| Puppet Camp 2009 |
[Oct. 4th, 2009|02:06 am] |
I have to say I've really enjoyed Puppet Camp. It's a reinvigorating experience, despite the jetlag, to meet up with smart, passionate and engaged operations people from all walks of life. My highlight really has been the people, and that's what I love about smaller unconferences is that you can meet everyone and everyone has something to contribute. Agile 2009 was great to go to, but I personally find I get more from smaller events.
I was happy to see the wide range of companies both in terms of size and domains who are using puppet and thinking about how to improve operations and systems engineering. San Francisco is an awesome city, and I've enjoyed finding some little havens of coffee drinking bliss, good food, fantastic cocktails and shopping heaven in my limited explorations so far.
Unfortunately I was a little nervous during my talk, which I'm pretty sure comes down to tiredness. I need to write up in more depth. For now here are my slides, video should be up shortly - I was really impressed by time to put up initial video by SFSU, and then them cleaning up the audio for the re-push.
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| Agile Operations - Thoughts on Operations Testing |
[Aug. 19th, 2009|09:03 pm] |
When we talk about agile systems practices the subject of testing often comes up. In the development world practices such as Test Driven Development and Behaviour Driven Development provide a supporting practice to enable iterative development, make change safe (enabling refactoring), and provide a way to do just enough to deliver what is asked for.
It's important to look at why developers test in order to think about what the enabling practices in systems and operations is. For those not familiar with test-driven development Nat and Steve have a great introduction in their forthcoming book: http://www.mockobjects.com/book/tdd-introduction.html
I think about tests for systems administration in terms of what they provide both in terms of quality and confidence. Coming up with the right language to describe testing for operations is hard.
I've seen a lot of development teams internally struggle with the naming of what Nat and Steve call Integration Tests and Acceptance Tests (Functional Tests, Customer Tests, System Tests). If we agree with the premise that testing types a certain level is desirable for operations teams then we should focus on what we achieve by that and a first step approach. It's also important to have a clear language that everyone can understand what you mean - so if your team is using Integration Tests to mean something specific, then don't use that language to mean something different in operational testing.
It's important to think about what the different test levels give you and how that maps to operations/systems engineering. Also we're hitting the fact you illustrated that testing and monitoring are conflated. For development internal quality of code driven by unit tests enables ease of understanding and ease of change. If we want to have a practice in operations that makes our intent clear and enables ease of change this is not monitoring. |
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| Agile Systems Administration Slides from Manchester Geek Night |
[Aug. 7th, 2009|02:09 pm] |
I spoke in Manchester last night, it was nice to be back in the city I spent five years failing to get a degree in. It's the place I first started working in systems at the Faculty of Arts helpdesk, first exposure to gopher, lynx, usenet and the web, and where I installed my first Linux systems.
The venue was the Kilburn building and the area outside the room had displays of Baby which was nice.
The group was small and mostly dominated by sytems people, I felt it went better than my previous talk on this at skills matter - I was more focussed and I think the presentation was more polished. Following we went on to the SandBar for good beer and further discussion.
Thanks to ThoughtWorks for inviting me up and putting me up in Manchester.
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