This week in DevOps #3

Hey, it's that time again and this week I start with an apology as we missed a week due to the awesome DevOpsDays London and a not so awesome bout of Tonsillitis.

DevOpsDays London

DevOpsDays London - easily the best conference/unconference I've ever attended. Great people, great speakers, OpenSpaces was awesome, food was good and to top it all off – free beer. Sadly, I missed the Saturday due to illness (not caused by the free beer, or the Wales Vs England rugby game).

Highlights;

• @niekbartho gave a solid opening presentation, monitoring his heart rate as he went. Some good real world advice and a story from the trenches is always a nice touch. I felt the story was a little more focused on continuous delivery, rather than DevOps. Niek did clarify the term "Snowflake Server" very nicely as being "a server having configuration as unique as a snowflake, and no one has a clue how it was built!" Thanks Niek.
• @johnC_bristol  gave us an insight into key cultural aspects of DevOps and how they monitored them at Nokia. It was a really interesting insight into how culture affects DevOps with some real information to backup theory. John completes a study with involvement of over 50 employees and presented some interesting findings.
• @DavidMytton gave a great insight into bootstrapping a startup. Some good advice on life hacks relating to Startups relating to mobile usage, travelling, etc. His advice was wide ranging, but our favourite item was on task automation. "Do it once, Learn, automate!" — Thanks David. The ServerDensity team have produced some content DevOps Dayers which is worth a read.
• In the final presentation before the ignite sessions, Deri Jones enlightened us on using metrics to calculate lost sales. His content focused on ensuring that all the great metrics captured by DevOps should be translated back to business measurements.
• The ignite sessions brought some great fast paced presentations. I really enjoyed @simonvc on "How schemaless databases fit into the continuous delivery world". His thoughts;

• "Continuous delivery is good."
• "Schema migrations are hard."
• "NoSQL should really be called Schema-less"
• I also thought that "What if config management was created by gamers" by @patrickdebois was really thought provoking.
• Thanks to @RealGeneKim for his Tweetscriber notes which cover the event in detail and for some great photos!

My final thoughts on DevOpsDays; awesome people, awesome event format but even at a DevOps event, it was surprising how many different ways people interpreted the terms DevOps. Here a just a few;

• DevOps  … is a movement, a philosophy, a way of thinking.
• DevOps  … is a person who can perform both Dev and Ops roles.
• DevOps … means cross skilling people.
• DevOps … is continuous delivery.
• DevOps … is a team of developers and operation staff.
• DevOps …is a culture movement.
• DevOps … is monitoring.

I have my views on what DevOps is and more importantly is not. It seems that there is still some teaching to be done!

Thanks to all those at DevOpsLondon 2013. It was great to meet you.

What we found this week

• A good article demonstrating how you can Hack-a-thon your way to Enterprise DevOps adoption. A nice way to accelerate DevOps Adoption with some out-of-the-box thinking.

• Citrix outfits NetScaler with troubleshooting tools to help sysadmins troubleshoot the cause of poor application performance from multiple data centres, cloud services and networks. NetScaler can emit performance data in the AppFlow format, which third-party diagnosis tools such as Splunk.

• The benefits of DevOps are numerous. First and foremost, there is more collaboration and trust within an organization. Where are you on the timeline? Where do you want to be?

Tweets of the Week

• @patrickdebois: Mgmt wants us to replace shell scripts to become devops, /me Do they work now? Yes /me I suggest you find your real bottleneck.
• @rposbo: Loving that there's no DevOps Manifesto; just get everyone on the same goal, automate what you can, don't be evil!
• @withneedle: Pro tip: Changing everyone's title to "#devops engineer" will not magically make it so.
• @DevOpsBorat: In startup we are only use technology if is cover in blog of expert devops on benchmark is run on own laptop.
• Interesting Idea. The Twelve Factor App is a methodology for building software-as-a-service apps  that can be applied to apps written in any programming language, and which use any combination of backing services.

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Original Page: http://blog.devopsguys.com/2013/03/22/this-week-in-devops-3/

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