January 20-22, 2012, Hilton Los Angeles Airport Hotel

Everyone

Selena Deckelmann

Keynote: Mistakes Were Made

Ever have a code release go horribly wrong? Have a routine system upgrade turn into 12 hours of downtime? Had to field angry phone calls from engineers, customers and your boss?

Sometimes things go horribly wrong. This talk will teach you how to plan for the worst, minimize risk and recover gracefully from failure.

In an ideal world, code would have complete test coverage, releases would be seamless and databases wouldn’t require downtimes to upgrade. The fact is, most companies still have to manage systems upgrades and code deployment that includes downtime. This talk is for you.

Elements to successful downtimes include: proper testing, automated checks for success, completely failback plans, and a timeline. We’ll go over useful tools for keeping track of what is going on before, during and after a downtime, and talk through good and bad communication for employees and customers.

We’ll also talk about how non-technical people can evaluate technical change. And how having the right stakeholders involved from the beginning of the planning process reduces risk.

Stories to illustrate success and failure will come from Selena Deckelmann’s 15 years in education, public and private sectors, as a consultant, DBA and IT manager.

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John Willis, Jeff Roberts, James Dunn, JP Ramirez, Justin Dean

Panel: DevOps Newly Wed Game

How well do yours Dev and Ops teams know each other? Join us for the DevOps Newly Wed Game and find out!  Our host John Willis will interview Dev and Ops representatives from eHarmony, CityGrid, and others to see how DevOps is implemented in their respective organizations.

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Mark Hinkle, John Mark Walker, Lars Kurth, Simon Jakesch

Build A Cloud Day

Additional Speakers: 

Build a Cloud Day  will be dedicated to teaching users how to build and manage a cloud computing environment using free and open source software. The program is designed to expose attendees to the concepts and best practices around deploying cloud computing infrastructure.

Attendees should expect to learn how to deploy a cloud computing environment using CloudStack and other cloud infrastructure tools including those from Red Hat, Gluster, Puppet Labs and Opscode that automate server and network configuration for building highly available cloud computing environments.

Please register for this event on the CloudStack site so we can get an accurate headcount for food and beverages.

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Ross Brunson

LPI Exam Cram - LPI-102

Ross Brunson of LPI will host two half day exam cram sessions for  LPI-101 and LPI-102 -- exams necessary for LPIC-1 certification.  These sessions will assist exam candidates in preparing for the LPIC-1  exams.  Exam cram sessions include information on exam structure,  question types, and how to use practical experience and one's knowledge  of Linux to determine the correct answers to exam questions.  Participants in these exam cram sessions will also gain important tips, tricks and techniques in order to successfully complete and pass their  LPI exams.  Ross is an experienced presenter on this subject and welcomes all questions during his examcram sessions.

Note: This class is part of the SCALE University Program and includes an additional fee. Please remember to select the "SCALE University" addon at registration.

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Ross Brunson

LPI Exam Cram - LPI-101

Ross Brunson of LPI will host two half day exam cram sessions for  LPI-101 and LPI-102 -- exams necessary for LPIC-1 certification.  These sessions will assist exam candidates in preparing for the LPIC-1 exams.  Exam cram sessions include information on exam structure,  question types, and how to use practical experience and one's knowledge  of Linux to determine the correct answers to exam questions. Participants in these exam cram sessions will also gain important tips, tricks and techniques in order to successfully complete and pass their  LPI exams.  Ross is an experienced presenter on this subject and welcomes all questions during his examcram sessions. 

Note: This class is part of the SCALE University Program and includes an additional fee. Please remember to select the "SCALE University" addon at registration.

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Carl Caum

Puppet Master Training

A compressed version of Puppet Labs 3 day Puppet Master training, this course is ideal for those who want a Puppet jumpstart. Newer members at an organization already using Puppet, or experienced sysadmins wanting to bring Puppet into their team will get everything they need to hit the ground running.

Topics covered include:

  • Configuring Puppet and Puppetmaster
  • Resource Types and the Resource Abstration Layer
  • Virtual Resources, Exported Resources and Stored Configs
  • Meta-parameters, Dependencies and Events
  • Classes, Modules and Definitions
  • Tags and Environments
  • Puppet Language Patterns and Best Practices

 Pre-requisites:

  • Attendees should have at least the equivalent experience of a junior Unix/Linux administrator.
  • Each student should bring a WiFi enabled laptop with VMWare installed to participate in the labs.

 Note: This class is part of the SCALE University Program and includes an additional fee. Please remember to select the "SCALE University" addon at registration.

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Abe Kazemzadeh

OLPC for Middle School After-School Programs

We present experiences from an after-school program's activities with the OLPC project's XO computers at the Foundation for Arts, Mentoring, Leadership, and Innovation (FAMLI L.A.) .  We'll cover how kids and adults learned to use the XOs, the kids' usage of XO software, introducing the kids to hardware, projects using the XO, and the usage of XOs in comparison with other computers.  What we observed is that kids tended to approach learning to use the XO computers differently than adults, through playing with it and asking questions as opposed to having a specific task and doing internet searches.  Creativity programs and games were more used than educational applications, perhaps due to it being an after school program and not a daily class.  Students were also excited about the ability to take apart the computers and fix broken ones. This activity was generally successful although some students progressed further than others. Another successful project was using 3D to explain the representation of colors in computers. Though our findings are based on limited data, we offer our experiences in what worked and ways to improve what did not.  (slides)

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Aleksey Tsalolikhin

Time Management for System Administrators

Based on Tom Limoncelli's life-saving book, this course will cover Tom's Cycle System. These time management tips and practices can greatly increase the efficiency of any single sysadmin, and when applied in a group their effects can be a quantum shift in productivity. They also give the sysadmin practitioner greater peace of mind and more power and control.

Note: This class is part of the SCALE University Program and requires an additional fee. Please remember to select the "SCALE University" addon at registration.

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N. Nadine Miller

Technical Resume Writing

Technical Resume Writing covers the high points of overhauling your resume to receive better responses from the HR "gatekeepers" as well as potential IT managers and colleagues. Topics covered will include: "career objective" versus "professional summary"/"profile", improving the 30 second response to your resume, adding quantitative information to your resume, the type of resume to use, tailoring resumes to specific job listings, and improving the visual design of your resume. Real-world examples of before and after resumes help demonstrate how to adapt your own experiences. The principles taught apply to social networking profiles in addition to paper and on-line resumes. Bring your resume and be ready to ask specific questions.

Note: This class is part of the SCALE University Program and requires an additional fee. Please remember to select the "SCALE University" addon at registration.

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David Kavanagh

Installing Eucalyptus: Past, Present, and Future

From the start, Eucalyptus has been installed using a set of instructions that walked the user through various options, from distro to hypervisor to network mode. While there is still value in that for the ultimate flexibility, there are other ways to get Eucalyptus installed. FastStart is one such technology. It uses a set of simplifying assumptions to create a POC installer. For those who want to not only provision Eucalyptus, but handle ongoing configuration management, Puppet offers a nice set of features. We've developed a set of scripts to provision your Eucalyptus infrastructure. Finally, a new project we're running fully in front of the community is called Silvereye. Simply, this project provides a simple single media install solution whereby the first node is bootstrapped from a DVD and the remaining nodes are installed over the network. We have great plans for where this will lead.

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