DevOps Days SLC: Juju, MAAS, & Snaps!

[Marco Ceppi]

Hey everyone,

Jorge Castro and I spent the last two days at DevOps Days Salt Lake City.
We were "blue square" sponsors giving us table space and a one minute
pitch. This is the first of our “tour de force” for the Juju 2.0 launch and
a lot of refinement to the “pitch” and talking points were made. Overall
this was a fantastic event, first year SLC has had a DevOps Days. The
attendees and conversations were great. Jorge and I have highlighted a few
of the conversations and counterpoints we got when engaging with the the
conference goers.

To start, we got a 1 min pitch to the attendees on the first day. Unlike
other conferences where all the sponsors line up at once and everyone
leaves while we pitch; they put the pitches interspersed throughout the
day. This means we got a really engaged audience which Jorge Castro pitched
to. Jorge framed the problem space really well while also identifying us as
a solution.

During the set up for the pitch (audio problems) Jorge polled the room to
find of the 250 attendees, roughly ~80% raised their hands to using Ubuntu
in one way or another.

Booth talk was surprising, a lot of people developing code on or using
Ubuntu/Linux and deploying to mostly, or exclusively, Microsoft Server.
Being able to very early on highlight our native powershell support for
charms and Windows deployments in MAAS brought a lot of attendees from swag
hunting to engaged. Of the other people we talked to we found a lot of the
Ubuntu stack between IoT, Desktop, and Cloud applied in one way or another.

Here’s a few highlights of people we met and either their feedback or
interests.

Blake from Vivint Security. Vivint Security is a local security company
that produces everything from wall warts to cloud services for customers.
They do production of units in house along with the rest of the suite of
software. With a mixture of hardware and cloud the Ubuntu Core/Snappy,
MAAS, and Juju story was pretty appealing. We’ll be following up with Blake
later this week to continue the conversation.

Several SlingTV developers dropped by, where they let us know that they run
exclusively on Ubuntu.

Health Catalyst have a lot of acquired software which spans different
deployment types from Windows, CentOS, and Ubuntu. Most of this is done on
VMWare, MAAS was what this engineer who stopped by our booth was most
interested in.

Booz Allen Hamilton - This was someone from the training department. Was
once technical, a long time ago. After explaining the idea behind Juju he
seemed really interested in the problem space as it struck some notes with
what Booz does as a consulting company.

Tyler Bird from Stark & Wayne - this is a Cloud Foundry/BOSH company, where
they pretty much do Cloud Foundry deployments for customers. The
conversation started and ended with the engineer still thinking BOSH was
better. Considering they’re only doing CF we couldn’t convince them
otherwise.

Aaron Mildenstein from elastic - we showed off, and showered with
compliments, the elastic stack bundle, which is: elasticsearch, kibana,
logstash, beats. Aaron was really interested in the snap packages as he
currently has to build 8+ different packages to distribute elastic
software. Jorge is working close with him via email to get him in touch
with Snappy people and we’ve worked to connect the dots that elastic
snapping everything means charms are easier to maintain. We’re looking to
see if this might help make inroads to finally getting an elastic CPP.

Finally, Brad Woodward from Applied Trust. This was someone who has tried
Juju in the past, (1.20) and even filed bugs[0]. He confessed to loving the
idea behind Juju but not liking the implementation at the time. We spent
quite a lot of time walking through juju 2.0-beta8 and outlining the
maturity of the project. While we did caveat heavily that it’s still beta,
he seemed really engaged and eager to try Juju again.

We’re working to setup a charm school with him and his colleagues as
they’ve recently finished a terraform + packer + ansible project where he
likened all the work they did to something he’d rather just use Juju for.

Overall this DevOps Days was a success. We made inroads with the organizers
for DevOps Days, helped support the first ever DevOps Days SLC, and really
narrowed in on the stories that excite people in this community. We’re
packing up and moving on to DevOps Days Amsterdam on June 29th-July 1st as
our next stop where we hope to continue this trend of renewed interested,
or new interest, in Juju as core rounds out 2.0

[0]: https://bugs.launchpad.net/juju-core/+bug/1315497/comments/4

Thanks!
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