I’m Hunting Sasquatch

Speaker: Paul Grizzaffi

Date: Saturday, October 26, 2013 9:45am – 10:25am CST

Location: Alamo Drafthouse Cinema

In the mainstream world, Sasquatch (also known as Bigfoot) is an ape-like creature infrequently seen in the Pacific Northwest. In the software realm, we have our own version of Sasquatch: that irritating “intermittent issue” that is difficult to find and that is often blamed on anything other than a product defect. Let’s explore how “periodic automation” can help hunt down these elusive targets and some considerations of which we need to be mindful when implementing this concept.


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Cloud and You

Speaker: Matt Hester

Date: Saturday, October 26, 2013 9:00am – 9:40am CST

Location: Alamo Drafthouse Cinema

Cloud computing is emerging as a promising IT service delivery vehicle. But is the question “To cloud or not to cloud”? For IT professionals and your IT organizations, it is crucial to recognize the opportunities and play a key role in the transformation from existing infrastructure-focused IT into a service-oriented, user-centric, and IT-as-a-Service (IaaS) environment. Are you ready for the challenge to lead and transform your IT organization?

This session will clarify the myths and provide pertinent information on cloud computing from a business and IT professional’s viewpoint. We will review the architectures and examine the service delivery models of cloud computing while stepping through business scenarios and operations of employing public cloud and private cloud.


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Ansible Orchestration

Speaker: Jeff Gonzalez & Brandon Keown

Date: Tuesday, September 17, 2013 7:00pm – 8:00pm CST

Location: Paladin Consulting

Ansible is a radically simple IT orchestration engine that
makes your applications and systems easier to deploy.  Learn how we
leverage it to provision and deploy our software applications on
Amazon AWS.

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Demo of AppDynamics

Speaker: Spencer Grant

Date: Tuesday, August 20, 2013 7:00pm – 8:00pm CST

Location: Paladin Consulting

See AppDynamics in action! AppDynamics is application performance management software designed to help Dev and Ops troubleshoot problems in complex production apps. Improve reliability, speed up deployment cycles, and increase the quality of new products.

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Maestro, DevOps Orchestration Engine

Speaker: Etienne Pelletier

Date: Tuesday, July 16, 2013 7:00pm – 8:00pm CST

Location: Paladin Consulting

Maestro is a DevOps Orchestration engine for enterprise-class companies across a range of industries. A single interface optimizes task management for Continuous Delivery, Agile development, DevOps, and Cloud Federation. Today’s talk will include a product demonstration that will show you how it can help you integrate with your existing DevOps toolchain, and automate various development and operational processes.

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Crowbar

Speaker: Judd Maltin

Date: Tuesday, June 18, 2013 7:00pm – 8:00pm CST

Location: Paladin Consulting

Crowbar is an open-source software framework developed by Dell. With Crowbar, you can install cloud software across clusters and scale out systems quickly and automatically. Crowbar also provides capabilities for network monitoring and discovery, and gathering performance data, among other advantages. With Crowbar, you have a configurable, adjustable framework complete with many built-in features that can save time, streamline effort and potentially lower costs.

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From localhost to production with Vagrant

Speaker: Jordan Ambra

Date: Tuesday, May 21, 2013 7:00pm – 8:00pm CST

Location: Paladin Consulting

Jordan Ambra is the devops engineer/sysadmin for 3S Mobile, a company that provides a mobile platform to manage farmers and their activities in developing countries. He lives in rural Pennsylvania with his lovely wife and 2 kids, and has been working independently from his home office for 5 years. His biggest passion? Learning new things and sharing what he knows with others. Unfortunately, he forgets to share sometimes. Oops.

Jordan is going to talk about Vagrant, which is the easiest way to get rid of Works On My Machine problems for your development team. In particular, he will show how to minimize the differences between how you develop and run code on localhost and production through the help of automation and integration of Vagrant with Chef and Puppet.

No previous knowledge of any of these systems is required.

 

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Exploring MongoDB, by 10gen

Speaker: Craig Wilson

Date: Tuesday, April 16, 2013 7:00pm – 8:00pm CST

Location: Paladin Consulting

MongoDB is a robust, simple, and free alternative to mainstream data stores.  Craig will walk through what MongoDB is and how it can fit into your environment, including how replica sets work with tips and tricks for maintenance and backups.  In addition, he’ll discuss schema design and how it differs from traditional approaches allowing freedom and flexibility.

Craig Wilson is a software engineer with 10gen, the MongoDB Company.  He lives in Dallas with his wife and 3 kids and loves taking them to the zoo and parks when he isn’t programming.  He has been an enterprise architect, consultant, and developer in a variety of industries ranging from insurance and finance to retail.  He got into MongoDB by looking for an open-source project to contribute to and began by contributing to the .NET driver for MongoDB.

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Windows Azure: The Microsoft Cloud Platform

Speaker: Casey Watson

Date: Tuesday, March 19, 2013 7:00pm – 8:00pm CST

Location: Paladin Consulting

Unless you’ve been developing under a rock for the last year you’ve no doubt heard the deafening buzz in the development community around “the cloud.” But what is it? How can you take full advantage of it? Where do you begin? The cloud is more than a clever marketing buzzword. Much more.

In this session, Casey begins by guiding the audience on a high-level tour of general cloud-related concepts then takes a deep dive into the two major cloud computing platforms, Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon’s AWS, through a series of interactive exercises. In this session you will learn the fundamental concepts of cloud computing including the range of execution models that each of these platforms support.

The session will conclude with an audience-driven discussion covering special architectural considerations that should be taken when designing software for the cloud. By the end of the session you should know all that you need to hit the ground running creating massively scalable applications on these incredibly powerful cloud platforms. If you’re curious about the cloud then you owe it to yourself to attend this session.

 

 


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DevOps Now: A Fourteen Year Study Of High Performing IT Organizations

Speaker: Gene Kim

Date: Tuesday, February 19, 2013 7:00pm – 8:00pm CST

Location: Paladin Consulting

Gene Kim will be presenting his findings from an ongoing study of how high-performing IT organizations simultaneously deliver stellar service levels and deliver fast flow of new features into the production environment.  To successfully deliver against what on the surface appear to be conflicting objectives, (i.e. preserving service levels while introducing significant amounts of change into production), requires creating a highly-coordinated collection of teams where Development, QA, IT Operations, as well as Product Management and Information Security genuinely work together to solve business objectives.

Gene will describe what successful transformations look like, and how those transformations were achieved from a software development and service operations perspective.  He will draw upon fourteen years of research of high-performing IT organizations, as well as work he’s done since 2008 to help some of the largest Internet companies increase feature flow and production stability through applications of DevOps principles.


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