Devops Austin Day 1

Today I attended the devops days conference in Austin (http://www.devopsdays.org/events/2012-austin/). The usual suspects were there John Willis, Damon Edwards, Matt Ray etc, but so were a bunch of people who hadn't attended previous devops conferences. This made for a good mix of those inside and outside the echo chamber and brought in some new perspectives.

* John Willis gave a good "Devops State of the Union" presentation.
* James Turnbull had an excellent presentation on Devops and Security and how the two are not so different and actually complementary.
* Michael Cote gave a good overview of the work that Dell did with Crowbar

There was a provisioning panel where 6 different people from different vendors (and one consulting company) gave presentations on their respective products. Dan Bode and Matt Ray both gave presentations about Puppet and Chef respectively. Despite some of the heated discussions about the differences between, at this conference and at the Austin conference last year, Matt and Dan kept it quite professional. Ultimately, it does not matter whether you use Chef or Puppet, just pick one and do something with it.

I had an excellent lunch conversation with James Turnbull and Dan Bode about Puppet (and the issues of being an Australian in the US).

This was my first "open spaces" conference. I really like the idea and "the law of two feet" meant that people could wander in between them as necessary. I went to the following open spaces

* Monitoring sucks
* Devops cultural issues
* Devops Kanban

The open spaces part of the conference is where you really get to learn as it is all very open with people asking questions and providing answers.

Things I got out of day 1

* Tools are cool, but won't fix fundamental issues
* Security should be embraced early on in a project as it is easier to integrate their requirements upfront.
* Dell's crowbar project is pretty cool, but for our bare metal provisioning, it is overkill.
* Cultural change is really helped by the higher ups changing behavior and this has a trickle down effect.
* Running remote teams is difficult, it is not just me.
* Kanban is not just for dev teams
* EVERYONE is hiring right now.

I had to duck off to a meeting so missed the drinks, but am definitely looking forward to tomorrow.