Day Two
First, a public shaming. Some goober from Merantis left this spam on everyone’s car. Bah.
Presentations
@bridgetkromhout spoke on “how I learned to stop worrying and love devops” and @benzobot spoke on onboarding and mentoring apprentices. DoD SV certainly made a strong effort to get more female speakers this year! We tried in Austin (I personally wrote like every local techie woman group I could find) but we only had like one.
Then there were two super bad ass presentations back to back. I can’t find the slides online yet.
The Future of Configuration Management
Mark Burgess (@markburgess_osl), aka “The CFEngine Guy” and noted Promise Theory advocate, spoke. Chef and Puppet had eclipsed CFEngine for a while but it turns out as the Internet of Things and containers and stuff are arriving that maybe many of his design decisions were actually prescient and not retro. Here it is broken down into wise sayings.
- Why do we not have CAD for IT systems?
- Orchestration is not bricklaying.
- We need the equivalent of style sheets for servers.
- We are entering a world of decentralized smart infrastructure.
- Scale, complexity, and knowledge increase as our desire for flexibility increases.
- Separation of concerns adds complexity and fragility.
- To handle complexity – atomize and untether.
- 3D printed datacenters are coming.
DevOps as Relationship Management
James Urquhart (@jamesurquhart) spoke about the interconnectedness of our systems. The SEC, post flash crash, added circuit breakers, defined rollback protocols, inserted agents into the flow of the stock exchange trading systems to prevent uncontrolled cascading.
One simple rule – visualize the whole system (monitor your outside relationships) but take action at the agent level. “How are you doing today?” “Good.” Monitoring is going well, new approaches in the space look at policies and interactions and performance and business medtrics – but need to differentiate reductionist vs expansionist approaches.
Michal Nygard’s book Release It! is full of great patterns, and Netflix’ open sourced Hystrix is an example of the kind of relational system safeguards you can build off it.
Ignite Block
- Tips for Introverts (at Conventions) by Tom Duffield – They include find a role, don’t fear failure, attend preconference activities, go to lunch early and sit, engage, share interests, find a comfortable setting, take time to recharge. As someone initially introverted myself (no one believes that now) I like that this has actual tips to get past it; in some circles “introversion” has become the new “Asperger’s” as a blanket excuse for not wanting to bother to relate to people.
- Mike Place on scalable container management – Google kubernetes is an example. Don’t just provision your systems, you need to manage them too. Images came and went and came back now, but you also can’t ignore what’s onboard the image. It’s time to join image and config management.
This was really good and the world should listen. On the one hand, conducting CM operations on 1000 servers in parallel is contributing unnecessarily to the heat death of the universe. On the other hand, you need to build those images in a non-manual way in the first place! And too many systems worry about the configuration but not the runtime operation. Amen brother! - Finally (well, there were two more, but I didn’t care for them so took no notes), John Willis (@botchagalupe) did [Darwin to] Deming to DevOps, a burst-fire reading list of nondeterminism tracing from Darwin through various scientists to the Deming/TPS stuff through into the DevOps world with Gene Kim and Patrick Debois. It was pimp. Here it is when he gave it at another venue:
Conclusions
Here’s some big themes from the week.
- Deterministic, reductionist, and centralized are for suckers.
- Complexity is the enemy. Systems thinking is necessary.
- We love continuous deployment. But DevOps is not just about delivering code to production.
- Women exist in DevOps and are cool. More would be great.
- Most vendors have figured out to just relax and talk to techies in a way they might listen to. Some haven’t.
It was a great event, kudos to Marius and the other organizers who put in a lot of work to wrangle 500 people, nearly 30 sponsors, food, venue, and the like. If you haven’t been to a DevOpsDays, look around, there may be one near you! I help organize DevOpsDays Austin (just had our third annual) and there’s ones coming this year from Tel Aviv to Minneapolis.
If you went to DoD SV, feel free and comment below with your thoughts (linking any posts you’ve made, slides, etc. is welcome too)!
the agile admin 