ABLEconf Free Software for Free Enterprise

SCALE team member Gerald Fontejon met with Chris Nolan (eHarmony) to discuss DevOps and the nVentory project. Chris Nolan and his colleagues will be presenting on nVentory at DevOps Day Los Angeles on Friday January 20th.

SCALE:From looking at who is presenting the topic "nVentory - Your Infrastructure's Source of Truth", we have a Director, System Administrator, and Developer presenting - how does each role play a part with the implementation, management, and daily-use of nVentory?

Chris: I initially implemented nVentory shortly I after I started at eHarmony 18 months ago. There was no easy way to track all of our servers and it was frustrating coming in new and not knowing what was in our datacenters. Ongoing I have become more of an evangelist of nVentory, both internally to eHarmony and externally to the internet community.

Darren, as the engineer, works on features and bugs for nVentory. He is an active developer and sends a majority of his work back to the community, allowing others to share in our new features and tools.

Jeff, as a SysAdmin, is a big consumer and user of the information stored in nVentory.

SCALE: Also could you describe your environment at eHarmony in which you guys use nVentory?

Chris: Our environment is a mix of physical and virtual machines, or nodes, with hundreds of applications and data stores. We use it to manager our thousands of nodes (both physical and virtual) and layer metadata on top of the nodes and nodegroups to manage apps, monitoring, release, etc.

SCALE: It does give you some flexibility with the tool having Darren Dao adding new features to fit your team's needs.

Chris: Definitely. Having the developer of a tool in house is great; especially someone as gifted as Darren.

SCALE: Are the other tools that are comparable with nVentory?

Chris: For tools that do just what nVentory does there are not a whole lot of open source options out there. Puppet and Chef have a "server" concept that allows you to query information about your hosts, but neither track - storage, VIPs, network ports, etc. like nVentory does. There are enterprise solutions but nobody likes shelling out wheelbarrows of cash and working with stuffy consultants. :)

SCALE: Would you be able to use another tool like openLDAP to be the "Source of Truth" within your environment by injecting/adding new fields to accommodate your informational needs?

Chris: LDAP doesn't offer an API or an elegant CLI to extract information. It also doesn't have all the fields or an easy way to layer metadata on top of the nodes it may be tracking.

SCALE: I noticed from poking around LinkedIn, all the members possibly met at ATT Interactive, and had some experience with nVentory in the ATT environment. From your experience as a team of implementing nVentory within eHarmony, what were the major challenges?

Chris: Jeff, Darren and I actually met at a startup that did out of home advertising on digital billboards and TV screens.

Though I wouldn't call it a major challenge, the long haul has been getting people to use it. Sometimes people have to ask a few times about what node is handling service X or what port node Z is plugged into. When you keep telling folks to use nVentory and get the data there, they eventually get it and are more productive in the end. It also results in fewer shoulder taps for the Sysadmins, which is always a good thing.

SCALE: Agreed. Always good to provide users the necessary tools to find information on the given infrastructure. And having the information accessible by everyone outside the SysAdmin team is awesome. Researching the benefits of a "Source of Truth" concept, and nVentory - I'm thinking the number of its implementations will grow. However not many companies have thousands of nodes in their datacenter. What number of nodes would you say is the threshold to make a tech dept. invest some man hours on its 'source of truth' utility implementation? And given your experience with nVentory, what would be some of the crucial steps in order to implement nVentory. The datacenter environment touches multiple teams (netops, sysadmins, security, appops), so I would assume there has to be a lot of coordination.

Chris: I think this question can be asked of all sorts of "devops" tools. When is the best time to implement configuration management? When should I start using Jenkins or a similar Continuous Integration tool? When should I start doing test driven development? And finally, how large should my infrastructure be before I start using nVentory?

If you are only managing 1-10 hosts and don't expect to scale that then you probably don't have any problems that devops (and nVentory) address. If you have 10+ hosts and you expect to scale that as you grow then you should implement nVentory now (as well as the surrounding tools and practices I mention above).

Coordination between groups is important. For example, a lot of our tools make decisions based on rack location. This, unfortunately, is not automatable and requires that DCOps be onboard to manually enter the information. When people see the benefits of using nVentory they are happy to oblige and do what is necessary to make the data useful and valuable to the company.

SCALE: What do you mean by, "a lot of our tools make decisions based on rack location?" I'm unclear on this. And also a couple of the devops tools you mentioned, such as CM and CI are cloud ready - meaning these tools could work within a company's an EC2 or RackSpace environment. Is nVentory capable of supporting a hybrid physical/virtual datacenter(s)?

