I’ll tweet updates from the conference mostly from my personal account, so make sure to follow both @freistil and @geewiz.

• rackbox – to provision a rack-based web server
• databox – to provision a database server

Since they run with Chef Solo, the cookbooks don’t require a Chef server.

Huiming’s cookbooks are a great example how automation can be very effective even for small installations. We’re busy building something similar for our freistilbox hosting platform.

And if you’d like to learn how to use Chef for automating many hundred servers, join our operations team!

The european Drupal Dev Days will be one of, if not the most important events for us this year. Since they’re only a few weeks away, we’re preparing for the developer meet-up on several fronts. Markus is in charge of the marketing side and he’s been busy this week creating a handout that properly conveys why Drupal developers want to use freistilbox as their hosting platform. Jochen will cover the technological aspect. This week, he started not only preparing a talk about replicable development environments but also building one that can be installed with a single command. We’re going to start a beta test soon; drop us a note if you’re interested!

Documentation

There isn’t a day when we don’t realise that there’s still too much knowledge buried in our heads instead of being readily available to the rest of the team. We’ve made it an unwritten rule to immediately add a snippet to our company wiki when something like that comes up. (And yes, we should put this rule in writing, too…) This week, we’ve started a new wiki section named “Service Runbooks”. For every service we use (for example, our backup system), we aim to have a complete documentation of its purpose, its actual implementation, standard operating procedures, caveats, troubleshooting hints and references to further information. A great help in building this kind of documentation quickly is the ability of Confluence to define pre-filled template pages.

Stats

Help Center: This week, we received 25 new tickets and resolved 25, leaving us with 61 open support requests.

That’s it for this week. Have a great weekend, everyone!

Last year in Barcelona, I did a talk about “Staging with git and Drush“. The video recording of this talk got published a couple of days ago together with my slides:

Staging with git and drush from Asociación Drupal on Vimeo.

The three-day conference is hosted by Netways, an IT services company specialised in Open Source Software, just like ourselves.

I arrived on Tuesday night at about 20:30. Dinner was arranged so that even late arrivals could still get something to eat. Even better was that I found five ex-colleagues back from the good old WEB.DE days gathered around a table. A great start to a great conference.

To be exact, the conference had already started in the morning with workshops. But since I didn’t attend them, I can’t say anything about these.

As the conference programme was structured into the tracks “Cloud & Big Data”, “DevOps and Methods” and “Infrastructure Services”, it covered three of the hottest topics in IT at the moment.

On Wednesday, I attended these talks:

• “2000 databases later”: A great look behind the scenes at Booking.com, especially their huge MySQL installation. Kris Köhntopp is a brilliant IT operations expert and his opening session, both informative and entertaining, set the bar to a height that IMHO no subsequent speaker was able to reach.

• “Introduction to NoSQL with Couchbase 2.0″: CouchBase promises to be an in-place replacement for Memcached which we’re using heavily for freistilbox. But its lack of redundancy is a problem, so I was looking forward to Tugdual Grall’s talk. I left it confident that CouchBase is worth doing a proof of concept installation.

• “Petabyte storage with Ceph”: As storage technology is another essential topic at freistil IT, attending Martin Gerhard Loschwitz’s talk was a no-brainer. Ceph is getting more interesting every time I hear about it but I don’t think we’ll be using it anytime soon.

• “Configuration management and Linux packages”: The approach of distributing service configurations by auto-generating and deploying config packages certainly is better than doing it manually. But since, compared for example with Chef, it solves only a small part of the system management problem, Schlomo Schapiro could not convince me that this is a way to go in 2013.

• Jan Doberstein finished the first conference day with “The truth is in the logs”. His overview of useful log management tools confirmed that we need to get Logstash running ASAP.

In the evening, we left the hotel together for dinner and drinks at the “Indabahn” bar. I spent most of the time chatting with my ex-colleagues (when they weren’t occupied with playing Ingress) about what’s going on in our jobs and lives.

