DevOps Manchester 14

DevOps Manchester 14 is taking place on the 27th Sep 2017.

We'll be hearing from Jon Topper of Scale Factory and Tim Fletcher of LateRooms.com.

Food and drink will be provided courtesy of Auto Trader, who are hiring for Systems Engineers (http://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fcareers.autotrader.co.uk%2Fsearch-and-apply%2Fsystems-engineer%2F&t=YWViODkwZjEwYWY1MjMxOWE1MTRhMzFlNjkzMWY5Y2FlMzg2NTEwMiw0cVNEREpyag%3D%3D&b=t%3AMWtyal19IjwBJ7BOpLbBIQ&p=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.devopsmanchester.co.uk%2Fpost%2F165556079550%2Fdevops-manchester-14&m=1) and Enterprise Engineers (http://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fcareers.autotrader.co.uk%2Fsearch-and-apply%2Fenterprise-it-engineer%2F&t=ZDYzYzI1NDhiMTJmZjA0MjAyMzVjMjQ1Y2VjNWY3MGRiYTFmNzA1ZSw0cVNEREpyag%3D%3D&b=t%3AMWtyal19IjwBJ7BOpLbBIQ&p=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.devopsmanchester.co.uk%2Fpost%2F165556079550%2Fdevops-manchester-14&m=1).

Boring is Powerful - Jon Topper, Principal Consultant Scale Factory

People often think of boredom as a bad thing: I’ll argue that in systems design and operations, it can actually be a virtue:

Boredom is the motivation that leads us to automate the things we find ourselves doing frequently.

Software, frameworks or services that are “boring” often seem that way because they’re predictable, reliable and trustworthy.

Bored is the ideal state for an on-call engineer.

I’ll make the case that we should ration our excitement, saving it for the things that differentiate us from the competition.

Jon Topper has been doing DevOps since before we called it that. His UK-based consultancy, The Scale Factory, are a team of DevOps and cloud infrastructure specialists, helping organisations of various sizes design, build, operate and scale their infrastructure. He was recently awarded “DevOps Leader of The Year” by Computing Magazine.

Distributed Policy Enforcement with OpenSSH Certificates - Tim Fletcher, LateRooms.com

OpenSSH is a critical systems administration tool, installed on nearly every virtual machine, physical server and many IoT devices. OpenSSH is used to manage everything from the server in the shed to continent spanning collections of systems

Logging in to OpenSSH quickly and securely is normally done with cryptographic keys, sometimes using strong passwords and hardware key storage all too often left lying about on laptops.

Managing the list of keys and permissions for an organisation of more than a handful of people rapidly gets challenging, tracking who has used which key to do what even more so.

Using the CA feature of OpenSSH it is possible to remove all this complexity, and leverage OpenSSH to enforce your central policies and provide you with strong audit trails.

The talk will cover the technical aspects of what can be done with SSH certificates how this could be implemented as part of a DevOps workflow.