Chris: Let me clarify that statement. A lot of our tools use rack location in their configuration and deployment decision making.

One example is our custom private cloud. When a multi-node requests (a single service needing multiple services for load balancing and redundancy) the system decides where to place the VMs to ensure they are on different hypervisors in different racks.

nVentory is capable of supporting hybrid environments. The considerations would be around networking and encrypted tunnels between sites and providers.

SCALE: Well, thank you Chris for the interview and a glimpse of eHarmony's utilization of nVentory. I look forward to checking out your discussion. For anyone that is planning on attending your team's presentation - you have homework to prepare them for your guys' talk? Or will the discussion be relatively self-explanatory?

Chris: It's been fun, Gerald. People should think about the foundation tools they use to manage their infrastructure and come ready with questions. Our talk will be self-explanatory with examples of how we integrate our tools and infrastructure management together using nVentory.

[Blogger's Note: SCALE 10X will be asking some of the speakers to weigh in on their presentations for the expo. This is the Q-and-A for Mark Burgess, who will give a talk on “3 Myths and 3 Challenges to Bring System Administration out of the Dark Ages” on Friday.]

Q: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your background?

A: Well, let's see. I'm the founder, CTO and original author of CFEngine. I also used to be Professor of Network and System Administration at Oslo University College, but now I'm full time at the CFEngine company. I have a Ph.D in Theoretical Physics and I've been working on system administration as a researcher and sort of activist for nearly 20 years. I've written a number of text books for universities and dozens of scientific papers on the subject and I'm still pretty engaged in thinking about the future of IT technology. I like to get my hands dirty with practical issues, even though I'm a theorist. Theory is no good unless it is an accurate model of reality.

Q: You're giving a talk at SCALE 10X on “3 Myths and 3 Challenges to Bring System Administration out of the Dark Ages.” Without tipping your hand on the actual talk, can you give us an idea of what we might expect?

A: The talk is really about the future of system administration or IT management. I suppose what I'm doing is pointing out that system administration need to move on from some old-fashioned practices and explain why. Although it is not directly about CFEngine, a lot of these ideas have really come out of the years of research and lessons learned from making CFEngine 3. I'll be saying why we need to start looking at this kind of third generation technology to handle what's coming in the next ten years. I hope the talk will be a bit entertaining and will poke fun at the mirror in a humourous way.

Q: According to your bio, you have a very extensive background on System Administration, in both the academic and private sector. How has System Administration changed over the years, and are the challenges different than they were in years past?

A: That's quite a difficult question to answer. I feel that system administration itself has not changed very much in spirit. We cling to a lot of old ideas in a majority of institutions. The tools and technologies have changed a lot though -- and have especially been enhanced by Free/Open Source Software. The GNU project was a kind of Berlin wall moment for software -- opening up the borders of software creativity from the old monolithic software vendors to a freedom of ideas and the ultimately to a new commerce. That's now reaching maturity. This was always to be expected, but it's a subversive trend. That freedom drives commercial growth, which in turn drives demand for IT, and the size of installations -- so obviously datacentres are hundreds of times bigger than they were in the past. Scale and complexity are growing all the time and will soon become unmanageable without an attention to proper modelling. People are being forced to adopt modern methods, sometimes kicking and screaming.

Q: So what is the future system administrator?

A: System administration is engineering, even today, So the sysadmin of the future will be a fully fledged infrastructure engineer, equipped with proper tools and analytical skills. He or she will watch over an infrastructure that is more smoothly hidden from view. I don't like this expression "infrastructure is code" used by some DevOps commentators. I believe infrastructure should be more akin to documentation than code -- i.e. something that's there to be used without having to perform surgery on it to make a change. I think that is a difference between CFEngine 3 and other tools for configuration management, for instance, at least in edge cases. Future engineers will also have to deal with far greater numbers of devices at every scale from mobile phones to small embedded devices, up to mainframes and cloud installations. There might be less diversity in operating system, but a great focus on the application layer -- so ultimately greater complexity. I believe we're moving increasingly into what Alvin Toffler called the Third Wave of society -- away from the industrial era and all its monolithic mass production methods, towards a society driven by individual freedoms and diversity. Hallelujah! (laughs) That makes for an exciting challenge for the IT infrastructure engineer. In particular, it means that knowledge management will be a core competence, and there will be a more optimal division of labour between Man and Machine. We're also going to have to reconsider what we mean by security.

Q: Is this your first visit to SCALE? If so, what are your expectations? If not, can you give us your impressions of the event?

