This is a live blog of the whole day broken out by section. I’ll add all of the talks by title at the top – if you see something like, just scan down to that section. I thought of doing slide pictures but this will be posted on YouTube later if you want that.

• Intro
• LinkedIn – Shwetabh Mittal – Running & Growing an at-scale social media platform
• Steve Marx – Dropbox – “It’s complicated: the user/admin/developer/platform relationship”
• Nicole Forsgen, PhD – Chef Software – “DevOps: Next” – Director, Organizational Performance & Analytics
• Docker 101 – Jonas Rosland – @jonasrosland
• The Post-Cloud – Where Google, DevOps, and Docker Converge, Nick Weaver – Intel SDI
• Competing with Software – It Takes A Platform – Pivotal Exec

Intro

• Art Min – CTO? of EMC Code
• Hash tag – #DevOpsEMC
• Thank you to a ton of folks – EMC Code Team – Cef, Mooo, VMware, Pivotal, Intel, LinkedIn, Dropbox
• Following DevOps day format – series of talk in one room, other room has Open Spaces/Whiteboards/Demos/Giveaways/Happy Hour (6-8 PM)
• Open format – please be respectful – letting anyone attend even if not paid attendee of EMC World
• Github = http://emccode.github.io
• Twitter = @EMCCode

LinkedIn – Shwetabh Mittal – Running & Growing an at-scale social media platform

• How many social media profiles do you have?
  • Everyone has one, 90% with 2, 60% with 3, 40% with 5, 20% with 5….give or take
    • Huge competition for social media users….it’s something of a zero sum game.
    • Key tenets of a social media platform
    • Users – Sky is the limit…7 billion or so. Want to have millions or billions of users.
  • Key Questions
    • How to retain existing users while adding new users to the platform?
      • Trust – Users entrust you with their data.
      • “Data is king”.
      • Don’t use data in ways you don’t want users finding out.
      • Transparency – don’t sneak in changes to the platform, provide tools for users to understand platform/policies
      • Value – like any product management need to know who your users are
    • How to gain leverage in a resource constrained environment to deliver value at a fast pace
      • Closed source vs. open source
      • Open source is huge source of value for this.
      • Every web scale giant is heavily entrenched in Open Source.
      • Square has a 1/4 million lines of open source code, Facebook has 10 million.
      • LinkedIn has started a lot – Voldemort, a couple Apache products, etc.
    • What is the long term purpose of the platform and how to rally towards the vision?
      • Create the “Economic Graph” – snazzy animated image on the screen.
      • Overall goal = create opportunity for talent at massive scale.

Steve Marx – Dropbox – “It’s complicated: the user/admin/developer/platform relationship”

• For anyone who knows AJ Kuftic, this guys sounds like him.
• Most people call me SMARX – blog.smarx.com – @smarx
• Dropbox Platform
  • Goal: allow developers to integrate Dropbox into their apps (there are more ambitious goals but this talk focuses on this one)
  • Users authorize apps & apps act on behalf of users.
  • Giving Trulio as an example – utility service to allow developers to build text message capabilities into their apps
• OAuth Love Triangle – three roles – 1) Server (Dropbox), 2) Client (App), 3) Resource Owner (User)
  • About half the audience understand how OAuth works (raising hands)
  • Graphic on screen to show how OAuth works
  • Means you can get errors from the utility service
• Example errors
  • “My WordPress backup failed” – so…what’s the app?
  • “I got error 414, and the developer said it’s a Dropbox bug” – interesting b/c means user went to the developer
  • “My printer can’t get files from Dropbox” – cool that printers can access Dropbox but don’t rev API support very often. Some printers are still based on version 0 of the Dropbox API
• Challenge that at times developers want user info that developers could gather (but don’t) and ask Dropbox for it (email addresses, etc.). Interesting challenge…
• It’s complicateder – Dropbox for business has team admins, Admins can link apps to the whole team, “My shared link broke”
  • Now the user comes to Dropbox with an issue….and it’s not Dropbox issue or developer issue but the local admin
• Policy
  • App approval – Dropbox approves apps for production use if have more than 100 users (under that can do whatever you want)
  • Apps must have a privacy policy to access Dropbox data
  • Apps mustn’t claim Dropbox involvement – example = “Dropbox Photosop”

