#datops

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.