LOPSA Cascadia is one of the top 47 SysAdmin Conferences! https://blog.profitbricks.com/top-sysadmin-events-in-2015-2016/
50 minute talks on a wide variety of topics taught by top people in the field. Lightning talks are given in the final time slot of the conference. Attendees can sign up to give lightning talks during the the conference and present Saturday afternoon.
Lightning talks are short impromptu talks given on any topic relevant to IT.
In most cases, it is convenient to have some human interaction with a web (micro-)service, no matter how small it is. A traditional approach would be to create an HTTP interface, where user requests will be dispatched and HTML/CSS pages must be served. This approach is indeed very traditional for a web site, but not really convenient for a web service, which is not intended to be good looking, 24×7 up and running and UX-optimized. Instead, talking to a web service in a chat-bot mode would be much more convenient, both for a user and web service developer. In this session I will try to explain why chat-bot design is more preferable, what are the pros and cons.
Target Audience
Architects, Programmers, and Designers
IT is often seen as a necessary evil. Something a company will make reluctant expenditure to cover, but are always looking at a cheaper alternative. This session is about gaining the trust of the business and how to move from necessary evil to strategic partner
Target Audience
IT influencers, Architects, Senior technical staff, IT Managers and Directors.
Containers are revolutionizing the way we deploy and maintain our infrastructures: reducing development overhead, streamlining dev / test / ops, and enabling highly scalable, dynamic infrastructures. But containers still have a key problem: monitoring and troubleshooting them is impractical, painful, and sometimes plain impossible. Even basic things like understanding what is using CPU, memory, or disk bandwidth inside a container are difficult – let alone finding out who a container is talking to on the network or tracking malicious activity. In this presentation, Loris Degioanni will cover the current state of the art for container monitoring and visibility, including real use-cases and pros / cons of each. He will then focus on advanced container visibility techniques, such as: * visualizing a container’s network activity * understanding detailed resource usage (CPU, memory and disk I/O) of containers and individual processes running inside containers * following process and user activity inside containers * collecting logs from multiple containers The presentation will feature live interaction with container environments and live demos of all tools and techniques discussed. Special emphasis will be put on sysdig, an open source container and system troubleshooting tool of which that the presenter is a core author. GitHub link: https://github.com/draios/sysdig
Target Audience
System Administrator, DevOps, Containers enthusiast
Even the best designed systems can and will have outages. No matter how well you’ve hardened your infrastructure and put in place failover or self-healing automation, something you didn’t see coming will wreak havoc in your special snowflake of a system. In many cases a human is likely to be a contributing factor. In fact, Gartner has predicted that in 2015, 80% of outages will be caused by people and process issues. Are you considering the Human element when revisiting incidents and outages with your infrastructure? If so, are you approaching it with a blameless mindset focused on removing the many forms of bias and searching for absolute truth. Do you believe that there is always a root cause to outages or is it more accurate to seek out additional aspects that may have contributed to the incident, especially with regard to the people and processes? Regardless of your approach, the point of a postmortem is to accurately describe the “story” about what took place in as much detail as possible. The good, the bad, those involved, conversations had, actions taken, related timestamps, who was on-call, etc. You want to know absolutely everything that took place that was related in some degree so that you can review the data and learn from it. How do we ensure that we are asking the right questions and seeking out relevant and important information that will help us understand what took place and ultimately how to become a better team, company, and product as a result? The blameless culture (specifically blameless postmortems) is a topic of interest to many in the middle of a DevOps transformation within their organization. I’ll outline important best practices for conducting effective postmortems and demonstrate methods to measure benefits from adopting postmortems especially those of a “blameless” nature.
Target Audience
SysAdmins, CTO, DevOps Engineers, and anyone else that has a stake in incident management, resolutions, and the process of learning from outages. This talk has been given one other time at DevOpsDays – Silicon Valley (2015) Video: http://www.jasonhand.com/flaming-poo-the-human-response/
At Stack Overflow we run very lean, and very efficient. This talk is about how we run a top 50 website using only 20 servers. Each month we process approximately 6 Billion HTTP requests (about 2 Billion Page views) a month. We do this on an extremely lean stack primarily based on Microsoft technology. Additionally, we render each page sent to our users in about 20ms. I will talk about our stack, and what we do to quickly serve each page. I will also cover some of the tools we use to monitor, and verify our performance. Most of these tools are open source!
Target Audience
Anyone interested in scaling web applications. Or just how the Stack Overflow stack works in general.
There are those that bristle at the very thought of change control. And others that absolutely live and breath ITIL. When we had the need to put a speedbump in the way of changes that could take out the whole network I spent some time thinking through the good and the bad I had experienced with change control systems in the past. The first thing that I needed to decide was What system to back this with. I didn’t want to go out and get a full ITIL suite since I knew that would be overkill for our needs.
