I was in and out of DevOpsDays Austin over the past few days. It’s always a fun, event, packed with plenty of old friends and folks to catch up. We gave away a Sputnik to a lucky winner, a fine fellow from Boston as I recall.
Also, check out Barton’s video interview with Patrick Debois.
One of the tools in Project Sputnik is the “cloud launcher.” The idea for this tool is to help instrument a DevOps life-cycle: the tool models out a simulated cloud on your desktop during development, and then deploys it to “real” clouds once you’re ready. We demonstrated one version of the cloud launcher at Dell World this week that uses juju.
In the meantime, OpsCode’s Matt Ray has been working on another approach (which he describes in the above video) that uses Chef under the covers. See the code checked into the Sputnik repo as well. I’m looking at these two versions as proofs of concept, or even “spikes” to explore how to best implement the idea. We’re eager to get feedback and engagement from the community to figure out which approach (or a third!) is most helpful.
Ed and I talk about IBM as a company, their current high-level strategy (according to Cote). Also, the recently launched Project Sputnik and Hoodie-gate.
Click to listen below:
…or download directly.
And, don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast feed! Also, there’s a whole dedicated tumblr.
As mentioned earlier today, we launched a new project, named Sputnik, around exploring what a developer laptop would look like, here at the day-job. Part of what we want to make is a cloud-hosted service that allows developers to quickly setup their Sputnik machine with various profiles and, as we get into, allow the overall community to contribute profiles as well.
In the video above, Charles Lowell (of The FrontSide) and I talk through some thinking about what that service would be. As we emphasize, it’s just brain-storming at this point. We’d love to hear your thoughts!
Today one of the projects I’ve been working on at Dell is launching: Project Sputnik. Barton George is the one running it, while I’m just pitching in here and there. We started an internal incubation/innovation program a few months back to encourage ideas like this and Sputnik was the first project we picked.
Barton has a super-detailed post, but the upshot is: we’re exploring the idea of a developer-centric laptop starting with Ubuntu running on an XPS 13z. Canonical has been kind enough to get Unbuntu up and running on the laptop (thanks!), and now we’re doing some open innovation to explore the idea of what a developer laptop would look like.
We’ll be developing a tool-chain and a tool-driven service that lets developers layer on various pre-wired profiles, like “PHP developer,” “JavaScript developer, etc.” Ultimitly, I’d like to see us come up with an end-to-end approach that helps DevOps-minded folks out…but we’ll see where we end up! One of the participants in the program, Charles Lowell (of The FrontSide), and I recorded a white-board session going over some early thinking along these lines which I’ll post soon.
Our early reception has been great. People really like the experience of the XPS 13z, all the way from the packaging to the fast boot-up, to having a a solid developer environment.
We’re collecting input in an IdeaStorm session, and I’d love to hear any ideas you have. Also, if you want to snag the image Canonical built just for the XPS 13z, it’s available!
