Everything I learned about CI , I learned from System Administration

Abstract Julian Simpson: Before I donned my secret identity as The Build Doctor, I was a average Solaris administrator (okay, I spent too much time playing with log analysis and too little doing storage, but them's the breaks). After discovering the joys of Agile, I started to roll out tools like CruiseControl. Every time I would look at a CruiseControl installation (hey, it was 2005) I'd notice that some concerns were never met, concerns that I would think about when deploying services as a systems administrator.

These were development systems, so making sure we had a backup of the configuration wasn't so important, right? Wrong. When successful development depends on the availability of your CI system, you need to take some precautions. It was then that I realised: development needs systems administrators.

In this talk I'll share my experiences of the last 7 years helping companies run Continuous Integration and deliver to production with low risk. I've noticed in previous presentations that there's often a mix of experience in the audience; to address this I'll be adopting an informal presentation style so that members of the audience can ask questions.

devopsdays Goteborg 2011 - Julian Simpson , Everything I learned about Continuous Integration , I learned from System Administra from devopsdays on Vimeo.

Topics will include:

• Context of CI
• Deploying your CI server
• Performance Monitoring
• Scaling up
• How to choose (and does it matter?)
• Going with the grain of tools (and when you shouldn't)
• Information radiators
• What does it mean to actually do Continuous Deployment?

There will be minimal question time at the end, but plenty of opportunities during the presentation.