I’m packing for Boston and will be there next week for LISA11. This will be my second year as part of the LISA blogging team, and after how much I enjoyed LISA last year in San Jose I wouldn’t miss this one even if it is on the other side of the country. I’ve tried to finish as much work as possible to be able to focus on the conference but for various reasons of course this was not quite possible, and actually during the first days I will even be on call… In anycase, I’m sure this is going to be a great week full of awesomeness. I will be blogging for the USENIX blog every day, so be sure to follow that for fresh articles from me and the other memebers of our team (Ben, Rikki and Matt).

If you are going to LISA11 in Boston next week, we should definitely meetup. Contact me on twitter or email.

One of the advantages of being a member of the LISA11 Blog Team is that I was able to talk and interview this year program co-chairs: Tom Limoncelli and Doug Hughes. This was a great honor for me especially since I’ve been a big fan of Tom’s work for many years. The full article is available on the USENIX blog: “Tom Limoncelli and Doug Hughes Interview”

Also my colleagues from the LISA11 blogging team (Ben, Rikki and Matt) have done some very interesting interviews with some key people from LISA11 to get you prepared for the event. Check out the USENIX blog for more from us in the next week.

Here is also a quick intro of our team: “LISA11 Next Week – Meet your blog team!“

Yesterday evening I presented at the SF Bay Area Large-Scale Production Engineering meetup group at Yahoo HQ a talk about “Monitoring with Icinga”. This was an introductory talk intended to bring awareness about icinga (there were only 3-4 people from the audience of about 75 that heard of it before), and I think it reached its goal very well; afterwards there were many people interested to try it out and had various questions about it at the end. I was also very happy to have Matthew Brooks one of the icinga core developers in the audience and backing me up to some of the more difficult questions people had. Thanks again Matthew for coming! Here are the slides from my presentation:

@LSPEMeetup made available the video on justin.tv; unfortunately the quality of the video/sound is not the best; you can find it here.

Just like last year, after Velocity, I attended DevOpsDays in Mountain View, now at its second edition. Many people that were in town for Velocity spent at least one extra day for DevOpsDays, but also many people from the area that for some reason could not attend Velocity came to LinkedIn HQ for this event; about 200-250 people I would say. Even if the same type of people were at both events (awesome dev/ops), because of the completely different way they are organized they didn’t overlap at all. As you will see bellow in my impressions DevOpsDays wins largely in most of the areas:

• first of all it is a free event (compared with a regular O’Reilly conference where prices usually start at $1k).
• it is much more interactive: while Velocity is a classic conference where you normally have a presenter showing off something (hopefully not selling or hiring), and maybe some questions at the end, DevOpsDays is more like an open discussion, with people either on a panel or open spaces.
• the food was way better at DevOpsDays, no question about it. And the ice cream on Saturday added an extra special touch .

The first day, Friday, started with the “Devops State of the Union” by John Willis. This was a very good introduction on what DevOps means and a look back on what happened during the past couple of years, especially considering the fact that many people where there for the first time. For example I met someone from Microsoft that was sent here to find out “what is this devops thing” and how they can use it, and this just shows what a huge progress the devops movement has made in such a short amount of time, and how many people are now interested in the movement. (in this particular case I’m not sure he returned at Microsoft with something useful, but just the fact that they are interested in this demonstrates my point).

Read the rest of this entry »

Last week I attended Velocity 2011 in Santa Clara, CA; this was the 4th edition of Velocity and my 2nd one. This means that even if I was still very much impressed with everything what happened during these 3 days, it was not quite so mind blowing like last year, and you will be able to see this from my impressions bellow.

First impression was that this was much bigger than last year, and the numbers just released by O’Reilly demonstrate it was almost double with about 2,000 participants and another sell out (compared with 1,200 in 2010). Considering the high price of the conference (~1k) this is very impressive and interesting to see how they will host next year even more people. From a question a speaker had many people where at their first Velocity, but even so I met many friends and people I met last year. From the content point of view there was a lot of focus on mobile performance that I haven’t seen last year. Myself I mostly followed the operations track, and only a few talks in the performance track.

