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Healthcare information provider streamlines deployment with DevOps

Streaming music and online shopping are just two of the ways technology and the Internet have changed our way of life. One of the other major shifts in culture has been the ability to research symptoms and self-diagnose medical conditions. One online healthcare information provider recently teamed up with IBM and embraced DevOps to streamline development and deployment of features and information for customers.

In a case study titled A healthcare information provider cuts deployment time down to minutes, IBM details how this healthcare information provider—which remains anonymous—used IBM UrbanCode Deploy to get products to market faster. While the name of the company is not disclosed, IBM does reveal that it is a United States company that employs approximately 1,500 people, and develops and maintains more than 200 applications.

The case study describes a scenario that is probably common across many companies regardless of industry:

The organization’s existing deployment solution combined tools designed for other purposes, such as administration or content management, and strung them together with custom scripts. The process also involved many manual steps, which introduced the potential for human error. Developers and quality assurance (QA) teams were bogged down with the numerous administrative steps required to request a new deployment. And the company’s web operations team was spending much of its time deploying production and QA environments.

“In many ways they are a classic DevOps story for a mid-sized organization (1,500 people) with a heavy tech component,” stated Eric Minick, DevOps evangelist for IBM. Minick explained that development at the organization had shifted to agile, and that applied pressure downstream on operations. The natural evolution from there to keep up with development and continue to meet business needs was to automate aggressively and improve collaboration between developers and IT operations. In other words: embrace DevOps.

Minick told me, “The medical element almost doesn’t matter here—except that this is a place where I would go to get health information to make decisions that impact the well-being of my kids. They trade in trust.”

An outage would have financial consequences as it would for any company that engages with customers over the Web, but the more crucial issue for this company is its reputation—and the need to earn and maintain the trust of its customers. “In a lot of ways, this is the same fundamental challenge that banks have. You have to be consumer facing, compete with new money transfer startups that move fast, but if people can’t deposit their paycheck in time to make rent, you lose customers quickly,” said Minick.

For US Health insurers, the past couple years have been very interesting. The Affordable Care Act has forced the health industry to shift from thinking of the insured as a secondary customer (the employer being the primary) to really shifting into a business-to-consumer (B2C) business model. The change in perspective makes their systems of engagement more critical to the business, and being able to experiment and rapidly deliver has become more important.

Minick stressed, “At the same time, they have significant regulatory burdens requiring them to have strict controls, and security protections. Meanwhile, operating efficiency has become even more important as overhead / profit is capped as a percentage of premiums. This nets out to a requirement to be able to change more quickly, without additional risk or cost.”

A vice president from the healthcare information provider shared some thoughts on the benefits of working with IBM and embracing DevOps. “The fact that we had development, QA and ops engineers all in the same room choosing the tool, that process and the standards really created a sense of collaboration and let everyone walk in the other person’s shoes, understanding the challenges others face. To me that’s what the DevOps culture is about: breaking down the walls and letting staff understand everyone’s challenges. Everyone benefits from using tools and processes like this.”

February 12, 2015
5 Ways to Connect with me at IBM InterConnect2015
Well, I am an IBMer and going to IBM InterConnect2015 is a part of my job. And the best part about this event is that I will get the opportunity to meet all my clients and colleagues at one location instead of going to three different conference events which we use to call PULSE, IMPACT and INNOVATE. And for our clients, this is an opportunity to really get the broadest and deepest immersion into what IBM has to offer for cloud, mobile, bigdata, security etc.. and of course DevOps. That being said, I am really looking forward to it. By every measure it is going to be the largest DevOps conference ever with 300+ sessions just focused on DevOps. Although, InterConnect as a whole is not a DevOps conference – it has several areas of foci, across IBM’s massive and diverse portfolio. DevOps just happens to be one of the most significant areas of focus. At the conference, we have IBMers, sharing the IBM DevOps adoption journey with industry leaders, influencers, SME’s, and most importantly several of our customers who will talk about how they have adopted DevOps and achieved business benefits.

