Here is the second of two videos on Application Performance Management from DevOps Days Austin. Heiko Leibenath of New Relic, which recently received an additional $100M in funding, gives an overview of this APM vendor who is making the transition to “Software analysis vendor.”
Some of the ground Heiko covers:
Why Heiko moved from Salesforce.com to New Relic
What he does as a technical account manager
What excites customers the most about New Relic
The platforms and application development environments they support and whats coming up in the next year
Today’s entry from DevOps Days Austin concludes the series on configuration management tools. Today’s interview features Jonathan Thorpe of CFEngine, the company that started the whole configuration management thang back in the 90’s.
Some of the ground Jonathan covers
Why Jonathan recently joined CFEngine and its role with mobile and embedded
A quick history of CFEngine
The features of CFEngine 3
The companies focus for the next year
Stay tuned next time when we turn our attention to Application Performance Management and listen to folks from AppDynamics and New Relic.
Last week was DevOps Days here in Austin and I conducted a bunch of interviews. On Friday I shared an interview with Andrew Clay Shafer who gave the first-day keynote.
The next three interviews I’ll be posting deal with configuration management tools. Im going to kick off the topic with an interview with Lindsey Smith who recently joined Puppet labs and is the product owner for Puppet Enterprise:
Some of the ground Lindsey covers:
Why Lindsey decided to join Puppet Labs
Lindsey’s open source and enterprise background e.g. invis inspector
How Puppet Open Source and Puppet Enterprise differ e.g. Event inspector
What’s coming up in Puppet Enterprise e.g. manifest ordering, supported modules etc.
Earlier this week the third annual DevOps Days Austin took place. Given that it was Cinco de Mayo, and given that it was Austin, as we walked in on the first day we were greeted by a mariachi band.
Also on the first day we were treated to an opening keynote by Andrew Clay Shafer. Shafer, aka Littleidea, is among other things a DevOps bon vivant and all around muser on concepts and systems big and small.
Take a listen as Andrew gives an overview of his talk and answers questions. For your reference, his slides are embed below.
Some of the ground Andrew covers:
The history of the Japanese Samurai and how this parallels DevOps’ trajectory
How will DevOps evolve over the next three years
What needs to happen for DevOps to ultimately be successful
Still to come
You’ll want to stick around over the next few weeks as I post 10 more interviews from DevOps days Austin. I’ll be talking to people from Puppet, Chef, CFEngine, AppDyamics, New Relic, SumoLogic, Rackspace, Pager Duty, Dell Cloud Manager and Cote.
DevOps Days Austin took place earlier this week here in our fair city. Kicking off the festivities was Mr. John Willis who delivered the DevOps state of union.
I grabbed sometime with John on day two to discuss what he talked about:
Some of the ground John covers:
Culture as the secret weapon in the war of hiring
Comparing and contrasting the cultures of Netflix, Gighub and Etsy
Last week DevOpsDays was held here in Austin. It sold out in about day after it was announced and had a big waiting list. The two-day event, which was held at National Instruments (who did an awesome job as host), featured talks and panels in the mornings and “open space” discussions in the afternoons.
The panel on the first day, moderated by John Willis, was entitled: Provisioning Panel – Meet Juju, Crowbar, Puppet, Chef, Pallet + discussion. After the panel I caught up with each of the members for a follow-up chat. Here they are:
Juju – Mark Mimms of Canonical
Crowbar – Rob Booth of Zenoss
Puppet – Dan Bode of Puppet Labs
Chef – Matt Ray of Opscode
Pallet – Antoni Batchelli of Pallet Ops
Stay tuned for more DevOpsDays goodness in the days to come!
Yesterday, DevOpsDays Austin kicked off at National Instruments. If you’re not familiar with DevOps, its the idea of using people, processes and tools to break down the wall that traditionally exists between developers and operations with the idea of removing friction and increasing velocity to better support and drive the business.
