DevOps as Relationship Management: How to keep systems of services happy

Abstract:

Presentation and/or Moderated General Discussion

While much has been written and said about using DevOps approaches to building and operating individual applications and services, what happens when you have 50 or 100 or even 1000 services running across geographies and technologies, all interconnected in ever changing ways? How do you plan to keep such systems happy and alive. This session will address the following specific building blocks for building answers to that question: - What are complex systems, and what are their most common traits - Why managing relationships between services is almost more important than managing the services themselves from a systems perspective - General approaches to the problem, including monitoring/visualization, use of Circuit Breaker and other patterns, and the importance of “horizontal” communication among dev and ops teams working on different projects - How to view the Internet and 3rd party services with respect to system availability - What the future of “systems” operations may look like. - Possibly a general discussion about what others are thinking/seeing/doing in this regard This talk will combine a lot of the concepts I’ve written about on GigaOm with ideas and practices being worked on today.

Speaker:

James Urquhart is Director of Product, Cloud Management Solutions at Dell, arriving at Dell through its acquisition of Enstratius. Named one of the ten most influential people in cloud computing by both the MIT Technology Review and the Huffington Post, and contributing author to GigaOm’s cloud coverage (http://gigaom.com/author/jurquhart), Mr. Urquhart brings a deep understanding of these disruptive technologies and the business opportunities they afford.

Mr. Urquhart is a seasoned field technologist with 20 years of experience in distributed systems development and deployment, focusing on service-oriented architectures, cloud computing, and virtualization. Prior to joining Enstratius, Mr. Urquhart held leadership roles at Forte Software, Sun Microsystems, utility computing infrastructure vendor Cassatt Corporation and Cisco Systems.

Mr. Urquhart graduated from Macalester College with a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics and Physics.