the agile admin

Austin is such a great place to be a techie.

• The Austin Cloud User Group (I help run it) meets every third Tuesday evening, and we’ve ben having 50+ people come in to check out some awesome stuff.  Next meeting Feb 21 on Puppet, hosted by Pervasive.
• The Agile Austin DevOps SIG meets fourth Wednesdays, we had our meeting today and had about 20 attendees, hosted by CA/Hyperformix. I also help run that one.
• The Austin Big Data User Group is back meeting – next one is tomorrow night! Hosted by Bazaarvoice.
• The Austin OWASP chapter is one of the biggest and most active in the country, and also meets monthly, hosted by National Instruments. Fellow Agile Admin James Wickett helps run that group.
• The Cloud Security Alliance, Austin chapter is just getting started but has a lot of momentum and we’re coordinating with them from the ACUG and OWASP sides. Their first meeting is tonight, come out!

There are others but those are my favorites and therefore the coolest by definition.

There’s also cool events coming up you should keep an eye out for.

• DevOpsDays Austin, Apr 2-3, hosted by National Instruments, and this’ll be big! Patrick Debois and the whole crew of DevOps illuminati will be here. Now taking sponsors and speakers! Register now!
• AppSec USA 2012, Oct 23-26 – Austin OWASP kicks so much ass with LASCON that the annual OWASP convention is coming here to Austin this year!
• South by Southwest Interactive, March 9-13 – quickly becoming theWeb conference in the flyover states . Lots of stuff happens during it, like:
  • Austin Cloud/DevOps party courtesy GeekAustin (ACUG is a community sponsor). March 10.
  • CloudCamp – Dave Nielsen will be bringing a CloudCamp to Austin again this year during SXSWi. Details TBD, sounding like Mar 11 maybe.
• The Cloud Security Alliance and ACUG are hoping to put together an Austin cloud conference, too. Maybe early 2013.

Hey all, sorry it’s been quiet around here – Peco and I took our families on vacation to Bulgaria!  Plus, we’ve been busy in the run-up to our company convention, NIWeek. I imagine most of the Web type folks out there don’t know about NIWeek, but it’s where scientists and engineers who use our products come to learn. It’s always awesome to see the technology innovation going on out there, from the Stormchasers getting data on tornadoes and lightning that no one ever has before, to high school kids solving real problems.

There were a couple things that are really worth checking out.  The first is the demo David Fuller did of NI’s system designer prototype (you can skip ahead to 5:00 in if you want to) . Though the examples he is using is of engineering type systems, you can easily imagine using that same interface for designing Web systems – no ‘separate Visio diagram’ BS any more. Imagine every level from architectural diagram to physical system representation to the real running code all being part of one integrated drill-down. It looks SUPER SWEET. Seems like science fiction to those of us IT-types.

A quick guide to the demo – so first a Xilinx guy talks about their new ARM-based chip, and then David shows drill-up and down to the real hardware parts of a system.  NI now has the “traditional systems” problem in that people buy hardware, buy software, and are turning it into large distributed scalable architectures.  Not being hobbled by preconceptions of how that should be done, our system diagram team has come up with a sweet visualization where you can swap between architecture view (8:30 in), actual pictures and specs of hardware, then down (10:40 in) into the “implementation” box-and-line system and network diagram, and then down into the code (12:00 in for VHDL and 13:20 in for LabVIEW). LabVIEW code is natively graphical, so in the final drilldown he also shows programming using drawing/gestures.

Why have twenty years of “systems management” and design tools from IBM/HP/etc not given us anything near this awesome for other systems?  I don’t know, but it’s high time. We led a session at DevOpsDays about diagramming systems, and “I make a Visio on the side” is state of the art.  There was one guy who took the time to make awesome UML models, but real integration of design/diagram to real system doesn’t exist. And it needs to. And not in some labor intensive  “How about UML oh Lord I pooped myself” kind of way, but an easy and integral part of building the system.

