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Conference Program

A variety of topics are being covered at LISA15. Use the icons listed below to focus on a key subject area:


  • Culture

  • Monitoring & Metrics

  • SRE & Software Engineering

  • Systems & Network Engineering
  •  

Follow the icons throughout the Conference Program below. You can combine days of training or workshops with days of Conference Program content to build the conference that meets your needs. Pick and choose the sessions that best fit your interest—focus on just one topic or mix and match.

The conference papers are available to registered attendees immediately and to everyone beginning Wednesday, November 11, 2015. Everyone can view the abstracts and the Proceedings front matter immediately.

Proceedings Front Matter
Proceedings Cover | Title Page and List of Organizers | Table of Contents | Message from the Program Co-Chairs

Full Proceedings PDFs
 LISA15 Full Proceedings (PDF)
 LISA15 Proceedings Interior (PDF, best for mobile devices)

Full Proceedings ePub (for iPad and most eReaders)
 LISA15 Full Proceedings (EPUB)

Full Proceedings Mobi (for Kindle)
 LISA15 Full Proceedings (MOBI)

Download Proceedings (Conference Attendees Only)

Attendee Files 
LISA15 Proceedings Archive (ZIP, includes Attendee Lists)

 

Wednesday, November 11, 2015

8:00 am–8:45 am Continental Breakfast Thurgood Marshall Ballroom Foyer

8:45 am–9:00 am Wednesday

Opening Remarks and Awards

Opening Remarks and Awards

Opening Remarks

Program Co-Chairs: Cory Lueninghoener, Los Alamos National Laboratory; Amy Rich, Mozilla Corporation

Thurgood Marshall Ballroom

Available Media

  • Read more about Opening Remarks and Awards
9:00 am–10:30 am Wednesday

W-Keynote Address

LISA15: Culture

One Year after the Launch of the U.S. Digital Service: What’s Changed?

9:00 am-10:30 am
Keynote Address

Mikey Dickerson, U.S. Digital Service

Thurgood Marshall Ballroom

In 2013, Mikey Dickerson joined what became known as the “ad hoc” team, tasked with rescuing HealthCare.gov after its disastrous launch on October 1. In August 2014, President Obama established the United States Digital Service and tapped Mikey to serve as the Administrator to see if the strategy that succeeded at pulling Healthcare.gov out of the fire could be applied to other government problems.

Prior to his service in government, Mikey worked in Site Reliability Engineering at Google from 2006 to 2014. He took a brief hiatus in 2008 and 2012 to work on the presidential campaigns, and in 2012 helped write software and oversee computer systems for several programs, including the critical “get out the vote” campaign.

Each year, the Federal Government spends more than $80 billion on information technology. Too often, these projects are over budget, behind schedule, or on-track to fail. But the stakes couldn’t be higher. Millions rely on the basic services these systems support—like care to disabled veterans, health insurance to those who have never had it, and loans to first-generation college students.

The U.S. Digital Service is partnering the best talent from the private sector with dedicated professionals already in public service to transform the way government works for the people it serves. Mikey will talk about how this work is going and how you can help.

Each year, the Federal Government spends more than $80 billion on information technology. Too often, these projects are over budget, behind schedule, or on-track to fail. But the stakes couldn’t be higher. Millions rely on the basic services these systems support—like care to disabled veterans, health insurance to those who have never had it, and loans to first-generation college students.

The U.S. Digital Service is partnering the best talent from the private sector with dedicated professionals already in public service to transform the way government works for the people it serves. Mikey will talk about how this work is going and how you can help.

Available Media

  • Read more about One Year after the Launch of the U.S. Digital Service: What’s Changed?

10:30 am–11:00 am Break with Refreshments Thurgood Marshall Ballroom Foyer

11:00 am–12:30 pm Wednesday
Thurgood Marshall North/East Thurgood Marshall South Thurgood Marshall West Lincoln 3 Lincoln 4 Lincoln 2

W-Talks 1a

LISA15: Syseng

Session Chair: Cory Lueninghoener, Los Alamos National Laboratory

Supercomputing for Healthcare: A Collaborative Approach to Accelerating Scientific Discovery

11:00 am-11:45 am
Invited Talk

Patricia Kovatch, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

Patricia Kovatch is the founding Associate Dean for Scientific Computing at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, joining in 2011. In 2014, she was awarded a $2M NIH grant to build a 5 Petabyte Omics Data Engine. Previously, she led the National Institute for Computational Sciences of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, deploying the world’s third-fastest machine, a 1.17 petaflop Cray XT5 for NSF in 2009.

Through partnership with researchers, careful analysis of actual usage metrics and benchmarking, modern technologies can be leveraged to decrease the time-to-solution for scientific workflows. The fruits of our collaborative approach have enabled our researchers to tackle more complex scientific questions to better diagnose and treat disease. We aim to increase computational and thus scientific throughput with optimized, scalable and sustainable computational architecture specific for our application workflows. Computational and data challenges associated with genomic sequencing will be used as an example.

Through partnership with researchers, careful analysis of actual usage metrics and benchmarking, modern technologies can be leveraged to decrease the time-to-solution for scientific workflows. The fruits of our collaborative approach have enabled our researchers to tackle more complex scientific questions to better diagnose and treat disease. We aim to increase computational and thus scientific throughput with optimized, scalable and sustainable computational architecture specific for our application workflows. Computational and data challenges associated with genomic sequencing will be used as an example.

Available Media

  • Read more about Supercomputing for Healthcare: A Collaborative Approach to Accelerating Scientific Discovery

Ironic: A Modern Approach to Hardware Provisioning

11:45 am-12:30 pm
Invited Talk

Devananda van der Veen, HP Cloud

Devananda has been building distributed systems with open source software for the past 15 years. Until recently, he worked primarily with MySQL. In 2012, Devananda began working on OpenStack, initially contributing to the Nova project, and founding the Ironic project a year later. He served on the OpenStack Technical Committee, the project's technical policy board.

Devananda is currently employed by Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, where he is also leading a small engineering team.

Ironic is a modern tool for hardware provisioning. Combining a RESTful API, scale-out control plane, and pluggable hardware drivers, Ironic installs operating systems efficiently and repeatably on diverse hardware.

With a vibrant community of developers, Ironic's support for the latest management technologies comes directly from hardware vendors. Meanwhile, the project ensures a consistent experience across all platforms.

Devananda will demonstrate how to install Ironic with Ansible, then build and deploy a machine image, while discussing the project's architecture, history, and current goals.

Attendees should be familiar with hardware provisioning standards like PXE and IPMI, but do not need deep knowledge.

Ironic is a modern tool for hardware provisioning. Combining a RESTful API, scale-out control plane, and pluggable hardware drivers, Ironic installs operating systems efficiently and repeatably on diverse hardware.

With a vibrant community of developers, Ironic's support for the latest management technologies comes directly from hardware vendors. Meanwhile, the project ensures a consistent experience across all platforms.

Devananda will demonstrate how to install Ironic with Ansible, then build and deploy a machine image, while discussing the project's architecture, history, and current goals.

Attendees should be familiar with hardware provisioning standards like PXE and IPMI, but do not need deep knowledge.

Available Media

  • Read more about Ironic: A Modern Approach to Hardware Provisioning

W-Talks 2a

LISA15: Metrics

How Can You Scale It If You Don't Trust It?

11:00 am-11:45 am
Invited Talk

David N. Blank-Edelman, Apcera

David is the Technical Evangelist at Apcera. He has spent thirty years in the systems administration/DevOps/SRE field in large multiplatform environments including Brandeis University, Cambridge Technology Group, MIT Media Laboratory and Northeastern University. He is the author of the O'Reilly Otter book (Automating System Administration with Perl) and is a frequent invited speaker/organizer for conferences in the field. David is honored to serve on the USENIX Board of Directors. He prefers to pronounce Evangelist with a hard 'g'.

When you scale up an infrastructure it is crucial that you can trust you have the right resources in play, the right code deployed and that information can only flow in a secure manner. When you scale the organization, trust is required amongst all of the people responsible for coding, testing, deploying and managing the applications that power the business.

With all of the chatter around scaling, you would think someone would have told you the key ingredient necessary for creating and fostering the required trust. Unfortunately it is very easy to get to the end of the diving board, right on the edge of jumping into something like a hybrid cloud deployment, before you realize you need to figure this out on your own.

When you scale up an infrastructure it is crucial that you can trust you have the right resources in play, the right code deployed and that information can only flow in a secure manner. When you scale the organization, trust is required amongst all of the people responsible for coding, testing, deploying and managing the applications that power the business.

With all of the chatter around scaling, you would think someone would have told you the key ingredient necessary for creating and fostering the required trust. Unfortunately it is very easy to get to the end of the diving board, right on the edge of jumping into something like a hybrid cloud deployment, before you realize you need to figure this out on your own.

This talk can help. We’ll discuss some concrete ways you can engineer trust into the system (complete with examples) you are building or operating so that it works well for cloud-native and legacy applications. By the end, you’ll have a good idea of the decision/enforcement points you’ll need to consider to be able to create a system (and an organization) that can scale.

Available Media

  • Read more about How Can You Scale It If You Don't Trust It?

W-Talks-2a2

LISA15: SRE/SWE

5 Things You Might Not Know about NGINX

11:45 am-12:30 pm
Invited Talk

Shannon Burns, NGINX

NGINX is a well kept secret of high performance web service. Many people know NGINX as an Open Source web server that delivers static content blazingly fast. But it has many more features to help accelerate delivery of bits to your end users even in more complicated application environments. In this talk we’ll cover several things that most developers or administrators could implement to further delight their end users.

NGINX is a well kept secret of high performance web service. Many people know NGINX as an Open Source web server that delivers static content blazingly fast. But it has many more features to help accelerate delivery of bits to your end users even in more complicated application environments. In this talk we’ll cover several things that most developers or administrators could implement to further delight their end users.

Available Media

  • Read more about 5 Things You Might Not Know about NGINX

Papers Session

Hyperprobe: Towards Virtual Machine Extrospection

Refereed Paper

Jidong Xiao, College of William and Mary; Lei Lu, VMware Inc.; Hai Huang, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center; Haining Wang, University of Delaware
Awarded Best Paper!

In a virtualized environment, it is not difficult to retrieve guest OS information from its hypervisor. However, it is very challenging to retrieve information in the reverse direction, i.e., retrieve the hypervisor information from within a guest OS, which remains an open problem and has not yet been comprehensively studied before. In this paper, we take the initiative and study this reverse information retrieval problem. In particular, we investigate how to determine the host OS kernel version from within a guest OS.We observe that modern commodity hypervisors introduce new features and bug fixes in almost every new release. Thus, by carefully analyzing the seven-year evolution of Linux KVM development (including 3485 patches), we can identify 19 features and 20 bugs in the hypervisor detectable from within a guest OS. Building on our detection of these features and bugs, we present a novel framework called Hyperprobe that for the first time enables users in a guest OS to automatically detect the underlying host OS kernel version in a few minutes. We implement a prototype of Hyperprobe and evaluate its effectiveness in five real world clouds, including Google Compute Engine (a.k.a. Google Cloud), HP Helion Public Cloud, ElasticHosts, Joyent Cloud, and CloudSigma, as well as in a controlled testbed environment, all yielding promising results.

Available Media

Dynamic Provisioning of Storage Workloads

Refereed Paper

Jayanta Basak and Madhumita Bharde, NetApp Inc.

Due to lack of generic, accurate, dynamic and comprehensive models for performance estimation, customers typically tend to under- provision or over-provision storage systems to- day. With multi-tenancy, virtualization, scale and unifi ed storage becoming norms in the industry, it is highly desirable to strike an optimum balance between utilization and performance. However, performance prediction for enterprise storage systems is a tricky problem, considering that there are multiple hardware and software layers cascaded in complex ways that affect behavior of the system. Con figuration factors such as CPU, cache size, RAM size, capacity, storage backend (HDD/Flash) and network cards etc. are known to have significant effect on the number of IOPS that can be pushed to the system. However, apart from system characteristics as these, storage workloads vary reasonably and therefore, IOPS numbers depend heavily on types of workloads provisioned on storage systems. In this work, we treat storage system as a hybrid of black-box and white-box models, and propose a solution that will enable administrators to make decisions in the presence of multiple workloads dynamically. Our worst-case prediction is within 15% error margin.

Available Media

SF-TAP: Scalable and Flexible Traffic Analysis Platform Running on Commodity Hardware

Refereed Paper

Yuuki Takano, Ryosuke Miura, and Shingo Yasuda, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology and Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology; Kunio Akashi, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology; Tomoya Inoue, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology and National Institute of Information and Communications Technology

Application-level network traffic analysis and sophisticated analysis techniques such as machine learning and stream data processing for network traffic require considerable computational resources. In addition, developing an application protocol analyzer is a tedious and time- consuming task. Therefore, we propose a scalable and flexible traffic analysis platform (SF-TAP) that provides an efficient and flexible application-level stream analysis of high-bandwidth network traffic. Our platform’s flexibility and modularity allow developers to easily implement multicore scalable application-level stream analyzers. Furthermore, SF-TAP is horizontally scalable and can therefore manage high-bandwidth network traffic. We achieve this scalability by separating network traffic based on traffic flows, forwarding the separated flows to multiple SF-TAP cells, each of which consists of a traffic capturer and application-level analyzers. In this study, we discuss the design and implementation of SF-TAP and provide details of its evaluation.

