Not Everybody is Kelsey Hightower

This is the tale of how we iterate on infrastructure, tooling, and product continuously at $startup. It arose from a need for an infrastructure that would allow us to continuously deliver applications; that would be appropriate for distributed systems and a services-oriented architecture; and that facilitated rapidly prototyping, building, and scaling new features. We went from a couple of Ubuntu instances with services running in screen to continuous deployments using Docker, CoreOS, Fleet, and custom tooling (soon to be open sourced). It stars our intrepid heroine, $name, in zir first role as employee #1 at a startup and the entire corpus of Kelsey Hightower's open source contributions as zir trusty sidekick.

It's a tale of experimentation, failure, breaking things, rebuilding things, and finally just running things (with scissors). It runs the gamut of emotions in your typical buddy flick as our stars learn how to run software together. You'll laugh as they try to run Kubernetes in production from day one. You'll cry when they manually rebuild an etcd2 cluster because they have to learn how. You'll be on the edge of your seat when they rebuild an entire AWS infrastructure in 15 minutes. You'll smile when the complete development stack spins up in Docker and no developer ever has to hit production databases again.

The moral of the story: you don't go from zero to Kelsey Hightower overnight. Understand your needs, and use that understanding to describe the ideal tool for the job. Evaluate multiple tools and find the tool or tools with the closest resemblance that allow you to do the most by doing the least. Then experiment until you get it right.

Speaker: Speaker 20