A: I attended SCALE 9x last year and gave a talk on the future of configuration management. SCALE is a pretty friendly event, with smart, likeable people. I'm looking forward to coming back this year.

Q: Is there anything else you'd like to add?

A. Apart from small and preferably prime numbers, no thank you, (laughs). I'll just wish everyone an amazing event and look forward to participating.

Thank you for taking part in this brief SCALE 10X interview.

At SCALE, in spite of having a lot of content for developers and sysadmins, we've always had a soft spot in our collective hearts for the newbie.   Sadly, we've not been able to muster a lot of material oriented towards the raw beginner in Linux and Open Source. 

Not until the 10th SCALE, that is.  This weekend SCALE will hold its first ever Linux Beginner's Training class.   It's a two-day 12-hour course on how to install and administer a basic Linux workstation.   The students will learn how to install Linux, configure printing and networking, how to install and update packages, and more.  They'll also get an introduction to the Open Source community: what it is, how it works, and how they've become a member, without having to sign up or pay fees!   The instructors, trainers and proctors are volunteers from the IT industry and the Open Source community.

We allocated a large room for the class, enough for 40 students.    However, apparently there's quite a demand for Linux introductory training, as the 40 slots filled up almost instantly, and we have, at this time, almost 20 on a waiting list.

We at SCALE are contemplating a follow-on class to cover the waiting list, but if you run a training outfit in SoCal, here's an opportunity for you: there's a demand for basic, entry-level Linux and Open Source education.  If you offer it, apparently they will come in droves.

While the beginner's class is full, we strongly encourage those new to Linux to attend the Expo.   There are a number of sessions that will help expose you to the Open Source software culture and help you "talk the talk", and the Expo floor has one hundred booths stuffed with people who would love to chat with you about Linux!   (See the list of exhibitors for details.)

Hope to see you at SCALE!

The annual SCALE PGP Keysigning Party continues to grow: we already have over 70 people signed up! Are you one of them? Whether you're a PGP newbie or a crypto veteran, if you're interested in securing your communications we've got you covered.

If you are interested in being able to verify or encrypt email but don't know anything about PGP, that's OK; we can get you started. Head over to the event page and it'll explain the few steps you need to do before you show up.  We'll explain everything else at the party.  Note that the explanations happen first, so please be especially prompt if you're a PGP newbie.

We will once again be in the lower lobby,  but this time we'll have ample signs to ensure that everyone finds it.  With 71 people already signed up and the number growing this is a great opportunity to significantly expand your web-of-trust!

If you've already registered for SCALE but didn't sign up for the party, see the event page for how to send me your keys manually.

I'm excited to be hosting this again and I can't wait to see you all on Saturday night!

SCALE had a chance to sit down with Cory Fields, a member of the XBMC community, to chat about XBMC and the future of the project.

Q: How did you first get involved with the free & open source community?

A: I first began using Linux as a Windows sysadmin around 8 years ago, in order to rescue broken systems. I dual-booted for a while as I learned the ropes, and finally removed my Windows hard-drive about a year later. Later, one of the businesses that I supported erupted in chaos when they added a few devices to their domain and hit their client-license quota, causing temporary lock-outs. The problem could have been avoided, but I decided at that point that FLOSS software is almost always the only reasonable choice.

Q: How did you get involved with the XBMC project? A: Many years ago I wrote an event-client for XBMC that allowed the Wii controller to be used as a remote. I had been in contact with many of the devs, and I was asked to join on to help with QA. 

Q:  What is your primary role within the community?

A: I am the Business Relations Manager. I attend most of the shows, helping to find sponsorships and other helpful allegiances. I'm also the gatekeeper for our primary contact email boxes, where I filter out the noise and pass people along to the team as needed. In addition, I am the lead sysadmin for xbmc.org and its kin, though lately I've been deep in the code helping with optimizing for low-power devices.

Q: Are XBMC forks such as Boxee a good thing?

A: Yes and no, of course. Forks can help cater to new markets, or spread the word where marketing may be lacking. They can also allow for the addition of features that a non-profit organization and group of volunteers could not offer. On the flip-side, forks can mark a significant philosophical change in direction and attitude, especially when driven by commercial goals. Often, lofty ambitions to cross-pollinate are lost in the name of meeting a deadline, so well intentioned plans to avoid duplicating work often fall short.

Q: What exciting things are on the horizon for XBMC? 

A: The great thing about XBMC is that you will receive a different answer depending on which dev or which user you ask. It takes on many faces. Personally, I see 2012 as the year of XBMC on embedded devices. I hope to see a widely-available hackable hardware configuration selling for sub $100 that is capable of showing XBMC in its full glory. 

