Devops in the shadows: Infrastructure in a software-defined world

Abstract: As a community we know a lot about testing apps. The talk will argue that we do not yet know enough about testing infrastructure.

Business requirements change, demand grows, ultimately every organization deals with a continuously evolving infrastructure. Each iteration we replace old with new, in most cases we get more open and easier accessible devices. Could these possibly be tested, quality assured and ultimately managed by the same practices we've preached for years? Adapation of a full-out infrastructure as code approach seems slow, what is holding us back?

Full CI/CD stacks that automates our software but reducing cycle time and versioning the environments makes just as much sense when it comes to hardware, storage or network equipment. At the same time it IS different, you can't as easily move your newly forged hardware down the chain from dev to prod. We'll look at some problem spaces and possible solutions to help get our code to cover more of that equipment hiding in the shadows of our DCs.

If you are an ops engineer, working with infrastructure testing feels familiar quickly. We'll look at testing in light of monitoring, would it make sense to combine these processes into one? Could we just say that testing == monitoring and what changes would that bring?

Speaker:

Jan Ivar Beddari is an automation pragmatist living in Volda, Norway. He's been at the forefront of automated infrastructure for a long time having worked on and with all the main OS platforms. Follow him on twitter: https://twitter.com/beddari