devops

Howard Abrams demonstrates, in an EmacsConf 2015 talk, how he uses org-mode's Babel and Tramp to configure and operate remote servers from a single document. Code blocks, their results and the explanatory text all live together.

A podcast episode of Arrested DevOps with Andrew Clay Shafer and Bryan Cantrill, featuring Cantrill's rant on integrity in companies and technology.

Bryan Cantrill's GOTO Chicago 2017 talk on debugging production systems under pressure, centered on the incident where an operator's mistyped command rebooted an entire Joyent datacenter. It covers human factors, automation and architecture.

Pixar staff tell the story of how Toy Story 2 was almost deleted from the studio's computers and was saved by a home computer backup.

Jesse Newland describes how GitHub uses Hubot, its chat bot, to run operations such as deployment, monitoring, graphing and provisioning from chat rooms. He explains how this improves shared awareness and remote work culture.

Solomon Hykes shows Docker to the public for the first time in a five-minute lightning talk at PyCon 2013. It demos Linux containers and the simplicity of a Dockerfile.

Amazon's Jon Jenkins at Velocity 2011 on how operations can drive revenue and on Amazon's highly available, autonomous architectures. It includes details on deployment frequency and Amazon's move to AWS.

A Downfall parody in which Hitler rages about Docker problems. It is a short comedy sketch aimed at developers.

Richard Cook's short Velocity 2013 talk on resilience in complex adaptive systems, arguing systems operate near the edge of failure and that the surprise is how rarely they fail. He presents a model of how pressures push systems toward failure boundaries.

Rick Houlihan's AWS re:Invent 2018 deep dive on advanced DynamoDB design patterns. It covers index overloading, GSI sharding, composite keys, graph processing and transactions.

Liz Rice live-codes a minimal container runtime in a few lines of Go at GOTO Amsterdam 2018. She explains namespaces, control groups and what a host knows about its containers.

Bryan Cantrill's Uptime 2017 talk on the engineering challenges of the stateful data path, including storage, firmware and hardware bugs. It uses the 'zebras vs. horses' diagnostic heuristic to explain why rare failures keep appearing.

Bryan Cantrill of Joyent presents Manta, an internet-facing object store that lets you run compute directly on the data. The talk is peppered with ZFS history and Cantrill's trademark commentary on the industry.

Daniel Azuma's ElixirConf 2018 talk on whether Docker and OTP conflict. He shows they can coexist and uses Horde and DeltaCrdt, with a live tank-game demo, to keep state alive across container kills.

James Hamilton's Tuesday Night Live keynote at AWS re:Invent 2016, touring AWS infrastructure at scale including networking, power and custom silicon. It also features NASA JPL's Tom Soderstrom.

Dropbox engineer Kevin Modzelewski gives a Stanford colloquium on Dropbox's history and the technical problems it faced scaling, including detailed database schema decisions.

Bryan Cantrill's 2007 Google Tech Talk on DTrace, showing how dynamic tracing improves debugging of both development and live production systems. It includes a vivid war story about tracking down a problem on a Sun Ray server.

Liz Rice builds a container from scratch in about 100 lines of Go, showing that a container is not a lightweight VM but a set of Linux kernel features and flags.

Nickolas Means recounts the 1979 Three Mile Island accident minute by minute, from the control rod insertion to the operator's decision to switch off emergency cooling. He argues that finding systemic causes is more useful than blaming individuals.

Dr. Richard Cook, a physician and patient safety researcher, presents his ideas on how complex systems fail, at Velocity 2012. He argues for designing for resiliency rather than trying to exhaustively handle every failure mode.

Jon Moore's Strange Loop 2017 talk argues that rate limiting is the wrong tool for protecting services from noisy clients. He proposes concurrency-based capacity management and quotas instead.

Jérôme Petazzoni explains how Linux containers are built from kernel features like cgroups, namespaces and SELinux. He demonstrates putting the pieces together by hand to make a container and compares runtimes and approaches like jails and zones.

Eric Brandwine's AWS re:Invent 2015 session on how Amazon VPC networking works. It covers the problems the design solved, why traditional approaches do not scale, and the mechanisms used for customer isolation and VPC endpoints.

Bryan Cantrill's Velocity NYC 2015 talk argues for running containers directly on bare metal rather than layering them on virtual machines. He covers the history of containers and how SmartOS runs Linux workloads via syscall emulation.

Kyle Drake of Neocities explains the bandwidth pricing pitfalls of the big cloud providers. He describes how to run high-volume, bandwidth-heavy infrastructure far more cheaply, including through co-location.

Mikey Dickerson's keynote at Velocity NY 2014, one year after the healthcare.gov launch failure. He recounts how a small team rescued the site and what the episode showed about government IT contracting.

Kelsey Hightower introduces Kubernetes to sysadmins at PuppetConf 2016, with a demo. He explains the declarative model and how it changes the contract between infrastructure and applications.

Rick Reed of WhatsApp speaks at MeetBSD about running a messaging service on FreeBSD and Erlang at huge scale. He covers the stack, tuning and the challenges of millions of connections per host.

Bryan Cantrill's illumos Day 2014 talk on running Linux containers on an illumos kernel via LX-branded zones. He covers emulating Linux syscalls on SmartOS and compares Linux and Solaris-derived systems.

Michael Bryzek of Flow gives a QCon London 2018 talk on key decisions for building maintainable microservices. It covers infrastructure, continuous deployment, communication, event streaming and language choice.

A dotScale 2014 talk by Robert Kennedy, a former healthcare.gov SRE who later worked at Google, about the engineering effort to rescue the troubled site. It explains the technical and organizational problems behind the failed launch.

James Hamilton, AWS VP and distinguished engineer, gives an insider view of the innovations behind the AWS cloud at re:Invent 2014. He covers custom hardware, networking, regions and availability zones, and infrastructure at scale.

An AWS re:Invent 2018 session in which Holly Mesrobian and Marc Brooker explain how AWS Lambda is built, including its sandboxing, isolation and scaling architecture. It covers what happens under the hood when serverless code runs.

Jessie Frazelle's DockerCon SF 2015 talk on running Docker containers for desktop applications, with fun container hacks and images. It shows how far containers can be pushed beyond servers.

Matt Godbolt tells the story of Compiler Explorer, from a hacky basement server to a cloud-scaled service handling tens of thousands of daily requests. He also shows its features and how it is built.

An AWS re:Invent 2018 talk on how AWS limits the blast radius of failures. It covers design techniques such as cell-based architecture and shuffle sharding.

An AWS re:Invent 2018 session on how DynamoDB was built as a hyper-scale NoSQL database. It discloses underpinnings of the service and how it is run for over 100,000 customers.

The day one keynote of Google Cloud's 2016 GCP NEXT conference, with Sundar Pichai, Diane Greene, Eric Schmidt, Urs Holzle and customers. It includes a Cloud ML demo by Jeff Dean.

A PyCon 2013 block of Friday evening lightning talks. It includes the debut of Hy, a Lisp dialect that compiles to Python AST, and Solomon Hykes's first public talk on Docker.

An AWS re:Invent 2019 session for advanced DynamoDB users on design patterns used by large customers, including Amazon retail. It covers GSI sharding, index overloading, graph processing, composite keys and transactional workflows.