devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Category: Local DevOps

Reports on the local DevOps scene from cities around the world

North Carolina May Meeting: DevOps – From the Hype to the Bottom Line

DevOps is generally defined as software development movement that encourages automation, integration and greater collaboration between software developers and operations staff. By bridging the gap between those two sometimes warring factions, DevOps establishes a consistent, repeatable way for IT to manage its production environment, resulting in faster time to market, higher productivity levels and smoother server and application deployment.

What does this definition really mean? Does the DevOps movement really deliver on the bottom line? Are organizations buying in to DevOps at all levels, or is it just the latest in a long line of the latest and greatest software development methodologies? What are the key elements of a successful DevOps initiative? What skillsets should IT professionals grow to be successful in a DevOps environment? Should organizations replace existing successful best practices with DevOps methodologies?

Our panel discussion of IT leaders in May will answer these questions helping sort through misconceptions about DevOps and its impact on the software development and delivery cycle. Panelists with links to their bios include:·

Frank Isaacs DevOps Engineer at IBM

Salill Soman Director, Application Development at MetLife

Josh Wyatt Director, Global DevOps at LogicNow.

The meeting will be on May 12 at The NC State University Club, 4200 Hillsborough Street in Raleigh. Registration and networking starts at 5:30 p.m., dinner is at 6:30. The feature presentation will be from 7:15 pm to 8:30 p.m.

Attention Job Seekers: Bring your resume

http://rtp-aitp.org/next-meeting/

May 2, 2016
DevOpsQA NJ Meetup: Jenkins with Gerrit and BDD Automation

DevOpsQA NJ recently held its April Meetup on Automation with Jenkins and BDD, with Kishore Bhatia from CloudBees and Tom Bartolucci from Billtrust as speakers. The venue, food and refreshments were provided by Audible at a state-of-the-art, vast office space in historical city of Newark.

After fun networking over pizza, wine and beer, we kicked off with Tom Bartolucci’s presentation on BDD Automation framework using Codeception. Tom has been in web software development for over 13 years. He has built applications in Java, .NET, PHP, Python and Javascript for clients in publishing and mobile video. Currently, he is a VP of Development at Billtrust – a SaaS-based payment cycle management company. His team of 13 web developers works on delivering six of the Billtrust SaaS products and uses Codeception, a PHP-based BDD framework to test.

According to Tom (and we all agree), the idea is not to find bugs but prevent them. His team at Billtrust chose Codeception because it allows tests to be written in PHP, which is what its development teams use; it also supports Selenium WebDriver, PhantomJS and BrowserStack; and has hooks for various tools and platforms and build-in reports. As a result, it had a low barrier of entry and got Codeception’s team off the ground quickly. Doing cross-browser testing allowed them to find IE bugs, which they previously missed due to testing primarily in Firefox. Codeception allows testers to create BDD-style readable tests, similar to Cucumber spec but written as code. The easy syntax enabled the QA team to write code that they could read and understand. And developers are able to add custom modules because the framework is developed in PHP, which they are familiar with. Codeception has a variety of uses including to write acceptance tests, unit tests and API tests.

Tom also described how Billtrust integrated Codeception with Jenkins to execute tests and publish reports. He then proceeded with a live demo of the framework. At the end of the session there were a lot of good questions on Vagrant integration, parallelization, failed test rerun and differences between Codeception and Cucumber.

Next, Kishore Bhatia from Cloudbees gave a talk on Jenkins pipelines and Gerrit Code reviews. Kishore Bhatia works for CloudBees, building custom frameworks with open source software and helping customers solve engineering problems around continuous delivery and DevOps at scale. Kishore is a Jenkins expert with development experience in FinTech enterprise software and Cloud platforms. Couple of months back, Kishore and Issac gave a presentation on Jenkins Workflow, demonstrating how workflow removes bottleneck of connecting multiple pipelines together.

