Arrested DevOps

Almost two years after the first episode on DevOps in Microsoft environments, Matty and Trevor bring back a panel that Matty bills as the largest in the show's history. Trevor's microphone fails almost immediately, so Trevor mostly appears through Matty's paraphrase and a checkouts segment near the end. The panel is Liam Bennett, who works at a managed hosting provider on Windows workloads across AWS, Azure and GCP and released many of the community Puppet modules from time at OpenTable, Brandon Olin, a systems engineer at Columbia Sportswear, Reuben Dunn, DevOps practice lead at Freedom in New Zealand, Glenn Sarti, a senior developer at Puppet specializing in Windows, and Chris Hunt, a Windows platform engineer at Ticketmaster who runs a DSC implementation approaching 1,000 nodes on a pull server. Matty works at Chef, after a pre-vendor career mostly as a Windows sysadmin. Liam's cold-open line is that "we're in this age of just kind of madness."

Chris says DSC works, with the caveat that it's challenging. Brandon says it's automation pipelines and ChatOps to expose tasks to groups who don't have the skills or access. Glenn says PowerShell has been an absolute saver, and Reuben adds PowerShell and Chocolatey for distributing everything from desktops to test environments. Matty notes that a robust shell and package management are what the Microsoft world lacked, and that the old automation in VBScript was really macros. Brandon says they don't like to talk about the VBScript days, and Chris says it took about 10 years before they had a way to package and distribute modules.

Matty asks about sharing code in a historically closed-source platform. Liam says many organizations needed Microsoft to make the first move, and that "it required Microsoft to make that first move," because after Ballmer stepped away in 2014 the company got permission to change, and that gave everyone else permission. Chris says Microsoft had a history of building its own version and killing an open source project, and now seems to contribute instead. Glenn says that having worked for banks, military and government, contributing outside the firewall is still a big challenge. Brandon says using open source is a lower barrier than contributing back. Matty says it's often lawyers worried about setting precedent for other IP, and about telling apart plumbing from what's different. Chris says permissive licenses like MIT have helped, since companies now separate plumbing code from business code.

Matty asks whether anyone deploys with Microsoft's stack. Reuben's team uses TeamCity, not VSTS, and objects to building differently on a server than locally, and to the one-pane-of-glass developer experience and right-click publish: "their definition of done, when they're finished is just a package," which is fine for a monolith but makes ops people mad in distributed computing. Matty recalls the stack being built around a developer with a codebase spraying it somewhere, config transforms and a per-seat license of $8,000 to $10,000 for every sysop who needed to deploy, so everything ended up manual.

Liam says culturally "you win most of these places over just by making it easier." Once you beat the Microsoft tool once or twice, people begin to question the rest. Liam sees TeamCity and Jenkins increasingly, and the source control part of VSTS dying quickly as Microsoft itself moves to Git, with the Windows core apparently 40 billion lines of code. Matty ties it to the old "Microsoft is the answer, what's the question" attitude, and to Microsoft's own not using SCOM to monitor microsoft.com. Matty adds that the company has improved by decoupling, and that its leadership and engineers get it, while middle management and sales might not.

Glenn says some people used Windows in the dark days and never want to touch it again, and some new ones love Visual Studio, and Glenn has even met a Linux admin who loves PowerShell. The bigger shift is teaching people to model architecture, since Windows admins are used to next, next, next, finished. Matty compares it to Microsoft's own Office for Mac lesson: a tool should fit where its user's comfort zone is. Glenn says Chef and Puppet need to do a better job onboarding Windows people.

Matty recounts Jeffrey Snover's line that Linux is a document-based operating system and Windows is API-based, which is why IIS, being document-based, is the easy example. Bootstrapping is easy on Linux with SSH, while enterprises turn off WinRM, and securing it means running a command and setting registry keys, not dropping a file. Brandon says onboarding matters because if Windows admins hit roadblock after roadblock, they'll give up. Glenn praises the Docker for Windows installer as the best of both worlds. On DSC, Chris says it's "delightful for about one server, and then after that it starts to go downhill," and Brandon says you need a management platform, which is where Chef and Puppet come in. Matty quotes Snover that DSC is a printer driver and Chef or Puppet is Microsoft Word.

Liam says initial usability of the tools is pretty good now. The roadblock is the second and third step of maturity, managing a whole fleet, and that story isn't told well. It depends on the company: if config management is in an internal IT organization that doesn't think of IT as its business, the jump feels epic. Matty says it's Conway's Law, and that in a low-trust culture people argue with math, as Adam Jacob says. Matty also notes that what vendors consider table stakes, like testing infrastructure code, isn't. Brandon says quite a few admins still use ".bak as their source control system," and one colleague with 30 years in IT said they were learning their job all over again.

Chris thinks Linux configuration management came from developers and Windows from ops. Matty has seen many Windows admins shred PowerShell and many Linux admins who want a click-button tool, and "being bad at command line knows no operating system." Liam calls this a golden age of managing Windows, with config management, Terraform and the PowerShell gallery, yet just as people reskill, the industry pulls the rug out with containers and .NET Core on Kubernetes. Liam sees mostly the other end, legacy apps never written for this, and cites that apparently 30% of Windows workloads on AWS are 32-bit.

Matty's advice is not to boil the ocean or fall into analysis paralysis: don't design high availability before you have one node under management, write some code and improve later, and avoid yaks. The principles, like continuous delivery practice and thinking of infrastructure as code, carry over when tools change, and they are harder than learning any syntax.

Asked for their daily drivers, Brandon uses an old Mac Pro running Windows 10 through Boot Camp, and PowerShell is the indispensable tool, Chris a corporate Lenovo with Visual Studio Code, Glenn a MacBook Pro with Windows 10 and no macOS, with Hyper-V and VS Code, Liam Ubuntu with Atom and a Windows VM, and Reuben a Surface Pro 3. Matty notes it is ironic that VS Code's Git integration is better than Atom's. The checkouts include Liam's pick of Terraform and a forthcoming book on it, Brandon's Operation Validation Framework and Pester, Reuben's Serilog and Seq, Glenn's Neo4j and Flow Perth's hack days for nonprofits, and Chris's GitKraken.

DevOps Cafe w/ Jeffery Snover - Linux is docs based, Windows is API based

Bridget and the show's audio editor, Joe, who joke that if this podcast were the Beatles, Joe would be Ringo, talk about the first DevOpsDays in Havana, Cuba, and share audio recorded in October at the closing session. The event was organized by Rudy of DevOpsDays Ghent as a joint venture between the University of Ghent and the University of Information Sciences (UCI) in Havana. Bridget and Joe joined fellow DevOpsDays organizers from Belgium, Patrick, Bernard and Rudy, and Mike from Dallas, whose fluent Spanish translated for the group, which Bridget says came in handy when explaining vegetarian food. Joe, who was the host for the event, needed some ancient high school Spanish too.

