SCALE 10x 2012

I am at the SCALE 10x conference today in LA. I just finished registration, the line was long, but I made it through.

The first talk I will be attending is called Mentoring Moments: Creating Opportunities for Success presented by Amber Graner

I will be doing live blogging throughout the day..

UPDATE….

Mentoring Moments: Creating Opportunities for Success presented by Amber Graner.

What is a mentor?
- Strong interpersonal skills
- Strong Supervisory Skills
- Knowledge of the project
– Have a broad knowledge of the project to match up people
- Interested in someone else’s growth
– What their feedback, you care about their growth..It can not be about you it has to be about their growth.

What Mentors Do?
- Set high expectations of performance, but not unattainable.
- Offer challenging ideas
- Help build self confidence
- Encourage professional behavior
- Offer friendship
- Listen to personal problems
- Control negative behaviors & attitudes
- Teach by example
- Provide growth experiences
- Explain how the project works
- Couches are not the same as mentors
– Couches successes can be easily measured by performance
– Mentors teach the whole of the person
— Interpersonal skills
— Communication skills
– Good leaders are usually good mentors
- Mentors are self aware of their actions & behaviors
- Open source work should be put on their resume..

What makes you a mentor?
- Role Model
– People want to emulate their behavior
- Teacher
- Friend
- Support
- Resource

What are moments?
- teaching someone skills in brief periods of time, should be present.

How to create moments?
- 1:1 Conversions
- Meetings
- Blog posts
- Actions
– You need to create those moments..every day.. all the time..
– Make those moments fun

How do you evaluate success?
- If you can create favorable or desired actions in people from brief moments.

Take ways
- Know the person well enough to know when to push them and when to hold back.
- Always be open to being mentored yourself..
- Traditional mentoring does not work
- Corporate methods do not work, because community based teams do not care about traditional methods.
- Be yourself without apology
- It is not personal
- Don’t be afraid to fail publicly
- I am good enough
- Collaborate openly
– Tell people your ideas, do not be afraid to share your thoughts
- Be Transparent
- Take ad-hoc moments to mentor people, when people ask for help
- Teach someone how to do something then get out of their way so they can do it
- Set times, no longer than a day to work on a skill set or share information
- How to find a mentor? Look for them! Ask them!

UPDATE….

-
Lee Thompson
DevOps Day Keynote

SCALE DevOps day
Lee Thompson is CTO at MorphLabs

- DevOps is a community based idea, not a set of specific practices.
- DevOps toolchain
- Ops wants stability
- Dev wants change
- Each have different traditional goals
- The Visible OPS Handbook
- Agile development fixes the wall between Biz & DEV
- DevOps fixes the wall between DEV & Ops
- Dev view
– Lack of visibility into production
– Schedule slippage due to deployment problems
– Lack of understanding in operations
– Release process is awkward
- Ops view
– 80% of prod outages are related to changes
- Businesses spend almost half them time on change management
– 47% of time is related to change management
- Everyone has monitoring, but almost no one has control, why?
- Need a control toolchain
– Runbook Automation
– Control
– Eventing, Alarm
– Charting, History
– Measurement Instrumentation
– System
- SPC
– Process control
— Keep things in standard deviation, goes out start alarming
— View few companies do SPC
- Lean Development
– Focus on Value Stream Mapping
— Understand what creates value in the process
- Read the Lean Startup – discusses the biz problem
– Aligns the concepts of DevOps with biz
– Provides tools
— Minimum Viable System
— Reduce Batch Size
— Continuous Integration
— Continuous Deployment
— Innovation Accounting
– Fail quick and Pivot
– To do lean Startup, you need DevOps!
Take ways
- Development has over focus on unit test and lack of focus on integration tests
- Integration testing is harder than actual development
- It is about people working together..
-

UPDATE…

Christopher Nolan

nventory – Your Infrastructure’s Source of Truth

nVentory
- Collects data in automated fashion
- Allows programs and people collect data about your infrastructure
- Common, but painful Sources of Truth
– Spreadsheet
– Static file
– DNS
– Hostname
– MySQL/Postgres
– Custom Solution
- Better approaches
– Puppet and Chef are better
– Enterprise solutions are expensive

Why nVentory?
- Centralized
- Detailed
- Metadata
- Multiple access methods
- API
- etc

Why for DevOps?
- It is essential that all individual tools be consider part of a a large toolchain that spans the entire dev to ops lifecycle
- Your tools should all talk to a master
– Everyone should know where to go for answers

What is nVentory?
- Provides the foundation, you have to build the house
eHarmony uses:
- Chef-solo – app config mgt
- Etch – sys config mgt
- Jenkins – ci
- Self service VMs – custom private clouds
- Splunk – Monitoring
- Finance – audits
- QA, Ops, and Engineering

Objects are the key to nVentory!
- Everything is an object
– Rack, nodes, load balancer, etc
– Tree of relationships
– Node Group is related objects based on purpose

Other Objects that nVentory provides!
– status
– hardware_profile
– operating_system
– network_interface
– ip_address
– vip
– lb_pool
– tags & graffiti
— allow customization of nVentory

How is the nVentory Server built?
- Uses MVC pattern
- Heavy usage of ActiveRecord
- For each object, there are corresponding model, view and controller for it
- RESTful API
– Makes integration very easy since it uses HTTP and associated VERBS (GET, POST, PUT, DESTROY)

nVentory Clients
- Written in Ruby & Perl
- Uses various tools to gather host/hardware info
- Clients use the RESTful api to talk with the Server by invoking the nv-register command

How do you setup client?
- Install one each box at build time

nVentory client provides simple commands for getting things such as:
- Get host names
- Get node groups
- Get named hosts
- etc..
- Can also use Ruby api for developing clients

How does eHarmony use nVentory?
- User mgt
- Actions to a group of machines
- Config mgt
- Discovery of node details
- Change mgt
- Use the api to write scripts that pull all the machine in a given node group then act on them

Demo
– http://nventory.slacklabs.com/

UPDATE…

DevOps Lightning Talks

Four lighting talks..

Communication topic
- Part of a triangle
– Infinity
— natural emotional response
— degree of liking, people are naturally social
– Reality
— the state of things as they are or they appear to be
— is subjective
– Communication
— imparting or interchange of ideas
— most important part of the triangle

Increase Infinity
- Find something to like about another person
- Find something that the person agrees with to find a common ground
———————–
HA Proxy topic – Slides
- mature 10 years old
- purpose is a load balancer, that is it
- configuration can get ugly
– haproxy_join can solve complexity
- has web ui for managing
- has command line, but unfriendly
– haproxyctl simplifies
- ruby gems
– rhapr – can manage multiple HAProxies
– easy libs
—————————–
Visualizing Http benchmarks topic – parbench
- incorporates time into the benchmark
- randomly sleep benchmarks

——————————-
Control for the Cloud topic – John Willis

Three legs of the cloud – Challenges
- Infrastructure
– Private, Public, Hybrid?
- Cloud Management
– ACL, DR, Auth, Auditing, Security, financial controls, compliance
- Configuration Management
– Puppet, Chef?