Everything I learned about Continuous Integration, I learned from System Admin

Abstract:

Before I donned my secret identity as The Build Doctor, I was a average Solaris administrator (okay, I spent too much time playing with log analysis and too little doing storage, but them's the breaks). After discovering the joys of Agile, I started to roll out tools like CruiseControl. Every time I would look at a CruiseControl installation (hey, it was 2005) I'd notice that some concerns were never met, concerns that I would think about when deploying services as a systems administrator.

These were development systems, so making sure we had a backup of the configuration wasn't so important, right? Wrong. When successful development depends on the availability of your CI system, you need to take some precautions. It was then that I realised: development needs systems administrators.

In this talk I'll share my experiences of the last 7 years helping companies run Continuous Integration and deliver to production with low risk. I've noticed in previous presentations that there's often a mix of experience in the audience; to address this I'll be adopting an informal presentation style so that members of the audience can ask questions.

Topics will include:

• Context of CI
• Deploying your CI server
• Performance Monitoring
• Scaling up
• How to choose (and does it matter?)
• Going with the grain of tools (and when you shouldn't)
• Information radiators
• What does it mean to actually do Continuous Deployment?

There will be minimal question time at the end, but plenty of opportunities during the presentation.

Proposer: Julian Simpson aka the builddoctor

Julian on LinkedIn @builddoctor

Julian Simpson is The Build Doctor. He started his career formatting 5.25 inch hard disks in IBM AT PC’s. That was quite some time ago. Since then he has been a:

* Marketing student
* Proprietor of a business connecting people’s computers to the Internet
* Very grumpy helpdesk operator
* Unix Systems Administrator
* Build and release consultant at ThoughtWorks and other companies
* Systems administrator, Puppet coder and deleter of fraudulent accounts at a startup

Presently he is Principal Consultant at The Build Doctor Limited, the consultancy named after this very blog! Julian’s desire is to help everyone get their code into production as soon as they can. Software is better when it works for us, not when we lose it in the cracks between our development and operations teams.