Nicole Forsgen, PhD – Chef Software – “DevOps: Next” – Director, Organizational Performance & Analytics

• Researchers have recently been able to find a link between IT investments and bottom line – but ONLY if accompanied by investments in culture, people, IT and automation, and process.
  • Would like to think this is common sense but flies in the face of research.
• We’d like to think that IT investments make the difference…and they do but not enough to get a leg up.
  • This is even the case for really advanced, really expensive ERP systems.
  • Even if gives you a competitive advantage doesn’t give you a sustained competitive advantage….so don’t see benefits last for very long.
• “Points of Parity” to keep up rather than “Points of Differentiation”
• We call it the Productivity Paradox – need it to stay competitive but won’t let you get ahead.
• DevOps is very different….what makes it look different? It’s like the LEAN and Toyota movements in the 90’s – shifts the whole system. This is a culture shift and engineering shift that’s fundamentally different.
• High performing DevOps teams are MUCH more agile
  • 30x more frequent deployments
  • 8000x faster lead times than peers
• Much more reliable
  • 2x Change Success Rate
  • 12x Faster Mean Time to recovery – MTTR
  • How do you sell DevOps to the business? These are huge numbers.
• High performing IT organizations
  • 2x more likely to exceed profitability, market share, and productivity goals
  • 50% higher market cap over 3 years
• 3 building blocks
  • Culture & Community – matters for any organization.
    • Novelty is valued, messengers aren’t shot, constant learning climate (if we don’t learn, we will die), Dev & IT Ops work well together
    • Job Satisfaction is the #1 indicator of organizational performance.
    • What’s next? Empathy (understanding the users), Burnout (preventing it), Community ()
  • Tools & Automation
    • What we know as best things to do: do version control for all artifacts (not just app code but EVERYTHING), automated testing
    • What’s next – Continuous Integration (CI) & Continuous Deployment (CD), Microservices Architecture
  • Practice & Process
    • What do we know? Cooperation between Dev & Ops, Peer-review change approvals are good for notification but don’t help with lowering error account (actually introduces more errors)
    • What’s next? Proactive & strategic planning, Value delivery w/business players, continue on Kaizen path (yeah…..I need to learn more about Kaizen)
• DevOps Research in 2015 – looking at Security and compliance at velocity, CI and CD, Exec and org support
• @nicolefv & nicoleforsgren.com

Docker 101 – Jonas Rosland – @jonasrosland

• He spoke at Varrow Madness! 🙂
• Around 50% of the audience has played with Docker
• Launched a bit over 2 years – launched by DotCloud that later changed its name to Docker
• Introduced during lightning 5 minute talk at PyCon – didn’t even have time to complete the demo – got pushed off stage partway through his demo
• Then it just took off with a huge organic community push
• Beginning of docker – why not scale with just load balancers in front of multiple copies?
  • It’s not just scaling but also about “Separation of Concern”
  • Want to be able to update applications individually.
  • This brings us into Microservices (also mentioned in a previous chat).
• Microservices = the same application but pulled all the pieces apart.
  • This does make the application more complex – it’s a great idea but adds real complexity.
• Everything is loosely coupled.
• When want to scale? Still have presentation layer – then scale out the various pieces. Not scale out the whole app with load balancer in front but scale the individual micro service.
• So how do we deploy it?
  • One app per physical server? No.
  • One app per virtual machine? No.
  • Containers!
• What do you need to run a Python app? Not really Ubuntu….but really just the relevant Python libraries.
• Usually have one function per container – if a Python app, that’s it.
• Containers are separate from each other – showing a picture of a container ship with each container isolated. Doesn’t matter what you put into each container because of that.
• Traditional Services — Hardware –> OS Kernel –> Multiple Apps on top (why you have conflicts)
• Inserted a virtualization layer above the hardware – Hardware –> Hypervisor –> lots of OSes –> lots of Apps
• Containers look like – Hardware –> OS Kernel –> (Apps but really Containers)
• Isolation is key without needing a Hypervisor
• Boot2Docker – tool to run Docker on your laptop – http://boot2docker.io
• Many minimal Linux OS releases to help you run your containers.
• What about added functionality
• Summary – Docker can let you run any type of application anywhere (laptop, AWS, vCloud Air, your own datacenter) — anywhere can install a Linux host as well as Microsoft
• Read this…
  • docker.com
  • The Docker Ecosystem by DigitalOcean
  • Monolithic Architecture Doesn’t Scale

