigniting an effort to move to continuous delivery for our software releases. We figured that we could learn a thing or two from Facebook, so we reached out to, Facebook’s first release engineer… Dec 1, 2012 How I got my kids into programming[Not a devops post, but I wanted to share this somewhere.] I’m the father of four wild and crazy kids, and the two older ones are at the age now (4th grade and 1st grade) that I’ve started trying to get them interested…

The archive runs from December 2011 to January 2013.

03 / Choose a thread

Start with the problem you are carrying.

Field note

What devops actually is

A fluff free definition, the forces driving the change, and why it belongs on your desk.

Read the entry →

Field note

Why a platform beats a pile of tools

Integration is the work. Tools only matter when process, data and people connect.

Read the entry →

Field note

Building a CMDB on a graph

Why a configuration database needs schema agility, and how Neo4j changed the design.

Read the entry →

Project / Kite

Harden a Spring service

A circuit breaker, concurrency throttle and rate limiter in two steps.

Open the project →

Zkybase began in 2011 as a place to work in the open. The notes stayed.

Willie Wheeler
Principal Solutions Architect
Java / Spring / devops