I myself have multiple sessions that I am delivering/participating in at InterConnect. These include:
1. Understanding DevOps (Session DTS-1778, Monday 12:15PM): This is my flagship session which I have been doing at IBM conferences for three years now. I introduce DevOps – it’s history, what it means, capabilities that make up DevOps, and where to start on your DevOps adoption journey.
2. Eliminate Dogwork with Leaner and Smarter Methods (Session DEV-6306, Monday 3:50 PM): This is a unique session. I will be delivering this with Walker Royce, IBM Chief Software Economist. It will be in the dev@InterConnect, a developer focused event happening in parallel with the main InterConnect event. You can register just for this event separate from InterConnect. Walker and I will go over how developers can self-empower themselves and reduce the waste in their application development and delivery pipelines. We will explore common sources of waste and techniques on how to identify and mitigate them.
Panels, Panels, Panels: I am on two panels with a bunch of very illustrious experts.
1. Mobile to Mainframe Experts: DevOps Best Practices for Systems of Engagement and Systems of Record (Session DEM-4399, Monday 2PM) – This panel is focused on organizations developing multi-platform applications – from Mobile to Mainframe. My co-panelists are: Rosalind Radcliffe (IBM Distinguished Engineer), Carmen DeArdo (Nationwide Insurance), Claus Bjorno (KMD A/S), Slavik Zorin (Synchrony Systems Inc), Jeff Blackadar (CMHC) and Mads Frank Zanderson (Xact Consulting).
2. Experts in Mobile, Deployment, Web IDE and Agile Answer Your DevOps Questions (Session DEV-1902, Wednesday 8 AM). This is a Q&A format panel with SMEs on all things DevOps. My co-panelists are: Yan Tina Zhuo (IBM), Eric Minick (IBM), Donald Thomas (IBM) and Wayne Monk (Skytap).
3. I will also be running a series of DevOps workshops in the ‘Inner Circle’ Event taking place at the MGM.
So, now you know where you can catch me at the conference, but that’s not all, there is a lot to look forward to with so many different stories at so many different sessions. Check out the entire agenda here. I intend to spend most of my time in and around the Cloud and DevOps tracks, DevOps Transformation workshops, and in the expo center in the DevOps zone. Come look me up. I will also be signing copies of my updated DevOps For Dummies book (2^nd Edition) on Monday and Tuesday nights in the expo center.

Register for IBM InterConnect 2015 today to know what’s happening in the world of DevOps and understand how you can be a part of it. And get your signed copy of DevOps for Dummies book today.
February 5, 2015
Google Hangout: InterConnect 2015 preview from IBM & Nationwide on #DevOps
Join us for a Google Hangout* with a distinguished panel of guests as we discuss: Adopting DevOps for Two-Speed IT.

With IBM InterCnnect 2015 just a month away, three featured presenters will give us an Interconnect preview

*Google Hangouts are FREE. To participate in a Google Hangouts LIVE, a Gmail or Google Profile is required.

Date: Wednesday, January 28th, 2015

Time: 3pm eastern standard time
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REGISTRATION LINK:(NO REGISTRATION REQUIRED*) 
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About Our Guests:

Rosalind Radcliffe, our guest from @IBM

Distinguished Engineer – Chief Architect for CLM and DevOps, Member of the Academy of Technology

Carmen DeArdo, our guest from @Nationwide

Director – Tools and Technology Leader

Sanjeev Sharma, our guest from @IBM

IBM Worldwide Lead – DevOps Technical Sales (Executive IT Specialist),

Author of DevOps for Dummies
January 26, 2015
Does Automating Application Release Mean the Same that it Used to?
Over the last ten years, we have seen a shift towards automation in how applications have been released. Automation has been encouraged first by agile’s embrace of continuous integration and delivery, and now the broader move to DevOps. As deployment automation left the sphere of the individual development team, another trend has emerged. The understanding of what it means to deploy an application in an automated fashion has steadily expanded. For developers in the early days of continuous delivery, production concerns were usually secondary. They would take a single build, and automate its deployment to test environments. Some teams would succeed in expanding this approach to production with a full-fledged delivery pipeline, but most would stumble. Ignoring production concerns in the lower environments resulted in their work being dismissed as unworkable in production environments. However, the success of agile development meant an increased demand for change in production. At the same time, the trend towards cloud services expanded the number of targets that a given deployment would impact. Production support teams had to automate, and in a way that would also work for the rapid rate of change in development and test. The build pipeline model was close, but didn’t meet the Ops needs of incremental change (rather than full builds), and orchestrating changes across multiple builds and tiers.

