This was my 9th time attending the Large Installation System Administration(LISA) Conference this year in San Francisco. I have been pleased with both the quality and variety of the conference content the past 2 years. They seem to be doing a great job finding new speakers each year that help shape the conference to address the current issues and technologies in the field. This was probably my favorite venue for LISA as the conference hotel was steps from the embarcaderro ferry building, so it was conveinient place to find food, go for a run, or get on public transportation to get to other parts of the city.
The conference is broken up into the first 3 days there are half and full day tutorials, which are training classes on a particular topic, and the last 3 days in the technical sessions where you can choose to attend talks, paper presentations, and mini tutorials. I touch on some of the highlights from the sessions I attended.
Tutorial: Hands-On Intro to Kubernetes
Instructor: Ryan Jarvinen, Red Hat
Slides: http://gist-reveal.it/bit.ly/lisa17-k8s#/S1-Hands-On-Intro-to-Kubernetes
We are starting to use RedHat OpenShift work, which is based on Kubernetes, so I was already familiar with Kubernetes on somewhat of a novice level. Kubernetes was probably the biggest buzz word of the conference as a lot of tech businesses starting to incorporate containers into theier infrastructure, and Kubernetes is one of the more popular management frameworks. This class gave a quick introduction of the concepts, design, and common features. Then the meat of the class was a hands on lab using minikube. Minikube, and the corresponding RedHat offering minishift, are great ways to get hands on experience using these complex technologies as they can be quickly and easily installed on your laptop or workstation. This class helped me reenforce some of my basic knowledge and get a little more hand-on experience deploying software using Kubernetes and debugging issues related to problems encountered along the way.
Tutorial: Getting Started with Docker and Containers
Instructor: Jérôme Petazzoni, Docker Inc.
Slides: http://container.training/
Of all the conferences I have been too, and all the issues in dealing with conference wifi unreliablity, this was the smoothest run hands-on lab I can remember taking part in. The instructor had pre-provisioned a ubuntu based cloud(not sure which one) VM that was preconfigured with docker, so all we had to do was login, and we could imediately start doing productive work as part of the lab. The layout of this tutorial was good mix of introductory material and advanced concepts, and was exactly the kind of tutorial I was looking for to get myself caught-up on the docker technology. He covered all the key concepts of docker, and present some useful examples on how to use docker as a personal development environment. I walked away with a lot more knowledge and confidence to use docker in my day to day work.
Tutorial: Git Foundations: Unlocking the Mysteries
Instructor: Mike Weilgart, Vertical Sysadmin, Inc.
Similar to the docker tutorial above, this was also a good mix of introductory concepts, advanced concepts, and hands-on labs that increased my experience and confidence of using git. While I used git every day at work, I still consider myself a novice, but the labs in this class helped me feel a bit more comfortable and knowledgable of the git commands and how to use them better.
Tutorial: Troubleshooting Performance Issues in PostgreSQL
Instructor: Camille Baldock, Salesforce
While its still unclear how much PostgreSQL we will end up using at work, this tutorial helped lessen my worries of venturing away from our "Only use one type of RDBM"(which is MySQL/mariadb) at work. Its very easy for a tutorial covering a advanced/detailed topic to get boring/overwhelming for those not already familiar with the technology, but I thought this class was designed well to avoid that and keep everyone engaged. The instructor gave a detailed yet understandable explanation of every phase of a query to a PostgreSQL database, which layed out the framework for how to understand and address performance issues.
Talk: ChatOps at Shopify: Inviting Bots in Our Day-to-Day Operations
This talked covered several real-world examples of how Shopify is using ChatOps in the day-to-day operations to handle incidents, make major techical changes(failovers), and improve documentation and communication. We have talked a some recently at work of using more ChatOps techniques, but have always been unsure of where/how to start. This talk gave me some examples and ideas on how we could get started using ChatOps at work.
Talk: "Don't You Know Who I Am?!" The Danger of Celebrity in Tech
This was one of my all time favorite conference talks, and one I really needed to hear. It convered, in a very entertaining yet blunt way, two major problems with conferences. The first being the misconception that what the largest tech companies(Google, Facebook, Netflix, etc.) are doing is THE RIGHT WAY to do things and everything else is wrong or out-dated. The second, yet related issues, was discussing the appropriate way to interact with speakers and other conference attendees in a respectful way. This should be required viewing for anyone attending a technical conference.
Talk: Managing SSH Access without Managing SSH Keys
This was my favorite talk about a technical subject in that it was all about delivering the content and no unneeded filler to distract from the point. He briefly described the issue he was solving in the all too common scenario of an unmanagable mess of ssh keys granting permissions to your systems. He then explained how they had solved the issue using OpenSSH Certificates with short lifespans by default, and a custom piece of software called Cashier that they used as an interface to obtaining and revoking certificates. It was a great talk demonstrating the significant improvement in security you can obtain by leveraging this new technology and a little bit of glue software. It was great to see how you can go to having all these keys out there that have 24/7 access to your systems and are in unknown hands, to a scenario where access is only possible for the few short hours its needed, and the rest of the time no access is possible(since nobody needs it).
Other Takeaways:
- Everyone is using slack.com for their internal chat
- A lot of intro/basics about containers, but not much advanced topics, which likely means fewer people(minority) are using them than it seems(majority).
- Everyone is hiring, no shortage of system administration jobs
- Security is still a problem that not many people want to talk about
- The sysadmin profession is still young, but I am starting to see it mature in starting to address important issues(diversity, integrity, burn-out, etc) that will be key to the profession to continue to become more legitamite.