Video Q&A: Adam Rosien on how Continuous Deployment relies on great testing

Last night, Adam Rosien of Wealthfront (formerly called KaChing) gave a presentation on Continuous Deployment at the Large Scale Production Engineering Meetup on Yahoo's campus.

Afterwards, I grabbed Adam for a quick chat about a topic that has been troubling me: 

Newcomers to the Continuous Deployment idea often overlook the importance of fully automated testing and instead focus their attention on the number of deployments these companies are making per day.

In the video below, Adam stresses how important a role testing plays in Continuous Deployment. Testing really is the linchpin on which a successful implementation of the Continuous Deployment methodology relies. 

If you are an active reader of this blog or listen to the DevOps Cafe podcast, you probably know by now that we are big fans of the process, tooling, and culture being cultivated by the folks at Wealthfront. Previous content featuring them can be found here, here, and here.

They are not clients of any of the contributors to this blog. We just think that they are a great example of a scrappy company rethinking IT Operations to maximize business value and agility. Their engineering blog is a must read. 

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. 

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

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.