devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Author: Alan Shimel

DevOps Connect: SecOps Edition @RSA Conference
We are very happy to announce that we will be hosting DevOps Connect: SecOps Edition at RSA Conference on Monday, April 20, 2015. It will take place at the Moscone Center and is sponsored by RSA Conference.

What is DevOps Connect? Great question. DevOps Connect is the new name for the Camp DevOps brand we have run here at devopsy.kinsta.cloud. We felt that Camp DevOps sounded too much … well, like a camp. DevOps Connect is so much more. We will hold DevOps Connect events at existing conferences such as this one at RSA Conference, as well as standalone events in cities around the globe.

DevOps Connect: SecOps edition will be focused on DevOps and security’s role in the software development lifecycle. The agenda, sessions and speakers will be chosen by our program committee. I am very happy to report that the committee is chaired by Josh Corman and Gene Kim, with the assistance of myself and Mark Miller, organizer of theNexus community. A formal call for speakers will be announced shortly.

We anticipate over 7 hours of sessions followed by the 2^nd annual DevOps wining, not whining happy hour brought to you by Sonatype, IT Revolution Press and devopsy.kinsta.cloud at a location to be announced.

Full details are on the DevOps Connect website, but there some bullet points:
1. Admission is free to all RSA badge holders, regardless of level. However you must pre-register for the event when you register for RSA Conference.
2. At the DevOps Connect website there is a code to save $100 dollars on an RSA Conference full conference pass.
3. We are limited to 600 attendees, so pre-registration is a must if you want to guarantee you are admitted. Attendance and registration is on and is on a first come first serve basis
4. Sessions will feature keynotes (Gene Kim will deliver one), panel discussions and multi-track topics.
5. DevOps Connect will be at Moscone West on Monday of RSA week.
6. Sessions and presentations will be focused on real world experiences from practitioners.
RSA Conference is where the premier infosec event in the world and we think a perfect venue for DevOps Connect: SecOps Edition. So if you are planning on attending RSA Conference you don’t want to miss what promises to be a great DevOps event!

If after visiting the DevOps Connect website you have any questions, please reach out to us at devopsconect@devops.com. We will update the website with more information as it becomes available.
December 8, 2014
DevOps Anonymous Salary Survey
DevOps certainly is a hyped word right now. There are no shortage of DevOps jobs either. But,
- What are the highest paying DevOps job titles?
- Which industries pay top dollars for DevOps skills?
- How is your salary compared to people with similar job titles in other companies?
- Does higher education mean higher pay?
- Do DevOps men earn more money than DevOps women?
We all need to know these answers. Take a few moments and complete the anonymous DevOps salary survey.

While email or contact info is not required, everyone who does fill in their email will get a copy of the results and 1 in 50 respondents will win a $50 Amazon gift card.
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December 3, 2014
CI and CD Across the Enterprise with Jenkins November 19th

We recently held another webinar in our continuing series at devopsy.kinsta.cloud. We partnered with the good people at CloudBees on CI and CD across the enterprise with Jenkins. The webinar featured:

Cyrille Le Clerc is Director of Product Management at CloudBees with more than 15 years experience in Java. Prior to CloudBees, Cyrille was Chief Technology Officer at Xebia. As an early adopter of the “you build it you run it” model, he put it in place for a number of high volume web sites. He naturally embraced DevOps culture. He is also very active in the Java community, creator of the open source project “embedded jmxtrans” and a speaker at various conferences.

It proved to be the most popular webinar we have held yet with almost 1500 people registered! Many were not able to log in live for the event. We are making a recording available for those who could not attend and anyone else who would like to listen:

Hope you enjoy it and stay tuned for more webinars.

November 26, 2014
Enterprise DevOps: same medicine, different dose

I am presenting at the DevOps Summit in Santa Clara early next month. The title of my presentation is “Enterprise DevOps: Same medicine, different dose.” I will be attempting to tackle the sometimes sticky subject of whether Enterprise DevOps is a unique species or is there just DevOps for organizations big and small.

