DevOps Manc

Our first autumn event in 2017 will take place at SpaceportX, 1st floor, 24–26 Lever St, Manchester, M1 1DZ. We'll be hearing from Jon Topper of Scale Factory and Tim Fletcher of LateRooms.com. If you want to come along please RSVP.

Food and drink will be provided courtesy of Auto Trader, who are hiring for Systems Engineers and Enterprise Engineers.

Boring is Powerful - Jon Topper, Principal Consultant Scale Factory

People often think of boredom as a bad thing: I’ll argue that in systems design and operations, it can actually be a virtue:

Boredom is the motivation that leads us to automate the things we find ourselves doing frequently.

Software, frameworks or services that are “boring” often seem that way because they’re predictable, reliable and trustworthy.

Bored is the ideal state for an on-call engineer.

I’ll make the case that we should ration our excitement, saving it for the things that differentiate us from the competition.

Jon Topper has been doing DevOps since before we called it that. His UK-based consultancy, The Scale Factory, are a team of DevOps and cloud infrastructure specialists, helping organisations of various sizes design, build, operate and scale their infrastructure. He was recently awarded “DevOps Leader of The Year” by Computing Magazine.

Distributed Policy Enforcement with OpenSSH Certificates - Tim Fletcher, LateRooms.com

OpenSSH is a critical systems administration tool, installed on nearly every virtual machine, physical server and many IoT devices. OpenSSH is used to manage everything from the server in the shed to continent spanning collections of systems

Logging in to OpenSSH quickly and securely is normally done with cryptographic keys, sometimes using strong passwords and hardware key storage all too often left lying about on laptops.

Managing the list of keys and permissions for an organisation of more than a handful of people rapidly gets challenging, tracking who has used which key to do what even more so.

Using the CA feature of OpenSSH it is possible to remove all this complexity, and leverage OpenSSH to enforce your central policies and provide you with strong audit trails.

The talk will cover the technical aspects of what can be done with SSH certificates how this could be implemented as part of a DevOps workflow.

Our third 2016 DevOps Manchester meetup is finally here! Again we’ve a great line up & a mix of technology and culture. We’ll be hearing from Chris Urwin of Rancher and Andy Burgin of Sky Betting and Gaming and Devops Leeds.

The event will be at Valtech, Basil Chambers. 65 High Street. M4 1FS, Manchester. Make sure you RSVP on Meetup.

Thanks to Rancher who will be sponsoring food and drink.

And thanks to Valtech for providing the venue.

Chris Urwin’s talk is titled ‘Containers: Desktop to Datacentre’. Chris works as ‘UK Technical Lead’ at Rancher Labs. Rancher is a complete, open source platform for deploying and managing containers in production. It includes commercially-supported distributions of Kubernetes, Mesos, and Docker Swarm, making it easy to run containerized applications on any infrastructure.

The DevOps revolution is on most technology-driven organisations agendas, and containerisation, driven initially by Docker, is a key strategy being adopted by a number of the globes biggest organisations.

In this engaging presentation Chris will discuss the adoption of a container strategy, where to start, the gotchas to avoid and the benefits it can bring.

This will be through real life-examples from Chris’ experience at Rancher working with large and small, public and private sector organisations to develop and implement container strategies.

Andy Burgin will be talking about ‘The DatOps Journey at Sky Betting and Gaming’. Andy works as Lead Devops Engineer at Sky Betting and Gaming where he looks after their data analytics platform. Before that he worked on the web platform keeping services up and running across hundreds of nodes. The previous 20 years of his career were spent working at design and build web development agencies being a dev/sysadmin for SMEs and Blue Chips.

The Data tribe at Sky Betting and Gaming manages the Data Warehouse, reporting and CRM platforms for the business. This talk discusses the evolution of the technical squads that build and run those platforms over the past 18 months, focusing on how the DatOps squad has acted as a catalyst for change. Firstly we'll cover how the business has grown and how the data tribe became a key focus for the business.

