I write this while looking out over Treasure Island and the beautiful San Francisco Bay that surrounds it. Off in the distance, a veritable armada of ships hauls millions of containers under the Bay Bridge, into and out of the Port of Oakland.
It is not lost on me that I’m watching the physical manifestation of the classes I’ve been going to for the past couple of days: the literal orchestration of containers and pods.
It’s 2017. Containers are “a thing.” For real. A few years ago, we were kind of wondering if they were, or if they were just a passing fad. Those of us who were busy Getting Things Done(™) don’t have time for all of the fly-by-night technologies that show up on HackerNews for a week, only to fall by the wayside.
I’ve been coming to LISA since 2009, and I’ve always wondered why the official conference opening was on Wednesday, when the party really starts on the Saturday prior. This year’s LISA in San Francisco is no different.
I’m a fan of documentation. I have been, ever since I first inherited an infrastructure and had to try to figure out what the previous admin had done. I try to write decent documentation—documentation that I wish had been was there when I first tried to learn about a particular system. I also find myself doing so much that what I can keep in cache in my brain is limited, and stuff I’ve worked on tends to “page out,” so to speak.
Working in IT operations these days can be challenging as it seems like there’s an ever-increasing curve in terms of the knowledge you need to have. Fortunately, there are tools that help simplify what we need to do. Rather than constantly observe workloads and manually respond by building the services we think we'll need, pretty much all production-ready cloud providers and services offer autoscaling and demand-driven resources.
The following post has been collaboratively written by the co-chairs for the SREcon17 Americas conference (Liz Fong-Jones and Kurt Andersen) and several of the program committee members (Murali Suriar and Betsy Beyer). It is intended to provide greater insight into the selection process which we used for this conference and may not entirely match the strategies which other conference committees employ.
USENIX, the Advanced Computing Systems Association, strongly objects to President Trump’s Executive Order “Protecting The Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry To The United States,” signed on January 27, 2017, which suspends the issuance of visas and other immigration benefits—including entry into the United States—to nationals of “countries of particular concern.”
“You’ve been hacked!” The cry echoes around the ballroom. A couple of dozen bemused and anxious faces turn to Branson on the podium as he grins and nods. The members of the four teams turn back to each other and their laptops and begin trying to find out what just happened.
OK, perhaps some of the people I went to dinner with last night would object to the label “geek.” I don’t. I embrace it fully. To me, it indicates a person who finds joy in the passion of learning and working and making things, and sharing that passion with others. Labelled or not, all the people in the group I led last night fit that description.
I feel like the newbie on a crew for a rock band on tour.
LISA Build is both a service to the LISA conference and a learning experience for the volunteers. I’m an old guy. I remember doing deployments like this (though we only had wired networks). I don’t think I remember the last time I worked on an operations project with this much intensity. It’s FUN, but I know I’m going to sleep well tonight.