My personal feeling is DevOps is DevOps. That being said though, I don’t think anyone would argue that large enterprises are a different animal than smaller companies. The inertia in these organizations make culture change on a large scale harder, if not slower. Just as you would give a different dose of medicine to a child then you would to an adult, I think you have to inject DevOps differently into a larger organization than you would a smaller one.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that anyone selling enterprise DevOps services or tools is a snake oil salesmen though. I think understanding the differences between a large organization and smaller ones creates opportunities for vendors. I think that some in the community think that large vendors are just using the term enterprise DevOps to protect their existing turf from usurpers.

Anyway, I will be diving deeper into this subject at my presentation. I will post the abstract link shortly and will post me slides after the show.

In the meantime you can help me. I am interested in your thoughts on this subject and what you think is important for me to cover. I respect all opinions so if you don’t agree with me, feel free to say so, but if you do, say why.

Thanks!

October 11, 2014
Webinar: DevOps in the Modern Enterprise
We are happy to announce the next devopsy.kinsta.cloud webinar. In partnership with AppDynamics and Citrix :

DevOps in the Modern Enterprise

DevOps has been embraced by companies ranging from small e-commerce providers to large fortune 100 institutions. As the rate of adoption continues to grow there is still much confusion about how to successfully transition from “DevOps curious” to full fledged “DevOps practice”. Jim Hirschauer, Technology Evangelist with AppDynamics, will discuss the role of software tools in fostering a successful DevOps practice. Spencer Schwab, Staff DevOps Engineer with Citrix, will share his experience in transitioning his organization into a DevOps centric practice. Spencer will expose the challenges associated with shifting towards DevOps as well as the solutions he discovered while leading and participating in this experience with all of it’s ups and downs. You’ll learn how to initiate change within your organization as well as the associated pitfalls and benefits of the DevOps journey, all based upon the real word experience that Spencer brings from Citrix. One attendee will win a $100 Amazon gift card. You must be present to win

Date: October 30th

Time: 1pm eastern, 10am pacific
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REGISTRATION LINK: (Limited registration, so don't wait!) 
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About the Speakers:

Spencer Schwab – Currently, as an Operations Application Owner at Citrix, Spencer leads a Dev/Ops team that is responsible for the availability, run state, capacity, and configuration of the GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar, and GoToTraining products in production. Prior to Citrix, he spent eight and a half years working for Fedex where he designed and implemented many high-availability solutions to support the company of over 300,000 employees. He also has served as the Director of Systems Management for Message Factors Inc. and has worked for several small technology firms. Spencer always enjoys a troubleshooting challenge and thrives under pressure. When not working hard, Spencer enjoys spending time with family, cooking, gardening, and riding the waves on his boogie board.

Jim Hirschauer – Technology evangelist for AppDynamics, Jim Hirschauer has an extensive background in highly available, business critical, large enterprise IT operations environments. Jim has been interested in application performance testing and monitoring since his days as a systems administrator in a retail bank. His passion for performance analysis led him down a path to design, implement, and manage the cloud computing monitoring architecture for a top-ten investment bank. During his tenure at the bank, Jim created new processes and procedures that reduced the time spent in the test and QA cycle while simultaneously increasing overall code release quality and dramatically improving end user experience.
October 7, 2014
DevOps front and center at Interop NY

Reporting from Interop NY where DevOps has made it presence felt. There are a number of DevOps related sessions over the course of the conference this week. I wanted to highlight 4 that I am looking forward to:

The DevOps Pay Raise: Quantifying Your Value to Move Up the Ladder by Dustin Whittle, AppDynamics

Location:  Room E08, Level 1

Date:  Thursday, October 2

Time:  2:45pm-3:45pm

The official blurb for this session is: DevOps, when done right, usually goes unnoticed. It’s only when something breaks that all eyes turn to IT. If your boss only sees you when the app is down, however, that’s not really doing your career any favors. In this session we’ll talk about how to prove your value to the organization by looking at the positive side: that is, how much money you’ve saved your company. We’ll take a look at how you can use tools like Chef, Puppet, Sensu and Logstash to quantify your value to your company. After this session, you’ll be able to walk into a meeting with your boss ready to talk about your value to the company (and to ask for a raise).

