Stitching it Together

My talk from Cloud Tech III: http://www.meetup.com/cloudcomputing/events/56678082/

Transcript

1. Stitching it Together
3. These are just my observations and should not be construed as the "one true way to do anything."
4. I am a "boss"
5. But I am also an engineer
7. From what I've observed it's all starts with servers.
8. Well .... servers and source code.
9. Oh .... and people. Lots and lots of people.
10. So what are you building?
11. You need to provision some servers somewhere.
12. Like maybe a cloud. That's sounds good right?
13. Provisioning
14. fog || libcloud || whatever
15. You need it to be highly repeatable over various networks
16. Orchestration
17. And they should probably be consistent.
18. Configuration Management
19. puppet || chef || custom || whatever
20. Package Management
22. Once servers are running, they should stay running.
23. You want your servers on your radar.
24. Monitoring
25. newrelic || nagios || whatever
26. "Dashboards"
27. You want to put new files onto your servers
28. Deployment
30. Servers will most certainly always have problems.
31. And someone should probably do something about that.
32. Alerting
33. pagerduty || twilio || whatever
34. So ... who is building it?
35. It's really all about the people building your infrastructure.
36. People like to think and have ideas.
37. People have dreams and aspirations.
38. People have fears and stresses.
39. People want to be happy.
40. People make the most important choices outside of their work.
41. People hate being ignored or feeling invisible.
42. People need to communicate.
43. But people have problems communicating .
44. It is really all about fostering communication and conversation around what you're doing. And why you're doing it.
45. So getting to the point ...
46. ... with all these vendors....
47. ... and all of these people ...
48. ... why is this still so much work?!
49. It's like you need to be a detective just to get by.
50. Or maybe just a tuning fork for the cloud.
51. "What did the documentation say?"
52. "Whose cellphone is setup to receive those alerts?"
53. "Why did everything break and fallover?"
54. After a while you are left completely drained
55. I've observed that it's really two fundamental problems.
56. We are generally stitching together solutions that are not designed to work together holistically.
57. We cannot (or will not) go the last mile for incident response and resolution.
58. Because people really only pay attention when things are broken!
59. OH! And way too many EMAILS
60. Why is no one trying to fix this problem?
61. ― KRS-­One “If you don't repeat the patterns of your own success you won't be successful. You've gotta know your own formula; what made you ... "you".”
65. Incompleteness Theorem
67. ― Tyler Durden “The ability to let the things which do not matter truly slide”
68. “ Special thanks to the Noun Project ― thenounproject.com ”
69. End