The annual Southern California Linux Expo was this past weekend. Put simply, it rocked. Everything about it this year was awesome. As usual the talks were great and the hallway track was phenomenal. That said I want to highlight some of the people and talks/software that stuck out to me.
The People
I met a number of new people in the “hallway track” this year. Many of which were doing the same things as my self, usually at larger scale, but there were a few that I got a chance to meet in real life that have had a large impact on our community and profession. Those people are listed below, in no particular order.
John Vincent (@lusis)
I got a chance to spend quite a bit of time with John this weekend and he is just as fun in person as he is on twitter. It was awesome to get a chance to hear his feelings on different aspects of cloud computing, operations and the ideas of DevOps. After spending a few days with John, I am even more excited to see the amazing things he is going to do in the coming years.
John Willis (@botchagalupe)
Meeting this John was amazing as well. With his years of experience he definitely is asking the hard questions and sees some of the bigger picture issues with the industry. I am looking forward to the next time I get a chance to sit down and have a beer with this man and talk shop.
Matt Ray (@mattray)
Matt is just one of those awesome guys that is a part of some of the largest projects shaping the future of our industry. His work with Chef, OpenStack and Crowbar is just amazing. I loved the back and fourth about Puppet and Chef. I feel like a better Ops guy just by getting a chance to spend time talking to him.
Carl Caum (@ccaum)
So while I definitely showed Chef some love this weekend, I am still a Puppet guy at heart. Getting a chance to meet Carl and talk a little about Puppet was great. Even better was watching Carl explain Puppet to people.
Brendan Gregg (@brendangregg)
Brendan Gregg falls directly into the celebrity category for me. He is someone that has just done amazing work and been directly responsible for making things that have made my life easier. It was great to see his talk (which, consequently is going to cause me to go back and look at things on my file servers) and then getting a chance to sit and talk to him at the meetup later that night. On a side note, I am super excited that I got a SIGNED copy of the DTrace book.
Deirdré Straughan (@DeirdreS)
Deirdré plays an important role in the Illumos and Joyent community. Whether it be making sure that videos are made available or facilitating the conversations that take place or need to take place, she is out there keeping us all aware of what is going on.
The Talks and Software
nVentory (http://nventory.sourceforge.net)
This just looks awesome. It does the work of inventorying systems and gives me the physical datacenter management tools that I have been looking for along with direct Puppet integration. This looks like it is just going to be one big win.
HAProxy and haproxyctl
I had heard about HAProxy before but hadn’t really looked much at it. The talk by @lolcatstevens was a great introduction to HAProxy and I can’t wait to give it a spin.
Chef
This was the first time I got a chance to really understand the fundamental differences between Chef and Puppet. As I said many times this weekend, I truly believe that over the next few years, being a good Ops person will require knowing both at least well enough to read them. Chef is doing some amazing things and has some really neat features, I am looking forward to the new concepts that come out of Opscode.
DTrace and Performance
Putting aside the fact that Brendan Gregg himself gave this talk, it was just awesome. If you are running Solaris/OpenIndiana/NexentaStor, you need to go look at the slide deck. I can’t wait to take the commands to my NFS servers. Here is a link to the slide deck. http://dtrace.org/blogs/brendan/files/2012/01/scale10x-performance.pdf
Monitoring Sucks
The panel was very interesting and really highlighted the frustrations we all have. The responses and later discussions with Simon from Zenoss and James from Pager Duty were great. I think my biggest takeaway and point is that monitoring is really a number of things and we need to focus on the smaller aspects of it to solve problems.
Additional Reading
As I see blog posts recapping SCaLE I will try and update them here.
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