I spoke to Dustin who occasionally writes for devopsy.kinsta.cloud about this session. Beyond getting a raise for your hard work, the session is about how you show the value of DevOps to your organization. Of course if you try to implement some DevOps type of processes and behavior and something goes wrong, it is easy to blame, but how do you show the benefit. No one notices when things are running right. How do you build on success to expand the rollout of DevOps to the rest of your organization? I have seen Dustin speak on this topic before and I am sure it will be an interesting session.

DevOps Gold: What the Olympics Teaches Us About Agile Development and Release by Dave Roberts, Sr. Director Solutions Marketing, Cloud, DevOps, and Data Center Automation, BMC Software

Location:  Room E15, Level 1

Date:  Thursday, October 2

Time:  4:30pm-4:50pm

The official blurb for this session is: At the recent winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, we saw athletes from all over the world striving for excellence. Some turned in the best performance of their lives and came home with a gold medal. Others, some favorites, struggled and saw their dreams slip away. In this session, we’ll see how DevOps done right is a lot like the Olympics. If you set reasonable goals, train hard, and execute well, you’ll reach DevOps Gold, too. But if you take your releases for granted, you may end up with failure. This session is for developers and operations personnel working toward implementing a DevOps process. You’ll learn best practices for achieving DevOps success and how to best implement them in your own company.

I spoke with Dave on this one as well. I love the idea of comparing DevOps to athletes training for the gold. Dave will talk about that there is no magic with DevOps success. It takes careful planning, reasonable goals and lots of preparation. You don’t just walk strap on skis and think you are a downhill Olympic champion. There is more to competing and winning than just showing up.

Dave is an accomplished speaker and this is a great topic. It should be a very interesting session. Note that this is part of the Cloud Connect Day 2 sessions and there are some other great sessions throughout the day there.

The next two already took place by the time you read this (thanks to my laptop crashing and this not being published earlier). They are both by Lori Macvittie, another devopsy.kinsta.cloud contributor.

Achieving Operational Excellence Through DevOps by Lori Macvittie, Principal Technical Evangelist, F5 Networks

Location:  Room E16, Level 1

Date:  Tuesday, September 30

Time:  9:00am-12:00pm

This is actually a day long workshop by a number of people with Lori kicking things off early and then chairing a panel at 10:45:

Panel: What Does DevOps do for the Network?
DevOps is to application deployment as SDN is to networking. They’re both ultimately about achieving operational excellence to improve time to market, reduce risks and costs associated with operational overhead. DevOps tends to focus on scripting and APIs as a means to achieve operational excellence, so how does that fit with the move to bring automation and orchestration to the network? We’ll explore questions that are on everyone’s minds such as: Do you have to have a soft network to take advantage of DevOps? Will network engineers need to become developers?

Interop Debate: Learn SDN vs. Traditional Certifications: What’s Better for Your Career? by Lori Macvittie, Principal Technical Evangelist, F5 Networks

Location:  Room E13, Level 1

Date:  Wednesday, October 1

Time:  2:45pm-3:45pm

This is another panel discussing: The networking industry views the CCIE certification as one of the most difficult and desirable titles to obtain. Many CCIEs enjoy extraordinary career opportunities as well as financial gain as a direct benefit of passing the notorious lab exam. Recently, the relevance of the CCIE certification has come into question by those who see a different future for networking. The big idea is this: if networking is headed in an automated, software-defined direction, is the CCIE still relevant? Or should networkers who want to be at the top of the industry differentiate themselves by learning the emerging tools and techniques of the SDN revolution? Our all-CCIE panel (including a former CCIE program manager) & CCIE moderator will discuss.