I am really enjoying working in the joint engineering/IT world.  There’s some things IT technology has figured out that engineering technology is just starting to bumble into (security, for example, and Web services). But there are a lot of things that engineering does that IT efforts look like the work of a bumbling child next to. Like instrumentation and monitoring, the IT state of the art is vomitous when placed next to real engineering data metric gathering (and analysis, and visualization) techniques.  Will system design also be revolutionized from that quarter?

The other cool takeaway was how cloud is gaining some foothold in the engineering space.  I was impressed as hell with Maintainable Software, the only proper Web 3.0 company in attendance. Awesome SaaS product, and I talked with the guys for a long time and they are doing all the cool DevOps stuff – automated provisioning, continuous deployment, feature knobs, all that Etsy/Facebook kind of whizbang shit. They’re like what I want our team here to become, and it was great meeting someone in our space who is doing all that – I love goofy social media apps or whatever but it can sometimes be hard to convey the appropriateness of some of those practices to our sector. “If it’s good enough to sell hand knitted tea cozies or try to hook up with old high school sweethearts, then certainly it’s good enough to use in your attempt to cure cancer!” anyway, Mike and Derek were great guys and it was nice to see that new kind of thinking making inroads into our sometimes too-traditional space.

Peco and I split up to cover more ground.  I went to four workshops and here’s the details… Peco will have to chime in on his.

First, Adrian Cockroft, Director of Cloud Architecture for Netflix, spoke on Netflix in the Cloud. This session was excellent.  He talked about the importance of model driven architecture, a runtime registry, how too many of the monitoring etc. tools don’t do cloud worth a damn…  All great stuff.  Included a love letter to AppDynamics, a cool cloud-friendly app instrumentation tool similar to our beloved Opnet Panorama.

Next, I saw John Rauser of Amazon talk about Just Enough Statistics To Be Dangerous. He talked about basic probability stats and how to use them.  Pretty good, though could have used more “and here’s how this applies to WebOps” examples instead of “how many quarters are in this jar” examples. I missed a bit of this because I ran out to go to the head and Patrick Debois grabbed me to talk to a guy from Dell about DevOps, which was loads of fun!  I missed the part on Bayesian stats though, I’ll have to watch the session video once it’s available.

Over lunch we met up with all the other guys here from NI, and my college friend Jon Whitney! Woot!  Rice University in the house!

After lunch, it was John Allspaw talking about reliability engineering and Postmortems and Human Error. Root cause is a myth!  So is human error!  Mindbending stuff. You should read the “How Complex Systems Fail” chapter in the Web Ops book to lube you up first, then watch the video for this session. Very relevant to all ops folks. We were a little split, though, on how a militant no-blame philosophy jives with places that aren’t hiring the absolute cream of the crop – if you don’t work at Etsy or similar 3l33t place, you do have some folks that are… a disproportionate source of errors.

My last workshop was a little disappointing – Automating Web Performance Testing by 5 PM, by the Neustar crew. There was some good info in there – Selenium, proxies, HAR format – but delivery was weak.  Sample code though, you can download some Python and Java automation examples. But “I can’t read text that small” combined with bad presentation technique (asking 5 times for “raise your hand if you don’t know X,” for example) made it a bit of a chore. Ah well.

Now it’s time for dinner and then the evening Ignite! sessions!

Two of the agile admins, Ernest and Peco, are in Santa Clara this week for our fourth Velocity conference! We’ve been to all of them and always get a lot out of them.  It’s the first conference focused on Web performance and operations. Today is the day of workshops, then Wed-Thurs is normal sessions.  On Fri-Sat we’re going to DevOpsDays 2011 Mountain View. The third agile admin, James, is in Penang hanging out with our follow-the-sun WebOps staff!

If any of you are out in sunny CA for these events (or heck, if you’re in Penang and bored), ping us, we’d love to meet you! Tweet me at @ernestmueller for the hookup.

