Earlier this month, I had the privilege of speaking in front of the Boston Amazon Web Services Meetup Group, at their monthly meetup. Zenoss co-hosted the event with Everbridge,, and we were joined by AWS DevOps guru Matthew Trescot. The topic of the three-pronged session centered on DevOps best practices in a ”cloud-first” world and, based on the great attendance and spirited discussions, it seemed to be a hit.
AWS and DevOps
Matthew from Amazon led us off with an overview of the many tools AWS offers to help companies adopt a DevOps operating framework and, ultimately, accelerated deployments into the public cloud. He told a great story about Amazon’s own move from a single large-scale, monolithic application to the industry-leading service framework they use today, and it really got the audience thinking about their own company transformations. I then had a chance to discuss the real purpose of continuous delivery models and why we’re all trying to get faster at delivering new services. It’s a topic I’m passionate about because I’ve never been a fan of the “fail fast” mantra that’s gotten so much buzz the last few years. I believe that continuous delivery models like DevOps are really tools to help businesses “fail small” and then “fix fast.” This is why monitoring is so important in a true DevOps environment. Monitoring is ultimately the feedback loop that makes a continuous delivery process “continuous.” Without real-time information about how a newly launched feature, patch or service is performing, your developers can’t make real-time adjustments to their code for future releases.
IT Alerting Solutions
My topic, not surprisingly, led to lots of questions about what happens when things “hit the fan.” After all, while we’d love to have monitoring in place just to fine tune and optimize our applications and environments, we all know its real value is often in letting us know when things have broken down. Luckily, that’s exactly why we partnered with Everbridge, who has an incredible IT alerting solution. Vincent Geffray, senior director of product marketing, IT alerting and IoT at Everbridge, discussed the importance of alerting the right people at the right time and in the right way when time is of the essence — and in a world of continuous delivery, time is always of the essence.
It was great to be able to show a start-to-finish view of how a DevOps environment should be implemented. And the subsequent panel discussion and Q&A session lasted quite a bit longer than expected with nearly the entire group remaining late into the evening and engaging in passionate discussion, debate and collaboration.
It was a memorable evening, and I hope I’ll have the opportunity to attend more sessions like this one, both locally here in Austin, Texas, and around the country, soon. If you’ve ever considered joining a Meetup group or attending a Meetup session in your area, I highly recommend checking them out — and if you happen to live in the Boston area and are passionate about AWS (or technology in general), I know just the group for you!
A shameless plug, join all of us at Zenoss and our customers at GalaxZ 18, June 20-22, 2018!