Q: Do you think we will ever see support for services like Netflix & Amazon Video On Demand for XBMC?

A: This is a very complicated issue, as I'm sure Boxee would say. An official means of streaming from Netflix or Amazon is unlikely until a suitable unlicensed API is created to allow it. And that unlicensed API is unlikely to surface any time soon, as the content producers demand a secure path from the provider all the way to the screen. This may be possible in the future, though, as XBMC is ported to more and more SOCs that are able to address some of these concerns.

In addition, many providers or aggregators like Netflix often impose strict guidelines over how their content may be offered (down to the background color and fonts used). These restrictions are generally incompatible with spirit of free software, even if they may be technically achievable via embedding an external application into another, or other equally clumsy mechanisms.

Q: The XB in XBMC used to stand for X-Box...now that the original Xbox is now long officially supported, what does that XB stand for? :)

A: Officially, nothing. We originally tried to shoe-horn in some shiny new meaning, or give it a gnu-style recursive acronym, but we were never satisfied with anything that arose. We considered a name-change, but decided that the XBMC branding was too strong to give up. So officially, XBMC is not an acronym. But if you must expand it, fill it in however you'd like :)  Thanks to Cory for taking the time to speak with us!

[Blogger's Note: SCALE 10X will be asking the keynoters and some of the speakers to weigh in on their presentations for the expo. This is the Q-and-A for Alison Chaiken, who will be giving a presentation on "Automotive: The Next Frontier for Mobile Linux" at 6 p.m. Saturday.]

Q: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your background?

A: My name is Alison Chaiken. For years I worked on cool technologies in the area of device physics and BioMEMS, but the projects I worked on always ended in cancellation and opportunities were diminishing. I've used Unix and Linux for almost 30 years on my personal systems. When the original Bug and Gumstix came out, suddenly I had the epiphany that by I could convert my hobby into a career with more positive impact on the world.

Q: You're giving a talk at SCALE 10X on "Automotive: The Next Frontier for Mobile Linux." Without tipping your hand on the actual talk, can you give us an idea of what we might expect?

A: That our current transportation system is unsustainable is no secret. My message is that now is the time when the Open Source Community should step up and help address the associated challenges, as the computing revolution is beginning to reach the automotive sector in a very real way. Just since I submitted my SCALE abstract, Toyota, Nissan and BMW gave presentations at the Automotive Linux Summit, and Ford and General Motors announced that they will releasing Linux-based Software Development Kits. While Microsoft Windows Embedded has a significant market share, several cars running Linux are already shipping in volume.

Q: If automotive uses for Linux is fairly new, what can we expect in the future?

A: As the desktop continues to pale in significance and phones and tablets mature, the battle for dominance will shift to cars, medical devices, home appliances and so forth. Linux can make the difference on these new platforms just as it always has: by giving users choices and access to data. The creativity of our community can help address the tough problems of the transportation sector, and the associated job and investment opportunities are already appearing.

Q: Is "automotive Linux" just for motorheads and car hackers?

A: Absolutely not. Even if you hate cars and don't own one, you might want to consider as you enter the crosswalk whether the car approaching the traffic light is infected with malware or if the driver is busy updating his Facebook status. Transportation systems impact all of us no matter how we use them. Car companies don't have the expertise to create great smart-transportation applications; it's up to us!

Q: Is this your first visit to SCALE? If so, what are your expectations? If not, can you give us your impressions of the event?

A: Last year was my first SCALE and I'm greatly looking forward to returning for many years. SCALE is a wonderful combination of information upload and plain old socializing. I look forward to learning about the latest innovations, to seeing live demos at the Exhibit, and to just hanging out with the peeps.

[Blogger's Note: SCALE 10X will be asking the keynoters and some of the speakers to weigh in on their presentations for the expo. This is the Q-and-A for Greg DeKoenigsberg, who will be giving the SCALE 10X keynote on Saturday.]

Q: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your background?

A: My name is Greg DeKoenigsberg; I'm VP of Community for Eucalyptus Systems. Before that, I spent many years with Red Hat, working to build the Fedora community.

Q: You're giving a keynote on "Amazon and the Future of the Open Cloud." Without tipping your hand on the actual talk, can you give us an idea of > what we might expect?A: Sure. Amazon's explosive growth over the past few years has made AWS a de facto standard for cloud computing -- but is it an "open standard"? What does it mean to build open source products around APIs that are defined and driven by a single company?

