DevOps Fest 2019

Applied Alerting Philosophy

More than five years ago, Rob Ewaschuk created an innocuous Google doc titled “My Philosophy On Alerting”. It became kind of viral and later formed the foundation of a chapter in the famous book Site Reliability Engineering – How Google Runs Production Systems. In parallel, the metrics-based monitoring and alerting system Prometheus was developed at SoundCloud. It is the open-source tool to put Rob’s philosophy into practice. Thus, I would like to present “applied alerting philosophy” and explain how we use Prometheus at SoundCloud to create meaningful and actionable alerts. In particular, SoundCloud follows a fairly radical “you build it – you run it” approach, which requires additional care to route alerts to the right group of engineers. Prometheus’s “label everything” mantra proves to be very helpful here.

Hands-On ModSecurity and Logging

This talk combines two of the OWASP top ten security risks:
* Injections (A1:2017): We are using a simple application that is exploitable by an injection and will then secure it with ModSecurity.
* Insufficient Logging & Monitoring (A10:2017): We are logging and monitoring the application both with and without ModSecurity with the open source Elastic Stack.
To make it more interactive the audience has to do the injections, which we are then live monitoring and mitigating with ModSecurity.

Taking your .NET Core container solution from laptop to production in under a minute

In this session we will take a look at building .NET Core solutions based on Docker, Kubernetes and Azure and taking these to production efficiently and how to iterate your development cycle. You are going to see how this can be done in a DevOps fashion, with full automation from provisioning cloud resources to build and release of your application. Learn how you can create robust web applications and web APIs that are resilient and robust, and how to add monitoring and instrumentation so any bugs or failures can be spotted early and pro-actively. We will go through the entire inner loop of fixing the bug on a local development environment with Visual Studio and Docker tooling, and take the fixed solution to production to a production Azure Kubernetes cluster with automated pipelines in VSTS. Be a DevOps pro and impress all your friends with your rapid iteration for cloud scale solutions.

Infrastructure-as-code: bridging the gap between Devs and Ops

Ops are overwhelmed with support. Devs are mad because their cannot deploy the changes as fast as they want. Sounds familiar?
Infrastructure-as-code can make your life easier by empowering developers and reducing operations' routine toil. It can cut down the lead time for infrastructure provisioning from hours or even days to minutes.
This talk reviews several IaC tools and approaches, showing how to integrate them into continuous delivery pipeline. It covers the problems and challenges that engineers may face while working with infrastructure-as-code tools and provides a few hands-on recipes to address them.

Configuration management and service discovery in a serverless world

Your system is composed of highly decoupled, independent, fast, and modular microservices. But how can they share common configurations, dynamic endpoints, database references, and properly rotate secrets? Based on the size and complexity of your serverless system, you may simply use environment variables or eventually opt for some sort of centralized store. And then how do integrate all of this with monitoring and automation tooling? During this session, I will present the ideal solutions and some of the alternatives available on AWS (such as AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store and AWS Secrets Manager). I will also discuss the best use cases for each solution and the corresponding best practices to achieve the highest standards for security and performance.

DevOps never sleeps. What we learned from InfluxDB v1 to v2

Where a company with an OpenSource project announce that they are working on a new major release there is always a lot of chatting going on in the community because you never know how much this is going to break your system. Gianluca Arbezzano SRE at InfluxData will speak about the journey the company is facing from a DevOps perspective to move from InfluxDB v1 to version 2 a fully integrated platform that starts from the strong background we built running a database like InfluxDB at scale in our SaaS offer. This is not just a story about how a project evolved but it touches all the company in particular for what concern DevOpsFest everything around Kubernetes, Container and automation. How the SRE team managed the onboard of 20 developers on a cloud based project where operating and observing the system is a key concept to learn how to build a more solid and sustainable product.

The evolution of Devops in the age of AI

AI become more and more an element of differentiation, above all to manage the increasing complexity of information. The presentation will focus on the opportunities of using Splunk to make efficient the DevOps ecosystem and what steps you should do to get your infrastructure AI ready.
The beating heart of devops is automation. But often efficient automation is possible only if you can manage correctly feedbacks from processes, give them meaning, and apply real time remediation. Large infrastructures that adopt devops to deliver software have huge machine data that should be understood to take the correct decisions. These machines are useful to extract significant data and metrics that could lead to a better understanding of the system. The presentation shows what is the best design for devops infrastructures data driven, what are the relevant tools to adopt (Splunk) and what the way they works together.

Сonnecting pool Kubernetes clusters: Federation and Networks

On this IT sense, we will talk about the Federation.
The Federation is a very flexible tool for connecting several clusters and gives us a lot possibilities in K8s control.
With the help of the Federation, we can easily:
- sync resources across clusters
- cross cluster discovery
We will also discuss how to connect several Kubernetes clusters into one network, how to reach services in each Kubernetes cluster...