Available Media

Spyglass: Demand-Provisioned Linux Containers for Private Network Access

Refereed Paper

Patrick T. Cable II and Nabil Schear, MIT Lincoln Laboratory

System administrators are required to access the privileged, or "super-user," interfaces of computing, networking, and storage resources they support. This low-level infrastructure underpins most of the security tools and features common today and is assumed to be secure. A malicious system administrator or malware on the system administrator's client system can silently subvert this computing infrastructure. In the case of cloud system administrators, unauthorized privileged access has the potential to cause grave damage to the cloud provider and their customers. In this paper, we describe Spyglass, a tool for managing, securing, and auditing administrator access to private or sensitive infrastructure networks by creating on-demand bastion hosts inside of Linux containers. These on-demand bastion containers differ from regular bastion hosts in that they are nonpersistent and last only for the duration of the administrator's access. Spyglass also captures command input and screen output of all administrator activities from outside the container, allowing monitoring of sensitive infrastructure and understanding of the actions of an adversary in the event of a compromise. Through our evaluation of Spyglass for remote network access, we show that it is more difficult to penetrate than existing solutions, does not introduce delays or major workflow changes, and increases the amount of tamper-resistant auditing information that is captured about a system administrator's access.

Available Media

W-Mini Tutorials 1a

LISA15: Syseng

Solving Problems and Identifying Bottlenecks with strace and truss

11:00 am-12:30 pm
Mini Tutorial

Doug Hughes, D. E. Shaw Research, LLC

Doug Hughes has a B.E. in Computer Engineering from Penn State University, and has had various positions in computing from G.E. Aerospace, Auburn University College of Engineering, and Global Crossing to his current position at D.E. Shaw Research. He currently leads a small multi-national team that is responsible for all things infrastructure, from the datacenter to clusters, storage, and networking.

  • Read more about Solving Problems and Identifying Bottlenecks with strace and truss

W-Mini Tutorials 2a

LISA15: SRE/SWE

Running with MongoDB: Build Your Cluster Like a Champ!

11:00 am-12:30 pm
Mini Tutorial

Nuri Halperin, Plus N Consulting, Inc.

Nuri Halperin consults, develops software, and teaches with passion. He designs and builds systems, websites and business applications, and gets things done for a variety of clients, both small and large. He also authors courses for pluralsight.com, is a MongoDB Master, and was the inaugural recipient of MongoDB's William Zola Outstanding Contributor Award. A frequent speaker at tech events, Nuri enjoys interacting and helping people reach that "Aha!" moment.

  • Read more about Running with MongoDB: Build Your Cluster Like a Champ!

W-Labs-1a

LISA Lab Office Hours

11:00 am-12:30 pm

Attending Office Hours or not—the Lab is open for all, so stop by to check it out!

  • Read more about LISA Lab Office Hours

12:30 pm–2:00 pm Conference Lunch on the Expo Floor Exhibit Halls B South and C

2:00 pm–3:30 pm Wednesday
Thurgood Marshall North/East Thurgood Marshall South Thurgood Marshall West Lincoln 3 Lincoln 4 Lincoln 2

W-Talks 1b

LISA15: Syseng

An Introduction to Database as a Service with an Emphasis on OpenStack Using Trove, and Exploration of the Architecture and Internals

2:00 pm-2:45 pm
Invited Talk

Amrith Kumar, Tesora

Amrith Kumar brings more than two decades of experience delivering industry-leading products for companies specializing in enterprise storage applications, fault tolerant high performance systems and massively parallel databases to Tesora, which he co-founded. Earlier, he served as vice president of technology and product management at Dataupia, maker of the Satori Data Warehousing platform, and Sepaton’s director and general manager where he was responsible for the development of the core virtual tape library product. As a director of product development at Netezza, he managed end-to-end product delivery for all customers and prospects. Amrith studied mathematics at the University of Madras (India) and management at the Indian Institute of Management.

This presentation provides a high level introduction to Database as a Service, and focuses on DBaaS with OpenStack Trove. It also presents an in depth exploration of the Trove architecture.

It helps answer such questions as “What are some major problems faced by IT and database users in the organization,” “What are the benefits of DBaaS,” “What is OpenStack Trove,” “How does Trove relate to such things as Amazon RDS, MongoHQ, Heroku, DynamoDB, HP Cloud Relational Database and Rackspace Cloud Databases,” “Should I offer DBaaS to my organization,” and “Practical considerations in migrating to DBaaS.”

It also explores such concepts as “How does Trove interact with other OpenStack services,” “What are the various components of Trove,” “What are guest agents,” “How are requests to Trove processed,” “How does Trove handle such activities as Backup and Restore, Clustering and Replication,” and “How does Trove support multiple database types.”
 

This presentation provides a high level introduction to Database as a Service, and focuses on DBaaS with OpenStack Trove. It also presents an in depth exploration of the Trove architecture.

It helps answer such questions as “What are some major problems faced by IT and database users in the organization,” “What are the benefits of DBaaS,” “What is OpenStack Trove,” “How does Trove relate to such things as Amazon RDS, MongoHQ, Heroku, DynamoDB, HP Cloud Relational Database and Rackspace Cloud Databases,” “Should I offer DBaaS to my organization,” and “Practical considerations in migrating to DBaaS.”

It also explores such concepts as “How does Trove interact with other OpenStack services,” “What are the various components of Trove,” “What are guest agents,” “How are requests to Trove processed,” “How does Trove handle such activities as Backup and Restore, Clustering and Replication,” and “How does Trove support multiple database types.”
 
It presents some practical examples of benefits achieved in adopting DBaaS, shares learnings from the adoption process, and highlights some potential pitfalls. It helps the participant understand the internals and architecture of Trove and provides the participant with knowledge that would be useful in assessing, deploying and managing Trove in the enterprise. It concludes with a view of the road map of features for upcoming releases.

Available Media

  • Read more about An Introduction to Database as a Service with an Emphasis on OpenStack Using Trove, and Exploration of the Architecture and Internals

Instrumenting a Data Center with InfluxDB

2:45 pm-3:30 pm
Invited Talk

David Norton, InfluxDB Core Engineer

David Norton is part of the InfluxDB team, developing the core of the database. He started programming on a C64 as a teenager and has worked on projects ranging from circuit design to distributed systems.

Maintaining a healthy data center and high availability of the services running within requires constant monitoring. It also requires monitoring that can scale and adapt quickly as a data center grows or new services are added. Collecting, storing, and analyzing metrics data at data center-scale poses significant challenges. This talk will discuss InfluxDB, an open source scalable time series database, which simplifies this task. We'll look at several options for collection, including Telegraf, InfluxDB plugins, and the InfluxDB API. We'll discuss the InfluxDB data model, built-in functions (derivative, mean, etc.), continuous queries, data retention policies, and clustering. And, we'll discuss options for data visualization.

Maintaining a healthy data center and high availability of the services running within requires constant monitoring. It also requires monitoring that can scale and adapt quickly as a data center grows or new services are added. Collecting, storing, and analyzing metrics data at data center-scale poses significant challenges. This talk will discuss InfluxDB, an open source scalable time series database, which simplifies this task. We'll look at several options for collection, including Telegraf, InfluxDB plugins, and the InfluxDB API. We'll discuss the InfluxDB data model, built-in functions (derivative, mean, etc.), continuous queries, data retention policies, and clustering. And, we'll discuss options for data visualization.

Available Media

  • Read more about Instrumenting a Data Center with InfluxDB

W-Talks 2b

LISA15: Syseng

OpenZFS Advancements

2:00 pm-2:45 pm
Invited Talk

George Wilson, Delphix

George Wilson is a software engineer at Delphix where he works on filesystems for the Delphix data platform. Most recently, George has developed the single-copy arc, compressed arc, nop write feature, and enhancement for imablanced LUNs as well as many performance enhancements to ZFS. Before joining Delphix, George was a senior member of the ZFS kernel development team at Sun Microsystems working on key features such as LUN expansion, Log Device removal, and Deduplication. He was also the tech lead for the Solaris 10 ZFS integration and developed an in-depth ZFS training course for Sun's field organization. George graduated from Clemson University with a BS in Computer Science.

This talk will focus on the latest advancements in OpenZFS in the areas of performance, scalability, and usability. It will go into details on the following:

  • performance improvements with fragmented and imbalanced pools
  • enhancements to the adaptive replacement cache
  • improvements in backing up or replicating ZFS filesystems.

This talk will focus on the latest advancements in OpenZFS in the areas of performance, scalability, and usability. It will go into details on the following:

  • performance improvements with fragmented and imbalanced pools
  • enhancements to the adaptive replacement cache
  • improvements in backing up or replicating ZFS filesystems.
Available Media

  • Read more about OpenZFS Advancements

W-Talks-2b2

LISA15: SRE/SWE

Containers, Microservices, and Data Gravity

2:45 pm-3:30 pm
Invited Talk

John Willis, Docker

John Willis is Technical Evangelist for Docker, which he joined after the company he co-founded (SocketPlane, which focused on SDN for containers) was acquired by Docker in March 2015. Before founding SocketPlane in the fall of 2014, John’s experience included VP of Customer Enablement at Stateless Networks, Chief DevOps Evangelist at Dell, and executive roles at Opscode/Chef and Gulf Breeze Software.

The convergence of these three ideas is causing a major disruption in the way we do infrastructure. We will first cover an overview of the three areas (Containers, Microservices and Data Gravity) then we will look at some use cases where the three are converging. I have often said that Containers are the killer app for Microservices and Data Gravity is the killer app for Containers. Come spend some time understudying the these three major areas of change. 

The convergence of these three ideas is causing a major disruption in the way we do infrastructure. We will first cover an overview of the three areas (Containers, Microservices and Data Gravity) then we will look at some use cases where the three are converging. I have often said that Containers are the killer app for Microservices and Data Gravity is the killer app for Containers. Come spend some time understudying the these three major areas of change. 

Available Media

  • Read more about Containers, Microservices, and Data Gravity

W-Talks 3b

LISA15: Culture

Scalable Meatfrastructure: Building Stable DevOps Teams

2:00 pm-2:45 pm
Invited Talk

Alice Goldfuss, New Relic

Alice Goldfuss is a Site Reliability Engineer at New Relic, where she spends her days wading through containers, comforting servers, and performing dark sacrifices to the network tier. You can find her on Twitter (@alicegoldfuss) ranting about feminism and posting pictures of spiders.

When we think of scalable infrastructure, we think of technologies such as AWS, Kafka, or Mesos. But to operate these shiny things, you need people. Organized and resilient people.

You wouldn’t rollout containerization while your app has a memory leak, so you shouldn’t expand your DevOps team without addressing the leaks in your day-to-day communication and processes. Come learn some of the steps necessary to make your most important platform--your engineers--stable and successful.

When we think of scalable infrastructure, we think of technologies such as AWS, Kafka, or Mesos. But to operate these shiny things, you need people. Organized and resilient people.

You wouldn’t rollout containerization while your app has a memory leak, so you shouldn’t expand your DevOps team without addressing the leaks in your day-to-day communication and processes. Come learn some of the steps necessary to make your most important platform--your engineers--stable and successful.

Available Media

  • Read more about Scalable Meatfrastructure: Building Stable DevOps Teams

W-Talks-3b2

LISA15: Syseng

Securing Your Cloud from Criminals—A View from SophosLabs on Securing Linux Assets

2:45 pm-3:30 pm
Invited Talk

Chester Wisniewski, Sophos

Chester "Chet" Wisniewski is a Senior Security Advisor at Sophos with more than 15 years experience in the security industry. Chester conducts research into computer security and online privacy with the goal of making security information more accessible to the public.

Chester frequently writes articles for the award-winning Naked Security blog, produces the award-winning podcast "Sophos Security Chet Chat" and is a frequent speaker at conferences and in the press.

Criminals have embraced the cloud to a greater degree than even private enterprise. What's the best cloud for a crook? Yours. This talk will take a look at how criminals are leveraging purloined Linux and Unix assets to build out their infrastructure and some simple methods to thwart their efforts.

SophosLabs' primary goal is publishing threat information to protect our customers. This requires us to monitor millions of malicious attacks each day providing a large data set to mine for information.

Our experience shows that more than 80% attacks originate from compromised assets, the majority of which are running a Linux-based operating system. Administrators of Linux systems can step up and have a serious impact on reducing the criminal footprint and making our friends, families and organizations safer.

Criminals have embraced the cloud to a greater degree than even private enterprise. What's the best cloud for a crook? Yours. This talk will take a look at how criminals are leveraging purloined Linux and Unix assets to build out their infrastructure and some simple methods to thwart their efforts.

SophosLabs' primary goal is publishing threat information to protect our customers. This requires us to monitor millions of malicious attacks each day providing a large data set to mine for information.

Our experience shows that more than 80% attacks originate from compromised assets, the majority of which are running a Linux-based operating system. Administrators of Linux systems can step up and have a serious impact on reducing the criminal footprint and making our friends, families and organizations safer.

Available Media

  • Read more about Securing Your Cloud from Criminals—A View from SophosLabs on Securing Linux Assets

W-Mini Tutorials 1b

LISA15: Syseng

Getting Started with Puppet

2:00 pm-3:30 pm
Mini Tutorial

Thomas Uphill, Wells Fargo

Thomas is a Red Hat certified architect with nearly 20 years of system administration experience. He has spoken at LISA, LOPSA, PICC, Cascadia, and PuppetConf. He has been working with Puppet for several years and recently wrote the Third Edition of the Puppet Cookbook. Thomas previously wrote Mastering Puppet, a book on deploying Puppet in large environments. He is a board member of LOPSA and the vice-president of SASAG, the Seattle chapter of LOPSA. When he isn't working on LOPSA or SASAG he can be found hosting the Puppet User Group Meetup in Seattle (PUGS).

