Hi. I'm Scott

So much stuff to write about, I broke it up into two parts. Part 1 is available here. Keynote #4: Staying Alive: patterns for Failure Management from the Bottom of the Ocean Deep water SCUBA diving is both complex and fatally dangerous. Therefore, systems and practices are put into place to ensure that failures are contained and not cascaded. We build safety in complex systems, but these systems cascade failures from one system to the next (system integrations anyone?). How do we contain the failures? Ronnie makes two solid points here: Unused safety systems don't exist Untested safety systems don't exist either.  Unused and untested safety systems are more dangerous than nothing at all.  If failure is inevitable, a safety system built with the purpose of containing a failure that is untested is an unknown. What is risk?  Risk for divers is based on two things:  the chance of occurance the chance of regret if it does occur For a diver, the...

I Love # DevOpsDays ! I love the diversity.  I love the inclusion.  I love the speakers.  I love the OpenSpaces.  I love the cost.  After a conference like this, I like to do a recap of the event with salient talking points,  what I learned, and what I did. For this I'm not sure I'm going to do a very good job, as I was stuck in the neither world of trying to live-tweet and take notes at the same time. I'm fairly good at doing one or the other, but I didn't do a great job of both concurrently.  Keynote #1: Tech for Good DevOps Days kicked off with an inspiring talk from the CIO of the City of St Paul: Sharon Kennedy Vickers  on the Impact of Technology. Technology can be incredibly powerful but also insulating. When you question WHY technology is used, the WAYS in which technology can be applied can have the greatest impact for the good of the community.  How can you apply this? The recipe is simple: User-Centered, Incl...

There are many paths to take when looking for a new job. Planning for the next step in career is an important step in making sure those paths aren't dead-ends, circles or worst of all traps. Location, Location, Location When looking for potential employers, are you concerned about how long it will take to get there? How many rivers do you need to cross? Do you want to bike to work? All of these can impact where you start looking for your next job. On a good day, my trip from Eagan to Minneapolis is about 45 minutes;  on bad days(blizzards), it could be close to 2 hours. That's my baseline for a commute. I can deal with the occasional outlier commute, but ideally I don't want to substantially increase my daily commute time. Therefore, I've broken my job search into three different zones. Zone 1 is < 10 miles from my house(inclusive of St Paul). Zone 2 is downtown Minneapolis. Zone 3 is everything else. In jest, I refer to Zone 3 as my Panic Zone . If I still...

I attended the second TechConnect event at the Amazon office in downtown Minneapolis on 6/27. The event was sponsored by Amazon with Flux7 presenting on how they do DevOps using AWS tools and resources. My goal in attending this event was to learn how others are using Amazon Web Services and to network with other professionals working in the downtown area. I was more successful at the former than the latter. The presentation started with an overview of AWS landscape by a solution architect from Amazon. Regions, availability zones, etc. If you want to get a glimpse of how fast Amazon is evolving in this space, remember these to factoids: Amazon Web Services launched in 2006, that's 12 years ago.  Amazon launched over 1000 new features into AWS in 2017.  So they are growing fast, and to scale. That's why they own such a huge portion of market share.  The meat of the presentation was from Lance Rifenberg from Flux7 . They offer DevOps consulting services to cu...