USENIX Blog

4-phase approach for taking over large, messy IT systems

Hit the ground running with these strategies and toolsets for ops teams taking over complex infrastructure.

By stevemushero from Opensource.com.

Everyone loves building shiny, new systems using the latest technologies and especially the most modern DevOps tools. But that's not the reality for lots of operations teams, especially those running larger systems with millions of users and old, complex infrastructure.

We already have nice things, and other reasons not to write in-house ops tools

Let's look at the pitfalls of writing in-house ops tools, the circumstances that justify it, and how to do it better.

By vishuzdelishuz from Opensource.com.

What is an SRE and how does it relate to DevOps?

The SRE role is common in large enterprises, but smaller businesses need it, too.

By craig5 from Opensource.com.

Even though the site reliability engineer (SRE) role has become prevalent in recent years, many people—even in the software industry—don't know what it is or does. This article aims to clear that up by explaining what an SRE is, how it relates to DevOps, and how an SRE works when your entire engineering organization can fit in a coffee shop.

An introduction to Ansible Operators in Kubernetes

The new Operator SDK makes it easy to create a Kubernetes controller to deploy and manage a service or application in a cluster.

By mhrivnak from Opensource.com.

For years, Ansible has been a go-to choice for infrastructure automation. As Kubernetes adoption has skyrocketed, Ansible has continued to shine in the emerging container orchestration ecosystem.

An Opportunity to Share Your Opinion: Take Our 15 Minute Survey

If I had to pick one thing that is the most readily apparent during my first year at USENIX, it is the high-caliber people who are involved with the organization.

From the staff to the Board of Directors, through the program committees, to our members and conference attendees, I have had overwhelmingly positive and thoughtful interactions with all those whom I’ve encountered.

A strong, committed community like this has valuable opinions to offer us, and so we have put together a survey to solicit those opinions.

Facebook Awards $200,000 to 2018 Internet Defense Prize Winners

August 16, 2018

Written by Pieter Hooimeijer & Nektarios Leontiadis

Cross-posted at Facebook Research.

LISA18 Wishlist: Talks and tutorials we’d like to see

By Elizabeth K. Joseph and Brendan Gregg

Join us for 3 days in Nashville at LISA18! Read more about this year’s conference and the CFP, due Thursday, May 24.

The Program Committee for LISA18 has spent the past few months reaching out to potential speakers and reviewing their submissions to ultimately build a strong, diverse line-up of topics for the this year’s LISA program.

Throughout this process, we have noticed a few gaps, so we’ve put together the following wish list of topics we’d love to see covered.

Join us for 3 days in Nashville at LISA18: CFP Now Open

By Brendan Gregg and Rikki Endsley

USENIX's LISA conference is the premier event for topics in production system engineering. LISA is a vendor-neutral event known for technical depth and rigor, and continues to attract an audience of seasoned professionals. You'll find sysadmins from Wall Street banks sharing stories with SREs at tech giants, as well as experts from many other industries. LISA is where the latest challenges and solutions are discussed face to face, and in more detail than you can find online. It's where important connections are made with other industry professionals, and where they catch up year after year. LISA is a gathering of the pros.

Announcement of Changes to Future LISA Conferences

A Statement by the LISA Steering Committee on behalf of the USENIX Association

Starting in 2018, LISA will run for three days, rather than six.

We heard you! You couldn’t get your boss to agree to let you go for six days, or stepping away from other responsibilities for that long was too hard. It was also a firehose of content, and trying to keep it all in your brain upon returning to work was a real challenge. Could we take LISA and make it into a reasonably sized conference that still had amazing talks and training? Yes, we could, and we have.

Review: Have You Tried Turning It Off and Turning It On Again?

When you attend a talk that starts with a Google engineer asking, “What would happen if all of the machines you are running on restarted right now?” you might get really worried. Think about the Google services we use on a daily basis and what would happen if they suddenly stopped working—Google Maps, for example. Hopefully, we’d be able to get home from the office, but if we were travelling or looking for a business location, that would become a disaster. What about Google Search? Would we be able to even do our job if it went down?

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