The (Comedic) Truth about DevOps

Many serious words have been written about DevOps, including my own "What is DevOps?" post. But sometimes a bit of comedy helps drive home some fundamental truth.

Behold Adam Jacob (CTO of Opscode): 

Note: this was part of Adam's "Choose Your Own Adventure" talk at Velocity. Be sure to check out the other videos from his show talk. 2 drink minimum not required.

Should you attend Velocity and DevOps Day? Yes.

 Quick questions...

• Is IT Operations important to you?
• Do you build and/or operate a revenue producing online service?
• Do you want to meet and learn from the best in the business?
• Are you looking for a job? or looking to hire IT rock stars? 

If the answer to any of these questions is "yes"... then you need to be in Silicon Valley the week of June 22 - 25, 2010.

First up, we've got O'Reilly's Velocity Conference from June 22 - 24 in Santa Clara, CA.

Velocity is the premier Web Operations and Performance conference (and from what I understand is O'Reilly's fastest growing conference). If you want to hear from the people who are pushing IT Operations to new heights and powering the biggest successes on the Web, Velocity is the place to be.

This isn't hyperbole. I've been to all of the Velocity Conferences and the hallway conversation alone is worth the price of admission. And that's before you add in value of the the excellent presentations. It's one of those conferences that always seems to manage to produce a handful of presentations that are talked about and referenced for the rest of the year (if not longer). 

This year, three of the the dev2ops.org contributors (Alex Honor, Lee Thompson, and myself) are speakers. Hopefully we'll live up to the high standards that those who have come before us have set.

Click on the banner below for more information and use the code vel10fsp for a 20% discount.

The day after Velocity, Friday June 25, is the DevOps Day Conference in Mountain View, CA (about 10 minutes from Santa Clara). DevOps Day is a one day free conference dedicated to discussing all topics around improving the interaction between what is traditionally considered development activity and that which is traditionally considered operations activity. As the name suggests... it's a day dedicated to an open discussion about all things related to DevOps! 

The event is following a unique single-track all panel format (with a few sets of "ignite style" lightening talks sprinkled in for good measure). The panels are designed to be highly interactive with the full audience. As you can see from the panelist list and the registered attendee list, the panels and the audience will be full of rock stars in our field.

Perhaps I'm biased since I'm one of the organizers, but this is shaping up to be a truly great event.

The conference is free, lunch will be provided, and there's going to be free beer afterwards! 

Click on the graphic below for more information and to secure your spot.

 

DevOps Toolchain project announced at O'Reilly's Velocity online conference

If you are the type who gets distracted at work while trying to stay plugged into the industry, yesterday was a big big problem.  In Austin, you had SXSW going on; in San Francisco, you had OSBC; in San Jose you had Cloud Connect; and on the internet you had the O'Reilly Velocity Online Conference.  Wow!

The dev2ops guys were busy.  Damon and Alex were presenting at Cloud Connect while I was presenting at Velocity OLC.  I'm an Austin resident, but SXSW really isn't the DevOps hang-out, at least yet! (heh). 

At Velocity, it was my privilege to announce the next generation of the provisioning toolchain project.  Some of the feedback we received from the original toolchain paper was from the front lines of DevOps: "yeah that's pretty interesting, but there is alot more to a datacenter than just provisioning". Good point.

So we scope creeped the hell out of the automated provisioning paper and started the devops-toolchain project dedicated to defining best practices in DevOps and open source tools available to accomplish those practices. 

So this time, the devops-toolchain project is an opensource community driven project, which due to its nature will need to be reved frequently due to the constantly shifting nature of "best practices".  We've kicked started some of the content at http://code.google.com/p/devops-toolchain/  and formed a Google Group for the discussion at http://groups.google.com/group/devops-toolchain. Come join the conversation!

Here are the slides from my presentation:

The Velocity team did a great job hosting the conference! An example of the great content presented is from Ward Spangenberg from Zynga. He updated us on the latest on security in Cloud deployments.  Getting security worked out gets more compute into the cloud:

I'm an OSBC alumni. If you're into vintage conference or need to find a way to get over insomnia, check this out from 2007...

dev2ops.org contributers presenting at Cloud Connect and Velocity Online Conferences

Perhaps proving that you can be two place at the same time, dev2ops.org contributers will be presenting at two different conferences tomorrow (Wednesday, March 17):

    

Alex Honor and Damon Edwards will be presenting at Cloud Connect in San Jose, CA at 8:30am (PDT):
"Orchestration: The Next Frontier for Cloud Applications"

 

 
Lee Thompson will be presenting on the Open Source Toolchain Project at O'Reilly's Velocity Online at 9:00am (PDT). Registration for this online event is FREE!