Next we'll talk about how this caused a small DatOps squad to change its focus from ops/sysadmin to a Devops approach, changing team dynamics and responsibilities through tooling and automation whilst still keeping it's focus on their "customers". We'll look at the original technologies and how they have evolved into our current toolset along with the problems, successes and failures, sharing lessons learned even if they weren't good.

But, this talk isn't about the destination, it's about the journey and we've still a lot of work to do, the final part of the talk will share what we still have to do and the challenges that presents.

Our second 2016 DevOps Manchester meetup is here!! We have two great speakers and talks lined up. The event will be at Code Computerlove, with the entrance on Spear Street (near Stephenson Square) over the road from Soup Kitchen, and a little towards Piccadilly Gardens (streetview link). Make sure you RSVP on Meetup.

Cake Solutions will be sponsoring the event for food and drink (there will be no cake). Thanks Cake! They are recruiting for a DevOps Engineer at the moment.

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Andrew Langhorn of Thoughtworks 

Writing your infrastructure as code using Terraform

Terraform is a way to describe infrastructure in a declarative fashion, and can be used by infrastructure and development teams alike. It works across vendors, and can be used without hassle with existing software development methodologies. In this talk, I'll give you an introduction to Terraform before progressing to building some infrastructure with Terraform on stage (...fingers crossed!).

Bio

Andrew is a site reliability engineer at ThoughtWorks, where he works with clients large and small on all sorts of infrastructure, security and performance problems at scale. In the recent past, he's helped build, manage and operate the infrastructure behind GOV.UK. He lives in Manchester with his beloved gin collection, and loves nothing more than an AWS region outage during a live demo.

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Ann Ledwith of Sage

SecDevOps culture

Ann will talk to us about building a secure delivery pipeline and creating a SecDevOps culture.  We are then going to have an interactive session where we try out a SecDevOps activity.

Bio

Development Team Leader at Sage, with 16 years’ experience working in IT.  Ann currently leads 2 cross functional teams, working on security-critical services, and is now heading up efforts to introduce Continuous Delivery to Sage globally.  

We’ve a great line up planned for our first 2016 meetup NEXT WEEK!

We have a talk and a DevOops Panel.

Lyndsay Prewer, an associate at Equal Experts will be talking about “Smoothing the continuous delivery path - a tale of two teams”.

Lyndsay is an Agile Delivery Consultant with over twenty years experience of helping developers, teams and organisations improve their software delivery. He is currently consulting for Equal Experts, at HMRC, on the delivery of HMRC’s new Gov.UK digital tax services. He speaks regularly at European conferences and London Meetups.

Abstract of Lyndsay’s talk What makes Continuous Delivery easy and what makes it hard? Should it be all Scala + Docker + microservices or is .Net + Windows + monoliths a safer bet? This session explores the successful continuous delivery journeys of two very different cultures. Both achieved weekly releases to Production, but one was a .Net monolith, the other a set of Scala microservices. We’ll explore the lessons learnt by looking at the blockers and accelerators each faced.

In addition, Andy Burgin from Leeds DevOps is going to be repeating his successful format of a DevOops Panel, drawing from the panel’s experiences of things going wrong. It promises to be an entertaining session, and we are very grateful for his contribution and the participation of:

Stuart Taylor: Head of IO at Laterooms

Andrew Langhorn: Senior Infrastructure Consultant at ThoughtWorks

Jim Jeffries: Senior Developer at CodeComputerlove

Lindsay Prewer: Associate at Equal Experts

We’d like to thank CodeComputerlove for supplying the pizza, beer and soft drinks by sponsoring the event, and SpaceportX for hosting us.

After we’re done we’ll head for some drinks to continue the discussion. If you’d like to chat with us in advance by joining our Slack group then drop us an email at [email protected] and we’ll send an invite.

Hi all,

Our next meetup is nearly upon us so we thought we’d let you know the format and lineup.

This month we’re lucky enough to have a main headline talk and then around 3 short lightening talks.