Target Audience
Anyone wanting to learn about a new method of change control that is not quite so encumbered by process. This talk would be useful for someone who needs to implement a new change control system, or someone who wants to reduce the friction in the change control system they are currently using.
If you need to manage wireless networks as part of part of your job, you probably get a lot of complaints about the wireless not working and often are unable to figure out why. This session will cover the basics of how Wi-Fi works, look at a few common Wi-Fi mistakes, and introduce some diagnostic tools that can help you improve your networks.
Target Audience
Network and system administrators who wear the Wi-Fi hat along with all their others.
What’s the point in automation? Isn’t that just for big shops? I’m too busy keeping the lights on to write docs, much less mess with some big configuration management tool. How would I even get management to give me time to figure this stuff out? If this sounds familiar, my talk is for you.
Target Audience
People new to automation or systems administration or those wanting to prove its usefulness to management.
You’ve just been hired aboard a promising start up as a fresh faced intern. You find yourself standing at a metaphorical fork in the road, just hours before your first day. Will you present your best self, wearing button up shirts and freshly washed hair on your first day? Or you could choose the comfort route, a t-shirt and trusty deodorant. This could change the fate of your potential career. If you decide to wear button-ups and present your best self, turn to page 20. If you go for comfort and wear t-shirts, turn to page 65. But tread carefully! Who knows what could be lurking in this start up. What happens next? It depends on the choices you, the audience, make. Will you survive the internship? Thrive? Or stay forever trapped in the meeting that never ends?
Target Audience
Anyone who wants to re-live the horrors of being an intern, anyone new to the industry, anyone who needs a refreshing perspective on what it’s like to enter the industry (e.g. managers, hr).
Transactional system administration puts sysadmins in a bad position. When organizations replace this model with a service-centric model the company receives better service and sysadmins gain positive visibility and increase their value. The transactional model is where customers make requests and system administrators fulfill them. It is the model of servitude. This has been the power dynamic for decades. The service-centric model is where sysadmins maintain the automation that does work rather than doing the work themselves. Another way to look at it is that the best use of human labor in an auto factory is not to build cars, but to maintain the robots that build cars. Stack Exchange’s SRE Team is making strides at minimizing transactional system administration and, instead, adopting DevOps practices that create a cooperative relationship with our users. We’ve adopted this as our guiding management principle and it has greatly improved how we get things done. Tom will discuss the successes and failures of these attempts and recommend how your organization can adopt this better structure.
Target Audience
Sysadmins that are overloaded and aren’t in a DevOps environment.
OpenStack is Open Source cloud software. It is used by huge corporations, elite operations teams, and free software fanatics. But what about humans? OpenStack can be used by regular humans too! In this talk I’ll introduce OpenStack, answering all those questions about what OpenStack is, and what it does. Then, I’ll give some brief tutorials on how to use to OpenStack, tutorials that can be understood by a human. Simple, concrete tasks will be demonstrated by the audience, who can go away ready to put their new knowledge to work. Whatever your ‘appetite’ for cloud is, whatever your budget and size needs, there is an OpenStack powered cloud for you.
Target Audience
Anybody interested in cloud computing and/or learning how to use Openstack.
This talk covers why you should pick a SAN for storage, what is a SAN, criteria you need to consider when picking one, and a few gotchas when picking a SAN.
Target Audience
Beginning and Intermediate System admins who are purchasing their first or second SAN
How to generate a private key. How to use the private key to generate a public key. How to use the private key to generate a certificate signing request (CSR). How to verify the private key and the public key match. How to verify the CSR. How to verify a certificate from the CSR. A good certificate. A mediocre certificate. A self-signed certificate. How to set up a simple web server using HTTPS and openssl. How to use openssl to verify a web site using HTTPS. How to use openssl to generate a cryptographically secure random number. What is the difference between a cryptographically secure pseudo-random number and any other pseudo-random number. And more.
Target Audience
Practicing system administrators. Software engineers developing secure websites Computing security practioners
As a system administrators we rarely have time to do indepth troubleshooting or research for each unique situation. We do what the vast majority of professions do, we create heuristics. Heuristics are a practical method not guaranteed to be optimal or perfect, but sufficient for the immediate goals. Or simply a rule of thumb. Some of these are timeless, “Always test your backups.” Some of dubious quality, “It’s always the network.” We naturally create heuristics, but within our bound of rationality at the time. As we become more experienced or learn new things, we rarely reprocess past experiences and information to prune or update our heuristics. I’d like to talk about using some of the techniques from cognitive behavior therapy to help us let go of long held heuristics that are now more superstition than useful approximations of reality.
Target Audience
Beginner to Intermediate sysadmins particularly administrators that have not worked in many unique environments to see knowledge gained on one system not apply the same way on a new system.
Business often through out the necessity of “5 9s” or other challenging availability numbers without knowing what it takes to achieve those numbers. This session will help you define availability requirements, and how and what to measure to determine truly meaningful Availability Measurements
Target Audience
Technical staff, Architects, Low to Mid Management.