A 2012 survey of over 500 technologists by UrbanCode found that only 12% of teams scoped production releases to a single build. With the business demanding faster change, and DevOps ascending, we have seen automation mature in the production environments rapidly in the past several years. This includes the rise of Application Deployment/Release Automation as a tool category at the start of this decade. These ADA tools are defined by automation scoped at a business application – they coordinate across multiple tiers and components. So they deploy not just the new version of a web service, but also five other web services the backend databases, etc. With DevOps better linking development and operations, and an increased willingness to automate in production, we saw the first big shift in the scope of automation. From deploying a build, to deploying the build and related builds, content and database changes. The web app was still the most common scenario. Today we are seeing the next major expansion underway, and it’s hitting on several fronts at once.
1. The first front is that organizations whose releases span multiple business applications are adding release centric orchestration to speed releases of coupled applications.
2. The next front is a move beyond the web application itself. Mobile development tied to backend services is getting pulled in to the definition of the “business application” as are systems of record including the mainframe.
3. The third front is a shift down the stack. The environment and infrastructure are seen increasingly not as a place the application runs, but as part of the application itself. As that shift happens, we see a push to make a change to the CPU count in a VM go through the same types of automation and governance that updates to the behavior of a web service go through. Change is change.
4. Finally, we are seeing the normalization of Platform as a Service offering like Bluemix. That results in increased acceptance of the technology, but also the desire to coordinate change to services delivered through a PaaS platform and those delivered through other cloud or traditional data-center platforms.
Broadly, IT is delivering value to the business by delivering services. Changes to those services tend to be scoped to applications that are complex. The trend is to treat everything in that application that is software defined the same through the same channels. That lets system level testing validate the whole system, and for the whole system to be promoted forward together. The above discussion not only informs about the change taking place but also prompts at taking the step towards the change. The move to DevOps is bringing about change rapidly. On November 20, some of the industry experts and leaders got together to discuss the effects and steps to adopt the change effectively, at the IBM DevOps Symposium in the New York area (Jersey City). Understand how to adopt DevOps successfully by listening to distinguished industry leaders and experts. Join us for the replay of the webcast. Be a part of the change

About the Author:

Eric Minick is a Technical Evangelist. He joined IBM through its acquisition of UrbanCode. He has spent the last ten years helping organizations – large and small – adopt continuous integration, delivery and now –DevOps. He is a frequent speaker on the topic, and co-authored Application Release and Deployment For Dummies. Prior to consulting, Eric was a developer, test automation engineer and support engineer, and has contributed to multiple generations of UrbanCode products.
December 9, 2014
DevOps: As critical for the Systems of Record as for the Systems of Engagement

There is a lot of talk about DevOps, and how it improves the process of delivering business value. Much of the discussion of DevOps has been focused on web based companies such as Facebook, or the mobile and distributed development teams. But DevOps principles apply just as well to the traditional Systems of Record, z/OS applications.   Many of these applications have been around for a long time and have very mature development and deployment processes. These processes include the requirements for separation of duties and audit tracking. Over the years these processes have developed into lengthy procedures, to be comprehensive, the net effect of this has been to reduce the number and frequency of the deployments to reduce risk. However, there is a better way.

In the recent blog posting by Ashok Reddy he talked about the 8 critical DevOps Practices: innovate, deliver, repeat. All of these are as applicable to z/OS applications as any other, for this blog I want to focus on just a few of the practices, Loosely Coupled Architecture, Automate Testing using APIs, Transparency and Minimize hand-offs, Maximize flow.

DevOps is about bringing the entire organization together, including Development and Operations, to more efficiently deliver the business value. The practices of “Transparency” and “Minimize hand-off, Maximize flow” go to the core concepts of the people aspects of DevOps i.e., integrating the organization.   By breaking down the barriers between the organizations, people can work together to accomplish the business goals more quickly. This does not necessarily mean actually changing the organizational structure, but it does mean having the organizational structures work together as cross functional teams.

One example would be the monitoring and optimization practices. These are generally done by Operations after the applications are deployed into production. However, if instead Operations and Development worked together in the early part of development cycle to monitor and optimize the application using the same capabilities that will be used in production any issues can be addressed much earlier in the cycle. This also helps both teams learn what is required to monitor and manage the application long before it is ever deployed to production. In many z/OS environments today, the same infrastructure is already available in the test environments, but it is seldom used.