Bridget says the university is worth a visit: it has a giant Android lab and its own Linux distribution, and it sits about a 30-minute drive out of Havana on an old Soviet military base, along a road that was once used as an airstrip. Joe warns the audio sounds like a big echoey room because it was one.

The recording begins with Hugo, an organizer, closing the fourth day, an intense few days in which Hugo saw people learning a lot, and says of the Ignite talks that "everybody was on fire." Hugo thanks the invited speakers, including Patrick, whom Hugo calls one of the founding fathers of DevOps, which is a rare opportunity for Cuba, and who answers "Two words: thank you." Hugo also thanks Bernard, Bridget, Mike for making everything understandable, Joe for the podcast, the local team, and a sponsor that covered all the expenses. Bridget adds that none of it would have happened without Rudy, who has spent years building the Belgian and Cuban cooperation, and leads a standing ovation.

Attendees then line up, in Spanish, with Joe translating in the episode. One says the event was great, interesting, instructional and intense, and that some of what was discussed will make life better and some will make it worse because they'll want to rush to implement it, but that the best part is the friendship. Another says the best part is the sharing of information, knowledge and experience among professionals. Maria Lina thanks the invited guests for dedicating their time and knowledge. A representative of UCI says the event helped identify bottlenecks and important things to do. Bernard says it is a pleasure to have been invited to be in Cuba, with "good weather, good food, good company, good conference."

Bridget asks Patrick Debois, who started DevOpsDays in Belgium in 2009, what was different about this one. Patrick says in other countries people are saturated and wonder if they can learn one more thing, but here people started sharing from the first exercise, with the same enthusiasm as in 2009, when everyone left to take it home to their friends. Patrick says the retirement from DevOpsDays became official two years earlier, and that Bridget is now in a good lead, helping people organize elsewhere.

Bridget asks Enrique what comes next, for the conference and for DevOps in Cuba. Hugo answers, and Joe translates, that that the survey results are coming, everyone wants to do it every year and to keep developing the cultural movement of DevOps, and the idea is to share, and to work with all companies to advance.

Joe, a fan of the Ignite format, says the Cuban participants had never heard of it before they were supposed to give them, and took to it like fish to water. Ignite is a five-minute talk with 20 slides that advance automatically every 15 seconds, which is difficult for first-timers. Bridget says English-speaking Ignite speakers manage about three sentences per slide, while the Spanish speakers were probably putting about six or seven. Joe says they were going a mile a minute, and even catching every fourth or fifth word, they were really good. Joe singles out Henry, the "on fire" speaker, whose Ignite was one of the lead-offs, and Maria Elena, whose evening talk on telenovelas was very funny.

Bridget says of the year's conferences on five continents that this one stands out as significant. The show ends with the banana stand line in Spanish, and Bridget's note that in Cuba the bananas are really plantains.

Bridget and Joe discuss their experiences at devopsdays Cuba and share audio from the closing session.

A few videos of devopsdays Cuba have made it to youtube. They can be found [here.]

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Matty, Trevor and Bridget record a hosts-only year-end episode in December 2016, and most of it is a long tangent about podcasting itself. The agenda, such as it is, covers favorite episodes, site and listen stats, what each of them did in 2016, and what they think the year meant for DevOps. The show notes are thin and Matty knows it. The cold open is Bridget: "Oh my God, we're not going to start talking about the process of podcasting again. Moving on."

The episode starts with a supercut of the year's cold opens, which Matty describes as the lazy route: in the first year-end show Matty tried to make a highlight reel and had to listen to every episode, but now "you only have to listen to the first 5 seconds of our show." Matty also says the cold opens only started this year, and that Joe, the new audio editor, picks them and keeps surprising Matty.

Listeners keep asking for better audio quality, and the hosts agree Hangouts is a poor choice but the "lowest common denominator": nobody has ever said they couldn't use it. They've tried other tools at least half a dozen times, including TriCast and Zencastr, and Trevor says that "every time we actually go to do it, something goes catastrophically wrong," usually with three hosts and a panel of guests. Matty says the show is unusual, since most podcasts have one host or a host pair in a room, and a panel show with few repeat panelists is "0.00001% of podcasts out there," so the software isn't built for it. Bridget's takeaway for anyone thinking of starting a podcast: "software is terrible." Matty also notes that two-person episodes are the easiest to edit, and that pre-recorded sponsor pre-rolls replaced the hosts reading them live.

This was also the year of cross-podcast episodes released on other shows' feeds, with the Goat Farm and Software Defined Talk, and a DevOpsDays Dallas super-episode with Software Defined Talk and Food Fight. Matty floated a roundtable of podcast hosts talking about how they make their shows, and every host who replied said nobody would care.

Bridget's favorite is the first episode of 2016, on platforms, which set a bar the year managed to live up to. Trevor picks the DevOpsDays Dallas episode and one recorded in Singapore, where people "are getting all the concepts that we're talking about now, but they didn't have to go through all the pain." Bridget compares it to skipping landlines and going straight to cellular.

Matty's picks:

Matty adds that the show gets "one episode a year to be self-indulgent," and this is it.

On the numbers, Matty notes that the website had about 16,000 unique visitors, almost half of traffic comes from search, and Twitter accounts for 6 percent. The number one search term is Arrested DevOps. 1 percent of traffic came from being listed in the Hugo gallery, and another podcast turned out to be using the show's Hugo theme, which Bridget discovered through a Google alert on a name. Matty then wrote a Hugo theme for podcasters. Listens were 232,200 against 204,001 in 2015 with about the same number of episodes, so Matty reads audio popularity as roughly flat. The most listened-to episode was Application Configuration with Adam Jacob and Tim Gross. The most watched video was Bridget's fireside chat with Bryan Cantrill, at almost 2,000 views, then the containers and security episode with Jess and Ben Hughes at about 1,200, then the Jeffrey Snover episode recorded in 2014. Matty credits big personalities and topics people are hungry for, and that if every episode were a chat with a personality the show wouldn't have lasted, and without any it would have burned out.

Matty also tells the story of a blog post that put a personal site on the front page of Reddit, and after Bridget asks, agrees to take down a post a commenter had asked to have removed.

