Phasor Burn

Monitoring software is ripe for a renaissance. Now is the time to for building new tools and rethinking our problems. Leading the charge are two projects: cucumber-nagios, and Flapjack.

A systems administrator’s role in today’s technology landscape has never been so important. It’s our responsibility to manage provisioning and maintenance of massive infrastructures, to anticipate ahead of time when capacity must be grown or shrunk, and increasingly, to make sure our applications scale.

While developer tools have improved tremendously, we sysadmins are still living in the dark ages, other than a few shining beacons of hope such as Puppet. We’re still trying to make Nagios scale. We’re still writing the same old monitoring checks. Getting statistics out of our applications is tedious and difficult, but increasingly important to scaling.

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Cucumber-Nagios is natural language front end for configuring Nagios. (http://agilesysadmin.net/cucumber-nagios)

Very interesting.

Even better, flapjack is parallelized, distributed monitoring and notifications system, which appears to have aims to leverage existing Nagios system checks/probes.

I think I just wet myself.

Velocity 09: John Allspaw, “10+ Deploys Per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr”

“In the last week there were 67 deploys of 496 changes by 18 people” – Flickr Dev Blog, December 17th 2008.

For deploying new code, planning projects, and crisis management, communications and cooperation between development and operations is paramount. As web infrastructures grow, the line between systems and software become quite blurred. Operations and development are disciplines that historically have been limited to a predictable list of responsibilities and have suffered from a culture of finger-pointyness.

We’ll talk about why and how these roles have mixed in Flickr’s environment for the better.

We’ll discuss tools, techniques, culture, and the processes of transparency that enables a healthy respect for the Big Red Deploy Button™ as well as incident management, escalation, and troubleshooting.

Tools, techniques, and culture:
• Overview of our one-button code deployment, application-level logging, and dev/ops communications tools.
• Examples of adaptive monitoring and metrics collection, capacity awareness and planning must-haves.
• Rethinking the ops/developer relationship and mutual respect for responsibilities and expertise.

Curiously compelling idea…

There’s a video of their talk. Watch it.