A second example is to have Operations define the deployment automation such that it can be done by Development in early stages and turned over in later stages. This ensures continued testing of the deployment capability and a validation that by the time the deployment is done in production; the deployment process itself will be well tested. Through this integration of Development and Operations you remove the hand off that currently happens only at the final stage just before production deployment.

The practice of loosely coupled architecture is key when building multi-platform applications. Having clear interface definitions between the different parts of the application is essential of a loosely coupled architecture. It is easier to allow the capability to build independently, tested at the interface level and then brought together when the parts are ready. By defining clear interfaces between application components and properly handling forward and backward compatibility, there is less of a requirement for coordinated simultaneous deployments. This allows teams to be less dependent on other parts of the application during the development process, and allows for easier automated testing.

The practice of Automate testing is critical to any DevOps transformation. It provides the capability to improve the speed of delivery while reducing risk. Moving to agile development practices while still requiring people to perform manual tests, will not allow the quick iteration on the capability. Even for existing applications you can generate interface tests to begin to build up automated regression test cases. Automated tests can be generated based on interface definitions such as a JSON schema or a COBOL copybook for new development. The increased focus on testing the interfaces early helps reduce the integration problems generally found late in the development cycle.

These are just a few of the key practices of DevOps but hopefully they have started to demonstrate how DevOps is as applicable to the Systems of Record on z/OS as it is to Systems of Engagement.   To learn more read the best practices for a DevOps approach with IBM System z whitepaper or watch the replay of the November 20, IBM DevOps Symposium webcast.

About the Author:

Rosalind Radcliffe is a Distinguished Engineer within the IBM Rational organization. She is Chief Architect for CLM and DevOps. She is responsible for driving the DevOps for multi-platform architecture. This includes System z and Power system. In addition she is responsible for the architecture for the Collaborative Management capability for Enterprise solutions. This includes UrbanCode Deploy and Rational Team Concert’s support for standard Mainframe development activities.

She is a member of the IBM Academy of Technology and a Master Inventor. Prior to Rational, she was in Tivoli responsible for the SOA Management Strategy for IBM.

December 2, 2014
Transforming applications with Cloud and DevOps – one hybrid solution for multiple challenges
Are you on cloud yet or clouded? The answer lies in how you have adopted the transformation. Today, the world is Hybrid. For large enterprises and organizations, it always has been. Almost no enterprise is monolithic when it comes to their environments. They may already have different distributed environments and/or mainframes in their ecosystem. The advent of cloud has only added to this complexity and hybrid nature of the environments. Enterprises which have replaced their datacenter with cloud adoption, in some cases are unable to do so completely or even adopt a singular cloud solution as that remains the domain of born-on-the-web companies that started on the cloud (think Netflix) or started on physical servers and migrated very early to the cloud (think WhatsApp). You cannot think of a big bank or even a telecom giant that is a Cloud Service Provider (CSP) that fits this bill.

For the typical Enterprise (IBM included), the cloud has replaced and consolidated large sprawls of physical servers. However, physical environments remain, and may never go away and cost of migration plays a very important part in this retention. There may be large data-heavy applications that are hosted on distributed environments that may be just too expensive to re-host on the cloud. Then there are mainframe-hosted applications that cannot be migrated to the Cloud. Or the migration to cloud may be a massive multi-year transformation that you are only starting on and will have to live with workloads spread between the cloud and the physical world for an extended period of time.

What’s interesting is that, even the cloud itself will be ‘Hybrid’ in nature. There may be combination of on-premises and off-premises clouds adopted, with off-premise’s ‘cheaper’ cloud used for less critical workloads like Dev-Test environments, and on-premise’s cloud for business-critical workloads. There may also be the presence of a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) being used for developing innovative Systems of Engagement applications or for experimentation, which co-exists with an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) Cloud for Systems of Record applications and other traditional workloads.

That is the complex world we live in.