Matty traveled little, lost status on everything, spoke twice (Pink16 and a CloudBees Jenkins conference in Chicago), attended one DevOpsDays, Chicago, which Matty ran, and got married. Trevor spent months leading a data center transformation in Asia-Pacific, saw Hong Kong, Singapore and Tokyo, and says staying on Singapore hours "broke me in some way," which is when Trevor understood burnout. Trevor spoke at the PowerShell Summit in Singapore and at ChefConf, moved to Los Angeles and joined Chef in the same role Matty holds. Trevor also recounts applying for an evangelist job at the lowest point of the burnout, and Matty adds that it was mature of a hiring manager not to hire for the wrong role at the wrong time. Bridget's advice is not to compromise on what you'll be happy doing and where you want to live.

Bridget gave about 25 talks, visited DevOpsDays in London, Toronto, New York, Detroit, Havana, Philadelphia, Madison and Sydney while running Minneapolis, and with Joe covered five continents. The plan had been to travel less, which became "the gamification of poor life choices" once the airline status arrived. Matty says the remote-work life has made travel something to dread, and that roles built on being in the room with customers make it hard to avoid. Trevor calls elite status "the worst wonderful thing in the world."

Matty's read of the year: "this was a year when we stopped talking about doing shit and we just started doing shit." After the empathy talks of 2014 and the thinking of 2015, people in the open spaces at DevOpsDays Chicago were talking as peers who were all doing it, instead of sitting at the feet of thought leaders.

Bridget says DevOpsDays grew from about 22 cities in 2015 to 42 cities on 6 continents in 2016, with first-time events in places like Istanbul, Porto Alegre, Raleigh, Kansas City, Philadelphia and Cape Town, and Moscow, Beijing and Zurich planned for 2017. Matty joined the core team as web team lead, doing the work behind the scenes of the site so that updating it is easier, while deliberately keeping the Git requirement: "we want to make it delightful but not easy." Bridget has notes on the mockup colors, asking only for better contrast.

Matt, Trevor, and Bridget chat (at length) about podcasts, podcast recording, and podcast recording software. Oh, and the highlights of 2016 if they get around to it. (Don't miss the supercut of all 2016's cold opens, which was edited by Joe, even though Matt takes credit for it!)

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photo credit 1, photo credit 2

Bridget records a live panel at DevOpsDays Sydney, held in the Sydney Masonic Centre, as a co-production with Software Defined Talk, whose Matt Ray guest hosts. Matt Ray moved to Sydney in July to build a footprint for Chef and do evangelism, and says Chef sponsors as many DevOpsDays as it can to build community. The panel is Katie McLaughlin, a first-year organizer who ended up emceeing the whole event, Lindsay Holmwood, who spoke first that morning, Matthew Jones, an organizer who runs the Melbourne meetup, and Mick Pollard, who goes by Aussie Linux and is attending. It's Bridget's first time in Australia, and Bridget wants a photo on one of the building's many thrones.

Lindsay and Mick started the first ever DevOps meetup, in February 2010, and Matthew says Sydney's DevOpsDays in 2010 was the second one outside Ghent, making it the longest running. Mick says the reason was that at the end of 2009 Mick worked at a startup that missed its next round of funding, and everyone was fired one morning. With no name in the industry and no community events behind them, Mick did the hard slog of job hunting and decided no one should have to. So the meetup would be inclusive, not just for practitioners but recruiters and anyone else, and helping people find jobs is the only reward Mick needs. Lindsay says they're actively inclusive of recruiters, on the condition they don't cold-call the members, and sees them as allies.

Katie says the event has skipped beer at the first-day activities, with bowling instead, for the past two years, which helped attendance the next morning. Lindsay gave an opening talk at the 2013 Sydney event, and says this year's attendance was spectacular by comparison.

Matthew likes that half of DevOpsDays is open spaces, shaped by attendees and not organizers. Lindsay says there are no silent witnesses, and people who participate most enjoy it most. Matt Ray, as a vendor and former organizer, says a table isn't the point, since you have to show up and talk. Lindsay says at corporate events the contrast is stark, and that at DevOpsDays a vendor person is just an actual person.

The challenge is selling open spaces in Australia to people who haven't been. Mick passed along feedback from someone asking "why am I giving you money to come to a conference that has no speakers." Bridget says about 85% of any room has never been to one, so the stock template now says attendee-suggested breakout sessions instead of open. Katie calls it "a supercharged hallway track and some talks," and says the conference emphasizes that talks are recorded so you don't have to attend them all, and people travel to meet people. Mick heard a non-technical attendee say they felt very involved.

Lindsay's morning talk was about building teams as complex distributed systems made of humans. Lindsay came for the technology in Ghent in 2009, when people wanted agile systems administration, and found that "none of the technology problems are the hard ones in our industry. It's actually people." Matt Ray says the talks break into technology like containers, and how to do DevOps with people in the enterprise, like getting your boss to listen. Lindsay says functions as a service is a fundamental game changer, and expects the talks in two or three years to be about different technology. Matt Ray says last year and the year before were about containers, and "The people problems never go away." Matthew notes recurring topics of DevOps and the rest of the business, including an Ignite about finance and DevOps, and security. Katie says language communities are picking up on culture, hiring, diversity and inclusion, and that a linguist gave the closing keynote, and adds that organizer burnout is real, which is part of why Katie volunteers.

Matt Ray doesn't sense the same fear of competition in Australia as in the States, where Amazon and Walmart are torching retail. Lindsay pitches changing technical practices to government by saying you want to go faster to deliver value and meet user needs, and that "going fast and being safe, they are not mutually exclusive." The Puppet survey stats show fast teams recover from failure faster, and Matt Ray calls it compliance at velocity. Lindsay says the government's Digital Transformation Agency supports hundreds of apps with a team of two. Matthew says Australians are open at meetups, but US and European companies moving in are bringing an NDA culture, which Matthew is mindful of as an organizer.

Mick says more effort is going into what developers deliver and less into the operating system: "The OS layer is really more a utility these days," like a tap you turn on without wondering where the water comes from. Katie, who is newer to ops, says there is still gap filling and legacy work, since not everyone is running containerless Lambda functions. Lindsay says operations will consolidate, with fewer of those jobs, so learn at least one other programming language, since you can help developers who now can get things running easily. Matt Ray adds that there are more places things can go wrong, so operability wisdom still matters, and that "there's always gonna be servers somewhere." Matthew says the future is about people, and adds that everyone talks about business value but should remember the customer who pays you. Bridget ties it together with the electricity generated on a river in Appleton, Wisconsin, and says you decide what to abstract away, and which to pay someone else to do.

Bridget and special guest host Matt Ray of Software Defined Talk chat with Matthew Jones, Lindsay Holmwood, Mick Pollard, and Katie McLaughlin at devopsdays Sydney 2016.