After some good night’s sleep (note to self: make sure to switch off the AC first thing after getting into hotel rooms in the future), I started refreshed into the second half of the conference:

• “lxc@libvirt”: We’re already using LXC for freistilbox and I hoped to perhaps catch a few new tidbits. But not only did Erkan Yanar only scratch the surface, his way of presenting also seemed to me unstructured and improvised, so I left his session disappointed.

• “PostgreSQL in 2013″: While we’re using MySQL almost exclusively, PostgreSQL is gaining more and more traction (for example as the main RDBMS at Heroku) and we’ll need to run it in production for the Chef v11 release. So Michael Renner’s overview over recent developments in the PostgreSQL world provided a good way for me to get up-to-date.

• “Introduction into Hadoop”: Olivier Renault’s session was another opportunity to learn more about a topic I’ve got no personal experience with.

In the evening, I left OSDC 2013 with a lot of new ideas, many of them spawned by simple side remarks of speakers or experiences shared by other participants. That’s what makes OSDC for me worth attending every time, even if I’m already familiar with many of the topics presented there. I’m going to propose a session myself again next year.

Since there were always two talks at a time, I could not attend all the sessions I had been interested in. Sometimes, I also gave preference to the “hallway track”, ie. talking to other conference attendees outside. I’m going to complete my knowledge intake as soon as the session video recordings are available.

The only downside for me was the long train ride to and from Nuremberg. This will change next year when I’ll be able to fly directly to Berlin where the conference will take place from 2014 on. See you there!

PS: There are just too many interesting IT conferences and DevOps meetups for our small team to attend! Help us!

Because we’re still not nearly as strong on the sales and marketing front as with technical topics, we got us some outside help. On Wednesday, we met with our coach Ute in Frankfurt for a sales and marketing workshop. She helped us tremendously with improving our processes, for example regarding follow-ups on quotes. We’ve got ourselves a long list of homework that will keep us busy over the next few weeks.

With our office assistant Susanne, we’ve streamlined our accounting processes, which at least those customers might have noticed that have overdue invoices.

We’ve also improved our internal communication. Because a daily standup call at a fixed time doesn’t fit with our anywhere/anytime work style, we decided to move it to email. Now, we’re getting an automated email in the morning asking for a retrospective of the previous work day, an outlook on today’s work, obstacles that could cause problems, and suggestions for improving our work. Everyone answers with their personal list of things and is encouraged to start discussions by responding to a coworker’s status. This asynchronous daily exchange has proven far less intrusive than a scheduled conference call. It’s at the same time more efficient because status mails tend to be quite concise while our calls often deteriorated quickly into smalltalk. And not to worry — we still have enough face time in hangouts on focused topics, so we don’t run the risk of becoming estranged to each other.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

From Tuesday to Thursday, Jochen visited Nuremberg for the Open Source Datacenter Conference (OSDC) where he’s been a regular attendant and speaker for some years now. OSDC is a great conference to learn about interesting open source software projects for IT operations and to exchange experiences with other professionals using OSS in the datacenter. Jochen came back with a long list of ideas how we can improve both our daily work and the services we offer to our customers.

For the rest of the week, Jochen had his focus on our recruiting. We’ve received some interesting new applications for our sysadmin job offer and we’ll make sure not to delay checking if they’re a good fit.

Meanwhile, Markus took care of our existing IT infrastructure and our customers. Behind the scenes, he worked on adding geo-replication to our storage clusters which will come in handy for a number of purposes when it’s ready for production. As he’s getting more involved in our marketing, he also made some preparations for the Drupal Dev Days which we’re supporting as Gold Sponsor.

Next week, we’re both going to meet with a business coach for a one-day sales and marketing workshop. Getting external support on running our company is something we still need to get used to and we’re excited to see what results this workshop will bring.

“Bridge the Gap” — Adopting this modification of the well-known London underground warning as the event’s motto was a stroke of genius. After all, that’s what DevOps is all about: crossing the chasm between software development and IT operations. And there were many practical examples of these efforts at DevOps Days London.