  • Read more about Getting Started with Puppet

W-Mini Tutorials 2b

LISA15: Culture

Contract Negotiation for System Administrators

2:00 pm-3:30 pm
Mini Tutorial

Derek J. Balling, Collective[i]

Derek is the director of technical operations for Collective[i], a SaaS provider. He has been leading operations teams and managing data-center facility relationships for nearly a decade.

Available Media
  • Read more about Contract Negotiation for System Administrators

W-Labs-1b

LISA Lab Office Hours

2:00 pm-3:30 pm

Attending Office Hours or not—the Lab is open for all, so stop by to check it out!

  • Read more about LISA Lab Office Hours

3:30 pm–4:00 pm Break with Refreshments on the Expo Floor Exhibit Halls B South and C

4:00 pm–5:30 pm Wednesday
Thurgood Marshall North/East Thurgood Marshall South Thurgood Marshall West Lincoln 3 Lincoln 4 Lincoln 2

W-Talks 1c

LISA15: Syseng

Efficiently Backing Up Terabytes of Data with PgBackRest

4:00 pm-4:45 pm
Invited Talk

David Steele, Crunchy Data Solutions, Inc.

David Steele is Senior Data Architect at Crunchy Data Solutions, the PostgreSQL company for secure enterprises. He has been actively developing with PostgreSQL since 1999.

PgBackRest is open source software developed to perform efficient backup on PostgreSQL databases that measure in tens of terabytes and greater. It supports per file checksums, compression, partial/failed backup resume, high-performance parallel transfer, asynchronous archiving, tablespaces, expiration, full/differential/incremental, local/remote operation via SSH, hard-linking, restore, and more. PgBackRest is written in Perl and does not depend on rsync or tar but instead performs its own deltas which gives it maximum flexibility. This talk by the author will introduce the features, give sample configurations, and talk about design philosophy.

PgBackRest is open source software developed to perform efficient backup on PostgreSQL databases that measure in tens of terabytes and greater. It supports per file checksums, compression, partial/failed backup resume, high-performance parallel transfer, asynchronous archiving, tablespaces, expiration, full/differential/incremental, local/remote operation via SSH, hard-linking, restore, and more. PgBackRest is written in Perl and does not depend on rsync or tar but instead performs its own deltas which gives it maximum flexibility. This talk by the author will introduce the features, give sample configurations, and talk about design philosophy.

Available Media

  • Read more about Efficiently Backing Up Terabytes of Data with PgBackRest

Working with Law Enforcement v3.0—Fifteen Years of Cooperation and Conflict

4:45 pm-5:30 pm
Invited Talk

Tom Perrine, PlayStation

Tom Perrine has been a system administrator for over 30 years and helped create LOPSA. He's built systems for the intelligence community, consulted for law enforcement and been the CSO of a national lab. He has spoken at USENIX, DEFCON, testified for Congress, and was an HTCIA Investigator of the Year. He’s now an Enterprise Architect for Playstation where he concentrates on global IT infrastructure.

I'll be sharing lessons for system administrators, learned from over 15 years of interactions with law enforcement. This will include some specific examples from older cases. I'll also be talking a bit about how the relationship between cops and sysadmins has changed in that time.

I'll be sharing lessons for system administrators, learned from over 15 years of interactions with law enforcement. This will include some specific examples from older cases. I'll also be talking a bit about how the relationship between cops and sysadmins has changed in that time.

Available Media

  • Read more about Working with Law Enforcement v3.0—Fifteen Years of Cooperation and Conflict

W-Talks 2c

LISA15: Syseng

The Latest from Kubernetes

4:00 pm-4:45 pm
Invited Talk

Tim Hockin, Google

Tim is a Senior Staff Software Engineer in Google's Cloud team, where he spends most of his time on Kubernetes and container-related stuff. Before that he worked on Google's internal cluster systems, machine management, the Linux kernel, BIOS, and hardware bringup, and before that he cut his teeth at Cobalt Networks and Sun Mcrosystems. The biggest challenge he faces on a daily basis is deciding which one or two of the hundreds of exciting open problems he is going to try to focus on.

An introduction to container cluster management as implemented in Google's Kubernetes system, as well as the latest news, patterns, and updates. We will discuss a few of the primitives, some simple use cases, and some current hot topics in the container space.

An introduction to container cluster management as implemented in Google's Kubernetes system, as well as the latest news, patterns, and updates. We will discuss a few of the primitives, some simple use cases, and some current hot topics in the container space.

Available Media

  • Read more about The Latest from Kubernetes

My First Year at Chef: Measuring All the Things

4:45 pm-5:30 pm
Invited Talk

Nicole Forsgren, Chef

Nicole Forsgren, PhD, is the Director of Organizational Performance & Analytics at Chef. She is an academic partner at the Social Analytics Institute at Clemson University and received her PhD in Management Information Systems and Masters in Accounting from the University of Arizona. She is an expert in IT adoption and use, DevOps impacts, and communication and knowledge management practices, particularly among technical professionals. Her background spans analytics, enterprise storage, cost allocation, user experience, and systems design and development. She is a LISA past chair, featured speaker at industry and academic events, and is involved in women in technology initiatives.

So what happens when you're brought in to a team and asked to "introduce a metrics culture" or "measure all the things?" This talk will cover just that: how to assess the state of affairs in your team or organization regarding measurement, how to decide what things to measure for maximum impact, and how to best communicate and iterate those measurements throughout the journey. The talk will cover these topics using my own journey at Chef as well as journeys I see at other companies that I meet and consult with. 

So what happens when you're brought in to a team and asked to "introduce a metrics culture" or "measure all the things?" This talk will cover just that: how to assess the state of affairs in your team or organization regarding measurement, how to decide what things to measure for maximum impact, and how to best communicate and iterate those measurements throughout the journey. The talk will cover these topics using my own journey at Chef as well as journeys I see at other companies that I meet and consult with. 

Available Media

  • Read more about My First Year at Chef: Measuring All the Things

W-Talks 3c

LISA15: Culture

Continuous Acceleration: Why Continuous Everything Needs a Supply Chain Approach

4:00 pm-4:45 pm
Invited Talk

Joshua Corman, CTO, Sonatype

Joshua Corman is a Founder of I am The Cavalry (dot org) and the CTO for Sonatype. Corman has served key research and strategy roles at Akamai Technologies, The 451 Group, and IBM Internet Security Systems. He co-founded @RuggedSoftware and @IamTheCavalry to encourage new security approaches in response to the world’s increasing dependence on digital infrastructure. Josh's unique approach to security in the context of human factors, adversary motivations and social impact has helped position him as one of the most trusted names in security. He is an adjunct faculty for Carnegie Mellon’s Heinz College and Advisor to DHS S&T. Josh received his bachelor's degree in philosophy, graduating summa cum laude, from the University of New Hampshire.

With continuous development, we write less code and consume more re-usable open source code. Innovation is accelerated and so is application complexity. Complexity is the enemy of quality. Poor quality creates unplanned/unscheduled work. Re-work creates a drag on development speed. It’s a continuous loop. While Agile and DevOps have made us faster and more efficient, they can only take us so far... and worse, the year of OpenSource attacks we've just had commands better practices.

What if we could deliver applications on-time (even faster), on-budget (even more efficiently) and with a natural byproduct of more acceptable quality and risk?

The good news: other industries have figured this out with supply chain management. Applying supply chain approaches to software raises the bar on continuous goals.

A few of the patterns we can take from the rigor of things like the Toyota Supply Chain:

With continuous development, we write less code and consume more re-usable open source code. Innovation is accelerated and so is application complexity. Complexity is the enemy of quality. Poor quality creates unplanned/unscheduled work. Re-work creates a drag on development speed. It’s a continuous loop. While Agile and DevOps have made us faster and more efficient, they can only take us so far... and worse, the year of OpenSource attacks we've just had commands better practices.

What if we could deliver applications on-time (even faster), on-budget (even more efficiently) and with a natural byproduct of more acceptable quality and risk?

The good news: other industries have figured this out with supply chain management. Applying supply chain approaches to software raises the bar on continuous goals.

A few of the patterns we can take from the rigor of things like the Toyota Supply Chain:

  • Scrutinize the number and quality of your “suppliers”
  • Manage out avoidable risk, complexity, and code bloat
  • Improve traceability and visibility
  • Ensure prompt agile responses when things go wrong

Pending legislation with the Cyber Supply Chain Transparency Act makes this a particularly important topic for Federal Agencies and the ISVs and SIs who provide software to them. This session will also provide background on this act and provide practical guidance on how respond to and benefit from it.

Available Media

  • Read more about Continuous Acceleration: Why Continuous Everything Needs a Supply Chain Approach

Software Patent Litigation: What Have We Learned?

4:45 pm-5:30 pm
Invited Talk

Deborah Nicholson, Open Invention Network

Deb Nicholson wants to make the world a better place with technology and social justice for all. After many years of local political organizing, she became an enthusiastic free software activist. She is currently the Community Outreach Director at the Open Invention Network and the Community Manager at GNU MediaGoblin. She also serves on the board at Open Hatch, a.k.a. Free Software's Welcoming Committee. She lives with her husband in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 

The huge increase in software patent litigation over the last 15 years has produced reams of articles, cost fortunes and even snagged the US President's attention. But when something goes on for long enough, it also produces data -- lots and lots of data. So what have we learned from all the data?

The huge increase in software patent litigation over the last 15 years has produced reams of articles, cost fortunes and even snagged the US President's attention. But when something goes on for long enough, it also produces data -- lots and lots of data. So what have we learned from all the data?

Available Media

  • Read more about Software Patent Litigation: What Have We Learned?

W-Mini Tutorials 1c

LISA15: Syseng

Automated Security Compliance Evaluation of Your Infrastructure with SCAP

4:00 pm-5:30 pm
Mini Tutorial

Martin Preisler, Red Hat, Inc.

Martin Preisler works as a software engineer at Red Hat, Inc. He works on the Security Technologies team, focusing on security compliance using Security Content Automation Protocol. He is the principal author of SCAP Workbench, a frequent contributor to OpenSCAP and SCAP Security Guide, and a contributor to the SCAP standard specifications. Outside of Red Hat, he likes to work on open source projects related to real-time 3D rendering and game development.

  • Read more about Automated Security Compliance Evaluation of Your Infrastructure with SCAP

W-Mini Tutorials 2c

LISA15: SRE/SWE

Managed Big Data

4:00 pm-5:30 pm
Mini Tutorial

Scott Lee, Amazon Web Services

Scott is a cloud engineer at Amazon Web Services, focused on Elastic MapReduce, a managed Hadoop service. He is also a volunteer contributor to Mozilla open-source projects, focusing on system administration tasks.

  • Read more about Managed Big Data

W-Labs-1c

LISA Lab Office Hours

4:00 pm-5:00 pm

Attending Office Hours or not—the Lab is open for all, so stop by to check it out!

  • Read more about LISA Lab Office Hours

5:30 pm–6:30 pm Expo Happy Hour, Sponsored by Oracle Exhibit Halls B South and C

6:30 pm–7:30 pm Poster Session in the Atrium Wednesday

The poster session will include posters by the authors of all of the accepted papers, plus DevOps Is Improv: How Improv Made Me a Better Sysadmin, by Brian Sebby, Argonne National Laboratory.

 

Thursday, November 12, 2015

8:00 am–9:00 am Continental Breakfast Thurgood Marshall Ballroom Foyer

9:00 am–10:30 am Thursday

R-Keynote

LISA15: Culture

Sysadmins and Their Role in Cyberwar: Why Several Governments Want to Spy on and Hack You, Even If You Have Nothing to Hide

9:00 am-10:30 am
Keynote Address

Christopher Soghoian, Principal Technologist, American Civil Liberties Union

Thurgood Marshall Ballroom

Dubbed the “Ralph Nader for the Internet Age” by Wired and “the most prominent of a new breed of activist technology researchers” by the Economist, Christopher Soghoian works at the intersection of technology, law, and policy. A leading expert on privacy, surveillance, and information security, Soghoian is currently the Principal Technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union.

A TED Senior Fellow, Soghoian has been named a top innovator under 35 by the MIT Technology Review, an Engineering Hero by IEEE Spectrum, and a Tech Titan by Washingtonian magazine. Soghoian completed his Ph.D. at Indiana University in 2012, which focused on the role that Internet and telephone companies play in enabling government surveillance of their customers.

Christopher Soghoian will talk about the latest developments in government surveillance, their implications, and the special relevance these developments have for our sysadmin community.

Christopher Soghoian will talk about the latest developments in government surveillance, their implications, and the special relevance these developments have for our sysadmin community.

Available Media

  • Read more about Sysadmins and Their Role in Cyberwar: Why Several Governments Want to Spy on and Hack You, Even If You Have Nothing to Hide

10:30 am–11:00 am Break with Refreshments on the Expo Floor Exhibit Halls B South and C

11:00 am–12:30 pm Thursday
Thurgood Marshall North/East Thurgood Marshall South Thurgood Marshall West Lincoln 3 Lincoln 4 Lincoln 2 Lincoln 5

R-Talks-1a

LISA15: Syseng

How Continuous Delivery and Lean Management Make Your DevOps Amazeballs

11:00 am-11:45 am
Invited Talk

Nicole Forsgren, Chef

Nicole Forsgren, PhD, is the Director of Organizational Performance & Analytics at Chef. She is an academic partner at the Social Analytics Institute at Clemson University and received her PhD in Management Information Systems and Masters in Accounting from the University of Arizona. She is an expert in IT adoption and use, DevOps impacts, and communication and knowledge management practices, particularly among technical professionals. Her background spans analytics, enterprise storage, cost allocation, user experience, and systems design and development. She is a LISA past chair, featured speaker at industry and academic events, and is involved in women in technology initiatives.

