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A DevOps Perspective on IT Infrastructure Management

Oct 5, 2021 2:56:04 PM By All Day DevOps

All Day DevOps, (ADDO) the world's largest DevOps conference, will be streaming live for 24 hours starting at 3 a.m. ET on October 28, 2021. The virtual event gathers more than 25,000 DevOps professionals for free, hands-on education from 180+ speakers in 6 separate tracks, along with peer-to-peer insights and networking with professionals worldwide. 

One of the organizers of the Modern Infrastructure track is Ernest Mueller, Director of Engineering, Product at Six Nines IT. Ernest has been in tech since 1993, having worked for places like FedEx, AT&T Cybersecurity, Bazaarvoice, Idera, and National Instruments. His DevOps journey started a decade ago with his group of Austin area friends and colleagues who call themselves “The Agile Admins.” They blog together at theagileadmin.com, author a line of DevOps courses for LinkedIn Learning, and organize conferences and user groups like DevOpsDays Austin and CloudAustin. ADDO’s Modern Infrastructure track provides insights on modern computing infrastructure - specifically how to provision and manage IT infrastructure in 2021.

What is DevOps?

But before we get into that, let's define DevOps, as it's a critical part of Ernest's approach to IT infrastructure management. DevOps is the practice of operations and development engineers participating in the entire service lifecycle, from its design through the development process all the way to production support. In that sense, it can be seen as an extension of the Agile framework. DevOps is also characterized by operations staff using many of the same techniques as developers for their systems work.

Modern infrastructure management

DevOps provides operations engineers with a different way of doing their work; that takes cues from development engineers' processes and pipelines. It also encourages more direct teamwork and cooperation by breaking down silos within the organization. Sharing information and openness is the crux of DevOps. You never know when an unexpected piece of information might be just what you need to overcome a technical roadblock you might be facing. And that moves the entire organization forward.

As Ernest puts it, "The track I'll be presenting is about modern computing infrastructure. It asks the question: How do you create and manage IT infrastructure in 2021? Back in the day, this would have been about networking. Today, it's about integrating a software development mindset and pipeline to infrastructure. So the track is about proposing modern ideas on how to provision and manage IT infrastructure, whether that’s bare metal, cloud, or containers.”

Who's it for?

An explicit effort was made to present a varied mix of content that includes expert tips for practitioners and some more introductory material accessible to managers or people just getting started in DevOps. "There should be some takeaways for people at all levels, though basic familiarity with the subject could be an asset," Ernest continues.

He hopes that people who are just starting to look into Cloud, Kubernetes, or serverless get valuable information on what awaits them along that path. Those who have already chosen a path should get some tremendous experience-based discussion on how to best leverage those assets. He's going to discuss a broad array of technologies that attendees can learn about to make more informed decisions about the tradeoffs and the right directions for their organization.

Ernest's teaser

All Day DevOps is genuinely international and runs for a complete 24 hours to make sure to reach everyone across the globe. Part of the event's core mission is to get fresh voices making presentations and sharing their experiences rather than only focusing on the big names in the industry. ADDO wants you to hear from the people in the trenches who are actually doing the work.

As such, Ernest shared some of the other speakers' presentations he's looking forward to seeing. 

First up is Rob Hirschfeld, CEO, and co-founder of RackN. Hirschfeld, Ernest tells us, always brings tremendous insight into managing physical servers and infrastructure for the server wonks out there. His talk focuses on the future of infrastructure: After infrastructure as code, it's time for infrastructure as pipelines.

Make sure and catch Saiyam Pathak’s talk on using Kubernetes with virtual machines instead of containers with kubevirt.  He’s Director of Technical Evangelism at Civo, and always has a cool demo or something new to teach you in his talks.

He's also looking forward to JJ Asghar's talk. Aschar works at IBM on the IBM cloud as a Developer Advocate who focuses on the IBM Kubernetes Service. His talk centers on building modern infrastructure and shares a behind-the-scenes view of how the IBM cloud came to be.

Register for All Day DevOps (ADDO)

All Day DevOps is a global community of over 75,000 DevOps practitioners and thought leaders offering free learning and information exchanges. Founded in 2016, the community hosts an annual conference, live forums, and ongoing educational experiences online. The 2021 event will feature a great lineup with many more engaging speakers! Register online to participate in the 24-hour live, global event on October 28 featuring six tracks, including CI/CD Continuous Everything, Cultural Transformation, DevSecOps, Government, Modern Infrastructure and Site Reliability Engineering.