This time, the focus was on a very valid use case: a large codebase, many teams contributing to the code. Teams should not collaborate on emails. They should get notifications and post-commit validations done by the tool that they use. In this case it’s Gerrit—Google open source project, offers its own implementation of Git. You just want the job to magically run behind the scenes doing the code reviews for you. The primary challenges in this scenario are that you want to fail-fast—report CI results as soon as any steps fail and make sure there are no orphaned builds.

Kishore then demonstrated the steps involved in implementing this use case in Jenkins including adding pull request validation to the build step, allowing developers to get build status directly in the VCS tool only coming back to Jenkins if something fails. Currently there is a limitation with posting each status to GitHub. Key things that need to be set up—Gerrit infrastructure, Jenkins installation, workflow that Jenkins will refer to. While it might look complex at first it becomes easier once you start using the workflow, with such things as Groovy script helper. Jenkinsfile will define the flow of what should happen in dev, QA, staging and production.
Kishore then gave a great demo of the flow and answered questions from the audience which covered parallel commits and test data management.

At the end of the sessions, we did a raffle drawing where three lucky winners got prizes sponsored by Audible, including an Amazon Echo. Looking forward to our next session.

If you would like to learn more about Jenkins Workflow, you can reach Kishore at kbhatia@cloudbees.com. To learn more about exciting opportunities at Audible visit http://about.audible.com/ or reach out to sonatore@audible.com.

April 15, 2016
DevOps Luminary, Ernest Mueller Set to Return to DevOps Days Austin Stage

Ernest Mueller, the Agile Admin has been part of the DevOps scene almost since the very beginning. He was one of the founders and still a leader of the Austin DevOps scene. Ernest after many years of speaking at DevOps Days Austin had announced that he was “semi-retired” from speaking at DevOps Days Austin and would no longer appear there. devopsy.kinsta.cloud in an exclusive, is now reporting that Ernest Mueller, the Agile Admin is back!

Via unnamed confirmed sources we have verified that Mueller will be reprising his “State of DevOps” presentation at this year DevOps Days Austin on May 2nd and 3rd. If this is indeed true, what a great turn of events for the DevOps community.

Our unnamed confirmed sources also tell us that the his fellow organizer crew for DevOps Days Austin crew is ecstatic that Ernest has reconsidered. Just on the rumors alone ticket sales for the event have immediately picked up.

Will this be Mueller’s swan song? Will this years presentation rekindle his burning desire to present at DevOps Days Austin? Only time will tell. We hope to confirm details with Mueller shortly and will have a follow up story shortly. For now though the news is that Ernest M is back!

April 7, 2016
DevOpsQA NJ Meetup: Pipeline Patterns with ThoughtWorks

DevOpsQA NJ held our January Meetup on Pipeline Patterns, with Max Griffiths (@_maxamg), Max Lincoln (@devopsy) and Gary Stafford (@garystafford) from ThoughtWorks as speakers. The meetup took place at the sensational ThoughtWorks NYC location, with welcoming, open meet-and-greet area and a huge presentation area with bright, distinctive wall paintings.

Following speed networking with pizza and beer, the discussion kicked off with a brief intro from the speakers, who each has been in the DevOps space for 10+ years. They gave a high-level overview of ThoughtWorks and some book recommendations including, “Continuous Delivery” by Jez Humble, “Release It!” by Michael Nygard and “The Phoenix Project” by Gene Kim.

So what is the issue that we’re trying to solve? We are trying to gain an ability to make decisions early on to impact how our pipeline is going to scale, with the focus on culture, feedback and governance.

Max Lincoln gave a good definition of a “good” pipeline. It should have incremental QA, fast feedback, visibility of the progress and a consistent, auditable software delivery process. It’s a good idea to be very selective with how you name things in the pipeline. “The purpose of the pipeline is to kill the build as soon as possible,” he said. As the pipeline gets longer, quick feedback becomes more difficult.