Dr. Nicole Forsgren will present the latest research that uncovers what really drives business outcomes of market share, profitability, and productivity as well as DevOps transformation awesomeness... Hint: these include continuous delivery (and what is most important when you do CD) and lean management (and what that means for us). This exciting research was done with Jez Humble and Gene Kim, and is promising exciting new projects in the space.

Dr. Nicole Forsgren will present the latest research that uncovers what really drives business outcomes of market share, profitability, and productivity as well as DevOps transformation awesomeness... Hint: these include continuous delivery (and what is most important when you do CD) and lean management (and what that means for us). This exciting research was done with Jez Humble and Gene Kim, and is promising exciting new projects in the space.

Available Media

  • Read more about How Continuous Delivery and Lean Management Make Your DevOps Amazeballs

Practical Advice for Small and Medium Environment DDoS Survival

11:45 am-12:30 pm
Invited Talk

Branson Matheson, sandSecurity (presenting for Chris McEniry, Sony Network Entertainment)

Branson is a 27-year veteran of system architecture, administration and security. He started as a cryptologist for the US Navy and has since worked on NASA shuttle projects, TSA security and monitoring systems, and Internet search engines. He has also run his own company while continuing to support many open source projects. He is currently the CIO for Silent Circle, a privacy and security organization behind the Blackphone. Branson has his CEH, GSEC, GCIH, and several other credentials; and generally likes to spend time responding to the statement "I bet you can't."

@sandinak

Anyone running an Internet presence today is susceptible to denial of service attacks. The scale of these attacks has ballooned to over 400Gbps in the past year, and the barrier to producing these has dropped tremendously. While there are several proposed solutions at an Internet Engineering level, none is uniformly adopted to head off the issue, so it's left to individual site owners to make practical trade offs to protect themselves. In this talk, I discuss some of the trade offs and advice for what a small or medium site owner can do to survive in the current climate.

Anyone running an Internet presence today is susceptible to denial of service attacks. The scale of these attacks has ballooned to over 400Gbps in the past year, and the barrier to producing these has dropped tremendously. While there are several proposed solutions at an Internet Engineering level, none is uniformly adopted to head off the issue, so it's left to individual site owners to make practical trade offs to protect themselves. In this talk, I discuss some of the trade offs and advice for what a small or medium site owner can do to survive in the current climate.

Branson is a 27-year veteran of system architecture, administration and security. He started as a cryptologist for the US Navy and has since worked on NASA shuttle projects, TSA security and monitoring systems, and Internet search engines. He has also run his own company while continuing to support many open source projects. He is currently the CIO for Silent Circle, a privacy and security organization behind the Blackphone. Branson has his CEH, GSEC, GCIH, and several other credentials; and generally likes to spend time responding to the statement "I bet you can't."

Available Media

  • Read more about Practical Advice for Small and Medium Environment DDoS Survival

R-Talks-2a

LISA15: SRE/SWE

Windows Just Got Chocolatey (Package Management)

11:00 am-11:45 am
Invited Talk

Rob Reynolds, Puppet Labs

Rob is a developer who has a passion for developing low maintenance solutions. In his day job he works at Puppet Labs getting his automation on. By night, Rob is very active in OSS and manages several OSS projects. Some of those projects include Chocolatey (kind of like apt-get but for Windows) and RoundhousE (database migration engine, part of the Chuck Norris Framework). He tends to speak his mind about the importance of Behavior Driven Design. See more at https://about.me/ferventcoder.

Other platforms have long enjoyed package management, a concept that was mostly foreign to Windows. There have been a few attempts at it, but the only one that has had a large amount of success is Chocolatey. Chocolatey took a different approach that has allowed it to build on top of an existing Windows ecosystem. Learn about the simplicity and sensible design of Chocolatey, how it has started to serve the role of package management for Windows, and where we are taking it in the future.

Kids love it. Microsoft Approved! Chocolatey does some cool things that will save you time and money for your organization and make you look uber smart for using it. Come learn more

Other platforms have long enjoyed package management, a concept that was mostly foreign to Windows. There have been a few attempts at it, but the only one that has had a large amount of success is Chocolatey. Chocolatey took a different approach that has allowed it to build on top of an existing Windows ecosystem. Learn about the simplicity and sensible design of Chocolatey, how it has started to serve the role of package management for Windows, and where we are taking it in the future.

Kids love it. Microsoft Approved! Chocolatey does some cool things that will save you time and money for your organization and make you look uber smart for using it. Come learn more

Available Media

  • Read more about Windows Just Got Chocolatey (Package Management)

10 Years of Crashing Google

11:45 am-12:30 pm
Invited Talk

Kripa Krishnan, Director, Cloud Ops & Site Reliability Engineering, Google

Kripa Krishnan is a Technical Program Director at Google and has led Google's Disaster Recovery Program (DiRT) and related efforts for ~9 years. She also heads up the Google Cloud Product Operations Group. Her work in Google has included Privacy and Security initiatives in Google Apps and new gTLDs program. Prior to Google, she worked with the Telemedicine Program of Kosovo and ran a theater and performing arts organization in India for several years.

Google has long had a culture of causing failures to its systems intentionally to find failures and fix them before they happen in an uncontrolled manner. Along the way, we built up several supporting components that need to get addressed on the way: failure automation, response to incidents, learning from postmortems and failure prevention. This talk pulls together learnings (and war stories) from the entire lifecycle. 

Google has long had a culture of causing failures to its systems intentionally to find failures and fix them before they happen in an uncontrolled manner. Along the way, we built up several supporting components that need to get addressed on the way: failure automation, response to incidents, learning from postmortems and failure prevention. This talk pulls together learnings (and war stories) from the entire lifecycle. 

Available Media

  • Read more about 10 Years of Crashing Google

R-Talks-3a

LISA15: Metrics

System and Application Monitoring and Troubleshooting with Sysdig

11:00 am-11:45 am
Invited Talk

Gianluca Borello, Software Engineer, Sysdig

Gianluca Borello works at Sysdig, where he wears many hats. He's a core developer of the sysdig troubleshooting tool, and spends his days dealing with backend development, performance analysis and cloud infrastructures management. Prior to Sysdig, he worked at Riverbed and CACE Technologies, the company behind Wireshark. He's passionate about Linux, open source technologies and distributed systems at scale. He holds an MS in Computer Engineering from Politecnico di Torino, Italy.

This presentation will cover the current state of system monitoring and visibility, including real use-cases and pros / cons of each. Then, it will focus on troubleshooting and visibility of distributed cloud applications and containers with sysdig.

The presentation will include live interaction with environments and will focus on bringing practical value to the audience.

This presentation will cover the current state of system monitoring and visibility, including real use-cases and pros / cons of each. Then, it will focus on troubleshooting and visibility of distributed cloud applications and containers with sysdig.

The presentation will include live interaction with environments and will focus on bringing practical value to the audience.

Available Media

  • Read more about System and Application Monitoring and Troubleshooting with Sysdig

R-Talks-3a2

LISA15: SRE/SWE

Mozilla InvestiGator: Distributed and Real-Time Digital Forensics at the Speed of the Cloud

11:45 am-12:30 pm
Invited Talk

Julien Vehent, Mozilla

Julien is an Operations Security Engineer at Mozilla, and the lead developer of MIG. Julien works on building defense mechanisms to secure large Internet services and distributed systems. Julien’s expertise areas include systems security, distributed web applications, cryptography and security automation. Prior to Mozilla, Julien worked for several banks and financial institutions in Paris, as well as web startups in the US. Julien holds a Master’s degree in Information Security from the University of Poitiers, France.

Mozilla InvestiGator (MIG) is a forensics framework built by the Operations Security team (OpSec) at Mozilla to rapidly investigate large pools of endpoints across the organization. This talk will introduce MIG, the problems it solves, its design goals, capabilities, and security model. We will present its use on thousands of servers at Mozilla. The audience will learn how indicators of compromise can be searched across thousands of systems within seconds.

Mozilla InvestiGator (MIG) is a forensics framework built by the Operations Security team (OpSec) at Mozilla to rapidly investigate large pools of endpoints across the organization. This talk will introduce MIG, the problems it solves, its design goals, capabilities, and security model. We will present its use on thousands of servers at Mozilla. The audience will learn how indicators of compromise can be searched across thousands of systems within seconds.

Available Media

  • Read more about Mozilla InvestiGator: Distributed and Real-Time Digital Forensics at the Speed of the Cloud

R-Mini-Tutorials-1a

LISA15: Syseng

Docker Tutorial

11:00 am-12:30 pm
Mini Tutorial

John Willis, Docker

John Willis is Technical Evangelist for Docker, which he joined after the company he co-founded (SocketPlane, which focused on SDN for containers) was acquired by Docker in March 2015. Before founding SocketPlane in the fall of 2014, John’s experience included VP of Customer Enablement at Stateless Networks, Chief DevOps Evangelist at Dell, and executive roles at Opscode/Chef and Gulf Breeze Software.

  • Read more about Docker Tutorial

R-Mini-Tutorials-2a

LISA15: Metrics

Fundamentals of Data Visualization: Building More Effective Charts and Business Intelligence Dashboards

11:00 am-12:30 pm
Mini Tutorial

John Mechalas, Intel Corp.

John has worked for Intel since 1994, spending most of those years as a UNIX systems administrator and systems programmer, supporting a large design engineering environment, web and database servers, and UNIX and Windows integration. He is now an application engineer working primarily with security technologies. John lives near Portland, Oregon, with his wife, dogs, and cats. In his free time, he does photography and performs improvisational comedy.

  • Read more about Fundamentals of Data Visualization: Building More Effective Charts and Business Intelligence Dashboards

R-Labs-1a

LISA Lab Office Hours

11:00 am-12:30 pm

Attending Office Hours or not—the Lab is open for all, so stop by to check it out!

  • Read more about LISA Lab Office Hours

R-Vendor-Talks-1a

Vendor Talk: CoreOS: Building the Layers of the Scalable Cluster for Containers

11:00 am-11:45 am

Barak Michener, CoreOS

Barak Michener is a backend Go developer working for CoreOS and lead maintainer of Cayley, an open source graph database. Barak previously worked at Google through the acquisition of Metaweb. At Metaweb he focused on the graph database behind freebase.com. While at Google he worked on structured search using structured data to improve Google Search after some time focusing on music research and multi-model machine learning algorithms. He is inspired by the straightforward energy in New York City.

One of the strengths of containerization is the way it allows us to consider how to build our applications for scale. Turning a cluster of machines into a single, highly-available computer is the end goal of a containerized world.

However, there are many distributed systems problems along the way!

Barak will discuss the layers that tend to constitute a cluster (from the hardware up) and talk about the multiple open-source projects at CoreOS that build these layers through small, composable utilities.

One of the strengths of containerization is the way it allows us to consider how to build our applications for scale. Turning a cluster of machines into a single, highly-available computer is the end goal of a containerized world.

However, there are many distributed systems problems along the way!

Barak will discuss the layers that tend to constitute a cluster (from the hardware up) and talk about the multiple open-source projects at CoreOS that build these layers through small, composable utilities.

Barak Michener is a backend Go developer working for CoreOS and lead maintainer of Cayley, an open source graph database. Barak previously worked at Google through the acquisition of Metaweb. At Metaweb he focused on the graph database behind freebase.com. While at Google he worked on structured search using structured data to improve Google Search after some time focusing on music research and multi-model machine learning algorithms. He is inspired by the straightforward energy in New York City.

  • Read more about Vendor Talk: CoreOS: Building the Layers of the Scalable Cluster for Containers

Vendor Talk: Next Gen Data Centers Will Fail Without Storage, Compute, and Network Workflow Integration

11:45 am-12:30 pm

Bob Noel, Director of Product and Solutions Marketing, Plexxi

Bob Noel holds the position of Director of Product and Solutions Marketing for Plexxi. Noel has over 19 years of experience in Networking and associated technologies, having spent several years in senior level roles with industry leaders such as Cisco, Cabletron and Extreme Networks. Noel has spoken all across the world and is highly sought after for his knowledge in the areas of next generation data centers, virtualization, networking architectures and the new dynamics and challenges introduced by the growing trends in Software Defined Networking. Noel’s background expands senior sales, engineering, training and a number of marketing positions. Noel is currently located at Plexxi’s corporate office in Salem, NH. 

Disruption, in the form of automation and workflow integration, must occur for the network to keep pace with storage and compute. Virtualization and Hyperconvergence have significantly increased agility, performance and operational efficiency within the storage and compute domains. It’s time for DevOps integration across storage, compute AND network domains to deliver true data center agility.

Learn How:

Disruption, in the form of automation and workflow integration, must occur for the network to keep pace with storage and compute. Virtualization and Hyperconvergence have significantly increased agility, performance and operational efficiency within the storage and compute domains. It’s time for DevOps integration across storage, compute AND network domains to deliver true data center agility.

Learn How:

  • Networks can be built around data and storage workload needs, not the other way around 
  • Network configuration can be automated from within hypervisor management tools (vCenter, OpenStack)
  • To ensure IP storage and VSAN workloads are non disruptive to business critical application traffic
  • To deliver visualization across the physical network and virtualization domains  

Bob Noel holds the position of Director of Product and Solutions Marketing for Plexxi. Noel has over 19 years of experience in Networking and associated technologies, having spent several years in senior level roles with industry leaders such as Cisco, Cabletron and Extreme Networks. Noel has spoken all across the world and is highly sought after for his knowledge in the areas of next generation data centers, virtualization, networking architectures and the new dynamics and challenges introduced by the growing trends in Software Defined Networking. Noel’s background expands senior sales, engineering, training and a number of marketing positions. Noel is currently located at Plexxi’s corporate office in Salem, NH. 