The Austin event was maxed out the day after it was announced a couple months ago and there was a waiting list of over one hundred people. About half the crowd was from out of town with a big contingent from the Valley and New York. Near the end of the day yesterday I caught up with one of the organizers, Damon Edwards to learn more about the event and how it came to be.
Today at the W hotel in Austin, Dell held its bi-annual analyst summit. Today’s event is the third in a series of analyst functions organized around the theme “Services and Solutions for the Virtual Era.” The first event was held in San Francisco in March of last year and the second came six months later in Boston.
Today’s program
Today’s event was broken into three sections. The first section featured presentations by
Karen Quintos, SVP and CMO
Dave Johnston, SVP Corporate Strategy
Brian Gladden, CFO
Steve Felice, President, Consumer, Small and Medium Business
Paul Bell, President, Public and Large enterprise
In the case of Steve and Paul they also each featured a couple of customers on stage.
The second section was a solutions panel moderated by Brad Anderson, SVP of Enterprise solutions and featured members of his team who manage strategy, storage, networking and computing platforms. The final section of the day was also a panel. This featured the GM of Dell China, the head of Dell’s OEM business, Dell’s GM of Public and Large Enterprise in Europe, Middle East and Africa, the head of Dell Channels and the GM of Dell Small and Medium business solutions.
How did we do?
To see how the event came across, I grabbed some time with Redmonk analyst Michael Cote and we sat down for a chat (I’m hoping to grab more analyst feedback at day two tomorrow):
Some of the ground Michael covers:
What his clients ask him about Dell and what, as a result was he looking for today
Dell’s focus on solutions and de-emphasis on technology
Is Dell putting on its big boy pants?
The value of expanding on Dell’s success in select verticals
Last Thursday over a 100 cloud enthusiasts gathered for Cloud Camp Austin. The event was held at Pervasive Software‘s headquarters and kicked off after 5PM with munchies and beer. The event brought in folks all around Austin as well as visitors from exotic areas like upstate New York (the group had been in town for meetings).
Pre camp munchies and drinks as folks assemble.
Dell was one of the sponsors along with IBM, Microsoft, Twilio, Tropo, Redmonk and our hosts Pervasive . As always, the event was guided along by Mr. cloud camp, Dave Nielsen. Being an “unconference,” after a spontaneously assembled “unpanel” who was called upon to answer questions from the audience, the crowd worked together to decide on the topics that would be discussed.
Dave Nielsen explains how this "unpanel" is going to work.
What a difference a year makes
I attended last year’s cloud camp in Austin and I don’t know if its the fact the industry has evolved so much since then or that this year there was a greater percentage of knowledgeable attendees (I suspect a little of both) but this year the topics and questions were much more sophisticated/technical. As a results the conversations were much more meaty and focused more on “how to” rather than “how do you define.”
All in all a very cool event.
The schedule created on the fly by the attendees.
If you liked Cloud Camp and you like Hadoop, you’ll love…
Speaking of camps, Dave Nielsen is taking the camp idea and applying it to the world of Big Data. The event, which will be held in Santa Clara on June 28, is imaginatively entitled, Big Data Camp Santa Clara. This unconference is targeted at users of Hadoop and related technologies and is held the night before Hadoop summit 2010. So if you’re in the area and Hadoop/Big Data are your thing, check it out.
Rackspace, Microsoft and Sun find themselves in good company 🙂
As an application that leverages all the agility and reach that the cloud provides, we thought it only appropriate that Lombardi Blueprint help sponsor Cloud Camp Austin 2009.
Along with lesser known companies like Microsoft, Sun and Rackspace, Lombardi Blueprint is a gold sponsor of the event (actually since I took the screenshot to the left, Aserver, Rightscale and Zeus have also joined the golden ranks).
As a gold sponsor we get to deliver a 5-7 minute lightening talk at the beginning of the event. The only restrictions are that it be cloud related and it can’t be a product pitch. I will be talking about the cloud and democratization of information.