The Post-Cloud – Where Google, DevOps, and Docker Converge, Nick Weaver – Intel SDI

• EMC to VMWare to Intel – SDI-X group
• Progression of how we produce things over the years – lots of producers and few consumers.
  • Manual labor, slaves, forced labor, etc. – big jump was the Industrial Revolution. Machines allowed creating more things so we consumed more things.
• Big Switch – fewer producers and many consumers.
• Jevons’ Paradox: The proposition that as technology progresses, the increase in efficiency with which a resource is used tends to increase (rather than decrease) the rate of consumption of that resource.
• What does efficiency look like to us? (as technologists)
  • Walking through server changes…..then database changes.
  • Overall things aren’t getting simpler…they’re getting more complex and more powerful.
• DevOps has been most a cultural change – letting people run more things.
  • DevOps = efficiency in controlling change.
  • That we as technologists can run more stuff.
  • That shouldn’t just let us do more….but also not burn ourselves out.
• PaaS – what an Apps needs – like IaaS but closer to the point.
  • Great starting point for container integration (Docker, Rocket), cloud-native apps, etc.
• Pumping Latice – latice.cf
• Container Benefits
  • Faster lifecycle vs. virtual machines
  • Contains what is running within the OS
  • Ideal for homogenous app stacks on Linux
  • Almost non-evident overhead
  • Containers start REALLY fast – 1 second vs. 1-2 minutes for a VM
  • This is fine if you’re starting at VM that will run for 6 months – it’s big deal if want to spin up something that runs for 8 seconds and is killed.
• Running out of steam on taking notes on this session (dealing with some scheduling for the coming week).
• “The Road to Awe” – where Nick would like to see things go…
• Want to deploy my web services – x86 servers
• Want my web service deployed on a VM – VMware
• Want it automagically configured – Puppet, Check, DevOps
• Want it packaged and released as a service – PaaS (Cloud Foundry)
• Want it to be immutable images I can…. (all of this is Docker)
  • turn up in a second for a developer to work on
  • do testing cycles
  • turn up for production – Docker
  • want them to be spun down – Mesos, Kubernetes, CF Diego
• Want it to be managed intelligently and run anywhere –
• States….where we’re going (also a bit scary to me – Andrew)
  1. Wider telemetry
  2. Google Omega-style decision making for the masses
  3. Brand new disciplines around efficiency
  4. Massive cooperation of cloud domains
• Post-cloud – just a label for the computing that our grandchildren will take for granted as they provide their own value.

Competing with Software: It Takes a Platform

• No one is entitled to their business model – showing lots of companies that have exited the S&P 500 that were too big to fail.
• Everything is technology driven now – financial services (Square), entertainment (Netflix), 
• @littleidea – You are either building a software business…or you are losing to someone who is.
• Traditional IT vendors are declining – Cisco, HP, Dell, etc.
• Consumer expectations are going up…but it’s startups that are not only meeting those expectations but also building those expectations.
• Changing development and release disciplines
• Agile/Developer Productivity/TDD
• Continuous Delivery
• DevOps
• Cloud-native App designs
• Culture/Talent
• Amazon deploys code very 11 seconds.

Had to pack up after this…the sessions are recorded. The Puppet one was particularly good.