DevOps at a Distance

Abstract:

How to get your team collaborating with Chef, Configuration Management, and CI when you're not in the room, the office, or the country.

In 2014, BuzzFeed embarked on a project to work Chef into how their main CMS, an application with 5 years of history, 3 different teams, dozens of internal and external service dependencies, and about a thousand configuration variables, gets configured and deployed.

It was never going to be an easy task to tackle, but the benefits just over the horizon were myriad and dazzling.

Then, for fun, they sent the SysAdmin in charge of the project to go live on the other side of an ocean and work in a remote office.

This is a talk about my experiences being that remote worker in London, interfacing with Ops, Tools, and Dev teams in New York with only a few hours a day of overlap. It's a talk about communication, tooling, best practices, empathy, ChatOps, getting everyone on board, Conway's Law, sleeping in so you can work until midnight, and cats.

Speaker: Greg Damiani