This panel will discuss what it the future of the CCIE certification in an age of SDN. With software eating the world and networks, is hardware relevant even anymore? Should be great discussion and promises some fireworks!

October 1, 2014
IBM Interconnect 2015 Call for Papers

IBM Interconnect is IBM’s premier event covering DevOps, mobile, cloud, security and more. With 300 sessions focused exclusively on DevOps, IBM Interconnect delivers a full 360 degree view of all aspects of DevOps, including best practices, technical implementations and management strategies.

IBM Interconnect offers breakout sessions, labs and hands on experimentation and learning at the dev@ experience. The dev@ experience is a zone built by developers for developers, to learn from developers. Tech Talk. Hands on. Straight forward.

The IBM InterConnect 2015 Call for Speakers is now open, and we want to hear from you on a variety of topics. Submit your paper today, deadline is October 10^th. Speaking at InterConnect will help raise your profile and expand your network with more than 20,000 peers, experts and influencers. All speakers are eligible for a complimentary conference pass, enabling them to experience this incredible value for free!

October 1, 2014
CloudBees nurtures the Jenkins community to new highs
One of the linchpins in the DevOps tools box is Jenkins. Just about everyone knows Jenkins. For those few not familiar with Jenkins, here is an excerpt from the “What is Jenkins” page:

What is Jenkins?

Jenkins is an award-winning application that monitors executions of repeated jobs, such as building a software project or jobs run by cron. Among those things, current Jenkins focuses on the following two jobs:
- Building/testing software projects continuously, just like CruiseControl or DamageControl. In a nutshell, Jenkins provides an easy-to-use so-called continuous integration system, making it easier for developers to integrate changes to the project, and making it easier for users to obtain a fresh build. The automated, continuous build increases the productivity.
- Monitoring executions of externally-run jobs, such as cron jobs and procmail jobs, even those that are run on a remote machine. For example, with cron, all you receive is regular e-mails that capture the output, and it is up to you to look at them diligently and notice when it broke. Jenkins keeps those outputs and makes it easy for you to notice when something is wrong.
Jenkins offers the following features:
1. Easy installation: Just java -jar jenkins.war, or deploy it in a servlet container. No additional install, no database.
2. Easy configuration: Jenkins can be configured entirely from its friendly web GUI with extensive on-the-fly error checks and inline help. There’s no need to tweak XML manually anymore, although if you’d like to do so, you can do that, too.
3. Change set support: Jenkins can generate a list of changes made into the build from Subversion/CVS. This is also done in a fairly efficient fashion, to reduce the load on the repository.
4. Permanent links: Jenkins gives you clean readable URLs for most of its pages, including some permalinks like “latest build”/”latest successful build”, so that they can be easily linked from elsewhere.
5. RSS/E-mail/IM Integration: Monitor build results by RSS or e-mail to get real-time notifications on failures.
6. After-the-fact tagging: Builds can be tagged long after builds are completed.
7. JUnit/TestNG test reporting: JUnit test reports can be tabulated, summarized, and displayed with history information, such as when it started breaking, etc. History trend is plotted into a graph.
8. Distributed builds: Jenkins can distribute build/test loads to multiple computers. This lets you get the most out of those idle workstations sitting beneath developers’ desks.
9. File fingerprinting: Jenkins can keep track of which build produced which jars, and which build is using which version of jars, and so on. This works even for jars that are produced outside Jenkins, and is ideal for projects to track dependency.
10. Plugin Support: Jenkins can be extended via 3rd party plugins. You can write plugins to make Jenkins support tools/processes that your team uses.
But beyond the wiki how did Jenkins become one of the most successful open source projects of all time? The answer to that has a lot to do with CloudBees, a little to do with Oracle and even more to do with an architecture that supports an ecosystem that has allowed almost a thousand plugins to be developed to the core project.

