Make sure you didn't miss anything with this list of the Best of the Week in the DevOps Zone (July 18 to July 25). Here they are, in order of popularity:

1. Part 1: Getting Started with Ansible

Why Ansible? It’s agentless. Unlike Puppet, Chef, Salt, etc.. Ansible operates only over SSH (or optionally ZeroMQ), so there’s none of that crap PKI that you have to deal with using Puppet. It’s self-documenting, with simple YAML files describing the playbooks and roles. It’s feature-rich.

2. Null Object Pattern Implementation in Groovy

Quite common real life problem. Simple map based configuration. How to handle gracefully a situation when a given key is not supported? See how Groovy can simplify the implementation.

3. Introduction to Functional Programming in Java 8 – Part Two

For a preview of what will be covered in a future article, try changing stream() to parallelStream() in the example and see what happens. So that’s the basic operations we’ve covered so far in the blog. We can take a container make a stream, transform items, filter items, peek at them and do something with them.

4. Why You Should Build an Immutable Infrastructure

Immutable components as part of your infrastructure are a way to reduce inconsistency in your infrastructure and improve the trust into your deployment process. Atomic deployments, combined with validation of the image and easy rollback, make managing your infrastructure a lot easier.

5. Test Attribute #5 – Differentiation

In order to analyze a problem when tests fail, we need to get into detective mode. The more evidence we have, the better. With enough differentiation, we can get a mental model of what works and what doesn’t, and better – where the problem might lurk, so we can go on and fix it.