Q: The title of your talk mentions the "open cloud," creating the assumption that there is more than one type of cloud. For those who may not know, could you briefly explain the difference between the open cloud and ones that may not be open?

A: It's about the user's ability to be in control of their infrastructure. In the world of cloud service providers, getting locked into using one particular cloud provider's services, without the ability to move to other infrastructure, is a big risk. It's important that users understand those risks, and even more important that the open source world provides alternatives.

Q: Is this your first visit to SCALE? If so, what are your expectations? If not, can you give us your impressions of the event?

A: It is my first visit to SCALE. From the praises that my friends have colleagues have heaped upon the SCALE experience, I'm expecting chocolate fountains and streets paved with gold. Don't let me down!

Q: Do you have any other plans around SCALE?

A: As a matter of fact, we do. We will be having our first Eucalyptus education session in the Los Angeles area right around SCALE, and we've arranged for a discount for SCALE attendees. Just use the "EUCASCALE" discount code when you register here.

Q: Is there anything else you'd like to add?

A: Can't wait.

[Blogger's Note: SCALE 10X will be asking the keynoters and some of the speakers to weigh in on their presentations for the expo. This is the Q-and-A for Selena Deckelmann, who will be giving the SCALE 10X keynote on Sunday.]

Q: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your background?

A: My name is Selena Deckelmann and I'm founder and COO of Prime Radiant. We're working on a product that helps organizations document, share and tweak their processes. I contribute to PostgreSQL, run conferences, and keep chickens. I also give a lot of technical talks.

Q: You're giving a keynote on "Mistakes Were Made." Without tipping your hand on the actual talk, can you give us an idea of what we might expect?

A: I make mistakes all the time. One thing that I have always loved about open source culture is how we tend to think that if we just tried a little harder, or if we knew just a little bit more, we'd totally be able to fix that. "That" being pretty much anything. There's an admirable do-it-yourself ethic, well-deserved mistrust of vendors, and -- I think -- a problem. We could do better. Particularly around communicating and recovering from failure. There are some great thinking about handling mistakes and failure from the business world that people working with open source should import, hack and make our own. So, I'm going to talk about what I've learned over the years, and tell some great stories about failing from my friends.

Q: You mention in your abstract the role non-technical people play evaluating technical change. Again, without tipping your hand, how do the non-techs play a role?

A: When you roll out a new bit of code, or reboot a server, there might be a whole lot of users affected. When you're in that situation, and this may seem totally obvious as you read it, you need to tell them. But, you also need to ask them to consider how this change is going to affect them. I'll just spill the beans and say that I think users need to be part of the planning process for change from the beginning.

Q: Is this your first visit to SCALE? If so, what are your expectations? If not, can you give us your impressions of the event?

A: No!  I've been to SCALE twice before. I love the mix of attendees, and especially the focus on sysadmins and users of open source software.

Q: Is there anything else you'd like to add?

A. Just looking forward to joining you there!

By Guest Blogger: Phillip Banks

We get it. Sometimes there's just too much to see and do at a convention. The exhibitors have a lot to tell you about their products, services or what they are doing in the community. How on Earth do you squeeze all this into a day?

SCALE Tours is your answer. What we do is lead a group of people out onto the showroom floor and make the whole experience a fun, exciting trip through the SCALE world. We stop at select exhibitors and let them briefly walk you through what they're doing and why you should be interested.  Just a couple minutes around the floor and you'll be ready to jump right back in for yourself and revisit places you've been or some of the exhibitors you past along the way.

If you're bringing family or friends that are new to open source or aren't very technically savvy feel free to take them on the tour. Our goal is to make it as fun filled and exciting as a tram ride through an amusement park that everyone can enjoy while getting you in and out. Make sure to get a bag at registration because exhibitors love passing out all kinds of gifts to people on the tour.

Hope to see you soon on a tour around the expo floor!

There have always been employment opportunities arising from a visit to the Southern California Linux Expo.  In recent years a number of companies have had booths at SCALE, actively recruiting for new employees.

Employment opportunities in IT have been rising steadily the last year.  So SCALE10X will have an unprecedented number of companies looking for your resume.  Here's an almost complete list of those firms looking to hire you at SCALE:

• SpaceX
• Q
• Disney
• BazaarVoice
• HostGator
• Godaddy
• Facebook
• Oversee
• Riot Games
• Google
• SMCI
• Citygrid
• Ticketmaster/Livenation

SCALE will also provide an onsite job board where prospective employers and recruiters can list openings.

So spiff up those resumes if you're looking for work or just looking for the next opportunity.  The "Southern California Linux Employment Expo" is January 20-22nd!

