Video Q&A: Aaron Peterson and Kevin Gray on self-healing infrastructure

At LISA 2010, I caught up with Aaron Peterson (Opscode) and Kevin Gray (Dyn) after they gave a very interesting presentation/demo called "DevOps Gameday".

From the title, I think a number of attendees were expecting to see the standard Dev to Ops promotion/deployment of code that is so common to the DevOps discussion. Instead the presenters (Opscode, Zenoss, Dyn Inc.) focused on what happens when you have a failure after the code has been deployed. This demo was about self-healing infrastructure... breaking a multi-node system and having it heal itself.

Of course, this kind of canned demo isn't all that new in the vendor world. However, what is very interesting about their efforts is they want to capture the best practices required to do it and share the code with the world through their combined project (hosted on GitHub). 

If they fulfill the mission of their open project, it's exactly the kind of "here is how you can do what the big players do" sharing that is good for our industry. 

Comments

[Adrian Howchin]

Thanks for the video. It actually is helpful to hear what other people are doing when it comes to thinking of how to implement this stuff in your own environment. I'm more focussed on a build/deployment environment than a systems type view of the world, but the ideas are still applicable. Cheers!