The Best of the Week (Nov. 21): DevOps Zone

Make sure you didn't miss anything with this list of the Best of the Week in the DevOps Zone (November 14 - November 21). Here they are, in order of popularity:

1. A Guide to Ansible Galaxy

• I've started using more and more from Ansible Galaxy. For those of you who don't know, Galaxy is a community "app store"-like thing for sharing reusable Ansible Roles.

2. Declarative Programming

• Declarative programming seems applicable to the cases where the ordering of operations can be easily deduced. It seems like the significant value of declarative programming is to rely on an optimizing compiler rearrange the declarations into properly-ordered imperative steps.

3. The Config Promotion Problem

• Deployment isn’t quite the right word for what happens when the business decides to go live for one partner (but not others), it is “promotion” and it can be quite granular. The promotions activity is orthogonal to the application binary deployment cycle, and has a flow through environments towards production.

4. Metrics, Metrics Everywhere

• With DevOps, metrics are starting to be among the non-functional requirements any application has to bring into scope.

5. Stop Investing in Manual Regression Cycles

• Manual regressions are an old necessity in the software industry or are they? Today in a mutli-browser world and short release cycles on the rise the amount of time spent on manual regressions is rising as well. Visual UI validation can decrease time spent on manual regressions and increase productivity.