Speaker Notes & Slides - BOS VMUG 2016

20 Jun 2016

This last week I had the wonderful opportunity to speak at the Boston VMUG user conference as a part of both a community panel, as well as a talk on “Automation - You’re doing it wrong”. This post then includes the speaker notes for said session in raw form, as well as the similarly raw slides.

Slides

Notes

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Automation - You’re doing it wrong

Automation has been a major topic at IT conferences more or less forever. Be it batch files, PowerShell, VCO (you know, before they renamed it). We’ve even had movements towards automating IT workloads at scale… DevOps, etc. In this talk, we aim, not to cover whatever is the latest and greatest in tactical tools for automation. Rather, our aim is to equip you with the mental models to help resolve some of the underlying issues that prevent IT teams from achieving the goal of having a more automated system, by approaching the problem with a different mindset.

• Introductions
  • Who is Cody
  • About the space
• Processes
  • The Credit Union
    • Standard Operating Procedure(s)
    • A Big Project
    • A Small shell script
    • What happened…
    • Lessons learned
  • The Roomba example:
    • “O2O” - Order to Online
    • The Whiteboard
    • Lessons learned
• People
  • The Credit Union
    • The People
      • The “Mainframe Guy”
      • The “Operator”
      • The “Desktop Guy”
      • The “Web Guy”
• Stop addressing first order tasks
  • Evolution of Automation
    • Mechanical Turks
    • Task Based
    • “DevOps” / Product Dev
  • Look at the whole system
  • Design an autonomous system
• Buying Time
  • “If we are engineering processes and solutions that are not automatable, we continue having to staff humans to maintain the system. If we have to staff humans to do the work, we are feeding the machines with the blood, sweat, and tears of human beings. Think The Matrix with less special effects and more pissed off System Administrators” - Joseph Bironas, Google SRE