First let’s get the little do with Oracle out of the way. Jenkins was originally known as Hudson. Hudson was started by Sun Microsystems. When Oracle bought Sun it inherited a lot of open source projects (OpenOffice and Java among them). Many in the open source community questioned Oracle’s intentions regarding open source. It didn’t take long for a dispute to arise between many of the Hudson developers and Oracle. Oracle claimed they owned the term Hudson and that had an easy answer. There was a vote taken and Hudson became Jenkins. When Oracle objected, Jenkins became a fork of Hudson (or Hudson became a fork of Jenkins). Oracle still maintains Hudson, which is a shell compared to Jenkins.

In the meantime Sacha Labourey former CTO at JBoss, started CloudBees in 2010. This was after JBoss was acquired by Red Hat. CloudBees created a PaaS that was one of the first PaaS to support the entire application lifecycle from development to deployment. A key part of CloudBees offering was the Jenkins Continuous Integration (CI) engine. Labourey brought in Kohsuke Kawaguchi, a founder and key contributor to Jenkins. Along with Kawaguchi, several other key Jenkins contributors also came to CloudBees.

CloudBees and their employees contributed more than 80% of the code to Jenkins. Jenkins and the community that supports it is thriving. I had a chance to speak with Kawaguchi about this. He is very proud that there are over 1000 plugins now for Jenkins. I was blown away by a number of something like 500k downloads a month from the Jenkins website.

Of course a thriving open source community does not necessarily translate into a thriving commercial business. There have been many companies that never cracked the formula to monetize there open source success.

This is where CloudBees appears to be winning. I spoke to Kwaguchi about CloudBees commercial success. With offices around the world CloudBees has been able to translate an iconic open source project into a thriving business. They have a set of enterprise (ready pay for) plugins that enhance Jenkins in a number of ways. Additionally, the offer hosted versions of Jenkins, CI-a-a-S if you will. They call in Jenkins Operations Center. They also offer Dev@cloud, which is an umbrella for other services and software that enhance and make Jenkins easier to use across different platforms, with different languages and other options. Of course they offer support for your Jenkins installs as well.

All in all, Labourey and Kawaguchi have built a thriving commercial entity on top of Jenkins, while at the same time keeping Jenkins as a healthy, growing open source project. Kudos to them for a job well done.

That is not to say that there aren’t competitors to Jenkins. There are some open source projects and some commercial projects that claim to do CI better and faster. Of course many of them benefit from having Jenkins already there as a template and just improving incrementally on this already there. You can see a full list of Jenkins competitors at: https://www.g2crowd.com/products/jenkins/competitors/alternatives

While some of these competitors offer an improvement here or there, by and large Jenkins is still the standard against which they are measured. With CloudBees guiding and managing Jenkins, it will probably stay that way for the foreseeable future.
September 26, 2014
IBM and Rackspace join as premier sponsors of Camp DevOps Houston, tickets now only $5

We are very happy to report that IBM and Rackspace have signed on as a premier sponsors of Camp DevOps Houston on October 28, 2014. They join CA Technologies ITInvolve and JumpCloud as premier sponsors of this event. Additional sponsors of Camp DevOps Houston include BlueMeric, CloudBees, PagerDuty, VictorOps, Automic, Qwinix and Incapsula. We are very grateful for the support.

With all of this great support from our sponsors, devopsy.kinsta.cloud is dropping the cost of admission to Camp DevOps Houston to just $5.00!

The reason for this is that Camp DevOps are set up to educate and bring DevOps to areas that may not have been exposed to on site DevOps education and conferences. We believe Houston is a great market to bring DevOps too. As long as the costs of the conference are covered (including breakfast, lunch and refreshments) our mission is accomplished in that regard. The only reason for the $5 dollar admission is to stop people from registering and then not attending, taking away a seat from someone else who would like to attend.

