New Relic – DevOps Days Austin

May 21, 2014

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

Extra-credit reading:

Pau for now…

 

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Posted by Barton George

CFEngine, where its been and where its going — DevOps Days Austin

May 15, 2014

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.

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Talking about Chef and Unicorns – DevOps Days Austin

May 13, 2014

Today is the second of three entries focused on configuration management tools.  Today’s interview from last week’s DevOps Days is with Matt Ray from Chef.

Matt did a cool a presentation on the first day about how to introduce DevOps to traditional enterprises (see below) and I was able to grab him on the beginning of Day two to hear about his talk and the latest regarding Chef.

Some of the ground Matt covers

  • His talk about taking DevOps into the traditional enterprise “Helping horses become unicorns” (see presentation below)
  • Recent announcements from ChefCon e.g. Chef Metal etc
  • How they will be participating in this week’s OpenStack conference
  • Some of the traditional enterprises using Chef e.g.  Nordstroms, Target, GE

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Learning about Puppet Enterprise – DevOps Days Austin

May 12, 2014

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.

Extra-credit reading:

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Posted by Barton George

LittleIdea: No true DevOps (but we do have Samurai) — DevOps Days Austin

May 9, 2014

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.

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

DevOps Days NYC — Jonathan Reams of MongoDB

January 8, 2014

As I continue in my series of videos from DevOps days NYC a few months ago, here is an interview with Jonathan Reams of MongoDB.

Johnathan is systems engineer on Mongo’s DevOps team and is helping to make MongoDB, the NoSQL non-relational database, more appealing to operations.

Some of the ground Jonathan covers:

  • Mongo’s huMONGOus recent round of funding
  • As a NoSQL database, how is Mongo different from traditional relational databases
  • How does MongoDB compare to other non-relational databases like Couchbase or Basho’s Riak
  • Seeking to widen appeal beyond developers to operations
  • Whats next for Mongo for both developers and ops

Extra-credit reading

  • Military Supply Data Search Tool Uses MongoDB – InformationWeek
  • MongoDB grabs $150M in funding, now top NYC startup at $1.2B valuation – VentureBeat

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

DevOps Days NYC: Mike Ainsworth of SaltStack

January 7, 2014

Infrastructure automation and configuration management have become a hot topic as organizations, particularly those in the web and cloud space have continued to scale out. The first player, that helped define the space, was CFengine.  Heavy weights in this space now include Puppet and Chef, and at Dell we lead, Project Crowbar, an open source effort in this area.

The new kid on the block, based in Salt Lake city, is SaltStack.   Although relatively new, they count LinkedIn as one of their users.   At DevOps Days NYC back in October I grabbed some time with Salt solutions engineer, Mike Ainsworth.  Here is what Mike had to say:

Some of the ground Mike covers

  • What does SaltStack do
  • When did they get their start and how has their momentum been
  • How they differ from the other players in the space
  • How Linkedin is using SaltStack
  • The technical details re what they are focusing on going forward

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Update: Project Sputnik Profile Tool and Cloud Launcher

May 6, 2013

During last week’s DevOps Days here in Austin, Matt Ray of Opscode and Charles Lowell of the Frontside did a demo showing the status of the Project Sputnik profile tool and the cloud launcher.  The profile tool is still at a very early stage, and while the Cloud Launcher exists today in the form of LXC + JuJu, we are working on a version that works using Chef.

After Matt and Charles’ talk I grabbed sometime with them as well as Chris McClimans of Opscode to talk about where we’re at, where we’re going and what’s a spice weasel.

Profile Tool & Cloud Launcher Tool Slide

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Dell Acquires Enstratius — So what do they do?

May 6, 2013

Last week at DevOps Days Austin, I did a couple of interviews with John Willis (aka @botchagalupe), VP Client Services and Enablement at Enstratius.  The first video dealt with devops and the idea of culture as a secret weapon in the war of hiring.  The second one was about Enstratius the company, which coincidentally today Dell announced it was acquiring.

I’m very excited about the move because, besides the great technology, with Enstratius we are getting some top talent like John, James Urquhart, George Reese, Bernard Golden, David Bagley and many more.

Take a listen as John explains what exactly it is that Enstratius does:

Some of the topics John covers:

  • Enstratius’ common open API structure
  • Governance: e.g. Role based access, a federated view of resources, encrypted key management storage yadda, yadda
  • Direct integration with Chef and Puppet
  • Integration points with APM companies like AppDynamics and New Relic

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

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