Do you want to be part of the SCALE team? SCALE is entirely run by volunteers and community members.  We will be onsite 1/19 - 1/22 tackling various projects and would appreciate helping hands.

SCALE has openings on a number of our teams including registration, A/V, speaker wrangling, and more. If you are interested in volunteering to help with SCALE 10x, please send an email to bala@socallinuxexpo.org.

We invited frequent SCALE speaker Aleksey Tsalolikhin to tell us about his upcoming SCALE University class on Time Management for Systems Administrators. This tutorial will be held January 20, 2012 at 2:30 at SCALE University.  For more information on how to register see the  SCALE University site.  

Guest Blogger: Aleksey Tsalolikhin

So much to do! So little time! Sysadmins are pulled in so many directions it is impressive anything gets done at all. Regular Maintenance competes with Projects and User Support Requests; and of course Production Outages supersede everything! What's a sysadmin with an ever-growing to-do list to do?

Fear not! Feeling the same pain, Tom Limoncelli, a professional sysadmin for over 20 years, co-author of the "The Practice of System and Network Administration" book and many papers on system administration and recipient of the System Administrator's Guild 2005 Outstanding Achievement Award, undertook an extensive study of time management techniques and selected the most workable ideas in "Time Management for System Administrators" book, published by O'Reilly and now translated into 5 languages.

Tom's ideas are very workable; application results in lower stress levels and MORE FREE TIME. The goal of this class to get you more time. For example, if you do 8 things a week that save you an hour each, that equals one day a week which equals two and a half months a year. Applying the TM4SA materials, you should be able to go home on time and take a reasonable vacation.

This SCALE University "Time Management for System Administrators" course is based on Tom's book and on Tom's workshop at the LISA 2011 sysadmin conference. Your instructor, Aleksey Tsalolikhin, has read the book cover to cover multiple times, and has been practicing Tom's "Cycle" time management system for five years.

Aleksey and Tom are members of LOPSA, the League of Professional System Administrators, the sysadmin professional association. This class is part of LOPSA's mission to support education in system administration.

This class covers theory, has examples and demonstrations of the time management techniques; practical exercises; and a Q&A section. Additionally, the class will differentiate time management from project management or task management - time management is its own subject!

Aleksey is a seasoned sysadmin (with over 12 years experience) and instructor at local Linux and Unix user groups, at conferences big and small, and in private and public trainings. He is enthusiastic about improving the quality of life of system administrators though automating system administration (server configuration management), documentation and effective time management.

Guest Blogger: Jorge Castro

juju is a new deployment tool for the cloud by Ubuntu that provides "service orchestration". It has been likened to "apt for the cloud". juju is for system adminstrators who need a tool that can deploy what you need to the cloud quickly and repeatably.

With Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Long Term Support) coming in April, we're looking to train and educate users on how you can use juju effectively and put it to work. juju uses what we call "charms", which are scripts that encapsulate best practices for a service. Charms can be written in any language you like and more importantly, we've built in sharing and extending charms with other people as part of a simple and fun process.

Here's some sessions we'll be running at SCaLE:

- juju - DevOps Distilled- This will be our general presentation about juju. Why do you need it? What problems can you solve with it? How is it different from other tools? (This presentation will be held at 3pm on Saturday in Los Angeles B)

- juju Charm School - This will be an indepth hands on workshop for turning your trusty old deployment script into a reusable juju charm. We'll go over some use cases for cloud deployments, how you can form relations between charms, and how to scale it all up. If you're working on a project that can deploy in the cloud and want to make it a breeze for Ubuntu Cloud users to do so, then this is the session for you! (Juju Charm School will be held on Friday at 2:30pm in the Marina room. There is no charge to attend Charm School)

Whether you're in the public cloud or building your own internal private cloud, you can use juju to save time and effort doing deployments, we hope you join us. Clint Byrum and I will be available to answer any question about juju (and Ubuntu Cloud in general). Look for us and come chat with us about Ubuntu:

Happy New Year from the SCALE 10X Team!

If you need to make – or add – to your New Year's resolutions for 2012, the SCALE Team has some ideas for you: Attend SCALE 10x and become an evil genius in 2012!  

SCALE 10X will be held Jan. 20-22 at the Hilton Los Angeles Airport hotel. Registration is still open and the Hilton is offering a special room rate of $109/night for conference attendees.

STEP 1: Get certified and buy your own volcano lair!* 

• Attend LPI Exam Crams at SCALE U and then take the LPI and BSD certification tests.
• Get a better job by writing a great resume  

*Volcano lair not included

STEP 2: Build and host your own private cloud from your volcano lair. 

