Recap on the HelsinkiJS & DevOpsFinland January event that gathered 146 developers into Alma Media headquarters. See also full videos of the presentations.
Marriage made in heaven?
150 RSVPs and 80 more on a waiting list on EventBrite: At least by looking at those numbers the HelsinkiJS & DevOpsFinland joint event on 22nd of January 2015 seemed like a great success. DevOps is a hot topic currently, maybe reaching the hype peak, but many don’t associate DevOps with front-end in any way… but is there a rallying point? To find out just that, the joint event with HelsinkiJS and DevOpsFinland was arranged.
The event started at 18:00 with some food & drinks and around 18:30 the actual presentations begun. The evening consisted of four presentations with topics varying from front-end to DevOps and from highly technical implementation details of CoreOS based PaaS solution to cultural side of DevOps.
You can watch the actual presentations and read more about them below.
Intro to Front-end Ops
The event kick started with Ari Palo from Alma Media introducing the concept of “Front-end Ops” to which he originally stumbled upon in Alex Sexton’s similarly named “Smashing Magazine article”. In the presentation Ari rushed through many, many tools and practises which he split into four categories: develop, test, deploy and monitor. Idea being that both front-end developers and devops-engineers hopefully would start thinking about all the possibilities these tools and practises would enable.
In his Smashing Magazine article, Alex Sexton wrote about “Front-end Operations Engineer”, but as not so many teams are lucky to have one, Ari suggested that front-end developers and devops-engineers should work together in collaboration to “fill in the missing front-end ops engineer”.
Kl.fi + Angular + Cloud
On 6th of January 2015 Kauppalehti launched their new, redesigned & rewritten website which is based on AngularJS and now lives in the cloud. The site and its many backend systems have been in the works for sometime and actually last year, in 2014, at HelsinkiJS January event Kauppalehti’s technology manager Niilo Ursin talked about the (then upcoming) challenges of embracing devops-thinking, moving into the cloud and building an AngularJS based website. Now though Niilo was again in the stage, but with the actual experiences of developing and launching the site.
A few interesting facts about the new site and its backend systems:
- Now hosted on 150+ cloud instances (of which between 40-50 are used for production environment), provisioned with Chef.
- After it’s launch, there has been four deploys per day on average for the Kauppalehti.fi front-end app.
NodeJS Paas using Docker & CoreOS
Oleg Podsechin “didn’t want to pay for Amazon Web Services or Heroku”, this is why he created Opshell, another reason was that he wanted to try out Vagrant, Docker and CoreOS.
In his presentation he gave us an introduction to Docker & CoreOS and other tools to on top of which Opshell is based.
DevOps culture
“C.A.L.M.S.” - one definition of DevOps explains the concept with these five points: Culture, Automation, Lean, Metrics and Sharing. As usual with developers, these four last technical points are usually discussed more, but Olli Vistbacka wanted to emphasize the importance of devops as a culture.
Thank you all!
According to our head count, a respectable 146 people attended and as this was the first time for us with such a big crowd (2014 we hosted “only” one hundred people), it was a relief to see that there was enough room for everyone!
