Adam Rosien from Wealthfront came to the Silicon Valley DevOps Meetup on Tuesday April 5 and gave a great presentation on how they use techniques like Continuous Deployment, Test Driven Development, and their “Immune System” (think automated testing and analysis) to run fast and run agile. Wealthfront’s DevOps lifecycle challenges a lot of conventional assumptions, but the results they achieve in a highly-regulated financial services business (with already over $180M being managed) speak for themselves.
Scroll down for the full video and slides…
Special thanks to the kind folks at Box.net for hosting the meetup!
I had the pleasure of being the track chair for the DevOps Track at Cloud Connect 2011. It was a short track (3 sessions) but thankfully a great lineup of all-stars accepted my invitation to participate!
Here is the video from the panel featuring all of our DevOps Track speakers. The audio is a bit soft in parts, but I think you’ll find it to be great content. I played the role of moderator and spent most of my time in the audience getting questions from the attendees.
Panelists:
Andrew Shafer – Cloud Scaling Teyo Tyree – Puppet Labs Alex Honor – DTO Solutions / Rundeck Project James Urquhart – Cisco Juan Paul Ramirez – Shopzilla Lloyd Taylor – ngmoco:)
Note: Some of the attendees had video cameras out and may have recorded the other sessions in the track. If I uncover those videos, I’ll post it ASAP.
I find Lloyd Taylor to be creating some of the most interesting and fresh DevOps related content around. He dives right to the heart of cultural issues and provides clear insights and practical strategies we can all use. Lloyd comes from an interesting background that combines senior operations experience at some of the biggest names on the web with his long-standing interest in studying interpersonal and organizational dynamics. If it sounds like I’m a fan, it’s because I am. Each time I listen to Lloyd speak, I learn something new. Hopefully you will as well.
Enjoy Lloyd’s presentation (and the ensuing discussion before my camera battery ran out) from this week’s SVDevOps meetup, it’s well worth an hour of your time:
There were a number of freeform lightening talks used as an excellent device to get the conversation started. Below is an interesting talk from DTO’s Anthony Shortand. Anthony gave an excellent conceptual introduction to two strategies for solving DevOps problems, “Full Lifecycle Traceability” and “Establishing a Formal Separation of Concerns”.
InfoQ.com has posted the videos they recorded at DevOps Day USA 2010. You can watch six of the seven panels now on the InfoQ.com site. There was a production problem with the seventh panel (“DevOps outside of WebOps”) that, if it can be fixed, will be posted as well. InfoQ decided that the lightening talks didn’t fit into their format so they have sent my co-organizer, Andrew Shafer the raw video and he’s going to look into posting them himself.
You can also download audio only versions (.mp3)
Here are the links to the 6 panels…
Your mileage may vary: Experiences and lessons learned facing DevOps problems in the IT trenches (even if they weren’t calling it DevOps!). The good, the bad, the surprises, and ideas for the future.
Infrastructure as code: Automation is essential to DevOps. The infrastructure as code concept drives many of today’s cutting edge automaton techniques. What is it all about? Where are its limitations?
Changing culture to enable DevOps: Changing tools is easy when compared to changing people and processes. How can we cultivate an organization’s culture to identify and solve DevOps problems?
Does the Cloud needs DevOps? Does DevOps need the Cloud?: Examining the role that cloud technologies can play in solving DevOps problems and the role that DevOps solutions can play in getting the most out of cloud technologies.
DevOps requires visibility: monitoring, testing, and performance: Examining the (often overlooked) role of monitoring and testing techniques in solving DevOps problems.
Making the business case: We know that solving DevOps problems improves your business operations and improves the bottom line, but how do you do you explain that to your CEO or CFO? How do you get the executives to buy in and invest in DevOps solutions?
EDIT: The recording for seventh panel was rescued from technical oblivion and is now live!…
DevOps outside of Web Operations: Much of the public discussion about DevOps focuses on Web Operations. This panel is about taking the lessons of DevOps to other types of IT. Adam Fletcher – ITA Software Gene Kim – Tripwire Michael Stahnke – James Turnbull – Puppet Labs John Willis – Opscode moderator: Patrick Debois http://www.infoq.com/presentations/DevOps-outside-Web-Operations
Early reports from OSCON are that DevOps is a topic of much discussion. My fellow dev2ops.org contributor Alex Honor and I are headed to Portland this morning to give DevOps related talks at OSCON. If you are there Wednesday or Thursday, please come by and say hello!
