Pro's Only: Shedding the Cowboy Image of DevOps, or How We're Crushing It At Rackspace

Abstract:

The DevOps mentality has historically been about bending or even forgetting the rules while developers take on operations roles (or vice versa) in the name of Getting Things Done. This cavalier approach may work in some environments but in situations where technical debt is measured in terms of years, corners cannot be cut. Even with enforced processes there can still be agility; quality software can still be developed, iterated, and delivered quickly.

Some teams at Rackspace are practicing "slipperly deployment." Code is pushed to production several times a day. Operations engineers and software engineers sit on the same teams, often next to each other, and all review each others code. For us, the process is what allows us to move quickly and freely.

In this presentation, you will learn about:

• the tools we have adopted or in some cases made,
• the processes we follow,
• and how we structure our teams

Properly executing along these dimensions allows us to deliver quality software in reasonable time.

Speaker:

An Apache Cassandra committer and PMC member, Gary Dusbabek is a life-long programmer specializing in distributed systems. His past experience includes working with large-scale text and image indexes in the newspaper industry and high-volume advertisement booking software. Recent work at Rackspace includes working on Cassandra full-time and being a founding member of the Cloud Monitoring team. Gary currently works on the Cloud Metrics team that created the open source Blueflood metrics engine.