November 2014 Archives

Tom will be the afternoon keynote at NLUUG's Autumn Conference. For more info, visit https://www.nluug.nl/events/nj14/

When Esther Schindler asked for permission to publish an excerpt from The Practice of Cloud System Administration on the Druva Blog, we thought this would be the perfect piece. We're glad she agreed. Check out this passage from Chapter 7, "Operations in a Distributed World".

If you manage a sysadmin team that manages services, here is some advice on how to organize the team and their work:

Organizing Strategy for Operational Teams

Paul Evans writes:

Next week marks the 20th anniversary of the "big" Synopsys downtime of November 18-20, 1994. It was the most ambitious one we attempted while I was at Synopsys -- a complete reconfiguration of the network in one weekend. It was also the first one we planned and carried out using the flight director and mission control model that Christine and Tom later made known to a wider audience in The Practice of System and Network Administration.

Although not all of you were working at Synopsys in 1994, this is probably the best chance I'm going to have to thank all of you for what you contributed to the downtime process. It was a real highlight of my professional career.

Thanks,

Paul Evans

PS If any of you still have digital photos of any of the downtimes, I'd appreciate it if you could share them.

If you have digital photos from that event, please contact Paul. If you don't have contact info for him, please post a comment.

To celebrate Usenix LISA, for 24 hours you can get The Practice of Cloud System Administration at an extra special discount: http://ow.ly/Ea7bH

I'll be doing a book signing at LISA on Friday at 10:30 in the LISA Lab. If you have the eBook, I have something special for you! See you there!

The monitoring system built for Stackoverflow was open sourced today. I've been using it since it was an internal beta and I'm really excited to see it shared with everyone. Congrats to Kyle and Matt on this release!

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2014/11/announcing-bosun-our-new-open-source-monitoring-alerting-system/

and check out: http://bosun.org

Tom will be teaching tutorials and giving other presentations at Usenix LISA in Seattle Washington, Nov 9-14, 2014.

Tutorials:

• Work Like a Team: Best Practices for Team Coordination and Collaborations So You Aren't Acting Like a Group of Individuals (S5)
• Evil Genius 101: Subversive Ways to Promote DevOps and Other Big Changes (M7)
• How To Not Get Paged: Managing Oncall to Reduce Outages (T8)

Presentations:

• Radical Ideas from the Practice of Cloud Computing
• Live Upgrades on Running Systems: 8 Ways to Upgrade a Running Service With Zero Downtime

Book Signing:

• TBA (still being worked out)

We're really excited about LISA this year. It is full of all new material and speakers. I'm really psyched and can't wait to attend!

I'm the guest on the new episode of Arrested Devops. I had a lot of fun recording this podcast. I hope you enjoy listening to it!

Check it out! http://adevo.ps/23

I'll be doing a book signing at Usenix LISA on Friday at 10:30am in the LISA Lab. The first 10 people to arrive will receive a free (printed) copy of the new book The Practice of Cloud System Administration. (I'll also sign other books you bring.) For info about the new book, please attend my talk "Radical Ideas from the Practice of Cloud Computing" on Wednesday at 11:45am-12:30 pm in Grand Ballroom C. I'll also be teaching tutorials and mini-tutorials.

Register for LISA today!