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Bridget chats with Julia Evans, a software developer at Stripe who lives in Montreal, writes a blog about what they learn, and makes paper zines and comics about it. Bridget's framing is that of everyone Bridget knows, Julia is the most excited about learning, so the topic is discovery: what to learn, how to find it, and how to ask for help. At Stripe, Julia works on making programs run on the company's AWS instances and making that easier for developers. The cold open is Julia's story of running out of inodes, and vowing to tell the world you can.

Julia has been trying to understand distributed systems in a way that maps to a real system. Stripe cares about both consistency and availability, though some systems can be a little less consistent than others. They say it took a long time to get the CAP theorem even with a math degree. Strong consistency means linearizable, meaning all the actions in the system can be put on a line, which is a very strong property, and availability means people can use the database. Because networks partition, you can't have both at once. Bridget cites Katie McCaffrey's point that you don't get to choose to skip partitions, and Julia adds garbage collection pauses as another way a system goes quiet. Bridget mentions the Juliet pause Bridget saw running HBase, where a system decides the other side is dead and kills itself.

At Strange Loop, Julia told Martin Kleppmann they were confused about the CAP theorem, and Kleppmann said not to pay attention to it, since there are more interesting things to say. Julia read Kleppmann's paper, A Critique of the CAP Theorem, the night before. It proposes thinking about what happens to reads and writes when the network is slow: a linearizable system has slow reads and writes, a weaker causal consistency has fast reads and writes, and some intermediate models have slow writes and fast reads. That is a richer model than CAP's two scenarios but not a complicated one, and it describes a replicated database that writes to a primary and reads from a secondary, which CAP doesn't help you reason about.

Julia mostly doesn't read papers. They go to Papers We Love in Montreal, listen, and ask dumb questions, and they read a paper when someone hands over a printed copy. What motivates them is a feeling of not understanding: "I got all the words, but I still don't really understand what's happening." They spend time being uncomfortable about how well they understand something and asking why, and with CAP the answer may be that the theorem isn't the answer to their questions, not that they're missing something. Bridget says people in tech are drawn to things that sound like answers.

Julia is on the team that owns service discovery, didn't set it up, and wrote the blog post after giving an internal talk to solidify their own understanding. If you lose instances, you don't need service discovery, since load balancers do health checks. It matters for registering new nodes. Before, Stripe used Puppet to write a configuration file on an HAProxy load balancer listing the nodes, which was slow and toilsome. Consul runs an agent on each host that reports what it is running to the Consul servers, which hold a database you can query.

The interesting part is consistency. Consul is strongly consistent, so it sometimes says it is having a leader election and gives no servers, and "Consul was like too consistent." For service discovery, "a lot of the time you don't really care if your results are exactly right. You just want to be mostly right." So Stripe uses Consul Template to generate an HAProxy configuration file every minute, which stays in place if Consul goes away, so the worst case is a slightly old list of servers. HAProxy does a graceful reload, forking so the old process handles old connections. Health checking happens in the load balancer, separately from Consul.

Julia started blogging at the Recurse Center three years earlier, writing a post every day about what they learned, joking it was a media strategy to get a job, and it worked. Their rule was that it doesn't have to be perfect. Bridget appreciates that they say what they don't know, and Julia says it matters at work too: when they joined the team they didn't know how the service discovery cluster worked, and now they do and can work on it responsibly.

Most of Julia's team, and most of the teams they've worked on for almost three years, is remote. They are aggressive about asking questions. When they joined a data infrastructure team, on the plane back from San Francisco they interrogated people about every noun they didn't understand, from HBase to Spark to YARN. They use Slack, sometimes schedule a Hangout, and visit San Francisco, and once gave a colleague who set up the cluster a list of questions. They think it helps the person who built it to hand a system off, since it's bad to be in charge of something forever, and Bridget says being territorial won't get you promoted.

Julia describes a zine as a tiny magazine about something you love. In 2014 they were giving a PyCon talk about Linux debugging tools, and people asked what to read afterward, and the links didn't get read. Inspired by a movie about riot grrrl and fanzines, they wrote a zine about strace to hand out at the talk. Bridget saw copies at DevOpsDays New York. They made a second zine in September about Linux debugging tools.

For comics, someone suggested a cute drawing at the top of the service discovery post, and Julia drew it on a six-hour flight. The person said the post was much easier to understand from the drawing, which works as a summary tool. They also drew the eight steps for setting up a new web service at Stripe. On Twitter, images communicate more, and a comic on /proc took off. The inodes comic came from running out of them once. Every inode lives in a flat numbered array on disk, and Bridget notes it's possible to run out. Julia says everyone has a day when they learn that, and it's better if it's when they read an adorable comic than while troubleshooting.

Julia's interest in containers is about making infrastructure easier for Stripe developers, and they find the Kubernetes hype frustrating. The appeal is a uniform infrastructure where every box is configured the same and all the special snowflake configuration lives in the container, so that setting up a new service is less work. Containers have been very successful on the desktop as a developer tool, but people conflate that with production, where it is less clear. Utilization makes sense as a business reason, though 99% is too high, and going from 20% to 80% would be reasonable. Bridget asks what business problem you're solving.

Julia says they became more excited about learning at the Recurse Center, with 12 weeks to learn whatever they wanted, and got stuck learning things all the time. Bridget notes their employer lets them stretch, unlike places that just want you to ship. Julia says asking questions is a skill, and that "I don't understand" is not a very good question. They try to understand it a bit alone, then describe how they think it works to someone and ask them to check their understanding, and they wrote a blog post on asking questions. They also have an unshakable confidence that they can figure things out, and think "I haven't taken the time to learn it" and not "this is too hard." Learning one thing at a time adds up, and "no one has ever anointed me the expert of anything." Their comfort limit is the Linux kernel code.

Bridget takes the opportunity to talk about CFPs, and Julia says the first conference talk they gave was at PyCon Canada, after the person who runs Montreal Python told them to submit, and they said someone had already talked on the topic. The organizer said it didn't matter, and both talks turned out to be great.

Distributed systems, service discovery, load balancing: Service Discovery at Stripe

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The week the Cubs won the World Series, Pauly Comtois finally comes on the show, after Matty kept saying they should do this eventually. Pauly is the VP of DevOps at Hearst Business Media and a former VP of Operations at Chef, where Matty works now. The conversation is about driving a DevOps transformation across a company made of independent business units, and about staying an engineer while doing it. Pauly opens with the line Pauly returns to at the end: "As a great conductor, I don't know how to play every instrument, but I know how they should sound and how they should sound together."

Pauly's background is varied. Pauly worked on the F-117 stealth fighter in the Air Force, then moved into telecom and satellites, did development, got roped into being a network engineer because the company didn't have one, and then moved back to development and operations. At Silverpop in Atlanta, Pauly started digging into DevOps, after some cultural and tooling transformations, and found Chef, after starting with a few other tools, some homegrown. Pauly then bumped into a Chef employee at a bar in Seattle who said they were looking for an ops leader, and moved the family to Seattle, where Pauly spent about three and a half years as VP of Operations at Chef, talking to customers at different maturity levels. Hearst Business Media has 10 business units going through transformations to agile, lean and DevOps, and they hired Pauly as VP of DevOps. Pauly tried to talk them out of the title. Pauly's job for the last two years has been building a DevOps community across ten islands that interact mainly at the senior leadership level.

Matty says that's common, and relates a story from a Chef customer's private community where someone asked why a person from another business unit was telling them something. Pauly says the first hurdle was building trust with each unit, since a VP title can be menacing, and the second was the belief that DevOps works everywhere else but not here because "we're a unique snowflake." Pauly's response was "you're incredibly unique, just like everybody else": where humans are involved there is a limited set of emotions, and those shape culture. Drawing a ten-circle Venn diagram showed more overlap than they expected, in language and tools if not process. The magic, Pauly says, was seeing people help each other who hadn't known each other a week earlier, including during outages, for no reward beyond paying it forward.

Matty says it's more facilitating a community than building one, since a community forms out of humans and you can stymie it but not force it. Matty shares the opposite: at a previous employer, a bank, Matty and later colleagues at Apartments.com found they had worked on the same product one floor apart, dev and ops, without ever meeting. Matty also quotes Sascha Bates that every snowflake has six sides.

Pauly agrees with Matty's "don't take a framework and make it dogma," and admits to originally going in looking for economies of scale, which was the wrong approach, so the choice of tools came off the table, since business units have the context. One level up, Pauly looked at common SDLC approaches, without change for change's sake: work that is cyclical, with a fixed start and end each year, may not need agile at all. Big bang plans like everyone being 100% agile and in the cloud by August were dropped, since it's like throwing someone in an icy pond instead of teaching them to swim. Instead they changed processes iteratively, with DevOps principles underneath, like turning up the water on the frog. Facilitation is guiding, not dictating, and some people won't come along.

Matty tells of a sysadmin asking how to make developers follow a process, and Matty's answer was to make the right way the easiest way, which the book Switch validated. Change annoys people because learning a process isn't their job. Pauly says ops people are so mired in daily brushfires they don't do fire prevention, so you show the investment makes their life easier, and they join organically. Matty says a cultural change has users, and the UX of that change matters, so put yourself in the ops person's shoes, and that "Everything's a product."

Pauly's principle is to work with the downstream work center in mind, since every customer in the value stream matters, and if work has to be sent back that is waste, measured as percent complete and accurate. Matty says the easiest waste to hammer home is people's time, and that, as Damon said, we should just call it common sense.

Pauly says the value stream mapping workshops turned out to be the most powerful tool, because everyone is in the room at once. Pauly adds that most of the time what someone cares about isn't the root cause, so you dig as with five whys, since "fixing the output doesn't fix the cause": Pauly compares it to giving a cough drop to someone diagnosed with lung cancer. Pauly's example is a color the customer wanted blue that was never specified, fixed each time, while the feedback loop from product never improves. They use Little's Law for efficiency ratings, and numbers on lead time, process time and percent complete and accurate, which confirm what people already feel. Matty says decisions from the gut are reactive, like the screaming customer versus the quiet one buying less, and that data doesn't have to be numbers, and Pauly says use your gut, but don't fly at night with no lights, or stare only at instruments.

Pauly says every workshop has one person with folded arms who rolls their eyes, and "that person should have representation." Matty recalls a proof of concept where a skeptic turned out to be the biggest champion, telling stakeholders to go buy it. Pauly says being a facilitator means letting that person be heard, and that they may either join or opt out, and leaving is a fine outcome. Pauly also cautions against forcing the top engineer, the Brent, through a transformation, which hurts the organization and the person. Matty recalls Adam Jacob saying most people want to do good work and haven't had the opportunity for a long time, that some people just don't want to be on the bleeding edge, and that change agents have to think like salespeople and understand drivers, as in Adam Jacob's talk on the five love languages of DevOps and the Bill Joy episode.

A listener, Michael Lombardi, asks whether companies should pay employees to attend and speak at conferences. Pauly says employees should get paid T&E and not take PTO, with common sense, and got the business unit leaders to go to the DevOps Enterprise Summit, which was an aha moment for them. Pauly has stopped going to purely technical conferences where Pauly doesn't gain anything. Pauly worries paying people to speak could push an agenda, and describes a DevOps conference in New York that was a day of sales pitches. Matty says DevOpsDays are strict about vendor pitches, and tells of a manager who offered a cash bounty per talk, which only rewarded people who were already speaking. Pauly says pushing someone terrified of speaking hurts quality, and a blog post is another medium, and Matty adds a podcast. Matty warns that an engineer who speaks constantly becomes a better speaker and a less awesome engineer, unlike a full-time evangelist. Both suggest bringing back an internal blog post or brown bag, and rotating who goes so no one becomes a conference pariah.

Matty loves seeing a big-muckety-muck VP in a customer's Slack talking about attribute precedence. Pauly loves being an engineer, and says that if the role doesn't allow building, Pauly will create an open source project. Pauly has to speak engineers' language, and when visiting a business unit and offered an office, Pauly sits in the queue with everyone else, because engineers can put on a show for a day but then start complaining across the walls, and that unvarnished view is the real world. Pauly works with CTOs, CEOs of business units and new engineers, and says the exposure is incredible.

Matty admits to over-engineering a Go application for the DevOpsDays website partly to keep chops up. Pauly says it's less about street cred, since developers will sniff out bluffing quickly, and more like speaking Spanish: saying hola gets you a torrent of Spanish, so you have to understand how it works. Pauly tells of building an elaborate Lego train and Arduino plan to wean a son off a sound machine when Pauly's wife suggested turning it down a little each night, and the domain name was already bought. Pauly points to Adam Jacob, who never stopped loving technology, as a guide.

Pauly's checkouts are the DevOps Enterprise Summit talk, which will be delivered as a story about middle managers in a transformation, and DevOpsDays Kansas City, and Pauly is starting a blog called DevOps Therapist next year.

