Title: The first 500 nodes: The story of our journey at a Microsoft centric enterprise

Description:

Although DevOps is becoming increasingly mainstream in enterprises, examples of DevOps applied to traditional 3-tier Windows Architecture on premises scenarios are not as prevalent (Although Linux examples are numerous). Microsoft implementations typically focus on e-commerce scenarios and/or simple IIS demonstrations. The cultural challenges at Microsoft enterprises are unique and can be more difficult to overcome as the engineers/administrators are much more accustomed to the GUI and "right clicking". Although some DevOps implementations may start in the C-Suite due to some existential threat, many more DevOps movements start as a grass roots effort and build momentum. Columbia Sportswear attended a couple of technical conferences in 2014 without any idea how to get DevOps started...This talk will discuss how we implemented our first 500 servers (including SAP, BizTalk, Sharepoint, and others...) on CHEF. This talk will focus how we started our cultural transformation, change techniques, and sustained the change. The talk will also discuss the various challenges at Columbia Sportswear as we learned to work differently on our DevOps journey. In addition, the talk will offer pragmatic advice to practitioners that want to start this highly rewarding journey. Our belief is that any enterprise can start a DevOps effort with a handful of believers and a modest budget.

Specific techniques to be discussed: CHEF, Microsoft DSC, automation, Hashicorp Terraform, powershell, PowerCLI, vmware, Kanban boards, stand ups, infrastructure as code, ChatOps, 3 Tier implementations, SAP, BizTalk, Tomcat, Ant, Java.