This document introduces Jon Aykroyd, an automation engineer with over 10 years of experience in Linux systems administration and automation. It provides an overview of Jon's background and role in helping organizations transition to DevOps practices. The document also shares a case study of how introducing Chef automation tools helped a clothing retailer reduce time-to-deployment from 2 weeks to just 2 hours. It closes with some details about Jon's initial work helping his own organization transition to Chef from various other tools and scripts.

1. Jon Aykroyd Cloud Platform Automation
Email: jon.aykroyd@charter.com
@gmail.com
Twitter: @qubitrenegade

2. Introduction
 Who Am I?
 Automation Engineer –
 Focus on Linux
 10+ Years Linux SA Experience
 10+ Years “Automation” Experience
 Why Am I here?
 2nd journey down this path
 Big proponent of DevOps philosophies
 Danielle and Jeremy asked me nicely
(these guys do great work and they don’t get thanked nearly enough)

3. Who are you?
 Manual Processes?
 Buzzwords?
 Source Control?
 Automated Processes?
 Formal Automation Tools?

6. 5 Stages of DevOps Transition
What’s
DevOps?
We need that
buzzword!
Our DevOps is
different!
Maybe our
DevOps isn’t
so different…
DevOps at
velocity
• Collection of
unorganized
scripts
• Sometimes in
revision control
• Lots of manual
processes
• LONG TTD
• Many silos
within an
organization
• Initial
implementation
of DevOps tool
• Lots of different
groups inventing
same wheel
• Hopefully some
source control…
• What’s testing?
• What’s a style
guide?
• Creation of
DevOps group
and / or titles
• Many different
groups writing
cookbooks
• Cookbooks
trying to be “all
encompassing”
• Groups
embracing the
importance of
source control
• Beginning to see
automated local
testing
• Emergence of
[manual]
formalized
testing
• Dissolution of
DevOps group
• Different groups
starting to
specialize
• Disparate groups
starting to work
together
• Review process
• Fully embracing
localized testing
• Beginning to see
automated
integration
testing.
• Emergence of
“gated” CI/CD
• Company-wide
acceptance of
DevOps:
Accounting to
Engineering
• Truly embracing
CI/CD
• Fully automated
testing, top to
bottom
• Unified coding
style

7. Case Study: Clothing Retailer
Before Chef
 30-40 VM Requests / week
 TTD: 2 weeks from approval
 Able to deliver ~30 VMs/week (problem?)
 Process largely manual, from setting NTP, DNS, to
joining domain. 30 steps total after deploying VM in
vSphere

8. Case Study: Clothing Retailer
After Chef
 30-40 VM Requests / week
 TTD: 2 hours from approval
 Most of the manual steps had been partially / wholly
automated with Chef anyway…
 Just tied it all together
 Process became:
 Deploy VM in vSphere
 knife bootstrap nodename --environment prod
--run-list “recipe[our_base]”
 Hand off to customer (i.e.: requestor)

9. Our Start
 Each team using something different (Puppet, Ansible,
Salt)
 Chef came on site for four days
 2d training
 2d writing cookbooks for our environment
 Took internal deployment application
 100% BASH, works well but fragile
 Wrote cookbooks to replace BASH framework
 Initial BASH tool took over a month to develop (and still not
100% bug free)
 Able to replicate 80% of functionality in Chef in the 2d

10. Questions?

11.  O RLY book generator: http://dev.to/rly