A long overdue report of DevopsDays

Here's how it started :

So I used to be a software developer, writing perl for the web, then C, then Java, then PHP, till I realized nobody ever configured my servers correctly and I changed trades becoming a system engineer, while teaching new developers the basics of their trade, whom grew into doing Infrastructure Architecture .. familiar story for much of the crowd at DevopsDays ... a crowd that wants to stopping the war between developers and system engineering , a crowd that wants to automate builds, integrate testing, deploy, deploy on very large scale, deploy in the cloud and much more.

So what do you get when you put together some of the experts on building software, organizing development teams , Agile geeks, Cloud infrastructure projects, and Automating guru's in 1 location for 2 days in Gent ? Exactly .. DevopsDays ..

The format was 2 days .. 3 kickass formal talks in the morning.. Open Space sessions in the afternoon. ... Friday featured talks on Non Functional Requirements, CucumberNagios and Monitoring in the Cloud with FlapJack and Building Agile Infrastructures with Puppet while discussing the James White Manifesto ..

which I had never heard of, but which apparently comes down to this

  1. == Rules ==
  2.  On Infrastructure
  3.  -----------------
  4.  There is one system, not a collection of systems.
  5.  The desired state of the system should be a known quantity.
  6.  The "known quantity" must be machine parseable.
  7.  The actual state of the system must self-correct to the desired state.
  8.  The only authoritative source for the actual state of the system is the system.
  9.  The entire system must be deployable using source media and text files.
  10.  
  11.  On Buying Software
  12.  -------------------
  13.  Keep the components in the infrastructure simple so it will be better understood.
  14.  All products must authenticate and authorize from external, configurable sources.
  15.  Use small tools that interoperate well, not one "do everything poorly" product.
  16.  Do not implement any product that no one in your organization has administered.
  17.  "Administered" does not mean saw it in a rigged demo, online or otherwise.
  18.  If you must deploy the product, hire someone who has implemented it before to do so.
  19.  
  20.  On Automation
  21.  -------------
  22.  Do not author any code you would not buy.
  23.  Do not implement any product that does not provide an API.
  24.  The provided API must have all functionality that the application provides.
  25.  The provided API must be tailored to more than one language and platform.
  26.  Source code counts as an API, and may be restricted to one language or platform.
  27.  The API must include functional examples and not requre someone to be an expert on the product to use.
  28.  Do not use any product with configurations that are not machine parseable and machine writeable.
  29.  All data stored in the product must be machine readable and writeable by applications other than the product itself.
  30.  Writing hacks around the deficiencies in a product should be less work than writing the product's functionality.
  31.  
  32.  In general 
  33.  ----------
  34.  Keep the disparity in your architecture to an absolute minimum.
  35.  Use [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set_theory Set Theory] to accomplish this.
  36.  Do not improve manual processes if you can automate them instead.
  37.  Do not buy software that requires bare-metal.
  38.  Manual data transfers and datastores maintained manually are to be avoided.

Much unlike the FAIL Manifesto

The openspaces tackled how to migrate from a totally unreproducable environment too a correctly bootstrapped infreaastructure, over the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud , then dinner and off for beers to the Vooruit . The OpenQRM "crowd" stayed at my place so I didn't stay around too late ..

Saturday morning came early ... sadly I missed the first 10 minutes of a very interresting talk about Kanban in operations ... let's ee if we can convince some more people to try it out ...

The talk on Continuous integration, Build Pipelines and Continuous deployment was also really interresting with lots of stories from the real world.. . after the openqRM talk it was time again for OpenSpaces with e.g discussions on svn vs git and building a feature matrix of Cloud , with @botchagalupe, @openqrm and @maesjoch in the room and @diegomarino online .

Devopsdays ended too soon , with way to much interresting ideas to build on .. Let's hope we can all work them out !

Submitted by Kris Buytaert on Thu, 11/05/2009 - 21:32
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