'Devops' and 'open source' - I was there.

Today I remembered that I was actually present in San José, at the 1997 Perl Conference, when Eric S. Raymond presented his fetchmail experiment in his talk/paper The Cathedral and the Bazaar, which more or less introduced the term open source.

This was quite a well attended conference with a couple of hundred people.

Another critical conference that I attended was the very first devopsdays in Ghent, back in 2009.  Originally focusing on the emerging movement around agile infrastructure, Patrick shortened the name to devops, stressing the importance of collaboration.

The lessons here?

1. There's only so much you can do alone.

2. Increase your network.

3. devops wouldn't be here without open source.

BizOps at Optiver

Last week the Amazon AWS meetup was hosted at Optiver.

We had two items on the agenda: Eucalyptus and Optiver.

First off, Eucalyptus strategy of mirroring the Amazon API for their private cloud offering appears to be paying off, as Amazon and Eucalyptus recently announced their partnership.
It is good to see how this highlights the importance of a cloud API.  Better yet, the essence of cloud computing is that you can automate everything - an API is not just a nice to have.

Some devops links and resources

At a recent Amsterdam Middleware Meetup I promised I would post some links about the devops movement.   I decided to replicate that post here for easier reference.

Start with the devopsdays.org site created by Patrick Debois, who coined the term 'devops'.

It's not easy to come up with a good definition.  Devops is a movement where system administrators and developers work together to continuously build and maintain a single system including application, infrastructure and process.  It builds on old and recent ideas from software development and lean systems thinking.


Some key concepts and a few links: