Ever since I interviewed Tom Limoncelli before LISA '10, I've wanted to take his time management training. Ironically, I never seemed to find the time, until this year. I was pleased to see that the local attendees already had sufficient time management skills to be in the room on time. We have no way of knowing if the remote attendees were similarly prepared, so I'll give them the benefit of the doubt.
On Sunday afternoon, I had the pleasure of sitting in another of Geoff Halprin's training courses: the new "Introduction to Provisioning" tutorial. Provisioning seems like something we all already know how to do -- something Geoff will readily admit to. His stated goal is to get system administrators to think more deeply about the things they already know, and deep he went in this course. By his own admission, a fair amount of time was spent down rabbit holes. This, of course, doesn't imply that the content was unhelpful.
"Agile" is a very popular term in the software development industry and beyond. Dozens of systems administrators started LISA '12 by attending Geoff Halprin's tutorial on the Agile methodology. Agile has developed from improvements to the original "waterfall" methodology for the software design life cycle (SDLC). In the waterfall model, projects moved from one highly-prescribed phase to the next. Waterfall works well for projects where the requirements are well-known and static, a rare case for most IT projects.
Tom Limoncelli taught the second half of his Time Management series this afternoon, Advanced Time Management: Team Efficiency. This session focused less on organizing yourself, and more on keeping teams efficient. There are ways of making sysadmin or other technical teams work more efficiently, and Tom let us in on those.
Tom opened the session with a question: what team problems do you want to see addressed? There were a lot of things called out, but many of them familiar:
David Nalley taught a class today on building massive IaaS clouds. Massive is a bit of a loose term, but the consensus is that’s “over 1000 physical nodes”. The session was fairly CloudStack centric, but the overall issues facing such deployments are common no matter what the actual framework is being used.
A key quote:
“Getting to thousands of physical hosts is complex -- getting to tens of thousands of physical hosts is a completely different magnitude of problem.”
Nuri Halprin taught the MongoDB: NoSQL Operations Hands On class this afternoon. The intent of this class was to give sysadmins a solid familiarization of MongoDB and those things near and dear to our heart: high-availability and disaster recovery.
David Nally taught RPM Packaging for Systems this morning at LISA '12. There were a few absentees, but as David pointed out, it was early on a Sunday so some of that is to be expected. That didn't stop him though.
He opened up with a slide-deck to give background on why package management is a good thing, and why we as sysadmins need to be doing more of it. Not just RPM, but package-management of anything, be it .debs, Microsoft MSI's, or ruby Gems.
Every year, the reception at LISA is just a little different. Last year, the Back to the Future themed conference took us to the 1980s, where we had arcade machines and awesome toys from the time period.
This year, keeping with the Secret Agent theme, we're having a Shaken, Not Stirred reception, and USENIX has pulled out all the stops.
