DrupalCon sessions about DevOps

Last time, we gathered together DrupalCon Baltimore sessions about Front End. Before that, we explored the area of Site Building, Drupal Showcase, Coding and Development, Project Management and Case Studies. And that was not our last stop. This time, we looked at sessions that were presented in the area of DevOps.

100% Observability by Jason Yee from Datadog

In this session, the author broke down the expansive monitoring landscape into 5 categories and provided a framework to help users ensure full coverage. He also touched why these categories are important to users business and shared the top criteria to consider when evaluating the options.

 

Automatic Drupal Updates using Visual Regression & Continuous Integration by Matt Cheney and Andrew Taylor from Pantheon

This session presented how to use a Continous Integration and Visual Regression solution to update a Drupal site. It seems easy at first, but when it goes down to updating, that's hard work, because you need to apply updates, test updates, and deploy updates.

 

Avoid DEEP HURTING! Deployment beyond git by TEN7

In this session, the TEN7 team introduced how to augment the deployment with Ansible, laying the foundation to fully automate users' deployments with free and open source software.

 

Basic DevOps Skills: Where to Start and How to Learn by Michelle Krejci from Pantheon Systems

This session started with some collective hand-wringing about what “devops” is and then decided that it is a set of skills and processes that are worth developing. Then, the author got into what is worth attendees' time and what is not (Continuous Integration ...).

 

Be A Developer Experience Super Hero: Robust Dev Scripts For Peace and Joy from Dustin LeBlanc from Pantheon

This session covered a lot of rather advanced topics including containerization, continuous integration, and automated testing. Listeners must have familiarization with Docker, common PHP testing frameworks, and how continuous integration platforms work.

 

Build & Launch Tools: Automating best practices for enterprise sites by Matthew Grasmick from Acquia

In this session, the attendees learned how to create a new BLT-powered Drupal 8 site, how to quickly spin up a Drupal VM, how to automate the local install process, how to validate their custom code (linting and sniffing), how to execute Behat and PHPUnit tests, and how to generate a sanitized deployment artifact.

 

Captaining a container ship: Docker orchestration with Kontena by Jochen Lillich from freistil IT

In this session, the author introduced Kontena, an orchestration tool that lets you level up from plain Docker without spending days reading and banging your head on the desk.

 

Death Star Security - Maintaining Agility and Security in Clustered Deployments by Chris Teitzel from Cellar Door Media and David Strauss from Pantheon

This session was for projects and teams of all sizes. It was an interactive time filled with lessons learned and examples from the real world. If you find yourself wiring together everything from Varnish to Apache to MySQL to Solr to backup storage (and especially if you're looking for answers better than just throwing it all behind the main firewall), then you have to know how to do the security part properly.

 

Docksal: Better than VMs by Leonid Makarov from FFW

In this session, attendees learned more about the basics of using Docker for local development, comparing the Docker -based vs the VM-based approach, getting over the pain points that Docksal eliminates, initializing instant environments with zero configuration, getting a Drupal7 and a Drupal8 site running side by side using different stack versions, seeing how Docksal can be integrated into an existing project and the last, they saw some more advanced use case supported in Docksal (e.g. complex, production-like stacks).

 

Implementing Full Stack Test Automation for Drupal 8 - From Unit to Acceptance Tests by Anastasios Daskalopoulos from Exove

In this sessions, the author discussed test-driven Development, unit test generation and execution in Drupal 8, functional test automation tools and acceptance test automation.

 

Incident Command: The far side of the edge by Lisa Phillips from Fastly

In this session, Lisa Phillips from Fastly presented how Incident Command was conceived, and the protocols that were developed within Fastly to make it work. She shared a number of war stories that illustrated how Incident Command contributed to protecting Fastly as a company, its customers, and the many end users relying on the service. Examples included a major software vulnerability that affected a Linux component in common use across Fastly, as well as a large Distributed Denial of Service attack.

 

Predictable Continuous Deployment: Value, Culture & Tools by Andrew Kucharski and Johnnie Fox from Promet Source

This session started with discussing why the company decided to make the investment and what are the benefits of being able to deploy with confidence. The authors touched on "configuration management" and talked through their lessons learned (Chef, Ansible), took the attendees through several iterations of their build scripts (briefly touching on Composer) for both D7 and D8. Moreover, they tackled "continuous integration" with Jenkins (vs. Travis CI) and other scroptis. They presented how they've managed to deploy to different target environments such as Pantheon, Acquia, AWS, Rackspace etc. In the end, they touched their journey of automated testing from Behat to the Robot framework.

 

The future of Monitoring is now with Sensu by Howard Tyson from Zivtech

In this session, the author looked at how sensu is architected and how it removes the pain wrought by its predecessors. He reviewed writing simple plugins to monitor their own services and how everybody can connect sensu to a graphing service like graphite or influxdb and graphana to monitor the same metrics everybody are using for alerting.

 

This is not a test: What you should know about containers by Michael Schmid from Amazee Labs

This session explained what makes containers so exciting and why they are seen as a revolution in computing, what new possibilities containers open up (for Drupal, for local Development, for automated Testing), why people are still hesitant on running containers in Production and where containers will bring us in the future.

 

¡Viva la Revolución!- How to Start a DevOps Transformation at your Workplace by Amin Astaneh from Acquia

This presentation gave attendees an access to the tools and knowledge to start their own DevOps transformation where they work.