If you are a system administrator, or just a regular Linux user, there is a very high chance that you worked with Syslog, at least one time. On your Linux system, pretty much everything related to system logging is linked to the Syslog protocol. Designed in the early 80’s by Eric Allman (from Berkeley University), the syslog protocol is a specification that defines a standard for message logging on any system.

This is pitched as “everything that you need to know about Syslog.” From what I can tell, it might just live up to that pitch. It’s high quality and thorough.

Almost any slog can be turned into a do-nothing script. A do-nothing script is a script that encodes the instructions of a slog, encapsulating each step in a function. For the example procedure above, we could write the following do-nothing script:

Containerization technologies are one of the trendiest topics in the cloud economy and the IT ecosystem. The container ecosystem can be confusing at times, this post may help you understand some confusing concepts about Docker and containers. We are also going to see how the containerization ecosystem evolved and the state of containerization in 2019.

Put on your swimming suit, because this is a deep dive. 🏊‍♀️🏊

An interview with James Shubin (DevOps/config-management hacker and physiologist from Canada who works on a next-generation config-management project he started called mgmt) about his open source work and how it contributes to the cloud native landscape.

Two new terms have recently emerged around software delivery: Software Defined Delivery and Progressive Delivery. Why? How do they relate to Continuous Delivery?

Several forces today make delivery increasingly complex. Notably, proliferation of repositories, with hundreds of small projects replacing a handful of monoliths; desire for greater automation to realize the full potential of CD across multiple environments; the rise of feature flagging; and increased evidence (such as the Equifax debacle) of the need to bake security into the delivery process.

There’s another gorilla to consider for container orchestration.

Kubernetes is the 800-pound gorilla of container orchestration. It powers some of the biggest deployments worldwide, but it comes with a price tag.

Especially for smaller teams, it can be time-consuming to maintain and has a steep learning curve. For what our team of four wanted to achieve at trivago, it added too much overhead. So we looked into alternatives — and fell in love with Nomad.

From the Nomad website:

HashiCorp Nomad is a single binary that schedules applications and services on Linux, Windows, and Mac. It is an open source scheduler that uses a declarative job file for scheduling virtualized, containerized, and standalone applications.

Anyone from the community with experience using Nomad? Let us know in the discussion below.

4 minutes and 8 seconds of pure entertainment. If you watch this and don’t bust a gut, I’m sorry to report that you have no soul. 😆 (h/t Mathieu Isabel who shared this in response to our viral tweet from yesterday)

The new changelog.com setup for 2019 is packed with exciting features that are too good to keep to ourselves. Since the infrastructure code is already public and has been running changelog.com for a few months now, the value that we are sharing is proven to us.

Host Jay Gordon hears stories from a variety of people in technology about their on-call experiences and some of the nightmares they’ve survived. Recent guests include Charity Majors and Sam Phippen.

Consider adding these mechanisms to your services and making them clearly visible and usable in the README. The poor soul having to solve problems late at night will thank you.

Who knew an audio post-mortem could be so fun to listen to!

On Thursday, November 8, Basecamp 3 went down for almost five hours. It was the worst outage to hit the company in a decade and a stress test of Basecamp’s practices around internal communication, customer support, and calm work. Today’s episode goes inside the company on November 8 to see how the outage unfolded.

Crossplane provides a universal cloud computing API. Control your workloads across clouds and on-prem environments from one unified place.

Nobody wants to be locked in to their current cloud provider. With Crossplane (and a new breed of ‘multi-cloud’ tools like it), you can spread your application across multiple cloud providers at a single time, migrate managed services across multiple clouds, and more.

We might be looking at the future of cloud computing, right here. I’m sure this will be a hot subject at this week’s KubeCon in Seattle.

(Adam is onsite covering the event. Find him and say hi if you’re attending.)

DevOps and Site Reliability Engineer(SRE), both seem to rule the world of software development, and at the same time, both appear to overlap or confuse people to some extent. Today, we will try to analyze both the terms and see if we can see some differentiating factors between the two.