DevOps and Hybrid Cloud

Cloud is the transformation enterprises are looking for whereas DevOps practices help achieve the transformation with speed and quality. When we talk about DevOps in the Hybrid Cloud environments, there are two main scenarios that can be adopted.
1. Cloud hosted application delivery pipeline: When adopting DevOps one adopts a set of tools that create what is an Application Delivery pipeline. This includes tools such as an Integrated Development Environment (IDE), a Source Code Management (SCM) System, a Build tool, an asset repository, Test tools, an Automated Application Deployment tool, Environment provisioning tools and application monitoring tools, etc. All these tools can be hosted in the cloud and made available as a service. If you are using a PaaS such as IBM Bluemix as your application delivery platform, it includes these DevOps services.
2. Cloud Hosted Environments: As applications are developed and delivered to production, they pass through multiple environments. These include development environments, multiple test environments, System Integration Test (SIT), User Acceptance Test (UAT), Performance Test, and potentially other pre-production environments (names and type vary from organization to organization), and of course Production. These environments may be spread over cloud and physical infrastructure, or even multiple cloud environments.
IBM has hosted offerings for the DevOps delivery pipeline that cover the first scenario, including its Collaborative Lifecycle Management as a Service (CLMaaS) and cloud hosted Rational Software Delivery Platform (SDP) tools available through IBMs business partner CloudOne. As mentioned before IBM Bluemix PaaS includes in it DevOps Services to deliver these capabilities in the PaaS.

For the purpose of this post, we will examine the second scenario in detail.

Application Delivery for Hybrid Cloud Environments:

Let’s examine a customer scenario I worked on recently. This customer, a large bank, was looking to host all their application delivery and production environments to the cloud. For cost management, they had decided to host their highly dynamic Development and Test (Dev-Test) environments on an off-premise’s ‘public’ or ‘virtual-private’ cloud, and host their Production environments on-premise on a private self-managed cloud. At the same time, their core business systems, in this case their core banking systems, all remained hosted on a Mainframe z/OS system. They are exposing their core Banking Applications to other applications that consume their services as REST APIs via an IBM DataPower gateway.

The goal of this organization is to be able to deploy complete business capabilities which comprises of services and middleware components deployed to the Production Cloud, and the back-end Mainframe. The primary challenge was to use a Deployment Automation tool that can deploy components and manage application configurations across all these multiple environments.

The second challenge was the need to deploy applications under development as they progressed through different environments in the delivery pipeline. These environments were hosted in a public cloud. As the production environments are hosted in a private cloud, there was a need to use ‘pattern’ technology that would allow for the provisioning of ‘production-like’ environments through the lower pre-production environments. These ‘patterns’ would allow for the production environments and the pre-production environments that match, albeit with different configurations and scale, to be managed and versioned as code. These patterns would evolve as the applications and the environments they were deployed on evolved through the development iterations.

Architecture for Application Delivery for Hybrid Cloud

Our discussion so far now leads us to designing architectures for application delivery for Hybrid Cloud which requires a deployment automation tool that supports multiple technologies comprising the hybrid cloud environment. As discussed before, multiple technologies ranging from off-premise, on-premise clouds to physical infrastructure may be included in these hybrid environments. IBM UrbanCode Deploy with Patterns provides such support.

IBM UrbanCode Deploy with Patterns supports two cloud pattern technologies:
1. IBM Virtual System Patterns
2. OpenStack HEAT/HOT templates
This allows IBM UrbanCode Deploy with Patterns to support both provisioning of cloud environments using these patterns, and the deployment of applications to these environments, whether to an on-premise or off-premise cloud. In addition, it supports application deployment to static environments on physical infrastructure – distributed and mainframe. The Cloud technologies supported by UrbanCode Deploy with Patterns include OpenStack Private Cloud, Softlayer, Amazon Web Services and VMWare vCenter. In addition, IBM UrbanCode Deploy with Patterns also supports deploying buildpacks to IBM Bluemix PaaS.

It is apparent from the example above that hybrid cloud is changing the face of enterprises and organizations today. With the speed the market is changing today, one cannot depend on waiting for transformation. IBM can help enterprises with their Cloud and DevOps journey leveraging our unique cloud and DevOps expertise. On November 20, you can know more about Hybrid cloud strategies and interact with some of the industry experts like Rosalind Radcliffe (Distinguished Engineer, Chief Architect for CLM and DevOps, Member of the Academy of Technology at IBM), Richard Irving (Certified Client Technical Professional at IBM) and Wayne Monk (Vice President, Business Development and Alliances at Skytap) at the IBM DevOps Symposium in the New York area (Jersey City). We are streaming the first hour as a series of lightning talks given by few distinguished industry leaders – so join us live or on the web.
November 18, 2014
IBM DevOps Webcast Nov 20 – Transforming Application Delivery for Continuous Innovation

What if you could deliver applications faster without compromising quality or accepting higher risk? Fast-moving adopters of technology are transforming software delivery to disrupt entire industries with rapid-fire, digital innovations that leverage cloud, mobile, big data and social.

