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?