[cs615asa] Meetup Summary - NYC DevOps

[Luke Smith]

(I attended this a while ago, but I'm finally doing this write up now.)

Meetup: NYC DevOps
Date: 3/20/18
Title: DevOps for K8S + Operational Excellence in April Fools Pranks
Link: https://www.meetup.com/nycdevops/events/246346445

I was mostly interested in this talk because of the topic of the second
speaker (and the speaker himself).  The idea of preparing for launches that
are both secret and need rapid scaling up was something I hadn't thought
about before.  Additionally, the speaker, Tom Limoncelli, is actually the
author of one of the books we use for this course.

I had never been to one of these meetups before, but overall it was a nice
experience.  It was actually held in the Stack Overflow office in the city,
and I also learned that Tom actually worked at Stack Overflow now.  NYC
DevOps actually meets monthly, and I've seen that some others have attended
the meeting that was a month after this.

The first presentation was on Kubernetes, which I previously had not heard
of.  Kubernetes are a container-like system used for application
management.  One of the analogies that the presenter, Paul Czakowski, used
was that applications are to operating systems as Kubernetes are to virtual
machines.  It was an interesting talk that definitely taught me things I
didn't know, since I didn't know anything about the topic, but I couldn't
help but feel a bit weird about the situation.  The presenter was actively
advocating for those interested in Kubernetes to *not* attempt to get the
system working on their own and instead to try to employ a company like
Pivotal, the company he works for, that specialize in doing this kind of
stuff for people.  That made me feel like the entire thing that I had just
listened to was actually an ad.  Maybe I'm just being pessimistic, but I
really kind of felt like this entire presentation was Paul trying to expand
his company's markets.  As a result, it left me with a bit of a bad taste
in my mouth.

The second presentation was about preparing for April Fool's Day launches.
Tom was actually using this presentation as a dry run, as he planned to
give the same presentation the next week at another conference, and asked
for feedback at the end.  Tom talked about things that are different for
"dark launches", the category of launches that are used for April Fool's
Day launches, compared to a regular launch.  The main points were that
launches need to (obviously) be kept secret, the problems that can occur
without comprehensive testing, and the necessary ramp up of services to
make sure that the prank works smoothly.  Interestingly, one of the was
that Tom advised doing these was to (for websites at least) have the prank
ready a while before hand, even having all needed javascript on webpages,
just without rendering anything.  This would let them do load testing and
look for bugs without revealing the prank to anyone.  While not an April
Fool's day prank, this is actually how Facebook rolled our Messenger when
it was launched.  While this was an interesting talk, I was hoping for a
bit more.  It was kind of short, and a thought it lacked in real detail.
For the most part, it felt like an advisory of things that could go wrong
instead of ways to successfully avoid having things go wrong.  I think this
was mainly because of how this presentation was meant for another talk
where the speaker had a time limit, and so it needed to be short.  I'd be
very interested in seeing a longer version if Tom ever made one.

As a final note, I wish I had known there would be pizza at this event,
since I ate before I went and then didn't notice it in the back of the
space.

Luke
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