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

Kanban and DevOps Roundtable (Video)

Ok so it's more of a semi-circle than a roundtable... I was at the first ever Kanban for DevOps class this past week in Sunnyvale, CA and after looking around the room I couldn't let these folks go without getting them on video:
- Luke Kanies (Puppet Labs)
- John Willis (Enstratus)
- Gene Kim (Author)
- Dominica DeGrandis (David J. Anderson & Associates)

Lucky for our readers, they didn't disappoint. We talk about why we think Kanban is an excellent tool for solving DevOps flow problems and our Kanban experiences thus far. 

Here is the video:

Update: If you are in the Atlanta area, John Willis has started the Atlanta Limited WIP Society!

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).

Huddle.com - Being Agile about Agile with Andy McLoughlin

Last week I attended a Pacific Crest Mosiac Summit in Vail Colorado and met with a number of institutional technology investors.  During the summit there were a number of interesting BOF’s and I was fortunate enough to moderated a #devops BOF.  Andy McLoughlin the founder of Huddle.com, was one of the individuals in the Devops BOF and he blew me away with some of his internal #devop practices.  I am happy to share some of Andy’s insights here with you in the video.

Full video of Israel Gat interview (Agile in enterprise, DevOps, Technical Debt)

After posting the exceprt on Technical Debt, I've gotten a number of requests to post the full video of my beers-in-the-backyard discussion with Israel Gat (Director of Cutter Consortium's Agile Product & Project Management practice).

We covered a number of interesting topics, including bringing Agile to enterprises, how Israel found himself part of the DevOps movement, and the measurement of Technical Debt.