Mobile CI/CD. Cross-platform app approach

In this talk I am going to show why mobile automation is important and how we evolved our mobile cross-platform (Xamarin) app to run different kinds of tests simultaneously in cloud and have fully integrated solution into CI/CD pipeline.
This talk contains practical aspects, technical details, benefits and disadvantages of setting up cross-platform app CI/CD on Azure DevOps.

Windows Containers. Why should I care?

More and more on-premise classic legacy .NET Framework applications migrate to cloud, but as a rule, due to lack of a mature DevOps culture or technology knowledge, the process of transition is not so smooth. The main objective of DevOps in this context is to be ready to make the transition to modern containerized applications that should both reduce costs to support the infrastructure and also allow flexibility in the providing of new business features through a fully automated CI/CD process. In current presentation I will provide an overview of the Windows Containers technology, as well as we will look into some scenarios for their usage and different options for migrating classic .NET Framework applications towards modern cloud-optimized applications integrated with existing solutions for the example of TIG stack.

CD for StartUp, cheap and furious

Who said startup always has lots of money? What to do if you need rapid development and continuous delivery but there is no funding at all?
We will talk about the cheap and feature-rich way to build CD process with ChatOps using common tools and services like Bitbucket, Kubernetes, Terraform, Scaleway and bare hands.
I'll show you how to automate with no additional costs and a clear approach.

Terraform: a novel about modules, providers, security, and pain

At Dev-Pro, DevOps specialists work with Terraform within Azure. The team works with a bunch of environments and resources, including the AKS (Kubernetes). Sergey will share his experience in successfully creating our own modules and providers within Terraform.

Building Next Generation Apps with Knative

Knative is a collection of open source building blocks for serverless containers running on Kubernetes. It brings together two worlds: Kubernetes, as container management solution; and serverless, as the way the application developers want to run their code.
In this talk we will discuss the foundation the Knative is built on, it’s components and capabilities. We will see how it simplifies life of both developers and operators.
And of course we will check it in action. Come to this section to see the future of the service world.

Monitoring Cloud Databases

Troubleshooting the database-related problems turns out to be not a simple task even if you run your database on-premise. And performance debug can become a nightmare when you run it as a managed service in AWS/GCP/Azure, because you have no access to the underlying OS, and series of DB metrics gathered by your monitoring solution is the only subject you have to explore.
The talk will make an overview of a monitoring possibilities available for MySQL/PostgreSQL managed database in case of AWS, GCP, and Azure cloud providers. We will review what monitoring data can be gathered, speak about data granularity, and discuss ways to export these metrics to Prometheus for their simplified representation and wide/complex troubleshooting analysis of the whole instance.

DevOps: Be good, Get good or Give up

In this presentation, I will take you through three main phases in DevOps culture: Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery and Post-Production, and I will demonstrate how some of the standard approaches have been changed during their adoption process.
This demo-centric presentation is based on the experience of building and continuous modernization of integration between global ecosystems. If you have a highly available and distributed application and need to address all important quality attributes of the system (Performance, Security, Availability, etc.) some standard approaches can make your life much complicated. I will take a look at different type of issues, which you can face during implementation and production, and possible solutions.

DevOps or business who wins?

On the way to business goals what is more important to achieve short term business value or long term engineering goals? If your organization decided to adopt DevOps approach but it seems like it contradicts with short term goals like value now, and what if the engineering team is not happy to be firefighters. In my talk I will provide simple checkpoint from the technical point of view and from a way of working side whether business and engineering goals are in the balance, I'll focus on topics how to follow DevOps principles even if there is no room for solo players.

Using Chef to manage hardware-based infrastructure

Using Chef for deployment, Configuration and Release management of medium-scale, hardware-based ifrastructure.
Following topics will be covered:
- Managing hardware-based cloud backend.
- How many engineers required to release on 1000 machines.
- Tools Chef provides to control and monitor release-flow.
- How to keep, manage and rotate secrets secure way?
- How much time it requires to change root-password on all infrastructure?
Bonus: How many trucks you need to move datacenter?

Testing in DevOps practices. Do you have a plan, Mister X?

Very often I faced with the following question:
- We have Jenkins.
- OK. How do you prove that your code works?
- We have the Jenkins and the tests.
- OK. What kind of tests do you have? When are you running them? What the plan of test running?
- We have no plan. We have Jenkins and tests only.
The theme of presentations the testing in the devops practices. We define what kind of tests we have. Why the tests can be useless and how we can help to engineers create a good test plan.

DevOps in the Cluster: A deep dive into operators

Operators are a recent concept in the Kubernetes world. They allow you to package, deploy and manage Kubernetes applications. But there is more to it. Operators also let you encode your operational knowledge and apply it from within the cluster. This talk wants to introduce Operators, explain the why, give working examples and go into some best practices for development. We will also look at tasks beyond packaging and deployment that can be performed by an Operator.