Now to our first workshops – I’m watching Adrian Cockroft talk about Netflix’s use of the Amazon cloud and Peco is going to see the Openstack workshop!

While at SXSW, I recorded an episode of the IT Management and Cloud Podcast with Michael Coté and John Willis. You can find it on Coté’s People Over Process blog! Sorry about the background noise, we were doing it in the upstairs bar at the Driskill.

Day 2 started off a bit rocky but then got really good.  I tried to get to the Lean Startup: King of the Apps Showdown session, but the shuttle buses take a long route and are few and far between, so I got there pretty late.  I saw snapappointments.com, snapwebsites, Planzai, Icebreakr,and mapomatic all get their app and pitch critiqued by a panel of folks – Robert Scoble, Eric Ries, Dave McClure, Bill Boebel, and Stacey Higginbotham. They demanded mapomatic release right away, and told snapwebsites to remove half of his features.  I was ambivalent about this advice – I can see streamlining the UI to hide advanced functionality, but “remove functionality”? Sure, a simple app has a wider reach, but if you can effectively provide an advanced mode/version with more functionality that professionals need, wouldn’t that be better? I just don’t like how all these apps are degenerating into one very narrow function “plus it checks you into Foursquare!!!!”  Bah.

They joked about how many of the candidates had “Snap” in their name, and then on the bus on the way back I met a girl from TeamSnap. They have a site that lets you arrange sports teams, even take Paypal payments for team dues, very slick.

And congratulations to friend of the blog Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan) of Localmind, who has been singled out by Scoble as “best SXSW app so far!” You should all go download it from the App Store now.

Then I tried to go to the session on How To Innovate At Big Companies, with Gene Kim of Visible Ops fame – I left the AT&T center early and went all the way to the Hyatt. But it was so full they had 30 people standing outside only allowed in if anyone left. So I went over to the Hilton to try to catch Mistakes I Made Building Netflix for the iPhone. And it also had a line of “one in, one out” standby people. Son of a bitch.  They better be videoing this stuff. Anyway, at this point it was too far into the slot so I just went to the Screenburn Arcade, which was fun. Got my picture taken with Loren Wiseman of Traveller fame – apparently the venerable RPG is being turned into an iPhone MMO!

To recuperate from our disappointing morning, Peco and I went and had a burger at Casino El Camino, which takes a ridiculously long time but is worth it, they have the best burgers in Austin. We hooked up with Cote and John Willis there, and then went to the Etsy Code as Craft: Moving Fast At Scale event which was brilliant and DevOpsey. Continuous deployment, only coding off trunk, logging and metrics, “dashboard driven development”, and more. A lot of the topics have info on them on the Etsy Code as Craft blog - they didn’t record the talk but promise to record it the next time they give it and put it up.

I took a lot of notes but the high points were:

• They have open sourced their log collection/graphing tool, Logster, and their stats collection daemon, statsd.
• They perform hundreds of releases a month but only had six “bad deploys” over the course of a year by combining one-button deploy, testing, feature flags, and a  theory of roll-forward. No more organized releases, release managers, rollbacks, all that stuff.
• They have a cute “deployinator” dashboard that lets people (and not just coders, they have more people deploying than they have developers) do the deploys – they’ll open source it, but stressed that it’s not much technically, the culture and practices are 99% of the work to get to this.
• They use a lot of chef but don’t use it for code deploys because that’s a simple task that they need more control over.

That was a two hour event, so then after a little VIP partyin’ atop Fogo de Chao, we packed it in for the day.

Isn’t that some 3l33t jargon.  Anyway, Dave Nielsen is holding a CloudCamp here in Austin during SXSW Interactive on Monday, March 14 (followed by the Cloudy Awards on March 15) and John Willis of Opscode and I reached out to him, and he has generously offered to let us have a DevOps meetup in conjunction.

