Bangalore played host to this year’s RootConf organized by HasGeek.
It was set in the spacious MLR Convention center and was a 2 day event that aimed at providing the DevOps community a platform to share its newest experiences and findings.
The event was also preceded by a workshop and run up events that focused on hands on learning. The conference had a wide variety of talks which included both community oriented talks and technical discussions. Docker was definitely one of the hot topics that was extensively discussed. Here are a few talks that caught our fancy.
The importance of DevOps has been growing steadily in the last few years and it’s now become a core part of any IT organization. It’s involved in all stages of development right from design to deployment. We as an organization realize this and wanted to be a part of the event. A group of 8 members from the Icicle which consisted of both developers and management attended the conference.
Building Elastic Infrastructures – Pankaj Kaushal
The event was kicked off by Pankaj Kaushal who names himself the “Master of Disaster” at Flipkart. The talk began by exploring the concept of automating infrastructure and why it is important for organizations. Pankaj talked about some of the challenges that Flipkart faced during their initial years and how they solved it. The next part of the talk focused on HostDB which is an in house tool built by Flipkart to automate infrastructure deployment.
Quick Prototyping with LXC and Puppet – Benjamin Kero
Benjamin Kero’s talk focused on LXC and Puppet, the configuration management tool. He talked about the various problems that are plaguing the developers due to differences in environments and ways to mitigate it. The talk ran through their thought process in selecting LXC + Puppet over other options like Docker and VMWare. A brief overview of LXC and Puppet and how it compares to other options like Docker/Raw Cgroups etc was also provided. A case study of the implementation was also presented where Mozilla uses a similar structure to automate their deployments.
Avoiding single point of failure in a multi-services architecture – Gurteshwar Singh
The next talk was by Gurteshwar Singh where he talked about his experience over the years on Plivo. The talk gave a brief introduction to the architecture and the technology stack that is used at Plivo. Gurteshwar then walked us through the initial practices that they followed at Plivo and how they have improved upon them so far. The talk included a wide range of topics like Sensu, SaltStack, Jenkins etc. The talk concluded with a brief demo on their setup.
How fast can you on board a new team member? – Vivek Parihar
Vivek Parihar talked about some of the problems that organizations face when they try to on board a new member and how most of it can be mitigated by using Vagrant. Vivek outlined a simple scenario where a new member is being on boarded and the difficulties that the member may go through and how the whole process can be simplified by using Vagrant. The talk was filled with cheesy lines and memes and was definitely one of the most entertaining one at the RootConf.
Scale anything with haproxy – Mohamed Imran K R
Mohamed Imran gave the next talk which completely focused on the problem of scaling applications and how HAproxy can successfully be used to do so. There was a brief introduction about HAproxy and its role in deployments. The talk was one of the most comprehensive and informative talks of this year’s RootConf.
Tsuru: Serve it yourself – Rohit Nair
Tsuru is an open source PaaS system that utilizes docker for parts of its implementation. Rohit Nair talked about the current scenario in the PaaS industry and how it can be improved by going the opensource way. A brief introduction on the architecture of Tsuru and the way it utilizes Docker to launch instances as and when required was also provided. The talk was concluded by comparing Tsuru to similar services like Flyn.
Testing Infrastructure Code using Test-kitchen, Docker and Chef-Zero – Kamalika Majumder
Kamilika talked about some of the most common problems faced by developers and Devops teams due to the various discrepancies that occur while coding and deploying an application. The talk focused on how we could apply tests to the infrastructure code to shorten the release cycle of applications. The talk gave a brief overview of Test-Kitchen and its integration with Docker to isolate environments. Chef-Zero was also touched upon and the talk concluded with a demo of the test suite.
Day 2
When the Internet bleeded – Anant Shrivastava
The day started off with the talk about the recent Heartbleed vulnerability. It included a demonstration on how the vulnerability can be exploited and then went on to explain why open source is the way to go ahead and how it can help mitigate such vulnerabilities.
Production is Priority – Self Fix / Heal Techniques – Jabir Ahmed
Jabir Admed gave a talk on why it is important for an organization to take up automation at an early level and how it can affect the organization positively in the long run. The talk started with explaining some of the commonly used tools for monitoring and their deficiencies. Jabir then talked about the framework that would not only monitor applications, but would also try to at least partially fix the problem so that more time is spent on fixing the problem rather than finding it. The advantages of the framework included a reduced feedback time and ease of use since it can be easily integrated into Nagios.
Mesos: Cluster management framework and it’s role at Shopify – Yagnik Khanna
Yagnik Khanna is a Software Developer at Shopify and gave a brief introduction to Apache Mesos – a framework for sharing resources across nodes in a data center. He also talked about how Shopify uses Apache Mesos to scale applications.
Building Orchestration and Configuration with Ansible – Aditya Patawari
Aditya Patawari gave a brief introduction to Ansible and the concept of Playbooks and how they can be used to set up orchestration for deployment scenarios. The talk included a small demo on how to execute ad hoc commands on server(s) and the Playbook creation and usage. The last part of the talk focused on a case study of how Ansible helped them in Virtualization (Xen) Servers at BrowserStack.
PostgreSQL as NoSQL – Himanchali
This talk focused on some of the advanced features of PostgreSQL and how it can be used as a NoSQL database. Himanchali explained how this can take advantage of the best of both the traditional and NoSQL sides. There was an in depth explanation of the way that this can be implemented and the talk ended with a performance analysis between PostgreSQL NoSQL and a NoSQL DB.
Continuous Multi-stack Deployments on Cloud using Docker – Vinothini Raju
The final talk of the day was given by Vinotini Raju on integration of Docker with PaaS systems and how it can be used to streamline deployments for various environments of the application. There was also a brief demo on the OpenShift LXC & CI and AWS Elastic Beanstalk + Docker deployment.
Team Icicle at Rootconf
The conference was all in all a fun and a good learning experience. We are excited to try out and implement some of the things that we learnt at at the conference and definitely looking forward to the next big event in .
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Icicle at RootConf 2014 – A conference on DevOps and Cloud Infrastructure http://t.co/fYLeJncJbC via @icicletech
— Icicle (@icicletech) June 18, 2014
