This is a report from the Devopsdays 09 conference which took place at the 30. and 31. October in Ghent (Belgium). Developers and System-Administrators presented new techniques for agile system administration followed by "open spaces" to work-out related topics suggested by the really interactive audience.
The first day started with a talk from Rachel Davies about "Non-Functional Requirements: do user stories really help?" followed by Lindsay Holmwood presenting new ways of monitoring clouds with Cucumber-nagios & Flapjack. Especially Cucumber-nagios seems to be extremely interesting because it allows to explain how services should be checked by Nagios in plain text using a business-readable domain-specific language. After the lunch break Teyo Tyree from Reductivlabs talked about "Building Agile Infrastructures with Puppet".
In one of the following "open-space" session John Willis gave some great insights about the new Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) which is now available in the Ubuntu Karmic release.
The second day began with a presentation by Mattias Skarin introducing Kanban in operations and Chris Read explaining "Continuous Integration, Pipelines and Deployment". Next was Matt Rechenburg contributing to Devopsdays on behalf of the openQRM Project providing details about how to save time and gain flexibility by using a private openQRM Cloud as automated provision system for Developer- and QA-Teams (presentation slides available here odp/ppt 20mb).
The following open-space session then provided time for discussions and loosely created mini-workshops in an "un-conference" style.
A really interesting results of the “Cloud Computing Technology Comparison” session was a matrix to compare the specific features sets and service offerings of the current Cloud Computing Technology Leaders. Here a picture of the resulting flip-chart taken by Kris B. who collected some more photos of the Devopsdays event at Flickr :
For better readability the flip-chart was immediately uploaded and shared between the session participants. Here the final document ods/xls.
Many thanks for this great conference especially to Patrick Debois who did a great job in organizing this agile Event !