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Matty, a Chicago native who has worked in the city's IT world for about 20 years, gathers three local DevOps people to ask what makes technology and DevOps in Chicago different. The idea came from something J. Paul Reed said on the show after DevOpsDays Chicago in 2014, that the companies there were doing real things and not "Uber for kittens." Jeff Smith manages site reliability engineering at Grubhub, where Jeff has also been the DevOps cheerleader for about two and a half to three years. Jerry Cattell is VP of engineering at a small, fully remote medical startup, and an organizer of the Chicago DevOps meetup and DevOpsDays Chicago. Sameer Doshi is a DevOps architect at kCura, a legal e-discovery company moving from an on-premise product to a hybrid and SaaS offering. The recording happens during Game 5 of the Cubs and Dodgers series, and Matty gives score updates throughout.

All four have crossed paths before. Matty traces how Classified Ventures, the company behind cars.com and apartments.com, is connected to Grubhub through people who left HomeFinder. Jeff recalls meeting Grubhub's CEO at a Twitter meetup around 2007 and turning down the startup for a safe job at Accenture. Jeff adds that Chicago feels like a really tight community where you keep running into the same people, so it doesn't pay to burn a bridge on the way out.

Sameer moved from Boston and New York, including a stint at Citi, and found a work culture that felt like a family. On starting at kCura, Sameer looked through the Outlook directory and recognized Matty and Trevor from the podcast. Jerry grew up in Miami, worked for FedEx swapping out computers for Y2K in tropical places, and spent four or five years in the Bay Area, through the crash. When Jerry's wife got an opportunity in Chicago around 2003, all that could be found online was banks, until Orbitz stood out. Jerry notes the meetup gets hosts, sponsors and speakers whenever it wants. Jeff says that in upstate New York there was information hoarding, and in Chicago people were humble, cognizant of imposter syndrome and willing to mentor.

Matty says the Midwest adopts things after they hit the West Coast and then the East Coast banks, and that Chicago has very traditional IT and a lot of startups with little in between. Jeff says it comes from Midwest practicality: the region isn't interested in the brand-new shiny, it's about "solving actual problems. And generating revenue." Businesses here have straightforward models, like delivering food and taking a slice, and Jeff tells the team to ask, "How does this help us deliver food better?" Jerry counters that innovation still comes out of Chicago: Graphite was developed at Orbitz, and Gogo had just presented Foremast at the meetup, a tool to automate Spinnaker pipelines. Matty calls it pragmatic innovation, like Etsy's, solving a real itch. Sameer adds that this leads to an iterative approach, where you can share work in progress and get "this is great progress" and not "you've got a long way to go." Jerry says the solutions from Netflix and Google look cool but aren't the scale of problem Jerry deals with.

Jeff reminds the audience that big, slow institutions are still bringing in revenue, and that people from them at DevOpsDays feel left behind. Jeff's message is that you may not be able to move as fast as others, but that doesn't mean you have to sit still.

Matty says that two years ago at DevOpsDays Chicago the story from traditional companies was "this will never work here," and now it's "this is really hard and we're not moving as fast as I wish we were," which is a sign you can do something about it. Jerry says the meetup, held downtown at 5:30, still misses suburban companies, though they post videos.

Jeff says DevOps doesn't have to be a top-down transformation: pair with the developer you work with most for half an hour a day, or have lunch with the team for the service you support. It spreads, and exposure between teams reveals "learned helplessness" on both sides, like developers who don't have access to log aggregation or ops people who restart the same service every night. Jeff tells of visiting the NOC, hearing a PagerDuty alert for a Splunk log velocity threshold, and turning it off on the spot, and getting donuts. Sameer says it's also middle-out, with a central team establishing practices and engineers deciding on their own to speed up deployments, and describes an ideal of engineers deploying to production with supporting people embedded on the team.

Matty says wherever you work, part of your organization is already doing this. Matty adds that a mandate from a Fortune 10 CIO won't magically create DevOps, and that managing sysadmins means being the person who says "I know you can think of 100 reasons why this won't work. For a minute, let's just pretend it will." Sameer spent five years implementing config management at Citi, sometimes tracking changes quietly when told to just get it done. Matty tells the story of learning Chef out of spite when told it would take a year and tens of thousands of dollars in training, and says that's not recommended.

Jerry names Gogo, Hyatt, which is moving website work to Docker, Braintree, DRW, which is doing a lot of bare metal DevOps, and ThoughtWorks. Jeff likes the way Hyatt is building a startup-like DevOps culture inside a big company, and Jerry says US Foods, around for 100 years, began with a single new application. Matty warns you have to avoid "bimodal" as an end state, and points to Target's dojo, which starts small but is for everyone. Jeff treats bimodal as a transitional state, and says that a pilot makes other managers say they want that. Matty says pilot it, stack the deck, and beware that people want the magic button, which was the point missed in the 10 deploys a day talk. Matty adds McDonald's, Walgreens, Hyatt and the Mercantile Exchange, which need velocity with safety. Sameer adds that Morningstar rotates developers through ops teams, and Jerry adds 1871, the incubator. Jeff says the startup challenges Jeff took part in felt very Midwest: less about technology, more about the minimum viable thing.

Matty ends by noting that Chicago's DevOps meetup has the best URL, meetup.com/devops, which to Matty means Chicago invented DevOps.

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Don't forget to check out the book itself! The Art of Monitoring.

Back in the day, James also wrote a book called Pro Nagios 2.0.

Three stages of monitoring maturity:

"You will eventually get to CPU, memory, and disk, but a lot later after you start with the things you should really care about" - James

"Too much monitoring is binary - this thing either works or it doesn’t" - James

Also mentioned:

Where we’ll be for the upcoming fortnight

If you have an upcoming conference you would like to see promoted on ADO, you can fill out the handy form at arresteddevops.com/conf

For any devopsdays, try the code ADO2016! It should get you 20% off.

For more DevOps awesomeness, check out the Chef Community Summit, October 26th and 27th in Seattle, WA. This Open Space event provides a great opportunity to connect with the DevOps Community and Chef Engineers over two days of engaging sessions and hallway discussions. Bring your ideas, passion and excitement for Chef and DevOps to this highly interactive event. Go to summit.chef.io to register for this awesome event and use the code ARRESTEDDEVOPS to get 10% off your ticket!

Trevor records a "supershow" at the very first DevOpsDays Dallas, combining Arrested DevOps with the Food Fight Show and Software Defined Talk, so the panel is a mix of hosts, organizers and audience. Nathen Harvey co-hosts Food Fight, Coté (Michael Coté) does Software Defined Talk and works at Pivotal, and Michael and Annie Hedgpeth are two of the organizers. Michael is a software architect at NCR working on DevOps for its hospitality group, and Annie is a new cloud automation engineer at 10th Magnitude, Trevor's employer. Dillon Culpepper, a developer at Code Authority who works in .NET and Azure, is an attendee. The show opens with Coté noting that "if you're up on your myth, heroes always get brutally punished."

