Global DevOps Bootcamp 2019 – Stockholm

This was my 1^st Global DevOps bootcamp. Being from a developer background I wanted to get my hands-on DevOps as well. It was hosted at Solidify office in Stockholm on 15^th June 2019. The theme for this year’s bootcamp was – “YOU BUILD IT YOU RUN AWAY IT”. The focus was on Run side of the DevOps.

Agenda –

• 9:00 – Coffee, Breakfast and registration
• 10:00 – Keynote by Niall Murphy followed by local keyword by Donovan Brown
• Divide teams and start working with challenges
• 12:30 – Lunch Break
• Hackathon continues
• 16:00 – Share your learning
• 17:00 – Events end

After registration and a quick coffee and breakfast the session started with introduction to the global DevOps boot camp along with inputs from the keynote speakers.

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They shared their experiences and few scenarios. Also, how to overcome issues and cope away with it.

• Intervene in the design and run phase
• Design with failure in mind
• Build with awareness of sensitive information
• Run with monitoring tools and observation

Azure provides tools, support for many of these. Azure monitor, credential scanner and application architecture advice.

What is DevOps –

DevOps is the union of people, process and products to enable continuous delivery of value to end users.

• Continuous Integration
• Continuous Delivery
• Systems thinking
• Feedbacks loop
• Continuous learning

SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) –

Site Reliability Engineering is an engineering discipline devoted to helping an organization sustainably achieve the appropriate level of reliability in their systems, services and products

• Reliability
• Appropriate
  • Expect in rare cases 100% reliability is never the right goal
  • Define goals wisely
  • Service level objective, Service level indicator, Service level agreement
• Sustainably
  • Spend time on automation
  • Less on tickets, calls, plans etc

DevOps Vs SRE

• It is not about DevOps Vs SRE it is DevOps and SRE
• SRE focuses on Reliability
• DevOps focuses on delivering value in a fast, secure, compliant and reliable way

Later a scenario was explained – PARTS UNLIMITED (car parts for mechanics). What challenges they faced and how they managed to tackle with it.

• These company sells car parts on internet
• Invested a lot in DevOps in last few years
• They use CI/CD and everything runs on cloud
• They lived by DevOps ways defined by Gene Kim
  • Systems thinking
  • Feedbacks loop
  • Continuous learning

After a complete walkthrough and understanding the scenario above we can say that DevOps and SRE go hand in hand.

• We build new features and deploy them everyday
  • We know how to mitigate the problem now
  • We constantly ask ourselves how do you prevent it for the future
• Engineering for stability and availability is an important practice
  • You need to have engineers that have a focus on this
  • Make them part of the DevOps team!

Challenge 2019

During the challenge we were divided into 6 teams and each team has around 5 members. The challenge was quite interesting.

• Each team will get its own website, that runs Parts Unlimited.
• Each team will earn $$$ by keeping the site up. The team who manages to keep the site running with less down time will earn more and finally will be declared winner!
• The goal of this session was learn as a team and compete with each other’s.

There were 8 challenges to complete. As soon as you click on any of the challenge there will be a disruption in your site, and it will go down. You need to fix the issue based on the inputs provided and later carry on the post-mortem. All the challenges had the same approach.

See the Problem > Quick Fix it > Setup issue detection > Setup measures so that it won’t happen again.

For example, the 1^st challenge – “Exception rate goes up”

• Quick Fix
• The root cause analysis
• To detect introduce monitoring
• CI/CD pipeline will help to roll-back easily

We managed to finish 4 challenges and our team was declared as a winner 😊 We manage to keep the site running for the max time and gained max amount of business.

Various challenges during the Bootcamp as below –

You can watch the Introduction, Behind the scenes videos and more about the challenges on the Link below – challenges website

https://www.gdbc-challenges.com/

Behind the Scenes includes –

• How they build the Challenge websites
• How they build Control Plane
• How they build the Event Automation
• How they build the event registration
• How they build the provisioning
• How they build the score board

Finally, the event ended with each team presenting and what each team gained and learned from this boot camp along with the group photos and winner declaration.

There was couple of things we learned related to DevOps from this bootcamp. Most of us do use the third party codes and open source code. We must always try to check it for vulnerabilities. There are couple of tools which scans for vulnerabilities (White Source & Synk)

https://resources.whitesourcesoftware.com/news-whitesource/whitesource-unveils-free-to-use-vulnerability-checker-to-combat-most-critical-open-source-vulnerabilities

https://snyk.io/