John’s putting together the details but is also traveling, so this is going to be kind of emergent.  If you’re in Austin (normally or just for SXSW) and are interested in cloud, DevOps, etc., come on out to the CloudCamp (it’s free and no SXSW badge required) and also participate in the DevOps meetup!

In fact, if anyone’s interested in doing short presentations or show-and-tells or whatnot, please ping John (@botchagalupe) or me (@ernestmueller)!

We started out the week gently, with a light Friday (why am I still so tired then?).  Two of your favorite Agile Admins, Peco and Ernest, were down at the Austin Convention Center to experience SXSW Interactive!  The third Agile Admin, James, was busy giving a talk at the nearby Security B-Sides Austin.

After getting down there early, getting badges, and getting oriented, we saw Jason Calacanis interview Tim O’Reilly. He gave a lot of interesting insight into the development of innovation, tracing the Internet, open source, Web 2.0/social media/user contributed content, cloud, and Big Data.

The single most interesting thing he said, though, was a side note that illustrated how hard it is for companies to maintain a real vision over time, especially once they get big and various stakeholders’ needs conflict – he talked about how many people have become billionaires off of O’Reilly ideas and how there’s been pressure for him to sell out or cash in – like Cisco offered to buy them, noting that “You guys are always first on the scene with the cool stuff but you fail to exploit it.” Tim always rejected those offers, though he did note he is often conflicted because of all the people he has working for them – and not making all those great people the money that would bring.

Next, Peco saw Google’s Marissa Meyer talk (he’ll have to share what went on there) and I kinda played hooky by going to a session about “daddy bloggers,” as that’s a personal interest of mine.

Then we both went to a session that was supposed to be about “The Connected Car: Driving Technology” and automobile telemetrics, but it sucked. It was some car guys and a lady from Pandora telling us over and over again that “cars hooked up to networks and stuff are cool.” I am willing to put up with about 5 minutes of telling me something’s cool, but if it doesn’t give way quickly to you SHOWING me that it’s cool, I’m out.  We bailed 30 minutes in, along with a lot of the other attendees.

Then we went down to the Austin Music Hall for four hours of Ignite, a format where presenters get 5 minutes and auto-advancing slides to make a point. The topic was “2021 Visions of the Future.”  Besides the talks and some bands, there were also a bunch of Arduino and robotics and various weird Maker type booths, which was fun. The crowd was really varied, in fact there were other people there from NI who had been invited via various completely different vectors (UT School of Engineering, Austin Ventures startup stuff, SXSWi). [Side note - there was a contest to drop an egg from the balcony safely using only 4 sheets of paper and a couple feet of tape, and I was one of the winners and got a Roku for my troubles! Engineering education FTW.]

Some presentations were good, others incoherent, but a common theme throughout the day was people doing things they have a passion for, and worrying about the money later.  This was a theme in Tim O’Reilly’s talk and it pervaded the presentations at Ignite. Really most people aren’t in the field they’re in because it’s the thing with the highest ROI they qualify for, they are in it because they  have some kind of passion for it.  A lot of life then tries to stomp that passion out, but the enabling factors of the Web, DIY, etc. are making it so you can flip off  “the Man” and pursue your passion yourself if you want to. As a large company we struggle with that, and try to promote people following their passions and enable internal entrepreneurship at a high level, while however the natural grinding wheels of a large organization grind that into meal at the middle levels.

Then we got free ice cream from the Free Ice Cream Man and headed home. I’m getting sick and feel whupped, but it was energizing to see so many people doing so many great things – and let me tell you, SXSWi is getting HUGE.  It’s nothing like the first year I went, when there were maybe ten sessions and the conference center was largely empty. The place was packed; companies have bought out and transformed nearby buildings – a bar across the street is now the Playstation Lounge, with huge video wall on the roof and stuff; CNN had a giant neon sign installed at one restaurant… I can tell the economy’s looking up and that Interactive is hot because Lordy there’s money getting thrown at this thing.

See the rest of my pictures from Day One of SXSW here!

I just went to lunch with a visitor in town for SXSW (@lennysan from Localmind) and it reminded me of some of the ‘gotchas’ that someone not from Austin may not know.

• If your hotel doesn’t have a shuttle, and it is not immediately inside the downtown area, you will need a car. (Unless you are real close to the one light rail line, and I wouldn’t bet on it not being totally overloaded). Austin is big and not pedestrian friendly outside of IMMEDIATELY adjacent to the river.
• Here’s an awesome downtown parking guide from Community Impact. Shows where they are, what the rates are, whether they’re lot or structure.
• You can rent your gun at the airport when you land, to avoid spending time finding another place to do it.
• Just because a place has a big “BBQ” sign doesn’t mean you should go eat barbecue there.  We were eating real BBQ at Rudy’s and looking across the highway at the Bone Daddy’s that has a big ol’ sign on it saying BBQ.  I’m not saying Bone Daddy’s doesn’t have things to recommend it, but BBQ isn’t really its strength.  If you’re downtown, eat at the Iron Works, and if anyone is organizing a field trip out of town to the really golden places in Taylor or Llano, go along.
• Someone asked on Localmind about breakfast during SXSW – here, breakfast is breakfast tacos, except for hotel restaurants and Denny’s.

Any more tips for furriners?  Post them here!

SXSW Interactive is going on in Austin tomorrow through next Tuesday, and loads of great cloud and DevOps folks will be in town for it. Looking forward to talking with @cote, @lennysan, @botchgalupe, @davenielsen, @ehuddleston, and many more.

Here’s what I think the best cloud/devops/high tech related tickets are, let me know what I’m missing! A lot of the off premise events don’t even require badges and are mostly free.

Random Off Premise SXSW Interactive Stuff

• South By Innovation Friday, March 11, 2011 from 5:00 PM – 7:30 PM in Union Park, held by our friends Pervasive.
• Ignite on Friday, 6-10 PM at Austin Music Hall, with @whurley, SXSW badgeholders only.
• Etsy’s “Code as Craft: Moving Fast at Scale” talk 4-6 PM Sat at Venue 222, anyone can attend but RSVP.
• Google’s League of Extraordinary Hackers, Sunday 1-6 PM at Speakeasy.
• Data Cluster Party with Datastax and Infochimps on Sunday, 5:30-8 PM at Elysium, anyone can attend but RSVP.
• SuperHappyDevHouse Sunday 7 PM at Speakeasy, with Lego Mindstorm NXT hackathon. (NI makes the software that powers Mindstorms, by the way.)
• CloudCamp App Workshop by Dave Nielsen CloudCamp, not SXSW affiliated and free, Monday 2-6 PM at Valhalla.
• Rackspace/Openstack Arcade Bash, Monday 6-9 PM at Kung Fu Saloon. John Willis is trying to get this converted into a DevOps meetup too!
• CloudCamp Cloudy Awards 3-8 PM Tues at 138 Listening Lounge, anyone can attend but RSVP.
• Security B-Sides Austin: Keep Security Weird is Mar 11-12 but is all sold out.  It will be awesome though!  Go try to sneak in.

Other events – not job related but make me happy:

• Drafthouse + Fandango launch party, 9 PM Sat at the Highball,
• John Oliver does standup, free with SXSWi badge! Monday 8 or 10:30 at Esther’s Follies, I’ll be there at 10!

Sessions

Sessions are less important than the other stuff so they’re on here second!  No time for links, search on ‘em.

• Eric Ries’ Lean Startup track on Saturday
• Thunder in the Clouds with Cote
• Scalability: Covering Your Rear with a Good Backend
• NoSQL stuff on Sunday and Monday (Cassandra, Solr)

What’s the good stuff I haven’t mentioned?  DevOps, Cloud, noSQL, and other cool stuff report below!