  • Read more about Vendor Talk: Next Gen Data Centers Will Fail Without Storage, Compute, and Network Workflow Integration

12:30 pm–2:00 pm Conference Lunch on the Expo Floor Exhibit Halls B South and C

2:00 pm–3:30 pm Thursday
Thurgood Marshall North/East Thurgood Marshall South Thurgood Marshall West Lincoln 3 Lincoln 4 Lincoln 2 Lincoln 5

R-Talks-1b2

LISA15: Culture

Making Every Hire Count—Data Driven Hiring!

2:00 pm-2:45 pm
Invited Talk

Chris Stankaitis, Pythian

Chris Stankaitis is a Manager for the Site Reliability Engineering group at Pythian, an organization providing Managed Services and Premium Consulting to companies whose data availability, reliability and integrity is critical to their business.

Chris is a key member of the hiring team for the Pythian SRE group and has participated in hundreds of candidate screenings and interviews over the past two years, resulting in the hiring of over 30 Site Reliability Engineers.

Passion, drive, the ability to learn new skills quickly…. The 21st Century SRE/SysAdmin job posting is starting to look like it belongs on OKCupid rather than LinkedIn. While technology is still evolving it remains measurable. But with the focus moving to soft skills how do you compare one candidate to another? We will deconstruct this topic and take the “woo-woo” out of the hiring process.

Passion, drive, the ability to learn new skills quickly…. The 21st Century SRE/SysAdmin job posting is starting to look like it belongs on OKCupid rather than LinkedIn. While technology is still evolving it remains measurable. But with the focus moving to soft skills how do you compare one candidate to another? We will deconstruct this topic and take the “woo-woo” out of the hiring process.

Available Media

  • Read more about Making Every Hire Count—Data Driven Hiring!

R-Talks-1b

LISA15: Syseng

Unit Testing and Monitoring Your Network Flows with Fwunit

2:45 pm-3:30 pm
Invited Talk

Dustin J. Mitchell and Michal Purzynski, Mozilla

Dustin has been a system administrator and software developer at Mozilla for five years, working with the Release Engineering team. His responsibilities include configuration management, network access-control administration, web services development and deployment, and administration of the multi-layered continuous-integration build system. His spare-time activities include homebrewing and, of late, curling.

Michal has been with Mozilla Corporation for over three years. Building on his experience, which includes designing and deploying networks and managed security solutions on an ISP and data center scale, he now focuses on network security. Michal designed and implemented the Network Security Monitoring system that monitors Mozilla’s datacenter, AWS, and office environments. He works in finding new ways to detect threats, correlate events and measure compliance. Previously he worked on the RSBAC project—a mandatory access control system for a Linux kernel. He tries hard to spend his free time behind a wheel and the camera.

Configuration of network flows, particularly across multiple firewalls, cloud providers, and datacenters, is complex, prone to error, and difficult for people who are not network engineers to follow. In a DevOps environment, we want to enjoy the benefits of software development even for our infrastructure. SDN lets us *write* our network, but what about continuous integration testing? Viewing changes over time? Visibility and intelligibility to other team members? Fwunit is a tool to address those needs and more.

Configuration of network flows, particularly across multiple firewalls, cloud providers, and datacenters, is complex, prone to error, and difficult for people who are not network engineers to follow. In a DevOps environment, we want to enjoy the benefits of software development even for our infrastructure. SDN lets us *write* our network, but what about continuous integration testing? Viewing changes over time? Visibility and intelligibility to other team members? Fwunit is a tool to address those needs and more.

Available Media

  • Read more about Unit Testing and Monitoring Your Network Flows with Fwunit

R-Talks-2b

LISA15: SRE/SWE

Finding Truth in Legacy Systems

2:00 pm-2:45 pm
Invited Talk

Daniel Cordes, Portware

Daniel Cordes is release engineering manager at Portware LLC, coordinating a continuous delivery approach to its trading software. He has ten years of systems administration/devops experience in the financial sector and the enterprise, prior to which he was in graduate study at Columbia University for political theory. He has previously presented on release configuration topics at USENIX.

Systems can go sour even when from day one we try to hew to the best practices of server and configuration management. But it can seem a lost cause to make that effort in inherited legacy environments that no one truly understands. This talk focuses on sorting out those different "truths" we need to discover to refactor such legacy systems, as we do legacy codebases, to become more reliable and perspicuous, and on how making that happen means acting as archaeologist, architect, and politician.

Systems can go sour even when from day one we try to hew to the best practices of server and configuration management. But it can seem a lost cause to make that effort in inherited legacy environments that no one truly understands. This talk focuses on sorting out those different "truths" we need to discover to refactor such legacy systems, as we do legacy codebases, to become more reliable and perspicuous, and on how making that happen means acting as archaeologist, architect, and politician.

Available Media

  • Read more about Finding Truth in Legacy Systems

R-Talks-2b2

LISA15: Syseng

The Next Generation Cloud: Unleashing the Power of the Unikernel

2:45 pm-3:30 pm
Invited Talk

Russell Pavlicek, Xen Project Evangelist

Currently employed by Citrix as the Evangelist for Xen Project, Russell has spent two decades evangelizing Open Source. Since his introduction to Linux in 1995, he has relentlessly promoted the concept of Open Source to anyone who would listen.

He has over 150 pieces published, including columns for Infoworld and Processor magazines and one book. He has spoken at over 75 Open Source conferences, including most of the biggest Linux conferences in North America.

Docker & containers have sparked much excitement over the concept of small, easily deployable VMs. But unikernels create even smaller VMs with much higher security than container-based solutions. The next generation cloud can leverage unikernels to do more in a smaller footprint while actually increasing overall security, while the cloud model will expand to include the concept of transient microservices.

Docker & containers have sparked much excitement over the concept of small, easily deployable VMs. But unikernels create even smaller VMs with much higher security than container-based solutions. The next generation cloud can leverage unikernels to do more in a smaller footprint while actually increasing overall security, while the cloud model will expand to include the concept of transient microservices.

Available Media

  • Read more about The Next Generation Cloud: Unleashing the Power of the Unikernel

R-Talks-3b

LISA15: Metrics

Thirty Billion Metrics a Day: Large-Scale Performance Metrics with Ganglia

2:00 pm-2:45 pm
Invited Talk

Adam Compton, Quantcast

Adam has been in the system administration field for over a decade, and worked with a wide variety of software and services in various industries. He, along with others at Quantcast, contributed a white paper to the Ganglia project's O'Reilly book. He is particularly interested in the areas of configuration management and systems automation, such as building robust, self-healing and self-managing systems. He also knows some great card tricks.

At Quantcast, we use Ganglia to track upwards of thirty billion individual metric samples each day across more than five million unique time series. We use this data in every aspect of the business, from monitoring and alerting, to capacity planning, to troubleshooting and root cause analysis. In the talk I'll explain how we got here, how we manage this data, and how we plan to continue scaling our performance metrics infrastructure as the business grows.

At Quantcast, we use Ganglia to track upwards of thirty billion individual metric samples each day across more than five million unique time series. We use this data in every aspect of the business, from monitoring and alerting, to capacity planning, to troubleshooting and root cause analysis. In the talk I'll explain how we got here, how we manage this data, and how we plan to continue scaling our performance metrics infrastructure as the business grows.

Available Media

  • Read more about Thirty Billion Metrics a Day: Large-Scale Performance Metrics with Ganglia

R-Talks-3b2

LISA15: SRE/SWE

How TubeMogul Handles over One Trillion http Requests a Month

2:45 pm-3:30 pm
Invited Talk

Nicolas Brousse, TubeMogul, Inc.

Nicolas Brousse is Senior Director of Operations Engineering at TubeMogul (NASDAQ: TUBE). The company's sixth employee and first operations hire, Nicolas has grown TubeMogul's infrastructure over the past seven years from several machines to over two thousand servers that handle billions of requests per day for clients like Allstate, Chrysler, Heineken and Hotels.com.

TubeMogul grew from few servers to over two thousands servers and handling over one trillion http requests a month, processed in less than 50ms each. To keep up with the fast growth, the SRE team had to implement an efficient Continuous Delivery infrastructure that allowed to do over 10,000 puppet deployment and 8,500 application deployment in 2014. In this presentation, we will cover the nuts and bolts of the TubeMogul operations engineering team and how they overcome challenges.

TubeMogul grew from few servers to over two thousands servers and handling over one trillion http requests a month, processed in less than 50ms each. To keep up with the fast growth, the SRE team had to implement an efficient Continuous Delivery infrastructure that allowed to do over 10,000 puppet deployment and 8,500 application deployment in 2014. In this presentation, we will cover the nuts and bolts of the TubeMogul operations engineering team and how they overcome challenges.

Available Media

  • Read more about How TubeMogul Handles over One Trillion http Requests a Month

R-Mini-Tutorials-1b

LISA15: Syseng

Automated Build and Deployment of Docker Hosts and Containers

2:00 pm-3:30 pm
Mini Tutorial

Bill Fraser and Dimitrios Liappis, Pythian

Bill Fraser is a Principal Consultant for Site Reliability Engineering at Pythian, an organization providing Managed Services and Project Consulting to companies whose data availability, reliability, and integrity are critical to their business.

With almost 15 years of experience, a strong background in systems architecture and design, and expertise in automation, high availability and service discovery, Bill is well positioned to speak about what works (or doesn’t) as teams adapt to increasingly complex infrastructure.

  • Read more about Automated Build and Deployment of Docker Hosts and Containers

R-Mini-Tutorials-2b

LISA15: Culture

Interfacing with Humans: How to Manage in Prod Ops

2:00 pm-3:30 pm
Mini Tutorial

Connie-Lynne Villani, Grilled Cheese Invitational

With degrees in both Electrical Engineering and Theater Management, Connie-Lynne brings 20 years of System Engineering experience to the table, as well as a keen understanding of how to handle drama in the workplace. In addition to founding and managing Groupon's first SRE team, Connie-Lynne has worked at Linden Lab, Yahoo, and Caltech, but admits that her most fun position is servng as a board member for the Grilled Cheese Invitational, an annual food festival celebrating all things cheesy.

  • Read more about Interfacing with Humans: How to Manage in Prod Ops

R-Labs-1b

LISA Lab Office Hours

2:00 pm-3:30 pm

Attending Office Hours or not—the Lab is open for all, so stop by to check it out!

  • Read more about LISA Lab Office Hours

R-Vendor-Talks-1b

Vendor Talk: Why XenServer Powers Large Scale Clouds

2:00 pm-2:45 pm

Tim Mackey, XenServer Evangelist, Citrix Systems

XenServer is the hypervisor at the core of many large scale public clouds, including those from Rackspace and IBM/SoftLayer, and is fully supported for both Apache CloudStack and OpenStack deployments. In this session, we’ll cover:

XenServer is the hypervisor at the core of many large scale public clouds, including those from Rackspace and IBM/SoftLayer, and is fully supported for both Apache CloudStack and OpenStack deployments. In this session, we’ll cover:

  • Exactly what a “XenServer” is,
  • What capabilities are often attractive to both cloud operators and those with large VM density requirements,
  • How XenServer has evolved to meet the stringent demands of cloud operations, 
  • A peek at what we’re working on for the next release and how it directly benefits cloud operators

Tim Mackey is a community manager and evangelist for XenServer within the Citrix Open Source Business Office and is focused on server virtualization and cloud orchestration technical competencies. He joined Citrix through the Reflectent acquisition in 2006, and served as architect and developer for Citrix EdgeSight; an end user experience performance monitoring solution. In 2007, Mr. Mackey became technical product manager for the EdgeSight product line and then in 2009 product manager for the XenServer self-service virtualization components. Since that time, he has held various roles within the XenServer team, and speaks regularly on topics related to the design of large scale virtual environments.

  • Read more about Vendor Talk: Why XenServer Powers Large Scale Clouds

Vendor Talk: Cutting-edge Linux Kernel Development on New SPARC Systems

2:45 pm-3:30 pm

Wim Coekaerts, Senior Vice President, Linux and Virtualization, Oracle

Wim Coekaerts is senior vice president of Linux and virtualization engineering for Oracle. He is responsible for Oracle's complete desktop-to-data center virtualization product line and Oracle Linux. Coekaerts joined Oracle in 1995.


Join Wim Coekaerts, SVP of Linux and Virtulization at Oracle for an exclusive session at LISA15 on how his team has been driving Linux development on SPARC.  Get insights on how we have modernized the tool chain and enabled brand new SPARC M7 features like silicon secured memory.  See how you can use our latest development code on the new M7 servers or try it on existing SPARC machines you have. We will be covering what's in the development code and what's coming.

Wim Coekaerts is senior vice president of Linux and virtualization engineering for Oracle. He is responsible for Oracle's complete desktop-to-data center virtualization product line and Oracle Linux. Coekaerts joined Oracle in 1995.

Join Wim Coekaerts, SVP of Linux and Virtulization at Oracle for an exclusive session at LISA15 on how his team has been driving Linux development on SPARC.  Get insights on how we have modernized the tool chain and enabled brand new SPARC M7 features like silicon secured memory.  See how you can use our latest development code on the new M7 servers or try it on existing SPARC machines you have. We will be covering what's in the development code and what's coming.

Wim Coekaerts is senior vice president of Linux and virtualization engineering for Oracle. He is responsible for Oracle's complete desktop-to-data center virtualization product line and Oracle Linux. Coekaerts joined Oracle in 1995.

