Conference Program

Outages suck; how you handle them shouldn’t. At PagerDuty, we talk to real customers experiencing real outages all the time. Operations escalations and downtime can be handled in many ways:

• During the incident: who to alert when, how to communicate, handling dependency and downstream failures, disclosure
• After the incident: post-mortems, public disclosure, formalizing process vs. investing in automation, preventative actions

There are also ways to keep engineers sane, customers happy, and the $$$ flowing. In this talk, come learn about best practices from across the industry, including how PagerDuty executes during an outage (but trust us, those never happen).

Tom will highlight some of the most radical ideas from the new book “The Practice of Cloud System Administration”. Topics will include: Most people use load balancers wrong; you should randomly power off machines; cloud computing will eventually be so inexpensive you won’t be able to justify running your own hardware, the most highly reliable systems are built on cheap hardware that breaks a lot, and sysadmins should never say no to installing new releases from developers. And many more!

When asked what to do about corporate hacking, Ex-NSA Director Michael Hayden replied, "Man up and defend yourselves." Within a few years, Edward Snowden rocked the world by disclosing information he had gathered using his NSA administrative privileges. JEA stands for Just Enough Admin. It is a PowerShell DSC toolkit that you can use to "man up and defend yourselves" by allowing admins to perform functions without giving them admin privileges across a large set of systems.

This talk describes how Google is using its proprietary package manager to distribute software across its server farm. I’ll describe some of the design decisions and features that allow Google to do things traditional package managers cannot in order to ensure consistency and achieve high performance. Hopefully this talk will inspire attendees to think of creative ways to do packaging and leverage features of popular package managers.

Infrastructure engineering is a craft learned outside of classrooms. The discipline is ever-changing. Our value is not in credentials or the recall of accumulated facts, but instead by our capacity to tackle the unknown.

Failures of management, product, development, and QA hit us first, usually in the dead of night. Established industries have begrudigingly accepted the need to pay for 24/7 staffing, but our teams are so small that we can find ourselves permanently on-call. Some organizations delay hiring ops talent for so long that it is impossible for the new hire to improve the infrastructure. Instead the engineer is sacrificed to an all-hours cycle of quick-fixes and looming crises.

The first bout of burnout is inevitable. How are we to know our limits until we run in to them? Burnout, sufficiently advanced, is permanent damage. I've recovered from bad situations in both startups and a huge corporation. I am going to share some war-stories and describe the fixes that I implemented to protect my long-term livelihood.

Performance is an increasingly important attribute of Big Data systems as focus shifts from batch processing to real-time analysis and to consolidated multi-tenant systems. One of the little-understood challenges in scaling data systems is properly defining and measuring performance. The complexity, diversity, and scale of big data systems make this a difficult task and we frequently encounter haphazard benchmarks that lead to bad technology choices, poor purchasing decisions, and suboptimal cluster operations. This talk draws on performance engineering and field services experience from a leading Big Data vendor. We will talk about the most common performance benchmarking pitfalls and share practical advice on how to avoid them with rigorous metrics and measurement methods.

Have a last-minute brilliant idea you want to propose? A sudden Epiphany in the hallway track or inspiration from a tutorial or workshop you want to share? The lightning talks are the place. No AV, no slides, just you and your idea and a friendly audience. It doesn't have to be a technical topic. Fill out the below form to signup for a lightning talk.

How do you manage a hundred or a thousand Linux servers? With practice! Managing Linux systems is typically done by an experienced system administrator using a patchwork of standalone tools and custom scripts running on each system. There is a better way to work – to manage more systems in less time with less work – and without learning an entirely new way of working.

OpenLMI (the Linux Management Infrastructure program) delivers remote management of production servers – ranging from high end enterprise servers with complex network and storage configurations to virtual guests. Designed to support bare metal servers and to directly manipulate storage, network and system hardware, it is equally capable of managing and monitoring virtual machine guests.

In this session we will show how a system administrator can use the new tools to function more effectively, focusing on how they extend and improve existing management workflows and expertise.

Russell Doty is a Technology Strategist and Product Manager at Red Hat. He is currently focused on challenges around systems manageability and security, addressing both technical and usability issues.

He has been heavily involved in the technology of computing, with a background in high performance computing, visualization, and computer hardware. Over the last several years he has worked closely with leading hardware developers and the Open Source community. Helping companies with a strong closed source background learn how to embrace and effectively engage with Open Source is an interesting challenge!

In early 2014, an alliance of security organizations including Cigital, DevOps Weekly, DevOps Days, HP, Sonatype, DevOps Cafe and the Trusted Software Alliance sponsored a study to determine who is responsible when it comes to security within the development lifecycle. We will present the results of our findings. The presentation will include open discussion with sponsors of the survey, highlighting some of the disturbing findings and how we can begin to build security assurance into the SDLC.

Each attendee will receive a copy of the survey along with analysis notes.

Over the past year, I have become more concerned about software vulnerabilities we unknowingly allow into our homes and lives. What are the implications of networking our kitchen appliances, embedding open source components into everything that we touch? Why are we allowing unmoderated access to our personal information just to play simple games on our mobile devices? What does it mean to have unmonitored computer components running your car? Who is managing and validating the components that now make up 90% of most major software applications?

I am building a community of DevOps and AppSec practitioners that acknowledge these issues through the use of multiple platforms (video, podcasts, surveys, advocacy programs) to promote the active monitoring of open source, component based projects.

Virtualization was the next Big Thing. Then cloud. Now, containers are at the peak of hype, led by the excitement surrounding Docker. But is this hype justified, or can innovation be tempered and improved by better management and control? This is the problem Project Atomic hopes to solve.

Demonstrate the value of Test Driven Development to those who do not self identify as developers. We will discuss questions such as why we should test, why test first, and what to test, as well as practices and tools to help.

As DevOps matures from craft, through trade, to a science, we are starting to work on distilling out how we can make DevOps' implementation and the organizational transformation repeatable and predictable, across all kinds of environments. As part of that search, it is time to start looking at humanity's other ""operational"" endeavors and see what is applicable to DevOps.

This talk examines one of the largest operational systems built to date: the national airspace system. We will look at specific aspects of how controllers (operations teams) work with pilots (developers) to safely move millions of passengers (customers) every year, with an incident rate that would make any development shop jealous.