An Introduction to DevOps

Nomadic software engineer and Open Source software advocate Meitar Moscovitz is in Albuquerque for a few weeks and will be giving a talk on Open Source tools and techniques for managing the complex infrastructure of the modern web. (And if there's a lot of interest in the topic we may talk him into a half day or day seminar on the topic in the future, with more in-depth information). Below is his description of the talk.

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As Web technologies become more responsive and dynamic, the process of managing the infrastructure that powers them, along with developing their attendant services and apps, also becomes increasingly complicated. The days of unchanging HTML pages and single web server deployments are long gone! In response to this increased complexity, a new, specialized field called “DevOps” (short for “development operations”) sprung up to assume the responsibility of managing the many moving parts that make up app deployments today. And thanks to the maturation of free software tools like Vagrant, Docker, devPanel, and more within the last year or two that handle much of this increased complexity, what was once solely the domain of specialists in large enterprises has now become accessible to smaller businesses and even independent developers.

Tasks that were once difficult to automate inexpensively are getting easier to do in ways that adhere to industry best-practices.

In this session, we’ll demystify what “DevOps” actually is, give you a solid understanding of the tools in the field, and run through some hands-on exercises to showcase how you can create stable, consistent development, testing, staging, and production environments in a repeatable, portable, and manageable way. And we’ll do it all using cross-platform, vendor-neutral, free software tools that you won’t have to pay a cent to obtain or use, so you’ll never be tied to a particular hosting provider or company again.