Thursday, July 14, 2016

Presentation: Containers-Don't Skeu Them Up (Use Microservices Instead)

William Henry and I gave this presentation at LinuxCon Japan in 2016. (About 8 hours after getting a panicked 3am email to fill a no-show slot.) It's similar to what we gave at LinuxCon Dublin last year but there are a few updates.

Skeuomorphism usually means retaining existing design cues in something new that doesn't actually need them. But the basic idea is far broader. For example, containers aren't legacy virtualization with a new spin. They're part and parcel of a new platform for cloud apps including containerized operating systems like Project Atomic, container packaging systems like Docker, container orchestration like Kubernetes and Mesos, DevOps continuous integration and deployment practices, microservices architectures, "cattle" workloads, software-defined everything, management across hybrid infrastructures, and pervasive open source.

In this session, Red Hat's Gordon Haff and William Henry will discuss how containers can be most effectively deployed together with these new technologies and approaches -- including the resource management of large clusters with diverse workloads -- rather than mimicking legacy sever virtualization workflows and architectures.

Presentation: Fail fast, fail often

My colleague William Henry and I just gave this presentation at LinuxCon in Tokyo. It ties into central DevOps concepts such as experimentation, constant iteration, and having a culture that supports these types of activities.

Here was the abstract:

Software projects were historically managed on a bet the farm model. They succeeded or they failed. And when they failed (as big software projects often did), the consequences were typically dire for, not only organizations as a whole, but for many of the individuals involved. Today, by contrast, many software and the development projects have evolved toward a much more incremental, iterative, and experimental process that takes cues from the open source model which excuses (and even rewards) certain types of failure.

In this session, we’ll discuss how failure can be turned into a positive. This includes the organizational dynamics associated with tolerating uncertain outcomes, the need to define acceptable failure parameters, and the technical means by which experimentation can be automated in ways that amplify the positive while minimizing the effect of negative outcomes.

Tuesday, July 12, 2016

Gordon's HaffTime - Issue #7 is live

Issue #7 talks travels, Red Hat Summit, automation, and gives a shout-out to a really good game.

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