• Attend the wide range of talks in the Cloud and Virtualization Track
• Build your own personal open-source cloud 

STEP 3: Learn revision control to track changes to your world domination plan.

• Getting Started with Git – Ron Toland

STEP 4: Build an army of Open Source robots.

• Linux Based Personal Robotics – Tully Foote 

STEP 5: Send your IPv6 enabled robots out into the world. 

• Owen DeLong – IPv6 Essentials for Linux Administrators

STEP 6: Control your robot horde using configuration management and service orchestration. 

• Carl Caum – Pupped Master Training
• Sarah Novotny – Infrastructure Automation with Opscode Chef 
• Jorge Castro/Clint Byrum – juju Charm School 

Got a passion you'd like to share? Have a community you'd like to connect with? Want some open discussion on a topic?

If, so, create or join a BoF session on either Friday or Saturday night at SCaLE 10x. The BoFs will be Friday and Saturday nights, January 20th and 21st. The first start at 19:00 and the last start at 22:00. Sign up on the Birds of a Feather (BoF) registration page or contact SCaLE10xBoFs@socallinuxexpo.org with any questions you have.

What is a birds of a feather session?? It's an informal meet-up or discussion, where SCALE attendees can get together and discuss a shared interest without a pre-designated agenda.

Want a Maker BoF ( Arduino, soldering, knitting, etc )? A board and card games BoF ( Settlers of Catan, Anti-Monopoly , poker )? A foodie BoF? A configuration management BoF? Programming? Cloud computing? Politics? Big data? Community building? Open data and open standards? An excursion to an offsite activity? All ideas are welcome!

Got five minutes? Have something important to say? UpSCALE talks at SCALE 10X will be held again this year on Friday, Jan. 20 at 8 p.m. UpSCALE talks are held in the style of the Ignite presentations made popular by various O'Reilly-sponsored events. Participants are given five minutes to speak on a subject accompanied by 20 automatically-advanced slides, making this a fast paced, fun event for participants and audience. To submit an UpSCALE talk, email gareth@socallinuxexpo.org.

Deadline for Submissions: January 14th, 2012

By Guest Blogger: Amelia Mango

Mongo Los Angeles will be the first full-day MongoDB conference in Southern California. We’re excited that the event will be co-located with SCALE, one of the premier events in the open source world.

The MongoDB team is thrilled to be part of SCALE’s 10-year anniversary conference in Los Angeles this year. From its relatively humble beginning a decade ago at USC, the Southern California Linux Expo has grown to a three-day mega-conference, attracting thousands of open source enthusiasts from around the world. Similarly, the MongoDB community has grown tremendously in Los Angeles since last year’s first MongoDB meetup. In 2012, we’ve expanded to a full-day MongoDB conference on January 19.

What is MongoDB? MongoDB is an open source, NoSQL database designed with flexibility and scalability in mind. The list of production users of MongoDB is growing, with thousands of leading Web 2.0 companies as well as major enterprises having adopted MongoDB.

What will you learn at Mongo Los Angeles? You will have an opportunity to hear directly from the team at 10gen working on MongoDB. The 10gen engineers will cover application development, deployment, and the newest features in MongoDB. Mongo LA will also highlight several interesting case studies from the local community. Here are some of the key sessions:

• Schema Design with MongoDB (Kevin Hansen, 10gen)

• Best of both worlds: Building the bridge between RDBMS and MongoDB (Will Jang, NBC Universal Group)

• How and When to Scale MongoDB with Sharding (Antoine Girbal, 10gen)

• MongoDB: Scaling Citygrid's Places Platform (Prashanth Ramdas, CityGrid Media)

• MongoDB’s New Aggregation Framework (Paul Pederson, 10gen)

• MongoDB and Analytics: Turning JSON data to Information (Roger Bodamer)

Mongo LA will be held on January 19th -- the day before SCALE 10x kicks off. We’re hoping that some of the SCALE crowd will stop by to learn more about what we’ve been working on and how MongoDB has solved some real-world problems. And of course, we hope you’ll come by the MongoDB table at SCALE, because we’re excited to meet new members of the community and hear your thoughts as SCALE celebrates its 10th anniversary.

For more information on Mongo Los Angeles, please visit http://www.10gen.com/. Use the discount code “ScaleLA” and get 25% off the ticket price!

UPDATE 12/22: The detailed schedule is now available.

Wondering what will be happening at SCALE 10x next month? Here is a high level overview of our planned events. A more detailed schedule will be coming online in the next few days. We look forward to seeing everyone next month at Los Angeles Airport Hilton!  Don't forget to register early, our early bird registration pricing ends on Tuesday, Dec. 20, at which point ticket prices go up.

