Anthony Shortland on strategies for solving DevOps problems (Video)

Last night, Adrian Cole (of jclouds fame) organized a Java-oriented DevOps Meetup here in San Francisco. 

There were a number of freeform lightening talks used as an excellent device to get the conversation started. Below is an interesting talk from DTO's Anthony Shortand. Anthony gave an excellent conceptual introduction to two strategies for solving DevOps problems, "Full Lifecycle Traceability" and "Establishing a Formal Separation of Concerns".

Videos from DevOps Day 2010 panels!

InfoQ.com has posted the videos they recorded at DevOps Day USA 2010. You can watch six of the seven panels now on the InfoQ.com site. There was a production problem with the seventh panel ("DevOps outside of WebOps") that, if it can be fixed, will be posted as well. InfoQ decided that the lightening talks didn't fit into their format so they have sent my co-organizer, Andrew Shafer the raw video and he's going to look into posting them himself.

You can also download audio only versions (.mp3)

Here are the links to the 6 panels...

Your mileage may vary: Experiences and lessons learned facing DevOps problems in the IT trenches (even if they weren’t calling it DevOps!). The good, the bad, the surprises, and ideas for the future.

Stefan Apitz – LinkedIn

Ernest Muller – National Instruments

Dan Nemec – SilverPop

Burzin Engineer – Shopzilla

Kevin Rae – PowerReviews

moderator: Andrew Shafer

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/your-mileage-may-vary

Infrastructure as code: Automation is essential to DevOps. The infrastructure as code concept drives many of today’s cutting edge automaton techniques. What is it all about? Where are its limitations?

Theo Schlossnagle – OmniTI

Luke Kanies – Puppet Labs

Adam Jacob – Opscode

Erik Troan – rPath

moderator: Patrick Debois

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/infrastructure-as-code

Changing culture to enable DevOps: Changing tools is easy when compared to changing people and processes. How can we cultivate an organization’s culture to identify and solve DevOps problems?

John Allspaw – Etsy

Lee Thompson – DTO Solutions

Israel Gat – The Agile Executive

Lloyd Taylor – Netelder Associates

moderator: Andrew Shafer

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/changing-culture-to-enable-DevOps

Does the Cloud needs DevOps? Does DevOps need the Cloud?: Examining the role that cloud technologies can play in solving DevOps problems and the role that DevOps solutions can play in getting the most out of cloud technologies.

James Urquhart – Cisco

Adrian Cole – Jclouds

Justin Dean – Shopzilla

Joe Arnold – Cloudscaling

moderator: John Willis

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/does-Cloud-need-DevOps

DevOps requires visibility: monitoring, testing, and performance: Examining the (often overlooked) role of monitoring and testing techniques in solving DevOps problems.

Jyoti Bansal – AppDynamics

Gareth Bowles – Appscio

Matt Ray – Zenoss

Eishay Smith – kaChing

Javier Soltero – SpringSource

moderator: Damon Edwards

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/DevOps-requires-visibility

Making the business case: We know that solving DevOps problems improves your business operations and improves the bottom line, but how do you do you explain that to your CEO or CFO? How do you get the executives to buy in and invest in DevOps solutions?

Kurt Milne – IT Process Institute

Jay Lyman – The 451 Group

Rolf Andrew Russell – ThoughtWorks

Jody Mulkey – Shopzilla

moderator: Damon Edwards

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Making-the-business-case

EDIT: The recording for seventh panel was rescued from technical oblivion and is now live!...

DevOps outside of Web Operations: Much of the public discussion about DevOps focuses on Web Operations. This panel is about taking the lessons of DevOps to other types of IT.
Adam Fletcher - ITA Software
Gene Kim – Tripwire
Michael Stahnke -
James Turnbull – Puppet Labs
moderator: Patrick Debois 
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/DevOps-outside-Web-Operations

OpenStack leaves out the "extra" you'll only find in Amazon AWS

Often I've heard the off hand comment that it is just a matter of time before there is another rival to Amazon's EC2. The private cloud has always been looming around the corner for those with large pocket books, and yet one rarely hears about a cloud offering the beats AWS's EC2. Even Rich Wolski, CTO of Eucalypus, has no delusions as to the scale pre-package software can tackle out of the box.

"One of the misconceptions about Eucalyptus is that it is able to allow an org to compete with Amazon," Wolski told us. "The Amazon AWS [Amazon Web Services] cloud is far more than a collection of software components. It operates on a gigantic scale, multiple time zones, multiple data centers, human resources that must be committed to maintain it so it can operate at that scale. It's not likely — maybe even impossible — that you're going to download something from the internet that is going to be able to operate at that scale. Eucalyptus can’t really be used for that purpose." [1]

So what gives EC2 the "extra" everyone wants to replicate?

First and foremost, AWS's EC2 is not a product of technology, but instead a product of operational excellence. It is in their culture, all the way down to their infamous door desks [2] and Jeff Bezos mediations on waste to shareholders in 2008 [3]. They took existing open source software and wrapped a service interface around it, while quietly offering some pretty amazing feats (vm startups measured in minutes from some mysterious cloud storage). Don't let their technology stack fool you, their value is in their operational discipline. AWS keeps their operational practices under wraps because they believe it gives them an advantage, and even if they did divulge them, they're likely nontransferable to your organization.

With the recent announcement of OpenStack, folks can consider another set of software components to implement their cloud and try to replicate the "extra" they get from AWS. However, without a solid focus on operations, they're not going to get much further than they would have gotten with Eucalyptus.

[1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/07/20/whynasaisdroppingeucalyptusfromitsnebulacloud/
[2] http://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/01/early-amazon-door-desks.html
[3] http://gigaom.com/2009/05/09/why-jeff-bezos-is-obsessed-with-waste/

This post is by the newest dev2ops.org blogger, Noah Campbell. Noah is a consultant specializing in automated infrastructure and DevOps process improvement.

DevOps (live) at OSCON

Early reports from OSCON are that DevOps is a topic of much discussion. My fellow dev2ops.org contributor Alex Honor and I are headed to Portland this morning to give DevOps related talks at OSCON. If you are there Wednesday or Thursday, please come by and say hello!

Wednesday (7/21) 1:40pm in room Portland 251 is Alex's presentation...
Open Source Tool Chains for Cloud Computing 

Thursday (7/22) 10:40am in room D135 is Damon's presentation... 
The IT Philharmonic: How Out of Tune Are Your Operations? 

Both talks feature lots of new content (even though the titles and outdated descriptions on the OSCON site are similar to our Velocity talks) 

Velocity and DevOps Day US was a success, now what?

Now that DevOps Day US and Velocity are in the past, where can you go for in person DevOps discussions?

Below are the DevOps Meetups that I know about:

In the San Francisco Bay area...
Tonight (!) Tuesday July 6 is the Silicon Valley DevOps Meetup

In the Los Angeles area...
Wednesday July 14 is the SoCal DevOps Meetup

In the Boston area...
Tonight (!) Tuesday July 6 is the Boston DevOps Meetup 

Across the pond in the London area...
The London DevOps Group meets regularly and has a great site.

And of course don't forget about the second installment of DevOps Days 2010 Europe October 15 - 16 in Hamburg Germany.

If you are looking for some online discussion, you can check out the following lists/groups:
DevOps Toolchain Google Group
Agile Systems Administration Google Group
DevOps LinkedIn Group
DevOps Google Group

Don't forget #devops on Twitter.

and don't forget to subscribe to the DevOps Cafe podcast!

Bonus: Here's an interesting video interview with Patrick Debois (instigator of the DevOps Days conferences) by Daniel Cukier at the DevOps Day 2010 after-party.