Our headline talk this month is from Kimball Johnson of Chef

Kimball is a "Customer Success Engineer" which in his words: 

According to our recruitment site is "Our Customer Success Engineers work with Chef's top Enterprise customers to develop, engineer, and implement their infrastructure strategy. Your day could consist of architecture reviews, bug squashing, advocating/developing new features for our roadmap, articulating Chef's value with new teams, inspire and identify the future possibilities of Enterprise Chef."

Kimball is going to be giving a talk on Cluster Control with Chef in-line report handlers

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We also have the following confirmed lightening talks:

Steve Elliott Development Lead at LateRooms.com Tech Lead for monitoring, alerting and site resiliency at LateRooms.com, trying to improve tooling so when things die we know, and know why.

Hubot, Always On Call How we embraced Hubot and Chat Ops and learnt to ditch email and phone conferencing for out of hours

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Ryan Yates

A Microsoft SharePoint & Windows Powershell Specialist looking to automate where possible.

DevOps for a Microsoft guy - is it really possible?

New meet: Mon 2nd Nov 2015 6:30pm at SpaceportX, with lightning talks & a main talk (details TBC).

http://www.meetup.com/DevOps-Manchester/events/225819829/

It has been a quiet nine months in which James and I have been busy / distracted but we are getting things moving again and have scheduled a new meetup on Monday 5th October 2015 6:30pm at SpaceportX. There are a couple of talks planned (which will kick off at 7pm) and we would love to see you there. We are sorry there has only been one event since December, and we intend to improve on that.

We will have Jim Jeffries of Allegro Networks with a talk titled ‘An introduction to network automation’, and James Heggs with ‘No silver bullet—Remember the people’.

Please RSVP to the meetup to let us know you’re coming so that we can plan numbers.

About our speakers:

Jim Jeffries is an experienced developer with a passion for software quality. He enjoys working in complex domains and believes in focussing on building the right software, rather than the wrong software right. He works collaboratively using techniques and ideas like BDD and enjoys working in a DevOps environment. Recently he has worked on Snap, a pioneering automated platform providing network service provision in minutes, rather than months.

James Heggs is Head of Development at ResponseTap. Over recent years he’s moved to management of development teams and technical operations which has presented itself with a new set of challenges differing from those of software development. At ResponseTap he’s been given the chance to grow from software developer into managing multiple development and support operations across an organisation of over 50 staff.

At the last meetup Andy Burgin of Leeds DevOps brought back some potential subjects from DevOpsDays Paris, and those who joined us voted on their preference. The top five were as follows: Monitoring as Code: 11; Network Automation: 9; Immutable Infrastructure: 7; How to setup an automated deployable pipeline on a legacy process: 7; Deployment of Microservices: 7. We will feed these preferences into our plans.

http://www.meetup.com/DevOps-Manchester/events/225310033/

We’ve had a few months off but we’re back with details of the next event. IP Expo are in Manchester on the 20th–21st May, and we’ve been invited to run a meetup as part of the event as part of their networking events. You’ll need to register free as an IP Expo delegate to attend* as the event will be inside the conference, but you don’t need to have attended during the day. Please also RSVP to the meetup group so we can stay in touch.

Date: Wednesday 20th May 2015 Time: arrive from 4:30pm, kick off at 5pm Location: Manchester Central, Petersfield, Manchester, M2 3GX

We'll have all your usual DevOps Manchester meetup format, two speakers, beer, pizza and pub afterwards :)

Our first talk will be from Mandi Walls of Chef.

Mandi is going to be giving a talk on the new exciting Chef delivery product with highlights of the open source areas of the product.

Our second talk will be Gareth Rushgrove of Puppet Labs and Devops Weekly.

Gareth is going to talk about “The End of the General Purpose Operating System (and what that means for configuration management)”:

The state of the art for infrastructure is advancing quickly; with Docker, containers, new operating systems and cluster-native tools like Kubernetes or Mesos coming out of the woodwork. What does this mean for how we will manage systems in the future?

Hi everyone,

Here are the details of the next meetup. 