What, When, Where…
The event takes place next Saturday, April 25th from 10AM – 4PM down at Austin City Limits on the UT campus.Here’s how the webpage sums up the event:
CloudCamp is an unconference where early adopters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas. With the rapid change occurring in the industry, we need a place we can meet to share our experiences, challenges and solutions. At CloudCamp, you are encouraged you to share your thoughts in several open discussions, as we strive for the advancement of Cloud Computing. End users, IT professionals and vendors are all encouraged to participate.
(Here are a few more thoughts regarding the event from co-organizer and Red Monk analyst Michael Cote.)
Free for All
The cost of the event is FREE and all you need to do is register online so they know how many folks are coming (heck, I bet if you showed up that day they probably wouldn’t turn you away.) So come on down next Saturday and enjoy and learn. And remember, since its an unconference that means anyone can propose and lead a session and we all learn from each other.
As I previously mentioned, on Saturday I headed down town to the Austin convention center and SXSW. Although I’ve lived here in Austin for 2 years this is the first time I’ve checked it out. I drove down after lunch and bought myself a day pass to the show floor.
The entrance to the convention center
While the biggest part of SXSW, Music, doesnt start until later this week, the Interactive and Film festivals kicked off on Friday. Film and Interactive had a combined “Trade Show” which ran from Saturday thru today and that’s where I hung out on Saturday.
Although the show floor was a modest size it was chock-a-block full of tech and cinema offerings (here’s the map and list of booths — my unofficial guess would be it was 80% tech/20% film). I hung out there for about four hours catching up with old friends and checking out the various offerings.
Artifacts from the event: Rackspace tube socks, business cards, BarCamp pass, Montana film board leather coaster, a brochure from "Austin's only tiki shop" etc.
As you would guess, social media apps dominated the tech offerings and a lot things seemed to be some derivative of facebook/twitter/craigslist/linkedin with an innovative (or not so innovative) spin. Microsoft had a big booth as did Sun who was showing off its JavaFX.
Don’t touch that dial!
Coming up later this week, the video podcasts I did with Charlene Li of the Altimeter Group and Jason Hsiao of Animoto.
There were a fair amount of apps that looked like this.
Here are a few of the faces from the show floor.
A picture of Guy Kawasaki taking a picture of the Lunarr booth.
The ever helpful Josh Dilworth of Porter Novelli working the press info stand.
Ka’awa was there promoting a tour of singers from Hawaii.
Kevin takes the hand-off. PR firm Porter Novelli gives new meaning to the expression "booth babe."
When our kids get older, we’re looking forward to having traditional Thanksgiving dinners like we remember. At this point, however, given their attention span and energy (one being short, the other seemingly infinite) we decided to go out to a family friendly restaurant that comes with an outdoor area for the kids to romp around before the meal.
Below is a summary of our day in four pictures.
1) Checking out the mini-herd of longhorns about a mile from our house
2) Going to the park with Grandma and Grandpa
3) Threadgills for our Thanksgiving feast (notice the armadillos coming out from under the eaves)
On Saturday we took the kids to the Sweet Berry Farm pumpkin patch in Marble Falls, about an hour outside of Austin.
When we checked out the petting zoo we were quite surprised to find the goats hanging out in the trees. I thought I’d share this rare glimpse of the species goatis-tree-dwellis.
I’ll have to admit that I was a bit surprised to learn that there was an exotic zoo/safari park just outside of Austin. To be more precise, its just outside of Johnson City (the boyhood home of LBJ) which is probably why its named the Johnson City Exotic Resort Zoo. The park has over 500 animals of 80 different species and they take you around the 137 acres in a cool tractor-pulled trolley.
We visited the Zoo on Sunday and the kids had a blast. Just another one of the wild and wacky reasons Austin is a great place to live.
Posted by Barton George 
Barton's Blog 