[Devops] PuppetConf 2013 Recap

[Aaron Zauner]

Hi Guys,

I'm currently in San Francisco for PuppetConf and VMworld. I'll do a (very) short recap of PuppetConf, since telling you about Talks that can be found online as slides and videos (presumably soon) won't get you far anyway.

I'll be blunt: PuppetConf was probably one of the most useless conferences i've ever been to. Held in the upscale Fairmont in SF it was a mixture of open-source, start-up and business crowd. The kind of bastardization of useless marketing talks and showcase for VMware (which invested substantially) you probably won't like to visit or pay for. It was strange. About 3/4 of talks i attended were simply bullshit,  people attending other talks that i talked to were giving me the same feedback - BLAH BLAH BLAH DEVOPS BLAH BLAH AGILE BLAH BLAH CLOUD CLOUD CLOUD BLAH COMMUNITY CLOUD BLAH. I'am quite serious about that. I like to listen to people who share their experience in DevOps, Managment, Operations, Development and so on, this was mostly a joke, speakers were simply not making any point, they sure used a lot of pie-charts a. Most "technical" talks did barely contain any technical information or code, a lot of speakers where philosophising about community development, management processes and the like - but it did not seem as they had any experience about the things they were talking about besides using a shitload of buzzwords. Even vendors like Cisco were a huge disappointment. I was visiting with a couple of colleagues who felt the same way.

You'll see for yourself if you decide to watch some of the talks. BUT; there for sure were a couple of useful and interesting talks. Most GitHub and Google talks were pretty interesting. Here is a list of Talks i enjoyed and considered useful, watch out for slides and videos online:

.) Keynote: Why Did We Think Large Scale Distributed Systems Would be Easy?
- http://www.slideshare.net/PuppetLabs/thur-945-gordonrowell12slides-25538241
- http://puppetconf2013b.sched.org/event/7aaf3305604487f5ffd2c0dd6bc7ff0c

distributed systems are hard. client management at google / keynote.

.) Architecting for Failure in AWS
- http://www.slideshare.net/PuppetLabs/aws-resilience-and-cost-at-scale-boumans
- http://puppetconf2013b.sched.org/event/f098b03be2bda417547403074ad1eee5?iframe=no&w=990&sidebar=yes&bg=no

basically a best-practices guide to AWS for large web hosting companies, pretty interesting if you're into AWS i can recommend it.

.) Puppet at GitHub
- http://puppetconf2013b.sched.org/event/8e756a1b70a8060b7cee247346e7afa2?iframe=no&w=990&sidebar=yes&bg=no

well, the title explains everything. didn't find any slides so far.

.) Building Data-Driven Infrastructure with Puppet
- http://www.slideshare.net/PuppetLabs/building-datadriven-infrastructure-with-puppet
- http://puppetconf2013b.sched.org/event/9cc8346bbafa29f77633699c3f8e5a6d

development and operation processes at github ("chatops", "beerops" [sic!]), some tricks and hints and a great speaker.

.) More Logstash Awesome
- http://puppetconf2013b.sched.org/event/e04740c470d121155dde26c75e50ade5?iframe=no&w=990&sidebar=yes&bg=no

a wrap up of new features in log stash, jordan sissel is just a greak speaker. did'nt find any slides so far.


.) Puppet, now with Google!
- http://www.slideshare.net/PuppetLabs/puppet-now-with-google
- http://puppetconf2013b.sched.org/event/75bf96539ae7375268a7e50bf5b38181

the title is a bit misleading - this talk was about google compute engine in general and how to use puppet on their infrastructure as a customer. they do not use it for their server orchestration/changemgmt. pretty interesting talk.


Yup, thats it. 

Aaron
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