Schlomo Schapiro

Last week I attended the Multikonferenz Software Engineering & Management 2015 in Dresden hosted by the Gesellschaft für Informatik : My topic was Test Driven Development, but I had to rework my original talk to fit into 20 minutes and to be much less technical. As a result I created a completely new  fast paced talk which draws a story line from DevOps over Test Driven Infrastructure Development into Risk Mitigation: SE 2015 DevOps Risk Mitigation - Test Driven Infrastructure from Schlomo Schapiro The conference is very different from the tech conferences I usually attend. First, I really was the only person in a T-Shirt :-/. Second, I apparently was invited as the "practitioner" while everybody else was there to talk about academic research, mostly in the form of a bachelor or master thesis. As much as the topics where interesting, as little was there anything even remotely related to my "practical" work :-( I still find it interesting to bet...

After many years of abstinence I went back to visit the CeBIT today. And actually enjoyed it a lot. It is funny to see how everything is new but nothing changed. From the oversized booths of the big players like IBM and Microsoft to the tiny stalls of Asian bank note counting machine vendors. From the large and somewhat empty government-IT-oriented booths to meeting old acquaintances and friends. But there are also several notably new things to see: For example Huawei shows itself being an important global player with a huge booth next to IBM. I managed only to visit a third of the exhibition but it was more than I could absorb in a single day. Nevertheless, my missing was accomplished with giving a talk about “ Open Source, Agile and DevOps at ImmobilienScout24 ”. The talk is much more high-level than my usual talks and tries to give a walk through overview. There were about 60-80 people attending my talk and the questions showed that the topic was relevant for the audience...

Relax and Recover  is the leading Open Source solution for automated Linux disaster recovery. It was once the pride of my work and is now totally irrelevant at my current job at ImmobilienScout24 . Why? Simply because at ImmobilienScout24 we invest our time into automating the setup of our servers instead of investing into the ability to automatically recover a manually configured system. Sounds simple but this is actually a large amount of work and not done in a few days. However, if you persist and manage to achieve the goal the rewards are much bigger: Don't be afraid of troubles, based on our automation we can be sure to reinstall our servers in a very short time. The following idea can help to bridge the gap if you cannot simply automate all your systems but still want to have a simplified backup and disaster recovery solution: Inject a layer of automation under the running system. The provisioning and configuration of the automation layer should be of cour...