Thursday January 19, 2012

SCALE is not yet open on Thursday, but our sponsor 10gen will be running an event.  

• Exhibit Hall: Closed
• Mongo Los Angeles (by 10Gen)  - The first full-day MongoDB conference in Southern California by the MongoDB community and 10gen.

Friday January 20, 2012

SCALE kicks off on Friday with a full day of pre-conference events by our partners and members of the open-source community.

• Exhibit Hall: Closed - Exhibitor Setup Only
• UbuCon  - Part unconference, part scheduled sessions, Ubucon SCaLE10X will cover topics of interest to new and intermediate Ubuntu users as they grow in their new OS.
• DevOps Day Los Angeles -  Do you have friction between your development and operations teams? Learn how culture, automation, messuring, and sharing can help make your teams more collaborative. 
• FOSS Mentoring -  Learn about open-source mentoring programs available to new community members.
• MySQL Community Day - A full day of MySQL sessions by the MySQL community.
• Los Angeles PostgreSQL Day - A full day of PostgreSQL sessions by the Los Angeles Postgres Community.
• Fedora Activity Day  - Join Fedora Amabassors for a study session focused on Systems Administration skills.
• Charm School - Juju - Learn about Ubuntu's new service orchestration tooling.
• SCALE University - Half day tutorials for by professional trainers.
• Build A Cloud Day (by CloudStack) - Learn how to build a cloud environment in your own data center using open-source software.
• UpSCALE - Ignite-style lightning talks and presentations at SCALE. and plenty of evening activities such as BoFs and Meetups. 

Saturday January 21, 2012 -- SCALE 10x Officially Begins! 

• Exhibit Hall: Open All Day (10am-6pm)
• 6 Tracks of SCALE Seminars
• Cloud Computing and Virtualization 
• Kernel 
• Application Development
• Systems Administration
• General (x2)
• Linux Beginner Training  - A two day hands on course on everything you need to know to run Linux on the desktop.  Bring your computer with you and our team will walk you through the installation, configuraiton, and day to day use.  
• SCALE: The Next Generation  - An event by organized kids for kids to discuss their participation in the free and open-source software communities.
• Open Source Software in Educationand plenty of evening activities such as BoFs, meetups and games! 

Sunday January 22, 2012

• Exhibit Hall: Open All Day (10am-4pm)
• 6 Tracks of SCALE Seminars (continued)
• Cloud Computing and Virtualization 
• Kernel 
• Application Development
• Systems Administration
• General (x2)
• Open Source Software in Education (continued)
• Linux Beginner Training  (continued) - A two day hands on course on everything you need to know to run Linux on the desktop.  Bring your computer with you and our team will walk you through the installation, configuraiton, and day to day use.  
• LPI and BSDA Certification Exams

As many of you know, at nearly every SCALE I've organized a PGP keysigning party (if you're not familiar with PGP, see my PGP Guide). They've grown every year and we are now the biggest part of the "BoF" section of SCALE. Two years ago we broke our record with over 50 attendees and this year we hope to further strengthen the web of trust by breaking 100!

Of course, as the size of the keysigning party grows, the amount of time required grows quickly. After the first few years, it became clear the slowest piece was properly signing each UID on each key, so I wrote PIUS to automate the work while still allowing careful verification at each step.

With that bottleneck out of the way, it became clear that the party itself required a lot of prep work on the part of the already busy and tired participants. To alleviate that we started letting people enter their PGP key information when they register for the conference. This enabled us to provide all the required information without making people worry about signing emailing fingerprints or bringing enough copies to the party.

Then we realized that printing fingerprints on badges would allow those who couldn't make it to get and give more signature.

Each year we've improved this flow through steps such as improving the sign-up UI and adding additional verification to catch typographical errors in key information.

If you haven't yet signed up for SCALE don't forget to submit your key information, and if you already registered but forgot to include your key information, the keysigning party event page will tell you how to submit it after the fact!

So get your keys ready, sign up for SCALE and the PGP Keysigning Party, and I'll see you next month!

Have you booked your travel for SCALE yet?  The Hilton LAX is offering SCALE attendees a discounted room rate of $109/night as part of this year's show. That is one of the best rates in the LAX corridor!

Even if you are local, consider spending the night! Its a great way to avoid traffic and there are always plenty of evening activities at SCALE once the main conference program ends.  

For more information on how to reserve your room see our travel page or book online with the Hilton directly.