  • Read more about Vendor Talk: Cutting-edge Linux Kernel Development on New SPARC Systems

3:30 pm–4:00 pm Break with Refreshments Thurgood Marshall Ballroom Foyer

4:00 pm–5:30 pm Thursday
Thurgood Marshall North/East Thurgood Marshall South Thurgood Marshall West Lincoln 3 Lincoln 4 Lincoln 2 Lincoln 5

R-Talks-1c

LISA15: Syseng

The Consilience Of Networking and Computing

4:00 pm-4:45 pm
Invited Talk

Dinesh G Dutt, Chief Scientist, Cumulus Networks

Dinesh G Dutt is Chief Scientist at Cumulus Networks. He has been in the networking industry for the past 15 years, most of it at Cisco Systems. Most recently, he was a Fellow at Cisco Systems. He has been involved in enterprise and data center networking technologies, including the design of many of the ASICs that powered Cisco's mega-switches such as Cat6K and the Nexus family of switches. He also has experience in storage networking from his days at Andiamo Systems and in the design of FCoE. He is a co-author of TRILL and VxLAN.

Historically, networking and computing have approached similar or sometimes even the same problems very differently. Consequently, network & server admins, and network & application developers have spoken different languages and inhabited different worlds. This has led to an inability for each to leverage the solutions of the other, whether it be simple package management, configuration and monitoring or even more advanced areas. Through real-life examples, this talk will show the discrepancies, solutions that can be commonly adapted across the two worlds, and a new breed of solutions that are a result of the consilience between networking and computing.

Historically, networking and computing have approached similar or sometimes even the same problems very differently. Consequently, network & server admins, and network & application developers have spoken different languages and inhabited different worlds. This has led to an inability for each to leverage the solutions of the other, whether it be simple package management, configuration and monitoring or even more advanced areas. Through real-life examples, this talk will show the discrepancies, solutions that can be commonly adapted across the two worlds, and a new breed of solutions that are a result of the consilience between networking and computing.

Available Media

  • Read more about The Consilience Of Networking and Computing

R-Talks-1c2

LISA15: Culture

Vulnerability Scanning's Not Good Enough: Enforcing Security and Compliance at Velocity Using Infrastructure As Code

4:45 pm-5:30 pm
Invited Talk

Julian Dunn, Chef Software, Inc.

Julian is a product manager at Chef, where he works on making IT automation tools fun and easy to use. He has over fifteen years of experience as a consultant, engineering manager, system administrator and software developer in industries as diverse as finance, broadcasting, advertising, publishing, and infrastructure software. Originally from Canada, he holds a degree in engineering from the University of Toronto.

In this talk, I'll discuss why existing approaches to achieving business compliance with security standards do not work. Manual verification steps, ad-hoc, emergency remediation when the auditors are in the building, and post-hoc vulnerability "scanning" that generate large reports but few actionable items result in a world full of "security and compliance theatre" that doesn't actually achieve the objectives. Worse still, once auditors leave, companies go back to doing business as usual -- until the next audit, when the cycle begins again.

I'll describe approaches we've found helpful in creating real compliance. In particular, we've studied common patterns of compliance regulations, and that you can express most of those in code, using a rules language that is easy enough for auditors to understand and for security analysts to use.

In this talk, I'll discuss why existing approaches to achieving business compliance with security standards do not work. Manual verification steps, ad-hoc, emergency remediation when the auditors are in the building, and post-hoc vulnerability "scanning" that generate large reports but few actionable items result in a world full of "security and compliance theatre" that doesn't actually achieve the objectives. Worse still, once auditors leave, companies go back to doing business as usual -- until the next audit, when the cycle begins again.

I'll describe approaches we've found helpful in creating real compliance. In particular, we've studied common patterns of compliance regulations, and that you can express most of those in code, using a rules language that is easy enough for auditors to understand and for security analysts to use.

Available Media

  • Read more about Vulnerability Scanning's Not Good Enough: Enforcing Security and Compliance at Velocity Using Infrastructure As Code

R-Talks-2c

LISA15: SRE/SWE

Release Engineering Best Practices at Google

4:00 pm-4:45 pm
Invited Talk

Dinah McNutt, Google

Dinah McNutt is a Release Engineer at Google, Inc. She has been involved with systems administration since the mid-1980’s. Some of her accomplishments include writing the Daemons & Dragons column for Unix Review Magazine, writing for SunExpert Magazine, Byte, and other publications. She has served on the LISA program committee several times including chairing the conference.

She has 20 years of commercial release engineering experience and has released all types of Unix-based software from shrink wrapped to web-based services to network appliances. She is the chair or URES ‘15 and was a keynote speaker at RELENG 2014.

Google Release Engineers are specialists in a company that traditionally has a culture of cultivating generalists. This is a snapshot of where we currently are with respect to disciplines, technology and best practices.

This talk will describe Google’s philosophy of release engineering and disciplines within release engineering at Google. It will include some technical details on how we are using bazel to help with our release processes, branching strategies using Google technology, and our automated release system.

The target audience is anyone interested in learning more about release engineering or who is looking for ideas on ways to improve release processes. 

Google Release Engineers are specialists in a company that traditionally has a culture of cultivating generalists. This is a snapshot of where we currently are with respect to disciplines, technology and best practices.

This talk will describe Google’s philosophy of release engineering and disciplines within release engineering at Google. It will include some technical details on how we are using bazel to help with our release processes, branching strategies using Google technology, and our automated release system.

The target audience is anyone interested in learning more about release engineering or who is looking for ideas on ways to improve release processes. 

Available Media

  • Read more about Release Engineering Best Practices at Google

2015 State of the Software Supply Chain: DevOps and the Illusion of Control

4:45 pm-5:30 pm
Invited Talk

Derek E. Weeks, Sonatype

In 2015, I led the largest and most comprehensive analysis of software supply chain practices to date across 160,000 development organizations. I am a huge advocate of applying proven supply chain management principles into DevOps practices to improve efficiencies, reduce costs, and sustain long-lasting competitive advantages. As a 20+ year veteran of the software industry, I have advised leading businesses on IT performance improvement practices covering continuous delivery, business process management, systems and network operations, service management, capacity planning, and storage management. As the VP and DevOps Advocate for Sonatype, I am passionate about changing the way people think about software supply chains and improving public safety through improved software integrity.

This year, I authored the 2015 State of the Software Supply Chain Report - a quantitative analysis of 160,000 software development organizations that consumed 17 billion open source and proprietary software components from over 100,000 projects. While the average organization consumed 240,000 components in 2014, the study revealed evidence of inefficient software sourcing practices, building in outdated components, and using software with known security vulnerabilities or potentially risky license types by mistake. Attendees will learn how leading organizations are applying proven supply chain principles from the manufacturing industry toward improving their DevOps and Continuous Delivery practices.

This year, I authored the 2015 State of the Software Supply Chain Report - a quantitative analysis of 160,000 software development organizations that consumed 17 billion open source and proprietary software components from over 100,000 projects. While the average organization consumed 240,000 components in 2014, the study revealed evidence of inefficient software sourcing practices, building in outdated components, and using software with known security vulnerabilities or potentially risky license types by mistake. Attendees will learn how leading organizations are applying proven supply chain principles from the manufacturing industry toward improving their DevOps and Continuous Delivery practices.

Available Media

  • Read more about 2015 State of the Software Supply Chain: DevOps and the Illusion of Control

R-Talks-3c

LISA15: Metrics

Automation at the Network Layer

4:00 pm-4:45 pm
Invited Talk

Scott Garman and Rick Sherman, Puppet Labs

Scott Garman is a Senior Engineer at Puppet Labs focused on using Puppet to manage enterprise network infrastructure. He has previous experience as an embedded Linux developer and technical evangelist at Intel's Open Source Technology Center, and has presented at many conferences and events, including the Linux Foundation's LinuxCon and Embedded Linux Conferences, LinuxFest Northwest, Open Source Bridge, and local user group events in his hometown of Portland, Oregon.

Rick Sherman (Shermdog) is a Senior Engineer at Puppet Labs driving the expansion of Network Platforms and Services. Prior to joining Puppet Labs he worked at Juniper Networks supporting Identity and Policy management, and providing automation frameworks for network engineers. Rick is passionate about bridging the DevOps gap in networking and moving the industry forward. Based in St. Louis, he prefers to communicate via animated gifs and movie-related memes.

Configuration Management tools have been primarily focused on server and application domains, but IT infrastructure includes more than just servers. Networking infrastructure has become increasingly complex and featureful, and managing the configuration of network devices has come under increased demands for higher velocity and consistency.

This talk will give an overview of the NetDev API, which was developed at Puppet Labs in collaboration with enterprise network vendors. It will demonstrate the power of the Puppet NetDev module ecosystem to maintain the same networking configuration across multiple devices and vendors, bringing network configuration management into the same "Infrastructure as Code" paradigm that the DevOps movement advocates.

Configuration Management tools have been primarily focused on server and application domains, but IT infrastructure includes more than just servers. Networking infrastructure has become increasingly complex and featureful, and managing the configuration of network devices has come under increased demands for higher velocity and consistency.

This talk will give an overview of the NetDev API, which was developed at Puppet Labs in collaboration with enterprise network vendors. It will demonstrate the power of the Puppet NetDev module ecosystem to maintain the same networking configuration across multiple devices and vendors, bringing network configuration management into the same "Infrastructure as Code" paradigm that the DevOps movement advocates.

Available Media

  • Read more about Automation at the Network Layer

Precise Alerting with Bosun

4:45 pm-5:30 pm
Invited Talk

Kyle Brandt, Stack Overflow

Kyle Brandt is the co-author of the Bosun monitoring system and the Director of Site Reliability at Stack Exchange (the company behind Stack Overflow). He will talk to you about monitoring until he starts to lose his voice. He also enjoys spending time with his wife and pets (two cats and a dog), video games, weight lifting, and road trips on his Harley.

In order to reduce alert desensitization, we must be alert developers and designers. Bosun is a monitoring system that was built to enable operators to do this. It includes an expression language, a templating language, forecasting, anomaly detection, and historical testing to enable one to create very refined alerts. I'll present my philosophy on what makes good alerts, and then demonstrate developing them and testing them in Bosun - as well as the alert handling workflow.

In order to reduce alert desensitization, we must be alert developers and designers. Bosun is a monitoring system that was built to enable operators to do this. It includes an expression language, a templating language, forecasting, anomaly detection, and historical testing to enable one to create very refined alerts. I'll present my philosophy on what makes good alerts, and then demonstrate developing them and testing them in Bosun - as well as the alert handling workflow.

Available Media

  • Read more about Precise Alerting with Bosun

R-Mini-Tutorials-1c

LISA15: Syseng

Live Upgrades on Running Systems: 8 Ways to Upgrade a Running Service with Zero Downtime

4:00 pm-5:30 pm
Mini Tutorial

Thomas A. Limoncelli, Stack Overflow

Tom is an internationally recognized author, speaker, and system administrator. His new book, The Practice of Cloud System Administration (http://the-cloud-book.com), launched last year. His past books include Time Management for System Administrators (O'Reilly) and The Practice of System and Network Administration (Pearson). In 2005, he received the USENIX LISA Outstanding Achievement Award. He works in New York City at Stack Exchange, home of Careers.Stackoverflow.com, and previously worked at Google and Bell Labs. His blog is http://EverythingSysadmin.com and he tweets @YesThatTom.

  • Read more about Live Upgrades on Running Systems: 8 Ways to Upgrade a Running Service with Zero Downtime

R-Mini-Tutorials-2c

LISA15: SRE/SWE

Git, Got, Gotten

4:00 pm-5:30 pm
Mini Tutorial

Jeffrey S. Haemer, Gogo Business Aviation

I tell my girlfriend I manage source code. If source code doesn’t do what I want, I fire it. Or maybe just don’t give it a good raise. I’ve been doing commercial UNIX and Linux since 1983. Back then, we used SCCS; now, it’s Git. In April 2015, Pearson released my video training, "Git Under the Hood LiveLessons," in which I delve into Git’s guts.

  • Read more about Git, Got, Gotten

R-Labs-1c

LISA Lab Office Hours

4:00 pm-5:30 pm

Attending Office Hours or not—the Lab is open for all, so stop by to check it out!

  • Read more about LISA Lab Office Hours

R-Vendor-Talks-1c

Vendor Talk: Expert Insights: Building an OpenStack Deployment on Oracle Solaris

4:00 pm-4:45 pm

Dave Miner, Senior Principal Software Engineer, Oracle Corporation

OpenStack, the popular open source cloud computing platform, continues to expand its momentum and integration into enterprise cloud infrastructures. OpenStack APIs have become a de-facto standard for building compute, network and storage components. It provides comprehensive self-service environments for sharing and managing compute, network, and storage resources through a centralized web-based portal. OpenStack has been integrated into all the core technology foundations of Oracle Solaris, allowing you to set up an enterprise private cloud infrastructure in minutes.

OpenStack, the popular open source cloud computing platform, continues to expand its momentum and integration into enterprise cloud infrastructures. OpenStack APIs have become a de-facto standard for building compute, network and storage components. It provides comprehensive self-service environments for sharing and managing compute, network, and storage resources through a centralized web-based portal. OpenStack has been integrated into all the core technology foundations of Oracle Solaris, allowing you to set up an enterprise private cloud infrastructure in minutes.

