DevOps Conceptual Intro

One of the topics I have been asked a lot about while doing Enterprise Hybrid Cloud presentations lately is the concept of DevOps. As many of you know I cover the Federal Government for those that don’t the worst kept secret is now out.  While the government sales cycles and IT cycles are usually far behind their commercial enterprise counterparts they tend to have better control over security and operations. (This really is true despite how much I have complained about my time working in the data centers.)

DevOps however is a relatively new topic for what has traditionally been a very ITIL driven and stove-piped world. While boxes need to be checked and security is of the utmost importance the concept of integrating teams and attacking production problems at the onset of projects is somewhat foreign. While I think DevOps is really very useful I also firmly believe that it’s everything in it’s time and place. It is with that in mind that I made the presentation you will see below. This isn’t something I have presented with customers yet, so you my tens of readers get to be the first to see it and give me some feedback. I am targeting IT Managers and Sr Sys Admins with it and trying to just give a 5000 ft view of what DevOps is to get them started.

Everyone loves buzzwords but hopefully this can help them get over that hump and into the mind set of discovering what the underlying concepts are and can do. Please reach out to me in comments or on twitter to let me know what you think.

(Edit: added some slides and content to the deck, thanks to everyone for the input and help!)

Upcoming Speaking Engagements Fall 2014

Just a quick post about a couple of upcoming speaking engagements:

If you are in Southern Maryland or want to visit the southern peninsula for some unknown reason I will be talking at the Patuxent Partnership Cloud Symposium, Oct 8th.

Then on the 22nd of October I will be speaking at the EMC Federal Technology Summit at the Renaissance hotel, talking about Hybrid Cloud: Bridging the Gap between Private and Public Clouds.

I hope to see as many of you there as can make it, and if you actually read the blog and can make it please come up and say hi I would love to chat.

NSX and Load Balancers

During VMworld a lot of announcements were made, one that may not have been as well advertised is F5’s integration with NSX. Load balancing isn’t always looked at as a sexy technology and at the end of the day may not be because when it works it just works.  But there are use cases for load balancing that go beyond a single web site with multiple servers hosting it or round robin load balancing VPN concentrators.

If this doesn’t look familiar you aren’t flying to the moon

Active\Active datacenters and workloads require some level of load balancing, and saying you are going to cloud burst without understanding how the DNS and network will respond or be routed is like saying you are going to fly to the moon with out understanding the premise of escape velocity.