[BBLISA] November Talk: Infrastructure modernization: Urban renewal in the datacenter

[Nick Cammorato]

Where: MIT E51-145
When: Wednesday, November 9th @7:30PM (Doors open at 7:00)
Who: Me - Currently IBM (for just over a week), past NEU, TERC, British
Telecom

Abstract:
The world doesn't run on the stuff you read about on hacker news. It runs
on solaris boxes hidden in the heart of infrastructures, on mainframes
almost old enough for social security, and on metal in racks. If it has
endured it was well built and has had years to be refined and perfected.
The business needs haven't changed, nor has the logic behind this stuff,
but increasingly the skills required to build, expand, tend to and maintain
it are scarce. Security becomes a matter of exploits being forgotten, not
patched. Interfaces are dated and slow, bottlenecking things and killing
agility. Eventually, for these reasons and others you may find yourself
just looking straight at the systems version of the colliseum and going -
damn, what I really need there is a skyscraper.

So how do you do it? How do you go from unmanaged, artisinal bespoke
machines to config managed? How do you go from configuration managed
infrastructure to more dynamic? From there to modern patterns? The urban
renewal reference wasn't an accident - how do you avoid doing this in a way
that parallels the story of places like Boston's own West End? Oh, and how
the hell do you bolt on tests when your service count makes most people's
node count look small and you're fairly sure your dependency chain requires
non-euclidean math and sorting it might unleash eldritch horrors?

I may or may not have answers to these, but I've battled this particular
tire fire a few times before.

- Note: This will be the final talk unless someone wants to organize.
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