Date: Monday 8th Dec 2014 6:30pm Location: Late Rooms, The Peninsula Building, 2 Cheetham Hill Road

This month we're taking a peak around the Late Rooms offices. As always, there will be pizza, there will be drinks, and there will be two perspectives on automation and transformation of companies platforms and infrastructure.

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Will Monk

Front End Developer, LateRooms

Paul Touhey

Software Engineer in Test, LateRooms

Project Moonstick: From Dev To Live & Beyond

Talking about Project Moonstick, a Node.js powered frontend for TLRG and how devops ideas have empowered the team, allowing commits from dev to live to be seamless. Fast feedback loops, high test coverage, frontend automation and operations monitoring are some of the topics to be discussed.

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Scott Ford

Solutions Engineer, Chef

A Taste Of Infrastructure as Code with Chef

Scott Ford has over 15 years experience working in Operations for both large enterprise and startups. He is passionate about building things, and loves to work on creative solutions for automating just about anything.

Chef is used by some of the worlds most innovative companies to automate their infrastructure, and is fast becoming the top configuration management tool for companies ranging from small startups to large enterprises. In this brief introduction to infrastructure as code with Chef Scott will provide a high level look at Chef and what it can do for you. 

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Tickets

Hi everyone,

Here are the details of the next meetup. Please be sure to grab a free ticket if you want to come.

Date: Tuesday 21st Oct 2014 6:30pm Location: Auto Trader Manchester, 1 First Street, Manchester, M15 4FN

Continuing our crawl across Manchester’s hospitable spaces we will be hosted at Auto Trader’s swanky new offices (yes, there are cars inside the building). There will be pizza, there will be drinks, and there will be two perspectives on automation and transformation of companies platforms and infrastructure.

Jim Davies

MoneySuperInfrastructure… and how we built a copy/paste datacenter

Jim (Infrastructure Tech Lead for DevOps/Sysadmin) will describe the Moneysupermarket ‘Reset’ programme and the challenges set down by the business.

He’ll take you along Moneysupermarket’s cloud migration journey, describing the technologies used to deploy and manage the infrastructure and the choice of services they use to pull the website services together. He’ll share the triumphs and pitfalls to date and the road ahead.

Mark Crossfield

Auto Trader: from Continuous Integration to Continuous Delivery

To compliment Jim’s talk, Mark will talk about his experiences as the Tech Lead of the Continuous Delivery team at Auto Trader and their activities facilitating automated deployment, preparing for a move into a private cloud and encouraging a culture of Continuous Delivery.

He will talk about how things have changed at Auto Trader, introduce a few of the technologies and techniques being used, and describe the current focus on automated provisioning. Most of this is work in progress, but plenty has been learned along the way from the work completed so far.

Tickets

Thoroughly enjoyed this months meetup - thank you to everyone that attended and big thank you to our speakers, Matthew, Chris and Caroline.

Also thanks to ThoughtWorks for being fantastic hosts and sponsors!

Market research

For anyone interested in the demographic of our users (the market research section we did prior to the talks) here are the details:

Number of attendees: 42

First timers: 21

People with knowledge of DevOps: 26

Working in a DevOps embracing environment: 22

Background in development: 28

Developer now cross-functional: 17

Background in operations: 12

Operations/SysAdmin now cross functional: 7

Resources

A list of all the resources from this months meetup.

Video Recording

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NIcRZYF4D0

Matthew's talk starts @ 20m 30s

Chris and Caroline's talk starts @ 1hr 38m

Matthew's Slides: 

http://www.slideshare.net/matthewskelton/how-to-choose-tools-for-devops-and-continuous-delivery-devops-manchester-meetup

Chris/Caroline Slides:

Hi everyone,

We can now share details of our next meetup.

Date/Time:

Tuesday 2nd September 2014 - 6:30pm

Location:

ThoughtWorks Manchester

26th Floor, City Tower, Piccadilly Plaza, Manchester, M1 4BT

Sponsors:

ThoughtWorks have also kindly offered to sponsor our meetup so we have them to thank for the pizza and beer :)

Speakers:

We have two great speakers lined up....

