A Gentle Introduction to Running Your Own Server

Abstract:

My intended audience are developers who are either unfamiliar with or don't know where to start on learning how to set up their own servers.

The current draft is in two parts:
* Briefly explain the benefits of a developer dabbling in ops (career potential, easier to communicate with ops with common ground, exposure to new ideas)
* Demo using Vagrant/Chef/Berkshelf and open-source Chef cookbooks to get started building a server locally and deploying it to Digital Ocean.

Starting with an empty directory, set up Vagrant and Berkshelf to set up a VM, iterate on it until Nginx is serving something and I can poke around the server. Then, simply recreate that server on Digital Ocean reusing all the work of setting it up locally. Time allowing, this can expand to learning a bit about Nginx and setting up DNS.

This won't be comprehensive training. My goal is to demonstrate how easy it is to get started managing your own inexpensive server. I want to encourage experimentation rather than focus on 'here's the right way to set up a server'. From there the world's your oyster.

Speaker: Speaker 9