The speaker lineup for Camp DevOps is just about full. Sanjeev Sharma, author of DevOps for Dummies headlines a great lineup of speakers on a wide variety of DevOps topics. There are multiple tracks aimed at both the technical and business tracks. You can get much more information at Campdevopsy.kinsta.cloud. You can register for just $5 at: http://www.eventbrite.com/e/camp-devops-houston-tickets-12489234637

If you are in the Houston area or know tech people who are, be sure to come join us. We think this is going to be a great event in just about a month away.

September 23, 2014
JumpCloud Introduces Directory-as-a-Service
First Cloud-based Directory Service Builds upon the Company’s Strong User Management, Orchestration, and Security Foundation
BOULDER, Colo.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–JumpCloud today announced the availability of the industry’s first Directory-as-a-Service (DaaS) solution. Through a SaaS-based offering, organizations can move the last vestiges of their legacy, on-premise IT systems to a fully-managed cloud service, providing an alternative to solutions such as Microsoft Active Directory^® (AD) or Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP).

“As we have seen with the transitions from Siebel to SalesForce, Exchange to Gmail, and file servers to DropBox, JumpCloud is enabling the transition of one of the last on-premise technologies to a fully managed service: the user directory”

JumpCloud’s DaaS is the first cloud-based directory with the ability to authenticate, authorize, and manage users, devices, and applications. The service acts as a single-user store for an organization or can extend existing AD/LDAP user stores to the cloud. Further, it integrates with single sign-on (SSO) providers without forcing IT admins to manage multiple directories.

“Jumpcloud understands the need for directory services in the cloud,” said Salvatore D’Agostino, CEO of IDmachines. “Building on their secure shell configuration management tools, this offer puts in place cloud-to-machine, user authentication and other directory services. At IDmachines, we see this as a big need in current XaaS.”

“As we have seen with the transitions from Siebel to SalesForce, Exchange to Gmail, and file servers to DropBox, JumpCloud is enabling the transition of one of the last on-premise technologies to a fully managed service: the user directory,” says Rajat Bhargava, JumpCloud’s President and CEO. “Directory-as-a-Service brings IT teams the simplicity, ubiquity, and security of user and device management, all from the cloud.”

A single, secure user directory is a foundational element of any company. By moving the directory to the cloud, organizations are more agile, efficient, and secure. Further, DaaS enables IT admins to take advantage of major IT innovations, including cloud services such as IaaS and Gmail, and additional device/operating system combinations, such as Linux and OSX, among others.

JumpCloud has reimagined the directory for the cloud era. The company’s new Directory-as-a-Service meets three critical enterprise needs:

Organizations who need a user directory – With the combination of a hosted LDAP offering as well as an agent-based authentication mechanism, this offering takes the heavy lifting off of IT and places it on JumpCloud while enabling the customer to authenticate and authorize cloud infrastructure, servers, IT applications, and internal devices.

Organizations extending their AD or LDAP to the cloud – With the adoption of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), managing server users is largely a manual process and can create reliability and security issues due to the complexity introduced around networking and security configurations. JumpCloud easily, reliably, and securely extends an existing user directory to cloud-based servers and infrastructure.

Organizations replacing AD – Many organizations have migrated to Gmail from Microsoft Exchange, but are still forced to leverage AD for continued management of devices (functionality not available with the Google Apps Directory). JumpCloud’s DaaS gives IT admins a fully cloud-based solution that connects and manages users, their devices and IT applications.Pricing and availability
JumpCloud’s Directory-as-a-Service is available immediately. Pricing plans start at $10 per user per month, and the first ten users are free forever. JumpCloud supports the LDAP protocol and works with Windows, Mac, and Linux devices.About JumpCloud
JumpCloud, the first Directory-as-a-Service (DaaS), is Active Directory^®and LDAP reimagined. JumpCloud securely connects and manages employees, their devices and IT applications. Try JumpCloud’s cloud-based directory free at jumpcloud.com.
September 22, 2014