Rootconf 2017

On service reliability

##Submit proposals for flash talks
Rootconf is on 11-12 May. If you have:

  1. Tips and tricks for simplifying infrastructure management and maintenance;
  2. Experiences with new tools to share;
  3. Cool demos;

then propose a flash talk here, or on the spot, at the venue.

The flash talk session is on 11 May, from 17:20-18:20. We have room for about 12 flash talks. Each presentation should be no more than 5 minutes.

A final note of caution when presenting at flash talks: we have a code of conduct at the conference. You must refrain from making remarks that may be perceived as sexist or derogatory. If you want to double check your presentation, contact Sandhya Ramesh, Karthik B. or Zainab Bawa at the venue.

##Theme
The theme for the 2017 edition is service reliability. The conference will feature talks on state of the art deployment strategies and appropriate monitoring technologies at different scales. Rootconf this year will broadly cover topics like toil, on-call, outage handling, and post-mortem analysis. We are inviting presentation proposals from academics and practitioners on these topics.

Rootconf aims to appeal to the widest possible range of DevOps practitioners: from embryonic startups to the largest established enterprises. We are keen to schedule presentations that appeal both to attendees’ current needs as well as their future aspirations.

##About the Conference
Rootconf is India’s principal conference where systems and operations engineers share real world knowledge about building reliable systems. We are now accepting submissions for our next edition which will take place in Bangalore on 11-12 May 2017.

Topics for Round 2 of the CfP were:

  1. Capacity planning.
  2. Deploying microservices, and issues concerning monitoring and reliability of microservices.
  3. Deployment and orchestration of container based infrastructures.
  4. Open tracing.

Topics for Round 1 of the CfP were:

  1. Monitoring strategies
  2. Deployment strategies
  3. Capacity planning
  4. Automation beyond deployment and monitoring
  5. Eliminating toil
  6. On-call outage handling
  7. Postmortem / root cause analysis
  8. Incident response

##Format
Rootconf is a three track conference:

We are inviting proposals for:

  • Full-length 40-minute talks – which cover conceptual topics and include case studies.
  • Crisp 15-minute how-to talks or introduction to a new technology.
  • Sponsored sessions, of 15 minutes and 40 minutes duration (limited slots available; subject to editorial scrutiny and approval).
    Hands-on workshop sessions of 3 and 6 hour duration where participants follow the instructors on their laptops.

##Selection Process
Proposals will be filtered and shortlisted by an Editorial Panel. Please make sure to add links to videos / slide decks when submitting proposals. This will help us understand your speaking experience and delivery style. Blurbs or blog posts covering the relevance of a particular problem statement and how it is tackled will help the Editorial Panel better judge your proposals. We might contact you to ask if you’d like to repost your content on the official conference blog.

We expect you to submit an outline of your proposed talk, either in the form of a mind map or a text document or draft slides within two weeks of submitting your proposal.

Selection Process Flowchart

You can check back on this page for the status of your proposal. We will notify you if we either move your proposal to the next round or if we reject it. Selected speakers must participate in one or two rounds of rehearsals before the conference. This is mandatory and helps you to prepare well for the conference.

A speaker is NOT confirmed a slot unless we explicitly mention so in an email or over any other medium of communication.

There is only one speaker per session. Entry is free for selected speakers.

##Travel Grants
As our budget is limited, we prefer speakers from locations closer home, but will do our best to cover for anyone exceptional. HasGeek provides these limited grants where applicable:

  • Two grants covering travel and accommodation for international speakers.
  • Three grants covering travel and accommodation for domestic speakers.

Grants will be made available to speakers delivering full sessions (40 minutes or longer).
*Speaker travel grants will be given in the order of preference to students, women, persons of non-binary genders, and speakers from Asia and Africa.

##Commitment to Open Source
HasGeek believes in open source as the binding force of our community. If you are describing a codebase for developers to work with, we’d like for it to be available under a permissive open source licence. If your software is commercially licensed or available under a combination of commercial and restrictive open source licences (such as the various forms of the GPL), please consider picking up a sponsorship. We recognise that there are valid reasons for commercial licensing, but ask that you support us in return for giving you an audience. Your session will be marked on the schedule as a “sponsored session”.

##Important Dates:

  • Deadline for submitting proposals: 10 April, 2017
  • Final conference schedule: 15 April 2017
  • Conference dates: 11-12 May, 2017

##Contact
For more information about speaking proposals, tickets and sponsorships, contact info@hasgeek.com or call +91-7676332020.

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

Yogesh Patel

@yogeshjp

Tailored OS boot process to auto-recover Vms from read-only state

Submitted Feb 15, 2017

Enterprises use internal hosting with HA virtualized environments hosted on VMware/KVM’s. To achieve HA virtualized environment, we need cost effective storage to serve as datastore – in which case NFS (or NAS, which will be used interchangeably, but mean the same) storage wins over SAN. This approach has been adopted by quite a few companies, however, though NFS storage is the one of the cheapest option, it comes with a risk – the risk of low reliability as compared to FC storage.

Using NAS storage renders the virtualized infra susceptible to network outages. These have led to operating system related file system inconsistencies resulting in VMs landing in a read-only state and requiring manual intervention to fix them. Recovering thousands of VMs manually - logging into Management Console, launching server console, repairing the root file system and booting up - warrants a highly orchestrated effort and can be highly time consuming.

Not having a comprehensive solution, to recover from such outages, poses a high risk for enterprises. This can easily snowball into wider customer-impacting application outages with undefined Recovery Time Objective (RTO).

Why we want to discuss this:
• Moving to the Cloud, or fault tolerant infra, can solve this but that is yet to be a reality for most Enterprises
• To manage current hosting solutions and their limitations this was a problem which needed to be addressed

There can be different ways to solve this problem:
• Move to Cloud or fault tolerant, auto-scaling infra – which is still some time away
• Offer tiered hosting plans i.e. Silver, Gold and Platinum plans based on Cost+Availability factors
• We’ve tried to solve the problem by letting the VM preemptively recover the file systems to auto-recover thereby reducing MTTR and defining RTO. This allows companies to continue enjoying cost-effective HA virtualized environment and improving availability/MTTR

How we did it:
By tailoring the Linux boot process to auto-recover VMs from read-only state. Join us to know more.

Outline

Introduction - 15 mins
Introduce ourselves
Share the problem statement

Content delivery on the how we solve - 15min

Requirements

Be able to project. We will have 2 speakers for this proposal,Neeraj Saigal and me. We will need two set of mic.

Speaker bio

Neeraj Saigal works for Intuit India and leads the service delivery function in Product infrastructure group. He is passionate about solving problems and come up with effective solution for it.
Yogesh Patel, I work for Intuit India as a Staff Systems engineer in Product Infrastructure group and am responsible for consulting, hosting and deployment strategies for the product teams.

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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