The Anxiety of Wrapping UpDi

After my day as an exhibitor at LISA14 I decided I was going to be sure I got my day as a participant.

I got to sit through the keynote by Gene Kim talking about DevOps in his own inimitable way, I'd finished my post for yesterday so I got to listen completely which was nice.  I'm fairly familiar with his work so the first part was re-hash for me.  I keep reminding myself that about half of the people at a typical LISA have not been to one before.  Gene and the rest of us are still getting the message out and there are still people for whom it's new.  I don't mine them getting what they need.  Gene's talk did get more juicy once he'd layed the groundwork and could start talking about incidents and events.  Other's have covered that better than I can so I'll leave it there, except to say that Gene's a great speaker and fun to listen to regardless.

Different is not Threatening, it's COOL!

About 4 years ago I had to automate the installation of a product for testing and documentation.  The product ran on Windows(tm) and the docs folks needed to be able to start with an installed clean build to vet a set of user behaviors. Early in that process I discovered PowerShell2 and I gotta tell you Windows admin became fun. I'm really glad to see both people presenting Windows admin with PowerShell and people interested in learning.  I think the acceptance divide between Windows and *NIX is falling.  I have my preferences, but for me the job is to use to tools at hand to get a job done.  There have been several people presenting on various aspects of sysadmin with PowerShell.  This was was "Building PowerShell Commands" by Steven Murawski from Chef.  I've also talked to a couple of other people from Microsoft talking about a relatively new feature, PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC).  This is a real configuration tool for Windows which has some really interesting Characteristics. Jeffrey Snover from Microsoft presented that in the afternoon, though I wasn't able to go.  I hope to get the slides and see the video when it's made available.

The Sky is Full of Clouds!

In the afternoon I watched a presentation from Peter Desnoyers of the Mass. Open Cloud foundation.  He's a researcher at Northeastern University and he's working with Orren Krieger at BU.  They have an idea for a Federated Cloud in which different vendors could tune their products and compete to provide different resources within a single cloud infrastructure.   With current cloud software a single vendor provides all the resource services; storage, networking management, processor resources etc.  In the MOC model a cloud might have several different storage providers for example and the user could select based on SLA promises, price or reputation or any other differentiator.  They're working to call attention to the ways in which OpenStack (as their current base) needs to grow to make this kind of idea work and to submit where possible to the upstream projects.

I've met Peter before and I'm watching the MOC work pretty closely.

Social Geekery

The conference reception was last night.  We went to the EMP Museum, which is down next to the plaza which houses the Space Needle.  EMP is a kind of pop-culture museum. They have exhibits on Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror in all kinds of modern media including gaming.  We all trooped down to the monorail and rode together and trooped into this good.  This was a really good mixer and we all had a brief hair-down time in the middle of our intense tech learning.

Today, Tomorrow, Next Year

I'm still here today but I'm flying out tonight so I had to check out.  It's comforting to have a quiet base available and now I don't have that and I'm a little out of sorts.  I'm going to hang in the LISA lounge and talk to say some good byes and talk about my impressions with people and about what we are hoping for at LISA15 next year in Washington DC.

See you there?

- Mark