The next meeting of Austin’s cloud computing trailblazers is next Tuesday, Sep. 21. Event details and signup are here. Some gentlement from Opscode will be talking about cloud security, and then we’ll have our usual unconference-style discussions. If you haven’t, join the group mailing list! It’s free, you get fed, and you get to talk with other people actually working with cloud technologies.
We were out at HomeAway for a technical discussion, and DevOps reared its head as it does so frequently nowadays. In the context of talking about their preparation to scale up for their big Chevy Chase Super Bowl commercial, they were doing all kinds of stuff. One of the things they noted was that the traditional dev and ops headbutting changed due to the long hours of work they had to put in together. They tried going off and doing “their parts” separately – ops doing network, servers, load balancers, and hosting and developers doing coding, caching, tuning, and testing – but the time pressure, importance, and complexity of the project forced them together into a room, and once they started to collaborate they just stayed there, working in close proximity, for the duration. When asked about the big takeaways from the entire project, the developers noted that “Leaning how everything interacts has changed how we build things” – for example, doing “pull the plug” fault testing has made for more resilient architectures and higher confidence and quality of life for both the dev and ops teams! They didn’t describe it as “DevOps,” but that’s what it boils down to.
The more I talk to other successful Austin tech companies – HomeAway, BazaarVoice, Pervasive – the more that I hear DevOps concepts mentioned as keys to their success – and they didn’t do them because they “wanted to do this cool DevOps thing,” but they did what was needed to succeed and it turns out that a part of that is bringing development and operational concerns together into a whole. It reminds me of the story behind the Visible Ops book, where the authors researched what high performing IT shops had in common and then realized those successful behaviors all mapped to certain ITIL areas (mainly change management). That is a compelling validation of its efficacy.
Anyway, I urged them to consider doing that presentation in public venues; it really was a great story and hit on many of the best practices that have been emerging from the ops and performance world over the last few years. They must be doing something right because they’re growing like gangbusters – if you want to take a vacation and rent someone else’s house/condo instead of going to a hotel, go try out homeaway.com!
I thought I would take this opportunity to invite the agile admin readers to LASCON. LASCON (Lonestar Application Security Conference) is happening in Austin, TX on October 29th, 2010. The conference is sponsored by OWASP (the Open Web App Security Project) and is an entire day of quality content on web app security. We’ll be there!
The speaker list is still in the works, but so far we have two presentations from this years BlackHat conference, several published authors, and the Director for Software Assurance in the National Cyber Security Division of the Department of Homeland Security just to name a few, and that’s only the preliminary round of acceptances.
Do you remember a few years ago when there was a worm going around MySpace that infected user profile pages at the rate of over one million in 20 hours? Yeah, the author of that worm is speaking at the conference. How can you beat that?
I have been planning this conference for a few months and am pretty excited about it. If you are can make it to Austin on October 29th, we would love to meet you at LASCON.
The first meeting of the Austin Cloud Computing Users Group just happened this Tuesday, and it was a good time! This new effort is kindly hosted by Pervasive Software [map]. We had folks from all over attend – Pervasive (of course), NI (4 of us went), Dell, ServiceMesh, BazaarVoice, Redmonk, and Zenoss just to name a few. There are a lot of heavy hitters here in Austin because our town is so lovely!
We basically just introduced ourselves (there were like 50 people there so that took a while) and talked about organization and what we wanted to do.
The next meeting is planned already; it will be at Pervasive from 6:00 to 8:00 PM on Tuesday, August 24. Michael Coté of Redmonk will be speaking on cloud computing trends. Meeting format will be a presentation followed by lightning talks and self-forming unconference sessions. Companies will be buying food and drink for the group in return for a 5 minute “pimp yourself” slot. Mmm, free dinner.
There is a Google group/mailing list you can join – austin-cug@googlegroups.com. There’s already some good discussion underway, so join in, and come to the next meeting!
The second CloudCamp in Austin is happening June 10. It’s an unconference about, of course, cloud computing. Read about it and sign up here!
I missed the first one but loved OpsCamp so I’m going!
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