Next, each speaker addressed how the pipeline can scale in three difference directions: X (more stages between commit and productions); Y (more projects/applications); and Z (concurrent releases). Max Griffiths gave overview of X-Axis patterns which include Linear, Parallel and Layered (with artifact promotion and release channels). Linear is the simplest pattern, which works for simple applications. With a parallel pattern, you start to parallelize where possible; however, that might create dependencies and make it difficult to reorder. The layered pattern encourages parallelizing but prevents direct dependencies between stages.

The layered pattern is further enhanced by adding a separate artifact repository for each layer, which makes artifact retention policies a lot easier. You can use bronze, silver, gold as names for the layers to easily understand how release candidate progresses from one stage to another.

Gary Stafford introduced Y-axis patterns which include joint labeling, aggregate labeling, independent pipelines and VCS labeling. among others. Gary used the Microservices example to demonstrate how to do continuous delivery with loosely related applications or services.

Max Lincoln spoke about concurrent releases with Z-axis patterns. As per Max, instead of a branching strategy, dev needs a merging strategy, especially if a release branch gets created six months in advance. “If you have Jenkins do 1,000s of builds a day, it does not mean you have CI,” he said.

The speakers concluded by each introducing an extra pattern which they referred to as “different dimensions.” The parting word of advice was to keep CI (whether it’s Jenkins or GoCD) in source control and test your pipeline continuously. At the end we had a great Q&A session and a very warm, open discussion.

Looking forward to our next session.

If you would like to learn more about ThoughtWorks and/or Pipeline Patterns, you can continue the conversation on the GitHub page: https://github.com/thoughtworks/PipelinePatterns

February 9, 2016
DevOps Roundtable & Networking Sales Events – February 11th, Costa Mesa, CA

DevOps Roundtable & Networking Sales Events

Do you want to deliver software projects faster and with greater efficiency? If so, you are not alone. Many teams are tripped up by manual deployments, inconsistent environments, and slow hand-offs. We will lead a discussion bringing together experts from IBM, partners, customers and others to discuss DevOps approaches for delivering continuous innovation.

At these events we will cover:
•Application deployment and release management with UrbanCode
•IBM’s BlueMix Garage Method and transforming your organization
•Building the business case for DevOps transformation including Hybrid Cloud
•Real customer case studies, including people, process and product implications
•Demos showing how to define, wire, and automate continuous application delivery

“I attended the DevOps Networking Event in Portland, OR and it blew my mind. I enjoyed the opportunity to network with local colleagues that are also focused on DevOps. This is the future of IT!” -Nick Wylde, DevOps Specialist, Daimler

Typical Agenda

8:45am-1:45pm
8:45 Networking & Breakfast
9:30 DevOps Introduction
9:45 “Why DevOps?”
IBM DevOps SME
10:15 DevOps Customer “Case Study”
10:45 Networking Break
11:00 “Understanding DevOps”,
IBM DevOps SME
11:45 Open Discussion
12:15 Lunch w/ UrbanCode Product Demonstrations
1:30 Conclusion and Wrap-up

January 21, 2016
DevOpsQA NJ Meetup – Jenkins Workflow Tech Talk

DevOpsQA NJ just held our November Meetup on Jenkins Workflow with Kishore Bhatia and Isaac Cohen from CloudBees as speakers.   The venue was provided by ROKITT at a state-of-the-art office space with breathtaking views of NYC.   Even though it was heavily raining outside, there was a great turnout of veteran and new members.

We kicked off with a fun speed networking over pizza and drinks provided by TEKSystems. Following that, I did an introductory session on Transformation thru Automation via Jenkins talking about 10 steps to get a head start on continuous integration and deployment. The steps include Identifying Bottlenecks, setting up a common repository, automating of the build, unit testing, environment configuration, test data management, regression testing and reporting.

Next, Kishore and Isaac gave an introduction to Jenkins Workflow followed by a detailed demo.

