Cisco Spark reviews and demos event driven operations platform

I'm really excited that we will have an excellent late July discussion building on what we learned from Facebook at the excellent June Event Driven Meet-up discussing FBAR.

Cisco Spark started as an internal startup within WebEx, and one of they key capabilities needed was an agile operations platform that matches up well with the most efficient and flexible and secure such systems in the world.

They are now rolling out the second generation of their automation tooling and ready to share with us what they have learned, how they have built it, and future directions.

They are hoping this will be a very interactive session so come with your questions.

Specific topics will include:

SaaS Platform Overview and Automation Foundations

A quick overview of where the Cisco Spark collaboration application runs, how multiple service abstractions are used to support application delivery and why, and what principles guide the development of the system.

Introducing event handling... for bootstrapping

Arguably, the most disruptive "event" that occurs on a regular basis in the Spark platform is the one that triggers a a new service build-out. The Spark team introduced StackStorm to their toolchest and reimagined their deployments as a trigger that sets off a cascade of events whose actions perform all necessary steps to build out required services. This has very interesting ramifications for new ways of working with application teams.

Connecting Humans and Automation via ChatOps

Perhaps the single most important "event" in any system is a human saying "do something". Given that Cisco Spark provides enterprise chat, it unsurprising that the team would prefer chat to communicate with their automation systems.

Demonstration

The Spark team will tempt the Demo Gods by demonstrating deployment via StackStorm's events handling.

Finally, we will also be joined by one of the best known advocates for ChatOps, James Fryman, who has spoken widely on the subject. He will wrap up the evening with a short overview of the state of ChatOps and of soft and hard considerations when adopting ChatOps.