Take Risks... But Don’t Be Stupid
LISA: Where systems engineering and operations professionals share real-world knowledge about designing, building, and maintaining the critical systems of our interconnected world.
The LISA conference has long served as the annual vendor-neutral meeting place for the wider system administration community. The LISA14 program recognized the overlap and differences between traditional and modern IT operations and engineering, and developed a highly-curated program around 5 key topics: Systems Engineering, Security, Culture, DevOps, and Monitoring/Metrics. The program included 22 half- and full-day training sessions; 10 workshops; and a conference program consisting of 50 invited talks, panels, refereed paper presentations, and mini-tutorials.
Patrick Eaton, Google, Inc.
The devops culture values taking risks and learning from failure. Of course, there are reasonable risks... and then there is sheer stupidity. A pre-production environment that supports experimentation and exploration can enable responsible risk-taking. As a system grows, however, it is not feasible simply to deploy two of everything. Building an effective pre-production environment becomes an artful exercise in systems-building in its own right. Our production systems runs on several hundred instances; our pre-production environment uses just a few dozen. I will describe the techniques and trade-offs we use to run a powerful and effective testbed with minimal resources. You can use these ideas in your own systems.
Patrick Eaton, Google
Patrick was a member of the Stackdriver engineering team building the intelligent monitoring service for systems built in the public clouds. His work spans architecture, development, and operations. Now an engineer at Google, after the Stackdriver acquisition, Patrick continues to work to build the best monitoring solution for applications in the cloud. Patrick holds a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley for his research in early cloud storage.
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author = {Patrick Eaton},
title = {Take Risks... But {Don{\textquoteright}t} Be Stupid},
year = {2014},
address = {Seattle, WA},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = nov
}