Read the rest of this entry »

This was by far the best Ignite event I’ve ever attended. This was huge… packed, with more than 400 people in the room, and even if the room was huge it felt like there was no empty seat. Second, the quality and energy of the speakers was amazing. Most of the videos are already uploaded to youtube, and I would recommend to check them out if you have the time. By far my favorite one was Dr. Nic Williams – Ignite Karaoke, where he improvised on a series of “interesting” slides (who selected them?) that he never sow before. Amazing… Check it out:

My other favorites ones were: Ben Scofield – How to be Awesome and Gregg Pollack – How to Create Awesome Screencasts.

As my friends know I’m a big fan of Ingite presentations, and the ones from MySQLConf 2011 last week were just outstanding. If you didn’t had the chance to see them live, here are the links to the best of them.

This was by far my favorite: “Scale Fail” by Josh Berkus; extremely funny on how to build sites that don’t scale. Highly recommended:

The other two were great ignite talks also, and definitely worth the time checking out: “Causes of Downtime in MySQL” by Baron Schwartz and “The Art of Data Visualization” by David Holoboff.

This week is a special week for the Drupal community and I’m very excited to be able to attend DrupalCon 2011 in Chicago.
My employer, Promet Solutions, is one of the gold sponsors for DrupalCon and we will have many cool activities for this week prepared for this event. Last year DrupalCon 2010 San Francisco was a great event and I’m sure this one will be even better. So if you are in Chicago and coming to DrupalCon, please come by and say hi; I would love to meet you and talk about cool Drupal projects. I will also try to setup a BOF on automating Drupal installations and configurations with opscode chef, and this will be based on my chef drupal cookbook.

This week I’ll be attending LISA10 in San Jose. I’ve always wanted to go to LISA, and the fact that it was so close to our location here in San Jose made it much easier. This is going to be a full week, but hopefully fun and interesting. I’ll be part of the USENIX blogging team, meaning I’ll have to be extra focused in order to be able to take good notes and prepare at least one blog post per day. These articles will be posted on the USENIX blog, where you can find articles from other colleges in our team (Matt, Ben and Matthew), and I highly recommend to check it out for updates regularly. I will link in this post all the articles I have written during this week in case you want to follow this up.

If you are in the area and want to meetup ping me on twitter or email.

Real-World Configuration Management Workshop: Sunday I’ve attended all day the CM workshop; this was an interesting workshop, where different people shared their experiences and pains in configuration management.

Time Management for System Administrators: Monday I attended  Tom Limoncelli’s tutorial on time management for system administrators. Very educational and inspiring. I will definitely revisit his book as its been a while since I’ve read it. As takeaways, I have at least 2-3 ideas that I’m really looking forward to implement and see how I can use them to improve my productivity.

OpsCamp: Tuesday I went to OpsCamp Silicon Valley - San Jose co-located with LISA10, and even if it was sponsored by LISA this was a standalone event. It was definitely a smaller event than expected (because of this we had only one round of sessions with everyone in the same room), but it was definitely interesting and I’ve met some very smart people with a lot of experience in operations and building high performance infrastructures.

Postfix: Past, Present, and Future: Wednesday started with the opening remarks by the program chair Rudi van Drunen, followed by the opening keynote by Tony Cass from CERN. Amazing stuff; if you have the chance to see the video do that . Afterwards, in the afternoon I went to the invited talks by Dinah McNutt, Google: “The 10 Commandments of Release Engineering” and Wietse Venema on “Postfix: Past, Present, and Future”. It was amazing to be able to meet in person and chat with the author of postfix, a program that I’ve been using for many years.

Last week I was in Baltimore for the inaugural edition of Surge, a conference organized by OmniTI. Ever since I signed up for Surge2010, I sow this as a conference of Velocity quality, only without the frontend track and focusing mostly on backend topics (what I was interested anyway), and in a much more distant location than Santa Clara . This sounded interesting enough to make me want to go, as the first conference I will go in 2010 outside Silicon Valley. Also I could not pass the opportunity to hang out with my friend Andy and sync’up with what we’ve been up to during all this time.

Read the rest of this entry »