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

Pankaj Kaushal

@spo0nman

Building Elastic Infrastructures

Submitted Mar 3, 2014

My aim is to describe the current best practices and software to use when creating an auto scaling infrastructure. I showcase an elastic infrastructure that is based on proven methods and open source software (Flipkart Hostdb and Puppet) which enables us to build a platform that inturn allows application engineers to create massively scalable web apps without losing sleep.

Outline

The state of auto scaling infrastructure is still in its infancy and information, open source tools and best practices to automatically scale infra and applications on a the cloud is scarce.

Flipkart.com has a private cloud spread over two datacenters, 5500 Servers, four environments. 350+ developers. Project based environments are created and destroyed automatically on demand, utilizing Infrastructure services viz Mail, DNS, Monitoring, Load Balancing, Backup and application services like Mysql, RabbitMQ, Couchbase. Software is developed and deployed using continuous integration.

How do we configure DNS automatically? How do we create Mysql clusters with master and slaves on demand? How do we make sure that all virtual machines come with monitoring and alerting by default? How are log files purged and backed up on their own? How do we make sure that your weekend hack is ready to perform at web scale; when the whole world discovers it at the same time? All these are important questions where automatic scaling, elastic infrastructure is concerned. I will answer all of the above.

My aim is to describe the current best practices and software to use when creating an auto scaling infrastructure. I showcase an elastic infrastructure that is based on proven methods and open source software (Flipkart Hostdb and Puppet) which enables us to build a platform that inturn allows application engineers to create massively scalable web apps without losing sleep.

The lessons we’ve learned demonstrate that a combination of state management and configuration management systems is effective in building and maintaining an infrastructure and applications that are elastically scalable. The ideas discussed here can be applied to a private cloud or a public cloud like AWS.

Requirements

Basic understanding of Virtualization and Puppet or Chef.

Speaker bio

I’m the Master of Disaster at Flipkart, where I work on creating and maintaining services that operate at web scale, Flipkart is India’s largest e-commerce website with multiple data centers and over thousands of servers. Before coming to Flipkart, I was a senior performance engineer at Yahoo! I’ve spoken at numerous conferences and events.

Slides

https://speakerdeck.com/spo0nman/building-elastic-infrastructures

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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