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:
Finally, a note on the location: Amazon found a GREAT building and created an awesome work space in Downtown Minneapolis. Dunn Brothers on the first floor, lots of big windows in a warehouse-like environment. Everyone was jealous, including me. Lunch provided by Panera, yum.
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 customers looking to migrate to the cloud. His presentation was focused a little bit on how you can target projects for DevOps approaches (start small), Win with Developers, Win with Operations and Win with Security (can't forget them) and then showed what tools they use from Amazon to implement their solution.
Interestingly, they target an engagement with clients at 8-12 weeks. They transition runbooks to build everything at the end of the engagement. And then, as if to prove their value, the Flux7 consultants wipe out the environment and then have their clients build new, with delivered runbooks. Interesting philosophy.
The Flux7 model of DevOps is focused on delivering value to the 'Landing Pad', aka Production. And then, they start building pathways to production. These include the following activities:
- Pipelines: delivering code to the Landing Pad with Jenkins, CodeDeploy, Bamboo
- Injectors: delivering data to the Landing Pad with connections to database platform of choice
- Inspectors: monitoring the Landing Pad with log collectors, application performance monitors.
If I can find the slide deck, I'll post a graphic that better represents the words above.
Functionally, the steps noted above offer a logical and systems approach to moving towards a continuous delivery model. These approach could be applied to any number of different tool sets, assuming that the colloration
All in all, great event, nice space, learned more about one way to use Amazon's tools to get to DevOps.
Finally, a note on the location: Amazon found a GREAT building and created an awesome work space in Downtown Minneapolis. Dunn Brothers on the first floor, lots of big windows in a warehouse-like environment. Everyone was jealous, including me. Lunch provided by Panera, yum.
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