Keynotes

I attended all the talks on both days. They were all interesting and some even entertaining as well:

• “DevOps For Dinosaurs – My experience in introducing a DevOps culture in a traditional enterprise“
• “Checking DevOps’ vital signs – how healthy is your culture?“
• “StartOps: Growing an ops team from 1 founder“
• “Adding Business Metrics“
• “DevOps and the traditional enterprise IT – Opposites and the best of two worlds“

With “DevOps in the Hell of a Thousand Different Platforms“, Sam Eaton gave a both highly entertaining and insightful talk that made “fail cake” a trending topic for the #devopsdays hashtag.

In the last keynote titled “Lessons Learned From Manufacturing For Maximizing Flow From Dev To Ops“, Gene Kim laid out some insight from his new book “The Phoenix Project“. It’s uncanny how much the situations described in his “IT novel” match my experience in corporate IT. Over lunch, I took the opportunity to tell Gene that reading “The Phoenix Project” is fun but at the same time nearly causes me PTSD…

Ignite sessions

After the keynotes, there was opportunity for participants to give IGNITE talks. I’ve especially enjoyed Patrick Dubios’ talk “What if config management was created by game designers?“.

Open Space sessions

DevOps Days, like Barcamps, are organised as an “unconference”. They don’t consist only of a fixed session schedule with speakers designated in advance by the orga team, which would reduce the participants to a mostly passive audience. Instead, DevOps Days leave most of the time open for topics brought in by the participants themselves. Both afternoons were reserved for “OpenSpace”, a very flexible format where everyone can suggest session topics and these may even still change during the sessions.

I was excited to join a session about hiring for DevOps teams and found out that we’re on the right track with our own growth efforts. I also had suggested a session about “Open Source storage solutions” myself. It was a great success, both in number of participants and in the insight I gained from the conversation. As an outcome of this session, we’re going to research object storage systems like MogileFS.

On Sunday, I had to already leave shortly after lunch because I chose an early flight home to my family. I’m sure the OpenSpace sessions were equally inspiring as the Saturday ones.

Location and catering

The event was hosted at the “Mary Ward House Conference & Exhibition Centre”. The house is a bit rambling and we had to climb stairs and turn many corners every time we needed to change rooms or go to the loo. On the other hand, this prevented us from further endangering our health by sitting all the time.

As earthly beings, we still need more than only food for thought. For beverages, we could choose between water, coffee and, we’re in London after all, tea. At lunch time, we were offered tasty options for both carnivores and vegetarians, and there were baskets of cookies for tea time. I think the level of catering was just about right for such a low-price event. I don’t like sitting through talks hungry but I also hate falling into a post-lunch digestion coma, and they hit the sweet spot in between.

Social event

After a packed conference day, I’m usually quite exhausted; a tribute I have to pay to my introvert nature. That and my burning interest in learning more about object storage systems led to my decision to forego the social event on Friday evening and instead have a pizza alone before spending the evening in front of my laptop. What I heard, though, is that many people enjoyed having drinks at “The Last”.

Conclusion

Although I missed the Sunday OpenSpace sessions, I found DevOps Days London highly inspiring and the results well worth the trip. The “unconference” character of the event which lets everyone address their own issues, and the very active “hallway track” are what from my perspective make DevOps Days essential community events.

If you’d like to go to one of the next european DevOps Days events, you should consider joining our team! We regularly send team members to community events, all expenses paid. Interested? Get in touch!

I look forward to the upcoming DevOps Days in Berlin! See you there?

From 29nd March (Good Friday) to Friday, 7th April, we’re going take some time off to recharge.

Of course, emergency support will be available during this time. Outages and other problems with our IT infrastructure that impact the delivery of your websites will be handled in the usual swift manner at any time.

On Monday, 8th April, we’re going to resume working on tasks that are not related to production problems.

If you do plan to launch a new website or if you are going to need other kinds of assistance during this timeframe, please let us know immediately via our Help Center. We’ll be happy to see what we can arrange to support you.

We wish you a happy Easter weekend and some joyful spring days!
The team at freistil IT