Annie says they had a little over 300 people, with everything going off without a hitch, and they wanted to be Texan but different from Austin, which has a huge DevOpsDays. Annie adds that many attendees were new to DevOps, and there were people around to mentor them. Michael says the reward is realizing the months of work helped people change their lives, and when Nathen asked on day one who was at their first conference, people stood up. The show-of-hands exercise, repeated for the recording, gives about 20 of 100 who had been to a DevOpsDays before.

Michael tells how the organizing came about: a local group called DevOps Live decided on a DevOpsDays, and Michael had read an old email from Doug Ireton about a conference open space where a bullet point said DevOpsDays needs more women organizers. Annie was looking at a career transition, and Michael suggested organizing, since Annie "can organize a conference." Annie became the sponsor liaison and raised money from about 25 sponsors. Michael watched the kids on Wednesday nights during Annie's sponsor meetings, and three weeks in got a text asking if Michael wanted to handle speakers and emcee.

Nathen was adamant about a single track. When you have choices, you go where you're comfortable, and Nathen heard people say they never would have gone to a networking automation talk, but they got a lot out of it. Michael, who had only been to Austin's multi-track event, mixed technical and culture talks on purpose and picked speakers from networking, security and development backgrounds. It's about empathy and common ground for faster delivery, and Nathen adds: "Imagine a DevOps conference where there was a dev track and an ops track." Dillon, who normally focuses on Microsoft subjects, found the exposure to different speakers surprising and delightful.

Nathen says the first DevOpsDays in a city is special because the community has two days to gel, and 90 to 95% of the audience lived within 40 miles. Coté says a lot of business and IT happens in North Texas and few people know it, and likes talking to "normal people doing normal things," since heroes are heroic and that gets boring. Trevor says the weekend brought a first: Dillon recognized Trevor from the podcast, which recalled the experience of meeting people Trevor admired, and it was the first conference where Trevor felt past imposter syndrome and unafraid to share thoughts.

Audience members share their reactions. Reuben Garrett, a Unix sysadmin at IBM SoftLayer, attending a first professional conference, wanted more technical talks but was glad for JJ's Ignite on introverts at conferences and a talk about empowering women in tech. Jean Bennett had been to many conferences but never a DevOpsDays, and the single track and open space worked well even though Jean isn't very technical. Jean is "a talkative introvert." Clay Schroeder of CBRE brought nine people, which would have been hard in Austin with travel and hotels. Michael says at NCR only a small group gets sent to conferences on planes, and this one had no hotel and an inexpensive ticket. Annie says leftover sponsor money can go back into DevOps Live to keep the community going.

Michael says the mix of speakers, including Franklin Mosley, whose security talk was a first at any conference, made the event more engaging than an all-heroes lineup, since the authenticity engaged the audience. Trevor says DevOpsDays is a great place to give a first talk, and that Trevor's was at ChefConf after about three weeks of Chef work, which was much more intimidating than a smaller venue would have been. Nathen says "you should build local celebrities within that meetup" instead of flying in people with name recognition.

Coté values meeting people who think differently about obvious things, and says it's fun to sort out the confusion on both sides. Coté recalls introducing Scrum at BMC around 2003 or 2004, when as a snarky young developer Coté figured they were replacing nothing, since nothing existed. Nathen says some attendees ended the first day asking what exactly DevOps is, and the answer on stage was that it's a journey, not something you finish after 18 months. Dillon found the most clarity in open spaces, since people shared similar problems and Dillon heard three or four different valid answers.

Michael and Annie stayed up until midnight after the kids went to bed working on InSpec profiles and pull requests, and Michael realized that "when you know something and you become the expert, you start to forget what it's like to learn it, and you lose empathy for people." Watching Annie struggle with something obvious to Michael made Michael a better change agent. Trevor says teaching others Chef while still green did the same for Trevor. Michael adds "you kind of don't learn empathy until you come across somebody who's disagreeing with you."

Michael asks how to get bosses to attend, and Coté says to figure out their motivations and goals, and either free up their barriers or be persuasive that unless management is involved it won't work at scale. Coté suggests giving them permission to attend, getting them on a panel like a hot dog on a string, sending them recorded talks, and writing up your conference notes as things to do here, not just what happened, and being ready for homework. Nathen suggests inviting managers to speak at a meetup to say what keeps them up at night, and points to books like The Phoenix Project as an audiobook and Mark Schwartz's book on business value, at 98 pages, and the DevOps Enterprise Summit. Annie suggests finding three or four of the boss's pain points and solving one in a DevOps way with a tiny project.

An audience member asks when you reach success with DevOps. Nathen gives the definition that Adam and Nathen use: "DevOps is a cultural and professional movement focused on how we build and operate high-velocity organizations built from the experiences of its practitioners." Nathen isn't sure all of NCR is bought in, but Michael is doing DevOps, and they treat it as planting the flag. Michael cites Toyota Kata: on Monday, set a target two weeks out in the direction of the goal state, like having lunch with someone to ask their pain points and mapping them to what automation could solve, and then create win after win. Nathen ends by saying that when you reach a milestone, stop to market and share it across the organization, and that you'll feel like you're telling the same story again and again, which is fine, since you're telling it to fresh ears.

Bridget sits down with Bryan Cantrill, CTO of Joyent and self-described agent provocateur, and lets the conversation wander from containers to open source economics to production empathy to computational literacy and, eventually, climate change and WarGames. They never settle on a title, and Bryan ends by apologizing for the "random tour" through disconnected things. The cold open sets the tone: "we're a couple of apathetic Xers," for whom a sense of community is something you make fun of on The Simpsons.

Bryan has just come from HashiConf, where the guest gave the closing keynote and, for the first time, used a physical prop: a 3.5-inch floppy disk to make a point about hardware virtualization. Bryan explains that the disk is a skeuomorph, like the save icon or the fake wood grain on a station wagon, and says "I do think that VMs are skeuomorph." Your VM has a floppy controller, and these legacy devices have no place in a modern container architecture. Worse, Bryan says, provisioning containers inside virtual machines on hardware wastes resources, "and this can't last forever."