In this session, Dave Miner describes how he deployed and maintains an OpenStack cloud for the Oracle Solaris engineering team. He uses all the great features that Solaris has always had to deploy, update, secure, and automate an enterprise cloud infrastructure. He uses his extensive experience with OpenStack to develop new Solaris features that support our customers' adoption of OpenStack. Prior to being knee-deep in OpenStack, he was the key architect for the Oracle Solaris 11 automated installer, unified archives, and many system management and networking features.

Dave Miner is Oracle's Solaris architect for cloud, deployment, and system management technologies. His hands are quite dirty these days building and operating Solaris engineering's OpenStack cloud.

Available Media
  • Read more about Vendor Talk: Expert Insights: Building an OpenStack Deployment on Oracle Solaris

6:30 pm–8:30 pm LISA15 Conference Reception Exhibit Halls B South and C

 

Friday, November 13, 2015

8:00 am–9:00 am Continental Breakfast Thurgood Marshall Ballroom Foyer

9:00 am–10:30 am Friday
Thurgood Marshall North/East Thurgood Marshall South Thurgood Marshall West Lincoln 3 Lincoln 4 Lincoln 2

F-Keynote Address

LISA15: Culture

Lean Configuration Management

9:00 am-10:30 am
Keynote Address

Jez Humble, VP, Chef

Thurgood Marshall Ballroom

Jez Humble is a vice president at Chef, a lecturer at UC Berkeley, and co-author of the Jolt Award winning Continuous Delivery, published in Martin Fowler’s Signature Series, and Lean Enterprise, in Eric Ries’ Lean series. He has worked as a software developer, product manager, executive, consultant and trainer across a wide variety of domains and technologies. His focus is on helping organizations deliver valuable, high-quality software frequently and reliably through implementing effective engineering practices.

Configuration management is an essential ingredient in creating high performance IT. But how you implement it matters. In this talk Jez will present the principles that enable high throughput and stability and the configuration management practices behind them, using models drawn from the Lean movement.

Configuration management is an essential ingredient in creating high performance IT. But how you implement it matters. In this talk Jez will present the principles that enable high throughput and stability and the configuration management practices behind them, using models drawn from the Lean movement.

Available Media

  • Read more about Lean Configuration Management

F-Mini Tutorial 1a

LISA15: Metrics

Evaluating Distributed File System Performance

9:00 am-10:30 am
Mini Tutorial

Jeff Darcy, Red Hat, Inc.

Jeff Darcy has been a UNIX/Linux developer since 1989, with a focus on network and distributed file systems. These have included NFS since version 2, MPFS, Lustre, and—most recently—GlusterFS. Jeff is currently the technical lead for the next major version of GlusterFS, from an undisclosed location at Red Hat.

  • Read more about Evaluating Distributed File System Performance

F-Mini Tutorial 2a

LISA15: Syseng

ITIL Overview for System Administrators

9:00 am-10:30 am
Mini Tutorial

Eric Sorbo, SAIC

Eric Sorbo is an Information Technology Instructor with Science Applications International Corporation. Currently contracted to support the United States Central Command in Tampa, Florida, his role there is to lead a team of instructors who provide software and technology training. He has been an instructor for over 10 years and has taught courses for several organizations and universities.

  • Read more about ITIL Overview for System Administrators

F-Labs-1a

LISA Lab Office Hours

9:00 am-10:30 am

Attending Office Hours or not—the Lab is open for all, so stop by to check it out!

  • Read more about LISA Lab Office Hours

10:30 am–11:00 am Break with Refreshments Thurgood Marshall Ballroom Foyer

11:00 am–12:30 pm Friday
Thurgood Marshall North/East Thurgood Marshall South Thurgood Marshall West Lincoln 3 Lincoln 4 Lincoln 2

F-Talks 1b

LISA15: SRE/SWE

Tools for Distributed, Open Source Systems Administration

11:00 am-11:45 am
Invited Talk

Elizabeth K. Joseph, HP

Elizabeth K. Joseph is a Systems Administrator at HP working on the OpenStack Infrastructure team which runs the fully open source infrastructure built for OpenStack development. She also does work in the Ubuntu community and is the co-author of the 8th edition of The Official Ubuntu Book. At home in San Francisco, she serves on the Board of Directors for Partimus, a non-profit providing Linux-based computers to schools in need.

With members distributed all around the world across multiple companies and organizations, the OpenStack project infrastructure team manages hundreds of servers for use by the OpenStack developer community. This talk gives an overview of the open source tools and strategies we use to be an effective remote, distributed team. These tools and strategies include weekly meetings on IRC, leveraging the OpenStack code review and continuous integration system for systems changes, use of collaborative editors when completing work during maintenance windows and more.

With members distributed all around the world across multiple companies and organizations, the OpenStack project infrastructure team manages hundreds of servers for use by the OpenStack developer community. This talk gives an overview of the open source tools and strategies we use to be an effective remote, distributed team. These tools and strategies include weekly meetings on IRC, leveraging the OpenStack code review and continuous integration system for systems changes, use of collaborative editors when completing work during maintenance windows and more.

Available Media

  • Read more about Tools for Distributed, Open Source Systems Administration

Lightning Talks

11:45 am-12:30 pm

Lee Damon, University of Washington

Lee Damon chaired the SAGE policies and ethics working groups that developed the original SAGE/LOPSA code of ethics. He has a B.S. in Speech Communication from Oregon State University. A UNIX system administrator since 1985, he has been active in SAGE (US) & LOPSA since their inceptions. He assisted in developing a mixed AIX/SunOS environment at IBM Watson Research and has developed mixed environments for Gulfstream Aerospace and Qualcomm. He is currently leading the development effort for the Nikola project at the University of Washington Electrical Engineering department. He chaired LISA '04 and co-chaired CasITconf '11, '13, and '14.

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.

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.

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F-Talks 2b

LISA15: Metrics

From Monitoring to Feedback: The Evolution of Operational Metrics (into What They Always Should Have Been in the First Place)

11:00 am-11:45 am
Invited Talk

David Josephsen, Librato

As the developer evangelist for Librato, Dave Josephsen hacks on tools and documentation, writes about statistics, systems monitoring, alerting, metrics collection and visualization, and generally does anything he can to help engineers and developers close the feedback loop in their systems. He’s written books for Prentice Hall and O’Reilly, speaks Go, C, Python, Perl and a little bit of Spanish and has never lost a game of Calvinball.

Monitoring is not a ritual; it is not backups or DR, or keeping our hands and arms in the vehicle at all times. It is not a check-box ceremony we perform to stave off some faceless danger than no one can quite articulate.

Monitoring is part of your engineering process; Every engineer should own it. Every engineer should rely on it. It exists to provide operational telemetry about how the things you care about -- the things we all care about -- are working right now in the real world.

This talk is about how we at Librato have transformed monitoring from an operations burden to an engineering tool that helps us reason about, build, and fix our services-based infrastructure, and about how you can do the same. 

Monitoring is not a ritual; it is not backups or DR, or keeping our hands and arms in the vehicle at all times. It is not a check-box ceremony we perform to stave off some faceless danger than no one can quite articulate.

Monitoring is part of your engineering process; Every engineer should own it. Every engineer should rely on it. It exists to provide operational telemetry about how the things you care about -- the things we all care about -- are working right now in the real world.

This talk is about how we at Librato have transformed monitoring from an operations burden to an engineering tool that helps us reason about, build, and fix our services-based infrastructure, and about how you can do the same. 

Available Media

  • Read more about From Monitoring to Feedback: The Evolution of Operational Metrics (into What They Always Should Have Been in the First Place)

F-Talks-2b2

LISA15: Culture

Why Your Manager LOVES Technical Debt and What to Do About It

11:45 am-12:30 pm
Invited Talk

Caskey L. Dickson

Caskey Dickson is an engineer with an MBA. Currently, he is a Site Reliability Engineer/Software Engineer at Google, where he works writing and maintaining monitoring services that operate at "Google scale" as well as business intelligence pipelines.

Caskey has worked in online service development since 1995. Before working at Google, he was a senior developer at Symantec, wrote software for various Internet startups such as CitySearch and CarsDirect, ran a consulting company, and even taught undergraduate and graduate computer science at Loyola Marymount University. He has a B.S. in Computer Science, a Masters in Systems Engineering, and an M.B.A from Loyola Marymount.

We have all used "Technical Debt" to describe the horrors under the covers. Why doesn't management get the same sense of impending doom that we do? Because management thinks debt is good! Debt is an essential part of business and part of managing risk in business operations.

TD is not a controlled thing with specific, manageable risks and rewards, it's a lurking monster waiting to bite us at the least opportune moment. In business-speak, what we actually have are "naked call options." Future obligations that could arise at any time, without advance notice, and having unlimited downside. All leading to downtime, outages, and loss of business. I'll be describing what this financial instrument is and how to describe your backlog of essential but non-urgent work in a way that executives and management can understand.

We have all used "Technical Debt" to describe the horrors under the covers. Why doesn't management get the same sense of impending doom that we do? Because management thinks debt is good! Debt is an essential part of business and part of managing risk in business operations.

TD is not a controlled thing with specific, manageable risks and rewards, it's a lurking monster waiting to bite us at the least opportune moment. In business-speak, what we actually have are "naked call options." Future obligations that could arise at any time, without advance notice, and having unlimited downside. All leading to downtime, outages, and loss of business. I'll be describing what this financial instrument is and how to describe your backlog of essential but non-urgent work in a way that executives and management can understand.

Help your manager lose as much sleep over this as you do; and maybe get some room in your schedule to start addressing these issues--or at least stop making new ones. Oh, and free ponies for every attendee.

Available Media

  • Read more about Why Your Manager LOVES Technical Debt and What to Do About It

F-Talks 3b

LISA15: Syseng

What Is Federated Identity and Why Should I Care?

11:00 am-11:45 am
Invited Talk

Rob Crittenden, Red Hat

Rob Crittenden is a Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat working on the Ipsilon Federated Identity server. He previously worked on the FreeIPA identity management software. Rob has a masters degree in Computer Systems Management from the University of Maryland, University College and a bachelors degree in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, College Park.

Federated identity lets you outsource authentication to a trusted third party, eliminating the requirement to manage a set of users in each web application. There are several specifications that implement this, for different targets. SAML is generally interesting to enterprises and provides features like Single Sign-On (SSO) and Single Logout (SLO). OpenID is a specification sponsored by Facebook, Microsoft, Google and others, and is generally consumer oriented.

Federated identity servers support a number of common authentication mechanisms from username/password, Kerberos, LDAP, one-time passwords, etc.

This talk will provide an introduction to Federated Identity providers: what they are, what they are not, and how and when they can be used.

Federated identity lets you outsource authentication to a trusted third party, eliminating the requirement to manage a set of users in each web application. There are several specifications that implement this, for different targets. SAML is generally interesting to enterprises and provides features like Single Sign-On (SSO) and Single Logout (SLO). OpenID is a specification sponsored by Facebook, Microsoft, Google and others, and is generally consumer oriented.

Federated identity servers support a number of common authentication mechanisms from username/password, Kerberos, LDAP, one-time passwords, etc.

This talk will provide an introduction to Federated Identity providers: what they are, what they are not, and how and when they can be used.

Available Media

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F-Talks-3b2

LISA15: Metrics

Scalable Online Analytics for Monitoring

11:45 am-12:30 pm
Invited Talk

Heinrich Hartmann, Circonus

Heinrich Hartmann is the Chief Data Scientist at Circonus. He is driving the development of analytics methods that transform monitoring data into actionable information as part of the Circonus monitoring platform. In his prior life, Heinrich pursued an academic career as a mathematician (PhD in Bonn, Oxford). Later he transitioned into computer science and worked as consultant for a number of different companies and research institutions.

Monitoring systems will get smarter in order to keep up with the demands of tomorrow's IT architectures. Features like anomaly detection, root cause analysis, and forecasting tools will be critical components of this next level of monitoring. At the same time, the data that monitoring systems ingest is ever increasing in amount and velocity.

This session covers architectural models for advanced online analytics. We argue that stateful online computations provide a means to realize machine learning on high-velocity data. We show how alerting systems, event engines, stream aggregators, and time-series databases interact to support smart, scalable, and resilient monitoring solutions.

Monitoring systems will get smarter in order to keep up with the demands of tomorrow's IT architectures. Features like anomaly detection, root cause analysis, and forecasting tools will be critical components of this next level of monitoring. At the same time, the data that monitoring systems ingest is ever increasing in amount and velocity.

This session covers architectural models for advanced online analytics. We argue that stateful online computations provide a means to realize machine learning on high-velocity data. We show how alerting systems, event engines, stream aggregators, and time-series databases interact to support smart, scalable, and resilient monitoring solutions.

Available Media

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F-Mini Tutorial 1b

LISA15: Culture

Introduction to Data Analytics with Pandas

11:00 am-12:30 pm
Mini Tutorial

Matt Harrison, MetaSnake

Matt Harrison is a consultant and corporate trainer at MetaSnake, focusing on Python and Data Science. He has been using Python since 2000 across the domains of search, build management and testing, business intelligence, and storage.

Matt also runs pycast.io, a screencasting service providing instruction on Python and Data Science. He occasionally tweets useful Python-related information at @__mharrison__.

@__mharrison__
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F-Mini Tutorial 2b

LISA15: Syseng

Lightweight Change Control Using Git

11:00 am-12:30 pm
Mini Tutorial

George Beech, Stack Overflow

George has been an SRE generalist at Stack Exchange since October, 2011. Before that, he worked for a multinational CRM company running their IVR infrastructure. He has worked on every part of the stack from Windows, to Linux, to the network infrastructure. He is currently serving his first term as a LOPSA Director.

His experience working in the IT field over more than a decade has led him to love working with multiple technologies, and allowed him to experience everything from running a small network as a consultant to being part of a large team running very large scale infrastructure.

