Operations as a Service - handling traditional enterprise projects

Abstract:

The "cloud" has opened the traditional "big enterprise" environments for outsourcing parts of their IT that has been kept in-house for a long time. Large companies and public institutions are looking for ways to save money, receive higher quality services, and become more flexible.

At gocept we provide an "operations as a service" hosting environment that picks up infrastructure development and application operations tasks for traditional enterprise-style projects: intranet, extranet and integration applications, corporate web sites, and such.

Over the last years we have served large enterprise and public institutions by applying and researching DevOps-style processes, FLOSS technology, and computer science to achieve those goals.

Our personal goals include keeping a small, agile team, as well as integrating with external project developers and the customer.

We will look at both the day-to-day and the less frequent challenges we meet:

• communication
• keeping customer applications up-to-date on a moving platform
• educating
• bridging the gap of operational responsibilities in a multi-party project
• negotiating trade-offs
• communication
• in-house production depth
• managing deployments
• interfacing with corporate legal and financial requirements
• helping customers consume the operational flexibility they ask for
• communication
• infrastructure and platform development
• FLOSS community interactions
• growing with no silver bullet
• trusting our instincts

Our talk will substantiate our experiences based on reliable anecdotal evidence from real, ongoing customer projects.

Speaker:

Christian Theune, Christian Kauhaus