Leveraging DevOps Tools for Training

Abstract

This is about education, learning and training.

Day after day our support teams are exposed to many different environments, ranging from the very well created and maintained to . . . well, not so very well created. Technicians are asked a wide range of questions from how to add a new user to helping the customer understand why their replication is broken. It is a fast paced environment. Things are always changed and technicians are always challenged to learn more to get up to speed quickly.

This presents a tricky training opportunity to tackle - How do we create a learning environment that helps system administrators get up to speed on new technologies? How do we do this without taking people from their team for days at a time?

Too often DevOps tools are seen as a developer-only toolbox. They are seen as the tools used to prepare deployments, test code and try out those shiny new cookbooks, playbooks, and manifests.

I want to share a slightly different approach. I want to share some ideas on how to use the DevOps tools (think Vagrant, Ansible) not for code, but for training. I want to start scratching the surface of how we can take some of the principals of learning and apply them using these tools.

This session will be focused around sharing ideas, techniques and lessons learned about building out training for support teams.