Open Source tools for distributed systems administration
With core team members distributed around the world and across multiple companies and organizations, the OpenStack project infrastructure team manages hundreds of servers for use by the OpenStack developer community.
This talk gives an overview of the open source tools and strategies we use to be an effective remote, distributed team. Strategies include weekly meetings, online sprints throughout the year and an incident channel for handling problems that require our full attention, all on IRC. Tooling we use includes of collaborative editors when completing work during maintenance windows, leveraging the OpenStack code review and continuous integration system for systems changes, using a suite of open source monitoring software and more.
Finally, there is value in meeting in persons at set intervals, so the talk will conclude with some challenges that come with remote system maintenance, how we've addressed them.