Who was there
Big names: Jez Humble and Dave Farley (authors of Continuous Delivery), and Katherine Daniels (Etsy).
Reportedly there were 270 delegates (it certainly felt like it).
Vendors
In general, thin on the ground – New Relic, HPE, Jet Brains, Automic, Chef, Serena, CloudBees and Perforce.
We didn’t see Red Hat or Puppet, and there were no service companies with a stand, although plenty of consultancies on the speaker list.
We asked some of the vendors about Docker support (which ended up feeling a bit like pulling garlic on vampires) and responses varied from “we don’t really have anything there” to “we’ve got something coming soon.”
Favourite Moments / Thoughts / Quotes
@drsnooks: microservices (n,pl); an efficient device for transforming business problems into distributed transaction problems.
“The Chaos Snail – smaller than the Chaos Monkey, and runs on shell.”
“With the earlier revolution (virtualisation), every tool that runs on bare metal also runs on a VM. With the container revolution, this is not true.” (Dima Stopel from Twistlock)
“Tools will not fix a broken culture.”
Katherine Daniels ending her talk with a passionate speech on the need for more diversity in the IT industry.
“Continuous Delivery != Continuous Deployment.” (Jez Humble and Dave Farley repeatedly)
Puppet Should Charge Per-Stream Royalties for Their Report
Memo To All Consultants: It Is Now Time To Stop Quoting The 2014/5 Puppet Labs State of DevOps Report.
Jez Humble probably got away with it by speaking first 🙂
Platforms In The Wild
An entirely unscientific sample of platforms that people are using in the wild for continuous delivery, microservices and DevOps:
Organisation | Platform |
Financial Times | 45 micro services running on Docker + CoreOS + AWS
Were using private cloud but now use AWS. Live. |
Pearson Technologies | Docker + Kubernetes + OpenStack. Two AWS availability zones and one private cloud. Not yet live. |
Home Office | Docker + Kubernertes. |
<private chat> | NServiceBus, Azure, Rabbit MQ. |
Government Digital Service (gov.uk) | Open Source Cloud Foundry + vCentre. Preparing for move to OpenStack on AWS. |
Azure Container Service | Reputed to be using Mesos … |
Personal Opinion:
For infrastructure-as-a-service, AWS is starting to sound like the choice for the early majority as well as the early adopters. Organisations with sensitive information requirements are already positioning themselves for the arrival of UK data centres. Relatively little mention of Cloud Foundry or Heroku – Docker is the topic du jour.
The objection to ‘rolling your own container platform’ is the amount of work you have to do around orchestration, logging, monitoring, management and so on. This didn’t seem to be putting people off, nor were we seeing much mention of frameworks such as Rancher.
Further Reading
Empathy: The Essence of DevOps – Jeff Sussna
http://blog.ingineering.it/post/72964480807/empathy-the-essence-of-devops
Why Every Company Needs Continuous Delivery – Sarah Goff-Dupont
http://blogs.atlassian.com/2015/10/why-continuous-delivery-for-every-development-team/