Most containers today run inside VMs, a layer people don't see, and Bridget raises the objection that unprivileged containers may not be production-ready without another security layer around them. Bryan is up front that this is talking one's book: SmartOS and Triton have run containers securely on the metal for over a decade, with zones designed to be completely isolated. Bryan contrasts that design center with Linux, where "containers" are really namespaces and cgroups that cut across the system. The guest draws a parallel to ZFS and DTrace, designed to be production-ready on day zero, and says the difference between a facility at birth and later is the scope of features, not readiness.

Bridget concedes that Linux won, and Bryan refines it: what won is the Linux binary interface. Because that is settled, Joyent implemented a Linux system call table for SmartOS, so a Linux stack can run in a Triton zone and looks like a VM but is a container on the metal. Bryan notes that FreeBSD and Windows have done something similar, including Bash on Windows, a phrase Bryan never expected to hear in a sentence. The guest believes open source has won an unconditional victory, and everything in the container ecosystem, from Kubernetes to Docker Swarm to BOSH, is open. That is why Joyent implemented the Docker Remote API, to have Docker without the Docker engine, and why Bryan wants an API separate from its implementation, so people can compete on the engine.

On the rumored Docker fork, Bryan says people shouldn't talk about forking, they should do it or not, and suspects some who talk are goading others. The guest would rather see de novo implementations of a stable Docker Remote API than a fork of the engine. Bryan advises people not to get swept up by vendors with an agenda: the people ginning up a fork have a solution in search of a problem, not a problem to solve. Bridget raises Red Hat's downstream patches, and Bryan says "I am a much stronger believer in incompetence than malice," since there are 20,000 issues on those repositories. Bridget adds that taking a patch is like adopting a free puppy.

Bryan says Joyent open sourced its stack almost two years earlier and found it wasn't enough, because the design discussions were still in hallways and chat rooms: "we actually need to be open sourcing our thinking, not just our code." Their answer was requests for discussion, or RFDs, written in an RFC style, which anyone can search to see the Triton roadmap. Customers read them and react to specific numbers. Bryan thinks design discussion in GitHub issues is an anti-pattern, since an issue gets closed and the valuable discussion is buried.

Bridget says the Cloud Foundry Foundation is valuable because employees of competitors pair on the open source project. Bryan, who is involved with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, says it is still finding its footing and it can't be the Kubernetes Foundation: "If we are the Kubernetes Foundation, then we have failed." Bryan wants the CNCF to have as public a mission as it can, contrasting a nonprofit with a public mission and an industry consortium, and says its constituents should be the people running and contributing to the infrastructure, not the vendors that paid for a seat.

Bridget respects companies that pay employees to write open source, including Joyent. Bryan objects to the GitHub resume because contributions to a fork don't show up on your activity. SmartOS and Illumos Joyent are GitHub forks of Illumos, so Bryan's own history looks empty. Bridget says paying people means they can write open source all day, then go home and not write more when exhausted.

Bryan says we're deep into what Bryan called supply-side open source a decade earlier, where infrastructure comes from companies dedicated to it, and asks how you monetize it. The guest thinks the era of proprietary software will be completely over, using ZFS as an example of a substrate where duplicated effort is over. In Bryan's view, people won't pay for the software, but for running a cloud, a service or metal, and for support: they will pay "for the ability to pick up the phone in the middle of the night and call for an upgrade that has gone sideways." Bridget says Cloud Foundry customers pay for integrations they could build but don't have time to. Bryan adds that if you intend to be the one who picks up the phone, it pushes you to make the software as reliable as possible, and to invest in debuggability and observability.

Bridget mentions a blog post by a Joyent engineer on a storage disaster, and Bryan says the details matter. Bryan doesn't think every software engineer should carry a pager, since it's like trying to train a dolphin with a shock collar, but does think "everyone needs to develop production empathy." Software engineers underestimate the stress of a working system that stops working while everyone asks why you can't turn back time. Bryan says that during an outage the personality types separate, and operators keep a cool head, while the dev mindset loses its mind. That makes Bryan a developer at heart, one who immediately goes to the worst case. Bridget suggests DevOpsDays organizers are often ops people because running live events is operations, with no do-over, as the event technology work of Bridget's spouse shows, and Bryan says if things go right nobody notices, so lighting and sound crews rarely hear thanks.

Bridget connects this to Simon Wardley's pioneers, settlers and town planners, placing the host in settlers mode caring about day two. Bryan says people have a preferred mode but can learn the other's empathy. Bryan tells of being told someone complained that Bryan talks about production too much, a complaint that, in Bryan's view, denigrates the people responsible for keeping systems up, since everything ultimately has to boil down to production. Bridget: "Otherwise, we're just making toys."

Bryan takes the 40-year view and says we're doing well, since so much software simply works, and that "computational thinking has to become literacy," a way to think analytically, not necessarily to code. The guest says there's a bifurcated economy, and the dividing line is how much you're participating in this revolution. Bridget pushes back that there are systemic barriers, citing computer science professors hassled by campus security because they're Black. Bryan agrees and adds that Bryan's inner-city magnet high school needed an IBM investment of millions for a computer lab, while online courses and the cloud now cost far less, though you still need quality instructors.

Bridget says DevOpsDays Minneapolis had 700 people, and with sponsor support they donated about 10% of the surplus to local initiatives, including a job training center run by the American Indian Council whose graduates move from fast-food jobs to data center jobs. They talk about how "the world does not need another dating app" and how Bryan's marriage began on Match.com. Bryan says climate change is going to be kind of exciting, as a grand unifying engineering challenge, and describes deep optimism given how close the Cold War came and how the best minds were briefly in government.

Bryan is an unapologetic Xer, and tells how a young engineer at Joyent who hadn't seen WarGames got demerits from the company's online demerit system until the engineer watched it, and afterward said it was a really good movie. The guest adds that Back to the Future is in the canon for millennials and WarGames isn't. Bryan also finds people are interested in history, which we don't teach, and Bridget says it involves rivalries like the split between Cray and Control Data in Minneapolis. Bryan recommends a book on the CDC 6600, with its parallel execution units and rotating Gatling gun, which is in the show notes.

Container Summit began as a marketing event disguised as a conference, Bryan says, and they took it on the road to have conversations with local technologists in front of local technologists. In smaller cities, people turn out for events, unlike in the Bay Area, and Bridget says about 135 people came to the Minneapolis one. The last topic is Joyent's acquisition by Samsung and Bryan's trips to Suwon, where, Bryan says, a baseball game in Korea is amazing and defies description.

Bridget sits down for a classic fireside chat with Bryan Cantrill (Joyent), ranging from containers to social justice to lawn care.

photo credit

If you have an upcoming conference you would like to see promoted on ADO, you can fill out the handy form at arresteddevops.com/conf

For any devopsdays, try the code ADO2016! It should get you 20% off.