How do you deliver 10-times faster business innovation instead of 10 percent incremental improvement? New and established companies are using DevOps to transform their software delivery process and are achieving dramatic improvements in overall speed, quality and business satisfaction.

Join executives from GE Capital, Forrester Research, IBM and others for a series of lightning talks with real experiences and best practices. Learn how you can adopt DevOps practices that deliver early wins and transform your application delivery process.

Date: Thursday, November 20th, 2014

Time: 8:30 – 9.30 AM Eastern Standard Time

Registration link: http://bit.ly/14z82GS

Speakers

Snehal Antani – CIO & Chief Architect, GE Capital Americas
Kurt Bittner – Principal Analyst, Forrester Research
Kristof Kloeckner – General Manager, IBM Software Group
Steve Kagan – VP, IBM Global Business Services
Dibbe Edwards – VP Development, IBM Software Group

In the New York Metro Area?

Join us in-person for a free, full-day event.

Click here to sign-up: http://ibm.co/1ljyjQQ

Download the event flyer here: ibm.biz/jerseycityflyer

November 18, 2014
IBM Webcast Nov 18 : Rapid and Continuous Delivery to Hybrid Clouds

Organizations need to innovate at speed. As software has become increasingly critical to business outcomes, delivering high quality changes quickly has become a competitive necessity. With rapidly changing applications has come a dynamic, programmable infrastructure that can meet changing business needs in the blink of an eye. In a word: Cloud.

But how do development teams take advantage of cloud resources? How do organizations coordinate application changes across clouds? Where do platform as a service tools like Bluemix from IBM fit in? Can we move quickly without losing control or quality?

Join Eric Minick, IBM DevOps Evangelist (and UrbanCode guy), as he examines best practices, and approaches for tying together cloud infrastructure, platform as a service and deployment automation to boost the responsiveness of IT as a whole.

Date: Thursday, November 18th, 2014

Time: 1:00pm – 2:00pm eastern standard time

Registration link: https://ibm.biz/BdEqve

About the Speaker:

Eric joined IBM through its acquisition UrbanCode. He has spent the last ten years helping organizations – large and small – adopt continuous integration, delivery and now –DevOps. He is a frequent speaker on the topic, and co-authored Application Release and Deployment For Dummies. Prior to consulting, Eric was a developer, test automation engineer and support engineer, and has contributed to multiple generations of UrbanCode products.

November 6, 2014
IBM Webcast Nov 12: Use Discovery to accelerate testing and virtualization

Many of today’s business applications offer a multitude of services (APIs) across many different technologies. These same applications also reach out into a web of already-existing services in order to retrieve and update information necessary to successfully deliver the end to end business processes. In many cases, these applications are being built by multiple development teams distributed around the world with architectural approaches and middleware changing over time and yet we point test teams at the mere tip of the iceberg and say, “Test it!”. Testers know the benefits service-based testing and service virtualization bring but to successfully use these capabilities they first have to understand not only the application’s architecture but also the way in which it communicates with everything around it. Finding this information can be a forensic-like exercise; even if there is documentation there is only one real truth – the environment itself. Watching and interrogating the real systems allows testers to understand what’s really happening under the surface, sometimes with surprising results.

Date: Wednesday, November 12th, 2014

Time: 1:00pm – 2:00pm eastern standard time

Registration link: https://ibm.biz/BdEqEf

About the Speakers:

Join Nick Portalski, IBM Development Manager for Integration Testing and Service Virtualization solutions as he explains the rationale for using various discovery techniques and explains how their use can accelerate project initiation making it possible to reduce testing cycles and mitigate risk. Al Wagner will be your host for this event. Al drives thought leadership, strategic initiatives, and tangible solutions with a specific focus on quality management, test automation, and service virtualization.

November 5, 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