Kishore started off with a famous saying by Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape – “Software is eating the world”.   More and more things are getting automated and every business is becoming a software business.   We are automating Ops so that we can do more Ops and automating Manual QA so that we can do real (valuable) Manual QA (e.g. exploratory testing).

Jenkins is the tool that orchestrates all the SDLC steps from code commit to binary delivery. There are currently 1183 plugins for Jenkins with new one developed every week.   With today’s plugins, you
have to create atomic jobs that then call each other, which ends up hard to visualize how the ensemble works, especially when you have a lot of different projects.

Workflow was designed to automate and scale pipeline steps and tools and solve common pipeline problems such as Parallelism, Branching, Looping, Restarts, Checkpoints, Manual Input, etc.   Jenkins Workflow is mostly open source with some advance features offered via enterprise edition by CloudBees. Workflows can be defined in one concise script, with a groovy-based DSL and 15 simple keywords.

Isaac took over to give the Workflow Demo. He explained that stages will be the different steps of the pipeline. The workflow script doesn’t have to be written directly in the jenkins job, but as an external file in your source code repository. New DSL can be c
reated to abstract the individual actions like source code checkout, build, test, etc. It will be possible to share this DSL in your jenkins and with the world, as well as download and use other people’s DSLs to leverage their code and avoid writing it yourself. Checkpoints can be combined with notification methods like email to get the input directly from the notified person. The multibranch Workflow system will support branching, any new branch in git will create a new workflow in Jenkins. Jenkins will scan all the GitHub repositories and add all the projects with Jenkins files automatically, as well as scan new projects and add them automatically in Jenkins.

At the end of the session, Kishore and Isaac gave us a glimpse of Jenkins 2.0 release which includes focus on Continuous Delivery use cases and UI/UX improvements.

If you would like to learn more about Jenkins Workflow, you can reach Kishore at kbhatia@cloudbees.com or Isaac at icohen@cloudbees.com .   For more information about CI/CD transformation you can reach me at tanya.kravtsov@rokittech.com

At the end we had a great Q&A session and a very warm open discussion.   Looking forward to our next session.

November 24, 2015
DevOps Connect: cdSummit SoCal

I know we have mentioned it before but we haven’t officially announced our DevOps Connect: cdSummit SoCal event on December 3rd in Los Angeles. The event co-produced with CloudBees, the enterprise Jenkins company, IBM and devopsy.kinsta.cloud will take place from 9am to 6pm at:

The Olympic Collection Banquet & Conference Center
11301 W. Olympic Blvd., #204
Los Angeles, CA 90064

We have a great line up of speakers and sessions for this event and I wanted to share 4 of them with you today:

1st Keynote/Headliner: John Willis, evangelist at Docker – That’s right, the one and only @botchagalupe will be kicking things off. If you have been lucky enough to catch John present before you know that he never disappoints. Partly because his experience and knowledge give him superior insight into the issues and problems that IT teams face today, but also because he is so passionate about what he presents on. John will be presenting:

Kata

Mike Rother in his book Toyota Kata implied there was an invisible side to why Toyota was so successful over the years. As we we have explored the transitions from Lean to Agile and now to Devops we often fight the visible versus the invisible in accomplishing our goals. This presentation will take a look at what Kata meant at Toyota, Alcola over the years and bring it full forward with companies line Netflix and Etsy.

2nd Keynote: Andy Pemberton, Sr. Director, Solution Architecture at CloudBees. I have seen Andy present several times now and he does a great job of showing how the technology we are using everyday in our lives is being pushed, pulled, stretched and shaped by DevOps, Continuous Delivery and Agile. Andy will be presenting:

Orchestrating the Continuous Delivery Process

Continuous delivery is an end-to-end process and orchestration is the engine that drives continuous delivery. Automating the continuous delivery pipeline starts with understanding the process and of the entire toolchain. It sounds daunting, but it can be approached in stages to keep up with the demands for application delivery speed.

