Atlassian DevOps Event Impressions

Today I attended an event, organized by ManageWare, titled “Bridging the Gap Between Dev & Ops”, focusing on Atlassian’s tools suite. JIRA is a very popular tool here in Israel, so the main theme of the event was to showcase how productivity and collaboration can be increased when integrating JIRA with other tools.

There were quite a few presentation (detailed at the end of the post) on various DevOps-oriented subjects, such as CI/CD pipelines, monitoring and reporting. Nothing revolutionary, but it was nice to see how a good integration between various tools (not just Atlassian ones…) can really make things flow faster and help focus on generating value for the business.

I only wish some of the sessions were longer, there was a lot more to see; unfortunately, due to time constraints, most presenters had to rush through their materials.

And finally we had some fresh Pizza and ice-cold beer 🙂

The presentations:

GitLab Breakfast Impressions

Today I attended a pleasant meetup arranged by ALMtoolbox, discussing GitLab.

The meetup started with a diverse and tasty breakfast:)

Why use an installation technology

This is a question that I get asked from time to time, usually after someone who is not familiar with the deployment world encounters problems with a certain installation. “We could just write a script that extracts the files to the right place, what’s the big deal?”

Well, it’s a big deal. Generally speaking, an installation framework (compared to a script) provides a lot of benefits, such as:

• Modelling the application deployment into sub-modules – allowing to add or remove parts of the applications, define dependencies etc.
• Built-in support for many deployment actions – from simple things like copy files, edit text files, or run some OS command, to configuring web servers and databases
• Ability to rollback each action – which gives you the ability to rollback changes in case of installation error, and provide an uninstaller, with (theoretically) no additional effort.
• Built-in detection of files in use, including the ability (in some cases) to replace such files (upon reboot, or by automatically restart the interfering process)
• Various levels of UI (from completely silent deployment to a full user-driven interface)
• Versioning and update management (upgrades/patches)
• Built-in logging
• Integration with the Operating System software management tools (such as the ‘programs and features’ in Windows)
• And more… (your comments are welcomed)

So, it’s so great, so why not everyone love it?

Jenkins User Conference 2016 – Impressions

Today I attended the Jenkins User Conference, held in Israel, hosted by JFrog.

First off I have to say the event was very well organized. Great location, everything on schedule, no technical issues, some nice swag, and excellent food and drinks throughout the day (including afternoon beer!). Considering there were about 450 people there, that is no small task…

The guest of honor was Kohsuke Kawaguchi (KK), the creator of Jenkins, who gave an interesting keynote, with overview about the concepts behind Jenkins 2.0, and some anecdotes from the history of Jenkins.

The main theme of the conference was that Speed is Everything, as you can figure from JFrog’s motto, “Release fast or die”. Their view is that software today is about continuous update – you basically deploy your products once, and from there onward you struggle to update them as often as possible, as seamlessly as possible, without negative effects on the user experience. This raises numerous challenges which various vendors and open source projects are striving to solve.

There conference was packed with sessions related to the DevOps world, mostly about making things faster without losing control on the process. Liveperson, for example, discussed how they manage 6000 releases a year, with over 10K builds per week.