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F-Labs-1b

LISA Lab Office Hours

11:00 am-12:00 pm

Attending Office Hours or not—the Lab is open for all, so stop by to check it out!

  • Read more about LISA Lab Office Hours

12:30 pm–2:00 pm Conference Luncheon Exhibit Hall B South

2:00 pm–3:30 pm Friday
Thurgood Marshall North/East Thurgood Marshall South Thurgood Marshall West Lincoln 3 Lincoln 4

F-Talks 1c

LISA15: Syseng

Named Data Networking

2:00 pm-2:45 pm
Invited Talk

kc claffy, University of California, San Diego/CAIDA; Van Jacobson, University of California, Los Angeles

KC is founder and director of the Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA), a resident research scientist of the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UC San Diego, and an Adjunct Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at UC San Diego. Her research interests span Internet topology, routing, security, economics, future Internet architectures, and policy. She leads CAIDA research and infrastructure efforts in Internet cartography, aimed at characterizing the changing nature of the Internet's topology, routing and traffic dynamics, and investigating the implications of these changes on network science, architecture, infrastructure security and stability, and public policy. She has been at SDSC since 1991 and holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC San Diego.

Van Jacobson is renowned for his work on TCP/IP network performance and scaling. He is one of the primary contributors to the TCP/IP protocol stack—the technological foundation of today’s Internet. Starting in 1985, he was an adjunct lecturer in Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley, and is now Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at UCLA.

Named Data Networking and how it intends to replace TCP.

Named Data Networking and how it intends to replace TCP.

Available Media

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Managing and Tracking Database Deployments

2:45 pm-3:30 pm
Invited Talk

CJ Estel, CoverMyMeds

CJ Estel has 15 years experience as a MySQL database administrator that overlaps with a number of years of Systems Administration. CJ has managed databases and systems that are Highly Available (HA) and involve replication and availability across multiple datacenters. CJ joined CoverMyMeds in May of 2014 to embark on a journey of migrating from Microsoft SQL Server to PostgreSQL.

We've all been there, managing multiple environments that all have different SLA's and release schedules. With systems, managing configuration files can be automated with something like Chef or Puppet. With code deployment, tools can easily push out the latest release. Databases present a unique challenge where you can't just push out a current state. You have to identify and walk through every change that has been applied and likely have to install the changes in the same order throughout environments. In this presentation, CJ is going to go over the tool that was developed in-house to address the complexity of database deployments. CoverMyMeds plans to open source this tool. The tool is extensible and at the time of release will support PostgreSQL, MSSQL, and MySQL.

We've all been there, managing multiple environments that all have different SLA's and release schedules. With systems, managing configuration files can be automated with something like Chef or Puppet. With code deployment, tools can easily push out the latest release. Databases present a unique challenge where you can't just push out a current state. You have to identify and walk through every change that has been applied and likely have to install the changes in the same order throughout environments. In this presentation, CJ is going to go over the tool that was developed in-house to address the complexity of database deployments. CoverMyMeds plans to open source this tool. The tool is extensible and at the time of release will support PostgreSQL, MSSQL, and MySQL.

Available Media

  • Read more about Managing and Tracking Database Deployments

F-Talks 2c

LISA15: Culture

DevOps Adoption Patterns and Anti-Patterns

2:00 pm-2:45 pm
Invited Talk

Geoff Halprin, The SysAdmin Group

Geoff has over 25 years experience in the IT industry, in roles including developer, Head of Development, system administrator, system architect, troubleshooter, Principal Consultant, Director of Network Operations, and CIO. Most recently, he has been working in a large Telco facing the problems of DevOps adoption first hand. In his spare time he drinks a lot of whisky. There may be a correlation.

Everyone is talking about DevOps. CIOs drop it casually into conversation as though they grok its true meaning, claim they are embracing it, and yet make none of the changes to the organization’s structure or culture that it requires. Enterprises continue to put their faith in ITIL and the silos of enterprise responsibility. The developers want Continuous Delivery but they don’t want the 2am calls. DevOps is being abused the same way Agile has been by the enterprise.

In this talk I will look at the enterprise setting, the challenges facing adoption, and how DevOps practices can be introduced. I will also describe seven adoption patterns and an anti-pattern.

Everyone is talking about DevOps. CIOs drop it casually into conversation as though they grok its true meaning, claim they are embracing it, and yet make none of the changes to the organization’s structure or culture that it requires. Enterprises continue to put their faith in ITIL and the silos of enterprise responsibility. The developers want Continuous Delivery but they don’t want the 2am calls. DevOps is being abused the same way Agile has been by the enterprise.

In this talk I will look at the enterprise setting, the challenges facing adoption, and how DevOps practices can be introduced. I will also describe seven adoption patterns and an anti-pattern.

Available Media

  • Read more about DevOps Adoption Patterns and Anti-Patterns

The Care and Feeding of a Community

2:45 pm-3:30 pm
Invited Talk

Jessica Hilt, University of California, San Diego

Jessica Hilt is a geek socialite. She is the technical outreach and program analyst for the University of California San Diego. Prior to UCSD, she was the Director of Support & Training for CompleteCampaigns.com and Aristotle, Inc. She helps with RailsBridge San Diego, which teaches women how to code in Ruby on Rails. She is passionate about users, community building, and minorities in tech. In her “spare” time, she writes fiction and teaches creative writing. 

Communities aren’t just for socializing. Ideally, we all work in a strong, vibrant technical community that helps foster learning, lets us get our job done faster, and encourages us to share our successes. But what if we have a decentralized IT, a recent reorganization, or just don’t have the ideal? Why should we want it and how do we get it?

This talk takes an enigmatic concept like “community building” and breaks it down to real steps and methodology of how to build a community from scratch, pitfalls of existing ones, and how to breathe life into the stagnant. 

Communities aren’t just for socializing. Ideally, we all work in a strong, vibrant technical community that helps foster learning, lets us get our job done faster, and encourages us to share our successes. But what if we have a decentralized IT, a recent reorganization, or just don’t have the ideal? Why should we want it and how do we get it?

This talk takes an enigmatic concept like “community building” and breaks it down to real steps and methodology of how to build a community from scratch, pitfalls of existing ones, and how to breathe life into the stagnant. 

Available Media

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F-Talks 3c

LISA15: Culture

Transactional System Administration Is Killing Us and Must be Stopped

2:00 pm-2:45 pm
Invited Talk

Thomas A. Limoncelli, Stack Overflow

Tom is an internationally recognized author, speaker, and system administrator. His new book, The Practice of Cloud System Administration (http://the-cloud-book.com), launched last year. His past books include Time Management for System Administrators (O'Reilly) and The Practice of System and Network Administration (Pearson). In 2005, he received the USENIX LISA Outstanding Achievement Award. He works in New York City at Stack Exchange, home of Careers.Stackoverflow.com, and previously worked at Google and Bell Labs. His blog is http://EverythingSysadmin.com and he tweets @YesThatTom.

Transactional system administration puts sysadmins in a bad position. When organizations replace this model with a service-centric model the company receives better service and sysadmins gain positive visibility and increase their value.

The transactional model is where customers make requests and system administrators fulfill them. It is the model of servitude. This has been the power dynamic for decades. The service-centric model is where sysadmins maintain the automation that does work rather than doing the work themselves. Another way to look at it is that the best use of human labor in an auto factory is not to build cars, but to maintain the robots that build cars.

Transactional system administration puts sysadmins in a bad position. When organizations replace this model with a service-centric model the company receives better service and sysadmins gain positive visibility and increase their value.

The transactional model is where customers make requests and system administrators fulfill them. It is the model of servitude. This has been the power dynamic for decades. The service-centric model is where sysadmins maintain the automation that does work rather than doing the work themselves. Another way to look at it is that the best use of human labor in an auto factory is not to build cars, but to maintain the robots that build cars.

Stack Exchange's SRE Team is making strides at minimizing transactional system administration and, instead, adopting DevOps practices that create a cooperative relationship with our users. We've adopted this as our guiding management principle and it has greatly improved how we get things done.

Tom will discuss the successes and failures of these attempts and recommend how your organization can adopt this better structure.

Available Media

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F-Talks-3c2

LISA15: Metrics

Iterative Traffic Engineering in Changing Internet Economics

2:45 pm-3:30 pm
Invited Talk

Tom Daly, VP, Infrastructure, Fastly

Tom Daly is Vice President of Infrastructure at Fastly. He was formerly CTO and co-founder of Dynamic Network Services (“DYN”). Tom joined Fastly with 15 years of network engineering and infrastructure-building experience. He serves as a member of Worcester Polytechnic Institute's Engineering Department advisory board. Tom has a B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and an MBA from Bentley University.

The physical, logical, and economic topology of the Internet is ever changing due to new network to network interconnections, the planned or accidental disconnection of existing interconnections, and the ever growing needs for more network capacity. As a multi-Terabit traffic source, Fastly must regularly evaluate its needs for network capacity against performance and operating costs. This talk will examine the capacity planning models, scalability concerns, and economic drivers used to make key business decisions regarding connectivity, emphasizing the needs for metrics collection, analysis, and constant iterative tuning involving a distributed, international team.

The physical, logical, and economic topology of the Internet is ever changing due to new network to network interconnections, the planned or accidental disconnection of existing interconnections, and the ever growing needs for more network capacity. As a multi-Terabit traffic source, Fastly must regularly evaluate its needs for network capacity against performance and operating costs. This talk will examine the capacity planning models, scalability concerns, and economic drivers used to make key business decisions regarding connectivity, emphasizing the needs for metrics collection, analysis, and constant iterative tuning involving a distributed, international team.

  • Read more about Iterative Traffic Engineering in Changing Internet Economics

F-Mini Tutorial 1c

LISA15: Metrics

Bashing JSON

2:00 pm-3:30 pm
Mini Tutorial

David Josephsen, Librato

As the developer evangelist for Librato, Dave Josephsen hacks on tools and documentation, writes about statistics, systems monitoring, alerting, metrics collection and visualization, and generally does anything he can to help engineers and developers close the feedback loop in their systems. He’s written books for Prentice Hall and O’Reilly, speaks Go, C, Python, Perl and a little bit of Spanish, and has never lost a game of Calvinball.

  • Read more about Bashing JSON

F-Mini Tutorial 2c

LISA15: Syseng

Cloudy with a Chance of Security: PKI in the Age of Distributed Computing

2:00 pm-3:30 pm
Mini Tutorial

Brian J. Atkisson, Red Hat, Inc.

Brian J. Atkisson has 15 years of production systems engineering and operations experience, focusing primarily on identity management and virtualization solutions. He has worked for the University of California, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Red Hat, Inc. He is a Red Hat Certified Architect and Engineer, in addition to holding many other certifications and a B.S. in Microbiology. He currently is a Principal Systems Engineer on the Identity and Access Management team within Red Hat IT.

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3:30 pm–4:00 pm Break with Refreshments Thurgood Marshall Ballroom Foyer

4:00 pm–5:00 pm Friday

F-Closing Address

LISA15: Culture

It Was Never Going to Work, So Let’s Have Some Tea (Presentation)

4:00 pm-5:00 pm
Closing Session

James Mickens, Harvard University

Thurgood Marshall Ballroom

James Mickens is a struggling computer scientist who is actively trying to become better at life. James Mickens has never won a Turing Award, a Fields Medal, or a game of Scrabble. His recent attempt to get Ubuntu to recognize his wireless card led to an unprecedented sequence of 73 kernel panics followed by what the Seattle fire department described as “the instant sublimation of his wi-fi card into molten, vengeful hate.” James Mickens is unmarried and likely to stay that way. His acoustic guitar currently has six broken strings, and it is well-known that you need at least one string to play the blues.

It’s difficult to administer large systems. In this talk, Mickens will argue that we should just give up. Instead of asking large systems to do anything at all, we should focus on less quixotic goals like turning lead into gold, or stopping Pokémon from having delightfully idiosyncratic magic abilities. Using case studies involving popular systems for version control and automatic OS updates, James Mickens will gradually make himself more and more depressed, and then he will tearfully answer questions in a way that makes everybody feel awkward. Mickens will then sign copies of his book. Note that Mickens has not written a book.

It’s difficult to administer large systems. In this talk, Mickens will argue that we should just give up. Instead of asking large systems to do anything at all, we should focus on less quixotic goals like turning lead into gold, or stopping Pokémon from having delightfully idiosyncratic magic abilities. Using case studies involving popular systems for version control and automatic OS updates, James Mickens will gradually make himself more and more depressed, and then he will tearfully answer questions in a way that makes everybody feel awkward. Mickens will then sign copies of his book. Note that Mickens has not written a book.

Note: The video of the presentation is available on this page. Go to the Q&A page to watch that portion of the presentation.


Available Media

  • Read more about It Was Never Going to Work, So Let’s Have Some Tea (Presentation)

Q&A Video Only

James Mickens is a struggling computer scientist who is actively trying to become better at life. James Mickens has never won a Turing Award, a Fields Medal, or a game of Scrabble. His recent attempt to get Ubuntu to recognize his wireless card led to an unprecedented sequence of 73 kernel panics followed by what the Seattle fire department described as “the instant sublimation of his wi-fi card into molten, vengeful hate.” James Mickens is unmarried and likely to stay that way. His acoustic guitar currently has six broken strings, and it is well-known that you need at least one string to play the blues.

Note: The video of the Q&A portion of this presentation is available on this page. Go to the main presentation page to watch that video.

Note: The video of the Q&A portion of this presentation is available on this page. Go to the main presentation page to watch that video.

Available Media

  • Read more about Q&A Video Only

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