High Velocity Release Management with Alex Honor and Betsy Hearnsberger (VIDEO)

This one is for the managers out there who straddle the Dev and Ops divide.

Alex Honor and Betsy Hearnsberger have seen the importance of release management dramatically change over the past decade. Through their collective experiences working inside organizations like E*TRADE, Ask.com, NASA Ames, and Zynga (as well as Alex's subsequent consulting work at DTO Solutions) they've each amassed a wealth of experience and insight into dealing with high velocity release engineering in large scale and complex organizations.

Since their professional paths have crossed multiple times, I figured I'd get Alex and Betsy together in front of a whiteboard for a chat. In these videos they talk about the common challenges they see, advice for managers addressing these issues, solution approaches that work, and criteria for tool selection.

Please note that these videos were originally shot on July 29, 2011. Due to a technical problem is was thought that these videos were lost. Lucky for us, they have been fully recovered. I'll have to get them both on camera again soon to discuss how their thinking has evolved since then. 

Part 1: Common problems

Part 2: Management's approach to the problems

Part 3: Solution patterns and tool selection

Crowbar is quietly getting more interesting (video)

Crowbar is an interesting project that I've covered before. Born out of Dell's cloud group, much of the initial buzz described it as an installer for the cloud era... "kickstart on steroids", if you will.

Crowbar's close association with the OpenStack project has further cemented its reputation as an installer to watch. But's it's Crowbar's quiet potential as a stack management tool that is the most interesting. Through the use of barclamps (Crowbar's modules) you can tell Crowbar to build a full stack from the BIOS config all the way up to your middleware and applications. John Willis on an episode of DevOps Cafe called it "Data Center as Code".

Crowbar barclamps are also an interesting way for independent projects or vendors to ensure that their projects/products can be easily integrated into a custom platform (today this type of focus is usually in the context of making things work on OpenStack). Want to add a new component to your platform? Grab the barclamp and Crowbar will know how to do the rest. Or at least that is the promise. The project is still young and the community is still forming.

Leading open source software projects is new territory for Dell, as a company, but the Crowbar team does seem committed and community focused. I've heard some grumbles from developers that barclamp development and testing cycles can be a bit tedious due to the nature of what you are building. But no reason to believe that those types of issues won't get sorted out over time. 

A couple of Crowbar related videos are below:

The first video was made by my DTO Solutions colleague, Keith Hudgins, after he wrote a barclamp for Zenoss. It's a short demo and tour that can give you a feel for Crowbar and Barclamps.

The next video is Barton George (Dell) interviewing Rob Hirshfeld (Dell). They start off talking about the Hadoop barclamp but quickly getting into a broader discussion about Crowbar. 

Video: Marten Mickos and Rich Wolski talk DevOps and Private Clouds

I ran into Marten Mickos and Rich Wolski from Eucalyptus Systems at PuppetConf and got them to sit down for a quick video alongside my fellow dev2ops.org and DevOps Cafe contributor, John Willis.

I had just come out of Marten's keynote where he spoke about DevOps far more than I would have expected. In this video we explore the deep connection between DevOps and Private Clouds as well as other industry changes for which they are planning.

Eucalyptus was one of the first private cloud technologies on the scene, and consequently got the benefit and burden of being the early mover. The community had some ups and downs along the way, but their product and industry vision seems encouraging and warrants a closer look (and never count out Marten Mickos in an open source software battle).

Matt Ray talks Crowbar, Chef, and OpenStack integration for building private clouds (VIDEO)

Also while in Austin, I stopped by Opscode's satellite offices to talk to Matt Ray about the integration work he is doing with Crowbar (a soon to be open source bare-metal provisioning tool from Dell), Chef, and OpenStack. This toolchain stretches the concept of infrastructure as code all the way from the bios to the provisioning of a private cloud... it's a "datacenter as code".

See the short (06:39) video below:

DevOps in the Enterprise: Whiteboard Session at National Instruments (Video)

I was recently in Austin, Texas and had a chance to visit National Instruments and talk DevOps.

National Instruments is a rare case study. While it's common to hear DevOps stories coming from web startups, National Instruments definitely falls into the category of a traditional legacy enterprise. 

After meeting the larger team, I settled into a conference room with Ernest Mueller and Peco Karayanev to get a deeper dive into both their DevOps and multi-vendor Cloud initiatives. Below is the video from that session.

0:00 - Intro
Topics include:

• How Ernest, Peco, and National Instruments got from traditional legacy IT operations thinking to DevOps thinking
• Scaling a single web app in a startup vs. managing the "long tail of long tails" in a heterogeneous enterprise environment
• Challenge of moving developers from a desktop software mindset to developing for the cloud

10:37 - Whiteboard
Topics include:

• "Sharing is the Devil"... Managing complexity through isolation by design
• Overview of NI cloud architecture
• "Operations as a Service"
• Model-driven provisioning
• Building cloud apps that span multiple clouds (Azure and AWS)
• Working with deployment tools (and enabling developer self-service/maintenance)
• Tools the team is publishing as open source projects (Only the second time that National Instruments has released something under an open source license)