Marching Towards Production: A Talk in Two Acts with David Blank-Edelman

Act 1: How Can you Scale It if you Can’t Trust it?When you scale up an infrastructure it is crucial that you can trust you have the right resources in play, the right code deployed and that information can only flow in a secure manner. When you scale the organization, trust is required amongst all of the people responsible for coding, testing, deploying and managing the applications that power the business.
With all of the chatter around scaling, you would think someone would have told you the key ingredient necessary for creating and fostering the required trust. Unfortunately it is very easy to get to the end of the diving board, right on the edge of jumping into something like a hybrid cloud deployment, before you realize you need to figure this out on your own.
This talk can help. We’ll discuss some concrete ways you can engineer trust into the system (complete with examples) you are building or operating so that it works well for cloud-native and legacy applications. By the end, you’ll have a good idea of the decision/enforcement points you’ll need to consider to be able to create a system (and an organization) that can scale.

Intermission: AMA (Ask Me Anything!)

Act 2: The Art of the Laptop Cluster. When Docker burst on the scene in 2013, one promise that excited both developers and operations people alike was the idea that a dev would create a container on her laptop that could then be shipped right up to production. Three years later, most people have realized that it may not be that simple.
In a world where we are building microservices and distributed systems, how can you ensure that the laptop you are typing at now is a step towards production-ready software and not a distraction from it? Let’s get deep down and dirty into the art of constructing useful clusters on our primary development/operations control machines and the challenges we face in the process.

Speaker Bio: David Blank-Edelman, Technical Evangelist, Apcera

David is the Technical Evangelist at Apcera. He has spent close to thirty years in the systems administration/DevOps/SRE field in large multi-platform environments including Brandeis University, Cambridge Technology Group, MIT Media Laboratory and Northeastern University. He is the author of the O’Reilly Otter book (Automating System Administration with Perl) and is a frequent invited speaker at conferences in the field. David is honored to serve on the USENIX Board of Directors. He prefers to pronounce Evangelist with a hard ‘g’.

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