“Naming things is hard” applies to so much more than merely code.

Tanya Janca’s new live video show about “Sloppy DevOps” sounds like a lot of fun:

A free online show dedicated to the art of implementing DevSecOps, includes free workshops, lessons and nerd-er-ific discussions!

Sid Sijbrandij and the team at GitLab compared GitLab CI with the three Jenkins variants. Here’s what they learned…

The many plugin combinations for Jenkins has made Legacy Jenkins hard to configure and brittle when updating. Cloudbees is introducing two new versions of Jenkins to remedy the problem: Cloud Native Jenkins will start from scratch, while Jenkins Evergreen will focus on a set of essential plugins. GitLab CI adds new functionality in the main code base, avoiding the need for needless configuration and ensuring everything still works when updating.

Also to note — according to a recent Forrester report GitLab CI and Jenkins/Cloudbees are two of the four leading products for CI.

Dan Barker:

In this new series, we’ll focus on DevOps monitoring and observability tools. Over the next few weeks, we’ll explore metrics aggregation and monitoring, log aggregation, alerting and visualizations, and distributed tracing. Alternatively, you can download the entire open source guide to DevOps monitoring tools now.

gaia is an open source automation platform which makes it easy and fun to build powerful pipelines in any programming language. Based on HashiCorp’s go-plugin and gRPC, gaia is efficient, fast, lightweight and developer friendly. Gaia is currently alpha! Do not use it for mission critical jobs yet!

Today, we are open-sourcing the code behind Changelog’s infrastructure as is, and are giving you the opportunity to influence the way we continue investing our time.

I’ve wanted this for years, but apparently never enough to build it myself:

A passive monitoring tool written in Python & Django. Set up your cron jobs, backup scripts, weekly email sending scripts, nightly data import jobs etc. to ping this service when they complete. When they don’t send a ping on time, you receive an alert.

The service offers a generous 20 free checks before you start paying. And since it’s an open source Django app, you can set it up to run on your own infrastructure too.

This checklist covers monitoring, infrastructure, culture, code, and protection. It even helps you focus based on the stage of your company (assuming you are venture backed).

Travis CI announced the merging of their worlds to combine their .org (open source) and .com (paid) efforts under one roof. Smart move!

Over time we found two platforms lead to confusion for people using travis-ci.org extensively, or together with travis-ci.com … when we decided to move our GitHub integration to GitHub Apps at the beginning of this year, we realized it was a great opportunity to dive into merging travis-ci.org and travis-ci.com into a single platform.

I’m a huge fan of well designed feedback loops. In software creation, feedback loops prove to be one of the most important, often overlooked, artifacts of the development lifecycle.

Evelyn Van Kelle writes on the O’Reilly Ideas blog:

There is a false dichotomy between full automation and human intervention. Successful quality control combines tool-based measurement with manual review and discussion. At the end of the day, the most effective feedback loops are a mixture of daily best practices, automation, tools, and human intervention.

Hongli Lai, co-founder of Phusion and Passenger engineer, shares his quest for an easy-to-use monitoring solution for Phusion’s servers.

Unlike the other solutions I’ve checked out, Netdata provides real-time, per-second monitoring. You can see the CPU/memory slider update in real time. Netdata also provides alerting and installs a ton of alerts by default. By default Netdata stores collected stats on the same server. This is very convenient if you are just getting started. It can also be configured to send stats to a central server.

Also, go back in time to 2015 when we talked with Hongli on The Changelog #136.

Cockpit makes Linux discoverable, allowing sysadmins to easily perform tasks such as starting containers, storage administration, network configuration, inspecting logs and so on.

Postmortems are a healthy exercise to do after an incident to learn the specifics of why it happened and what needs to be done to prevent it from happening again.

A good report captures the risks of current services, and helps Product and Engineering to more proactively prioritize work on services.

Someone from outside your team should be able to read your postmortem report and answer these five questions…