I've been selected to speak at the upcoming St. Louis Days of .NET (STLDODN) on November 12th-14th. I will be presenting my new talk on DevOps, Double Down with DevOps, and am excited about the opportunity to give this topic some attention.
Why Speak on DevOps?
As a developer I am often frustrated with the amount of manual processes that seem to exist between development and production. Many of us have found ourselves in the situation where we had a single point of failure for a process, the 1 person at the company that knows how to release the new software, or configure the server, or any number of other things that will invariably go wrong when when they are on vacation (or worse, just go on hold). Even if the process is documented or several people know how to do it, you end up with random problems because a step was skipped or some file wasn't copied.
These issues are all able to be overcome, but it requires communication between development and operations, a desire to cooperate, and progress towards some levels of automation. The communication and cooperation is imparative for longevity of any other solutions. Then we get to the real bread and butter of DevOps: Automation.
Automation, either via existing tools or writing custom tools or scripts, is how we eliminate issues with steps being missed and improve release cycles by not having to wait on a resource to perform the steps while still maintaining controls over what is done (regardless who is initiating the process).
This only a subset of what falls under the moniker of DevOps, but I think exposure to these concepts, tools, and approaches to managing processes and cultivating interaction and cooperation between operations and development is key to high project success and longevity.
The Talk
Are you ready to ease your deployment pains while at the same time making yourself more marketable? DevOps may be a hot buzzword that will get recruiters on the phone, but it will do more for you than just increasing your resume appeal. Most of us aren't blessed with a crack IT team (if we even have one) to handle operations and we are stuck doing it all. Taking a developers approach to operations by creating repeatable automated tasks will save you time and headaches. We'll take a look at some of the popular tools available to you and go over tips and tricks that I've had to learn the hard way over the years. Would you rather spend an hour watching builds, copying files, and trying to remember all the config values to change only to beat your head against the wall because you didn't stop some service when you started, or just click a button and watch IT Crowd while your code is built, deployed and tested for you? That's what I thought.
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