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Matthew Skelton

Co-founder and Principal Consultant at Skelton Thatcher Consulting Ltd

Matthew Skelton has been building, deploying, and operating commercial software systems since 1998. Co-founder and Principal Consultant at Skelton Thatcher Consulting Ltd, he specialises in helping organisations to adopt and sustain good practices for building and operating software systems: Continuous Delivery, DevOps, aspects of ITIL, and software operability. Matthew founded and leads the 800-member London Continuous Delivery meetup group (http://londoncd.org.uk/), and instigated the first conference in Europe dedicated to Continuous Delivery, PIPELINE Conference (http://pipelineconf.info/). He also co-facilitates the popular Experience DevOps workshop series (http://experiencedevops.org/).

How to choose tools for DevOps and Continuous Delivery

With an ever-increasing array of tools and technologies claiming to 'enable DevOps', how do we know which tools to try or to choose? In-house, open source, or commercial? Ruby or shell? Dedicated or plugins? It transpires that highly collaborative practices such as DevOps and Continuous Delivery require new ways of assessing tools and technologies in order to avoid creating new silos. Matthew Skelton shares his recent experience of helping many different organisations to evaluate and select tools to facilitate DevOps; the recommendations may surprise you

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Chris Kozak

Lead Consultant at ThoughtWorks

Chris Kozak is a Lead Consultant with ThoughtWorks.  He has worked across a wide variety of industries in a number of capacities including Development, Operations, Quality Assurance, and Architecture.

Caroline Kok

Consultant Developer at ThoughtWorks

Caroline Kok has been a Consultant Developer with ThoughtWorks since 2012.  She is an advocate for small, cross-functional teams and enjoys the freedom and responsibility that comes with maintaining one’s own environments.  

Disk Images as build artefacts: Why and How

Deployment can be a fraught experience.  Even fully-automated, provisioning and configuring live environments can leave you exposed in a number of ways.  Consider:

When a release goes wrong, how much time and effort does it take to roll-back to a previous release?

When things go right, how much down-time is incurred by provisioning?

What if somebody has manually modified the machine and the script’s assumptions about it are incorrect?  

Under heavy load, how long would it take to spin-up more machines?  What if one of them fails to provision properly?

If the build script fails mid-provision, can it be cleanly re-run? If so, how much effort was expended to ensure that it could be?

Using disk images as build artefacts allows us to decouple provisioning from deployment, mitigating many of these risks.  In this talk, Chris will use Packer to demonstrate this approach.  We will provision a machine, snapshot the disk, and discard the machine.  If image generation is successful, the deployment process is reduced to rebooting the live environment with the new image.  If it fails, it does not impact the live environment.

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Tickets

Hi all,

Great news we’ve scheduled our 3rd DevOps meetup.

Our next meetup will be on Tuesday 22nd July 2014 6:30pm at TechHub Manchester. Tickets are available on EventBrite

We have two speakers lined up...

DevOps, OpenStack and the Software Defined Economy - Chris Reid - PointGreen

The current compute environment is changing at a pace never seen before; traditional silo’s like Data Centres, Networking, Storage, Unified Comms and Application are colliding in a virtual frenzy with the added fog of Open Source, all driven by a product focused DevOps methodology. Chris will work through various terms associated with DevOps such as ‘Pets and Cattle, Virtual Machines, SDN and Affinities’ and step the audience through(at a high level) showing how they link together to deliver a Software Define Economy.

Chris works for PointGreen helping technology clients access new European markets. His focus is on open source Virtual Machine Orchestration platforms like OpenStack and Cloudstack, and rich set of emerging Compute, Storage and Network options now available from these platforms. He recently spoke at the SDN World Summit in London and contributes to various open source initiatives.

Story of our first DDoS - Will Jessop - basecamp.com - @will_j

Will’s is a story of their first DDoS, how we mitigated it technically and from an organisational perspective, and how you can use this experience to reduce the impact of events for your own infrastructure.

@tegud and @mrmanc have shared their presentations from our recent meetup.

Graphite and Friends by Mark Crossfield @mrmanc