Boyd Hemphill, Director of Evangelism, StackEngine. Boyd is one of the great Austin DevOps folks. He runs the Austin DevOps Meet up Group, helps with Austin DevOps Days, Container Days and so much more. Like John Willis and Andy Pemberton, I have seen Boyd present a few times and he also just really brings a great talk. Boyd presented on “HomeOps, lessons he learned about DevOps while doing work at home. It is funny, insightful and a really great presentation.

HomeOps – Learning DevOps At Home

DevOps is great. You can see the benefits. All the success stories have you champing at the bit to become your very own Unicorn. Oh, but you are smarter than that. You know that every one of those success stories comes with many, often hidden, trials and tribulations.

HomeOps is the way I have become familiar with many of DevOps models such continuous delivery, lean thinking and cultural impact. Bringing these models to work with the ability to anticipate problems helped me save nearly $1.0m in costs while opening $1.8m in revenue.

Come gain some of the missing insight to your continuous delivery journey.

Bob Reselman – Publisher and Managing Writer: The World in Which We Live. Bob is half of the ROELBOB team that has been creating some of the funny cartoons here on devopsy.kinsta.cloud. Bob also has many, many (did I say many?) years of tech experience under his belt which gives him the perspective he needs in his role at The World in Which We Live. Bob will be presenting:

Making a Linux Container: My pain and agony in grueling detail

Allow me to share an intimacy: I an experienced technology writer. Also, I am a container newbie. But, I understand that containers are an important step forward in computer virtualization. Knowing the stuff is a whole lot better than not knowing it.

So I took the plunge and decided to get down and dirty by building a containerized microservice.

I do have a method. I am a learn by doing guy. First I get the concepts down, then I get hands-on and write about it as I go. I assumed there must be a lot of Hello World type stuff out there to get me up to speed with the basics. Then, I could take things a bit further and build my microservice container on what I learned in the Hello Worlds.

I mean, it can’t be that hard, right?

Wrong!

It turns out that making my first container was a journey into pain and agony. No human should have to go through such an ordeal. So I am going to share my story with you in grueling detail so that you don’t have to experience such torture… ever.

We have another 5 or 6 sessions/speakers that we are finalizing right now and will announce next week. However, there are still one or two slots open and if you are interested in presenting you can write me at editor@devops.com with contact info and we will contact you.

Besides the great sessions and speakers, we will be featuring demos of Jenkins, CloudBees, IBM BlueMix and more. Also lunch, refreshments and more will be served. There is plenty of free time built in for networking as well including caricatures by the ROELBOB team and more surprises in store. We will also be announcing additional sponsors in the coming days.

So if you are in the Southern California area and into DevOps, CD, Jenkins, BlueMix or want to learn more, this is a can’t miss event. You can get more info here. You can register for the event (there is a $99 charge for the day) on Eventbrite.

We hope to see you in Southern California on December 3rd.

October 28, 2015
DevOpsQA NJ Meetup – NoSQL in Agile DevOps Model

DevOpsQA NJ just held our October Meetup on NoSQL in Agile DevOps Model with Shawn McCarthy from MongoDB, Bhavna Sehgal from Syncsort and Suhas Joshi as speakers.   The venue was provided by ROKITT at a state-of-the-art office space with breathtaking views of NYC.

Suhas, a Solutions Architect with a vast DevOps experience, gave a great introduction to NoSQL, starting with the history of the journey from relational to NoSQL and then deep diving into NoSQL Data Models including Key Value (e.g. CouchDB, Memcache), Document (e.g. MongoDB), Wide Column Store (e.g. Cassandra, HBase) and Graph (e.g. Neo4J). He also touched upon big data saying that the term “big data” is a misnomer, it should be “huge data” instead.

Bhavna gave a talk about how Syncsort clients leverage Hadoop and NoSQL database to achieve powerful results. Some of the use
cases included mainframe data offload to Hadoop, query of large data sets and real time analytics on Hadoop.   Bhavna also covered various options for accessing NoSQL in Hadoop including JDBC/ODBC and Java API among others.

