Rootconf 2014

On devops and cloud infrastructure

As Developers / Managers we almost everyday think and talk about faster / shorter Software Development cycles to increase our market presence/reach. Is there a way to measure how fast we are ?

Speaking of cycle: In Cycling a term “Cadence” is used, which simply means the speed at which you pedal. Cyclists measure this in revolutions per minute, or rpm. Similar to Cadence in Cycling, the cadence of a software team is measured by how fast and how frequent you can take your software live. Can you do this on every day, every week ? Do you have the tools for the same to Scale UP ?

While we try to improve the cadence of the team we have many challenges around Infrastructure Scaling, Test Integration, Configuration Management, Monitoring for uptime, Log Management, Security of Servers, Dev-Test-Prod setups, Maintaining single source of truth for your assets, etc… And how does these changes impact team dynamics ? If you have adopted some strategies have you noticed that your team has improved? do you need more QAs or do you need more sysadmins ? do you really need those many routers, servers or backups?

Rootconf is a conference which tries to address some of the challenges we face when we fine tune our infrastructure to be able to appropriately respond to a business need, while we Scale UP our Cloud or Web Infrastructure.

Developing a good Continuous Integration/Deployment/Testing/Delivery strategy is critical to improve the cadence of your team. Infrastructure and DevOps is an upfront investment human, time & money. The challenge always is whether you’re willing to make that investment right away, or in the future at a much higher cost and effort.

Rootconf is a conference which will help you to plan and develop a strategy map for infrastructure and devops. It will show you the building blocks for reaching a strategy for Infrastructure Scaling, Continuous Integration, Deployment and Delivery.

Target audience

Rootconf is targeted at individuals, teams and companies that are seeking to scale the effectiveness of their developer teams and performance of their web stacks, thereby increase the Cadence of their software delivery.

Organizations which need a CI and CD strategy to achieve the above will find a substantial headstart in doing so, by attending Rootconf.

Venue

Workshops

14th and 15th May 2014
The Energy and Research Institute,
4th Main Rd, Domlur II Stage,
Domlur, Bangalore

Conference

16th and 17th May 2014
MLR Convention Centre,
J P Nagar 7th Phase,
Brigade Millenium campus,
Bangalore

Tickets

http://rootconf.doattend.com

Online Presence

Website | Facebook | twitter

For questions about submissions or the conference, write to support@hasgeek.com

Theme

For Rootconf 2014, we are accepting proposals for Full Talks, Crisp Talks & Flash Talks for the Conference, and proposals for hands-on 3 hour workshops on the below topics. For more information on the types of talks, please checkout the Format tab.

  1. Infrastructure Scaling & Automation
    • Treating your infrastructure as code.
    • How did you do scaling and what were your automation strategies while you were gunning for scaling.
  2. Continuous Integration
    • Tell us how you have done it for your organization ?
    • Any use case around how it impacted your development team / process.
    • Reference Tools – Jenkins, Travis CI, CruiseControl, TeamCity.
  3. Deployment
    • Tell us how you have done it for your organization ?
    • Any use case on how you reduced your deployment time ? Did you reduce your time to market your product by Adopting CD ?
    • Reference Tools – Chef, Puppet, Ansible, Salt
  4. Automating Testing
    • How much manual can be automated ?
    • How did you automate ? What tools di you use ?
    • What framework(s) did you use ?
    • Did you use heavy weight Selenium or Watir or Sahi?
    • Tools that work across heterogeneous languages (PHP, Java, C, Mobile)
  5. Security
    • Code Security
      • Trust no one - including the developer.
      • How are you testing your code ?
      • Do you run vulnerability testing part of the CI ?
      • Best Practices for secure coding
    • Server side security
    • Data at motion
      • Is internet really safe, how do you protect your data. Is HTTPS alone sufficient ?
    • Data at rest
    • Do you need to implement standards?
  6. Log monitoring and server monitoring
    • The heartbeat / lifeline of your business: tell us more about how you monitor.
    • Do you use any of these tools? Graphite, Sentry, CopperEgg, Loggly, Papertrail, Splunk, Nagios, Monit, etc..
  7. Cloud databases:
    • NoSQL Databases (DynamoDB, MongoDB, Couch)
    • The good and bad of NoSQL
    • Automation challenges of NoSQL
  8. Self-healing
    • Automatic remediation of services and servers.
    • Process Protection using Service Protector, Monit
    • Auto Scaling Groups
  9. New tools
    • Do you have more tools that makes you a better DevOps Engineer ?

Talks can submitted for the following OSes:

  • Windows
  • Linux
  • Cross-platform

Hosted by

Rootconf is a community-funded platform for activities and discussions on the following topics: Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). Infrastructure costs, including Cloud Costs - and optimization. Security - including Cloud Security. more

Gaurav Gupta

@gagupta79

Scaling databases with a database access layer

Submitted Apr 26, 2014

The objective of this session is to discuss an architecture to scale and manage the database tier by introducing a database abstraction layer. We will discuss various challenges of database scalability and then discuss few solutions.

We will be taking few references from the Facebook’s WebscaleSQL project, Google’s spanner paper and MySQL proxy.

Outline

When an application goes viral it not an easy feet to scale the infrastructure to support it. It requires some crafty deployments, constant improvement in the application stack and a lot of automation in the infrastructure to serve the growing business.

For the past couple of years, I have been looking at the problem of scaling the database tier efficiently. Database (especially relational database) remains an interesting frontier to scale up in the multi-tier architecture. NoSQL offers promise of scale for certain use cases, but there a large ecosystem for SQL that remains and will continue to grow. I propose a database abstraction layer that offers great potential to scale, optimize, perform and manage the traditional database tier. This layer will virtualize the databases from applications and provides a single interface to DBAs, DevOps and Developers to manage, test and develop their database tier.

I will be talking about certain common optimization techniques that can be offered from this layer:

  1. Instant scale up - transparent connection pooling and multiplexing, transparent caching, surge protection
  2. Transparent scale out - read/write split, load balancing, query routing, Sharding
  3. Automatic high availability - automatic failover
  4. Real-time Analytics

Requirements

Inquisitiveness

Speaker bio

I am currently the VP of Engineering at ScaleArc, where we are building a solution like I described above. For the last 12 years, I have been working on building high-performance sub-systems on Linux in file systems, storage and networking domain. Most recently I was the founding engineer at CloudVelocity, where I helped build a hybrid cloud platform. Before that I worked as a Principal Software Engineer at Symantec, Cisco Systems and NeoPath Networks, and a contributor to OpenStack. The time I spent in these startups was a great experience and I hope I can share some of these learnings with fellow engineers.

In short, I enjoy sharing ideas on innovation, engineering and product development. I am looking forward for all the interesting sessions proposed on this conference.

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Hosted by

Rootconf is a community-funded platform for activities and discussions on the following topics: Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). Infrastructure costs, including Cloud Costs - and optimization. Security - including Cloud Security. more