I went to OpsCamp this last weekend here in Austin, a get-together for Web operations folks specifically focusing on the cloud, and it was a great time! Here’s my after action report.
The event invite said it was in the Spider House, a cool local coffee bar/normal bar. I hadn’t been there before, but other people that had said “That’s insane! They’ll never fit that many people! There’s outside seating but it’s freezing out!” That gave me some degree of trepidation, but I still racked out in time to get downtown by 8 AM on a Saturday (sigh!). Happily, it turned out that the event was really in the adjacent music/whatnot venue also owned by Spider House, the United States Art Authority, which they kindly allowed us to use for free! There were a lot of people there; we weren’t overfilling the place but it was definitely at capacity, there were near 100 people in attendance.
I had just heard of OpsCamp through word of mouth, and figured it was just going to be a gathering of local Austin Web ops types. Which would be entertaining enough, certainly. But as I looked around the room I started recognizing a lot of guys from Velocity and other major shows; CEOs and other high ranked guys from various Web ops related tool companies. Sponsors included John Willis and Adam Jacob (creator of Chef) from Opscode , Luke Kanies from Reductive Labs (creator of Puppet), Damon Edwards and Alex Honor from DTO Solutions (formerly ControlTier), Mark Hinkle and Matt Ray from Zenoss, Dave Nielsen (CloudCamp), Michael Coté (Redmonk), Bitnami, Spiceworks, and Rackspace Cloud. Other than that, there were a lot of random Austinites and some guys from big local outfits (Dell, IBM).
You can read all the tweets about the event if you swing that way.
OpsCamp kinda grew out of an earlier thing, BarCampESM, also in Austin two years ago. I never heard about that, wish I had.
How It Went
I had never been to an “unconference” before. Basically there’s no set agenda, it’s self-emergent. It worked pretty well. I’ll describe the process a bit for other noobs.
First, there was a round of lightning talks. Brett from Rackspace noted that “size matters,” Bill from Zenoss said “monitoring is important,” and Luke from Reductive claimed that “in 2-4 years ‘cloud’ won’t be a big deal, it’ll just be how people are doing things – unless you’re a jackass.”
Then it was time for sessions. People got up and wrote a proposed session name on a piece of paper and then went in front of the group and pitched it, a hand-count of “how many people find this interesting” was taken.
Candidates included:
- service level to resolution
- physical access to your cloud assets
- autodiscovery of systems
- decompose monitoring into tool chain
- tool chain for automatic provisioning
- monitoring from the cloud
- monitoring in the cloud – widely dispersed components
- agent based monitoring evolution
- devops is the debil – change to the role of sysadmins
- And more
We decided that so many of these touched on two major topics that we should do group discussions on them before going to sessions. They were:
- monitoring in the cloud
- config mgmt in the cloud
This seemed like a good idea; these are indeed the two major areas of concern when trying to move to the cloud.
Sadly, the whole-group discussions, especially the monitoring one, were unfruitful. For a long ass time people threw out brilliant quips about “Why would you bother monitoring a server anyway” and other such high-theory wonkery. I got zero value out of these, which was sad because the topics were crucially interesting – just too unfocused; you had people coming at the problem 100 different ways in sound bytes. The only note I bothered to write down was that “monitoring porn” (too many metrics) makes it hard to do correlation. We had that problem here, and invested in a (horrors) non open-source tool, Opnet Panorama, that has an advanced analytics and correlation engine that can make some sense of tens of thousands of metrics for exactly that reason.
Sessions
There were three sessions. I didn’t take many notes in the first one because, being a Web ops guy, I was having to work a release simultaneously with attending OpsCamp 😛
the agile admin 