Next, Shawn gave an exciting overview of MongoDB, starting with how it got started and deep diving into the functionality. MongoDB is a cross-platform document-oriented database. While MongoDB is classified as a NoSQL database, it also supports relational structures. Instead of breaking up data into multiple relational structures, MongoDB can store it in the small number of documents. Shawn went thru the reasons why divelopers like Mongo, which include the following 1) it was built by developers for developers, 2) very easy to setup, 3) availability, 4)automatic partitioning of data, 5) view of the data is abstracted out from the application. MongoDB does not have transactions or joints and should not be used for transaction based banking data, but it’s a great tool for storing log data, user profiles, user-generated content and location based data.   Shawn also covered Rich Query model and how Mongo can be used for real-time analytics. If you would like to learn more about MongoDB, you can reach Shawn at shawn.mccarthy@mongodb.com

At the end we had a great Q&A session and a very warm open discussion.   Looking forward to our next session in November.

October 27, 2015
DevOpsQA NJ Meetup – Configuration Management with Puppet

DevOpsQA NJ just held our September Meetup on Configuration Management with David Bowser and Jeremiah Sullivan from Puppet Labs and Michael Pereira from Syncsort as speakers.   The venue was provided by ROKITT at a state-of-the-art office space with breathtaking views of NYC.

Michael gave a great introduction to Environment Automation by giving a live demo of BCMT – Bash Configuration Management Tool – which he developed to demonstrate 2 critical concepts – Idempotence and Convergence.   Idempotence means that multiple applications of the same action do not have side effect on the system state while convergence means to bring system state in line with a defined polic
y. Changes are made on the system only if they need to be made which is one of the key behind the configuration management tools. My favorite was the definition for Configuration Management provided by Michael – “Whatever you need to run your application” – short, simple, straight to the point.

Next, David and Jeremiah gave a rundown of 2015 State of DevOps Report and a history of Puppet Labs.   Jeremiah covered the Open Source Puppet followed by a live demo of Puppet Enterprise. Puppet Enterprise offers everything available in Open Source edition, plus support, training and a web based GUI.   Puppet allows to automate provisioning for physical machines, as well as VMs, Docker containers, and AWS instances. One of the reasons Puppet is so powerful is due to the variety of the existing modules that are available from Puppet community.

At the end we had a great Q&A session ranging from Jenkins integration, automated validation of the modules, extending of the modules and future of Chocolatey.

September 16, 2015
DevOpsQA NJ Meetup – Containers with Joyent

DevOpsQA NJ just held our July Meetup on Containers with Casey Bisson from Joyent and Jeremy Rampon from Syncsort as speakers. The meetup was held at a new ROKITT location, a state-of-the-art office space with breathtaking views of NYC. This session marked 1 year since our Meetup was formed in July of 2014 and it was great to celebrate it with a great group of fellow DevOps and Automation enthusiasts.

Jeremy Rampon gave a great introduction to Docker and container technology. He spoke about how Docker allows to build, ship and run any app, anywhere with almost no overhead. We also discussed how Container technology is different from VM and future plans of Docker on Windows.

Casey Bisson gave a brief overview of the Joyent technology which offers container native infrastructure that runs in public and private cloud. We all want to run Docker on bare metal, but don’t want to lose security and elasticity. Joyent provides a way to do this without the overhead attributed to VMs. The Triton Elastic Container Infrastructure is build on top of SmartOS and provides its implementation of the Docker API, with full support for the Docker client and related orchestration tools. The advantages are the ease of management and improved performance from running on bare metal. We also got a live demo of the software that runs SmartDataCenter (software that runs the Joyent public sloud and powers private clouds) all the way from install to provisioning customer containers.

At the end of the session we did a raffle for 3 awesome books sponsored by Pearson and then toasted to 1 year Anniversary of DevOpsQA NJ.

July 28, 2015