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Tag: meetup

DAOPS Foundation Hosts Global DevOps Forum
DAOPS Foundation recently hosted its “Global DevOps Development Forum” in Santa Clara, California. The meetup, which was held May 13, was hosted by Jeff Liu, a DevOps expert from Google, and drew DevOps experts from Tencent, JFrog and JD.

The topics of this meeting were the history of DevOps and the introduction of DevOps capability maturity model. Liu shared the theme of DevOps’ development and current situation: Before the advent of DevOps, the lack of communication between development and operations teams always made it difficult to solve problems when they happened.

Since 2007, a movement to combine development and IT operations has occurred in Europe, and people are increasingly aware of the importance of combining the two. With the development of the movement, the scope of this concept is also expanding. It is no longer simply the communication between developers and IT operations personnel, but has been extended to the entire development life cycle, from the beginning of the process to the automation through deploying solutions in incremental build systems. The term “continuous delivery” is now used, especially for dynamic applications deployed on the internet. DevOps capability has become the focus of many enterprises’ transformation; we need to continue to move forward in the repeated failures and find out the suitable transformation path for ourselves.

During the meeting, Liu invited experts from JFrog shared their understanding of DevOps and expectations for the future.

The meeting was also the opening ceremony of DAOPS Foundation. Liu and Kohsuke Kawaguchi attended the meeting as governing board members. Alan Shimel, editor in chief of devopsy.kinsta.cloud and another board member, was unable to reach the scene for personal reasons, but sent a welcome via video recording. As partners in future course development of DAOPS Foundation, Jayne Groll, CEO of DevOps Institute, also sent her founding wishes.

About DAOPS Foundation

As an international organization, DAOPS Foundation hopes to gather experts from home and abroad to work together to improve the IT engineering efficiency (R&D efficiency) of enterprises in different industries around the world and to assist enterprise transformation. This is also called Advanced Software Engineering Model (ASEM), which based on DevOps framework. DAOPS Foundation introduces ASEM.

Future tasks of DAOPS Foundation:
1. International DevOps Capability Maturity Model and ASEM output
2. Open Source Product Promote
3. GNSEC-Global Next Software Engineering Conference
4. Lesson based on DevOps Capability Maturity Model and ASEM
5. Enterprise DevOps Promotion Program
6. Technical Publication
DAOPS Foundation conference attendance:
1. Participate in Cloud Expo-Hong Kong, May
2. GNSEC Taipei Station, June
DAOPS welcomes your participation as co-founders or individuals. If you are passionate about DevOps or AIOps and are enthusiastic about the future development of DevOps and AIOps, we sincerely invite you to join our team to contribute to the future development of DevOps and AIOps.

Any questions, please contact DAOPS Foundation via email or look for us on Twitter.

— DAOPS Foundation
May 28, 2019
DevOps is Becoming Mainstream in Australia

DevOps has taken root in Australia, where its practitioners are showing a high level of sophistication.

According to Paul Muller, vice president of Strategic Marketing, Software, at Hewlett Packard Enterprise Asia Pacific and Japan, interest in DevOps at Australian organizations rose, fell back and then rose again—a pattern that reminds us of Gartner’s Hype Cycle.

DevOps has progressed from the stage where its devotees were seen as a ‘radical fringe’ fighting against the organizations where they work, and is quickly becoming part of mainstream IT, he said, observing he has even heard the CEO of a bank talking about DevOps. (The banking sector in Australia is highly concentrated, with the ‘Big Four’ collectively accounting for around 80 percent of the market, with the customer-owned, regional and foreign-owned banks taking the rest.)

More generally, executives increasingly realize “their business is only as good as their software,” he said.

He sees innovation occurring in what are sometimes regarded as very traditional sectors (automotive, banking and finance, to name two) as companies realize that they face—or soon will face—competition from “software-savvy startups.”

The success of DevOps shows “Adam Smith was wrong”—that is, overspecialization is bad, he observed.

“The sophistication here is higher than I would have expected,” and higher than in most places outside Silicon Valley, said Muller.

The Australian DevOps community benefits from the huge amount of volunteer effort that goes into organizing events such as meetups. HPE is helping with its ‘DevOps Days’ that expose the company’s customers to HPE’s DevOps culture and practice, allowing them to “live a day in the life of this modern process” and take a better understanding back to their own organization.

One DevOps mistake he has seen made that generally results in failure is what he calls “processes of fetish,” where people simply try to copy another organization’s practices instead of developing a true understanding of DevOps.

He also drew attention to the shortcomings of measuring productivity in terms of lines of code or function points delivered. That overlooks, for example, the contribution of a person who does a lot of coaching.

Muller drew particular attention to the importance of scaled agile to larger organizations with multiple internal and/or external teams that need to work together to successfully complete projects. In such environments, problems arise if it is not used.

To be successful, DevOps requires the right collection of people, the right measurement and reward system, and the right tools (such as HPE ALM Octane, which can among many other things handle the synchronization of data across multiple teams), he said.

But it’s not just about implementation: organizations and teams still need to generate ideas that can be put into production. There are tools to help that process, Muller said, and HPE is teaching its innovation methodology to other organizations.

Many businesses spruik their innovation credentials and want their developers to focus on innovation. Agile and DevOps help free up developers’ minds—along with those of their colleagues in business units—to do just that, Muller said.

July 11, 2016
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: 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
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
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
Local DevOps NYC: Container Summit coming to NYC

Container Summit (https://www.joyent.com/containersummit) is a half-day technology conference in NYC on April 8th, focused on the future of containers in production. The event features container and microservices experts from Gartner, Walmart, Lucera, and Shopify as well as container ecosystem players like Docker, Tutum, InfoSiftr and Joyent. The goal of the event is to share best practices and user stories in an interactive forum.

The event ends with a cocktail hour at the venue, the W Hotel in midtown, which is a great opportunity to network with members of the broader technical community. I am planning to be there and have extended the invitation to the members of DevOps and Automation meetup group in NJ. Please join me and fellow DevOps enthusiasts at this event.

April 3, 2015
Master Meetup Calendar is up and running!

Since we were first planning devopsy.kinsta.cloud part of the vision was to have a master Meetup calendar of all of the DevOps Meetup groups. My thought was you could go to one master calendar and see where and when local DevOps groups were meeting and on what topics. Doing this has proved easier said then done. But finally we are launching in a “beta” our Meetup Group calendar. You can reach it by clicking the link in the previous sentence or by clicking the meetup menu button above.

The master calendar is still a work in progress. It is pretty bare bones white and black right now. Over time we will embellish the design, but right now it is about the functionality. If you click on a particular meeting it takes you to a page with a complete description of the particular meeting and a link to the actual Meetup page. Many thanks to Nuance Media for their work in developing this plugin.

If we do not have your Meetup group listed please email editor@DevOps.com with your meetup group URL and we will try to add it to the calendar. Right now we are showing 3 months worth of the calendar but will see what works best. We hope you find it useful.

Going forward one thing we would like to do is build up a list of sponsors who can provide a place to meet, speakers and refreshments for Meetup groups in need of these things.

Let us know if you have any other ideas on how we can make this calendar more useful.

[meetup-calendar future=”2″]

June 2, 2014