Introduction to Continuous Delivery

I am off to PuppetConf to spend a day in the world of DevOps and Continuous Delivery.  DevOps is pretty familiar to most of you.  What is Continuous Delivery here is a pointer to a GigaOm Research paper I wrote and was published back in Oct 2012.

Continuous delivery and the world of devops

•  Dave Ohara
• Monday, October 1, 2012
 
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Summary:

Thanks to the rise of online business, companies must now get their products and services to market as fast as they can, and releases that occur in periods of months or years are no longer competitive. As a result, the pattern of how to release software is changing from large, infrequent releases of new software to small, frequent releases. This paper explains the world of continuous delivery and its underlying philosophy, devops. It is intended for executives who determine their organization’s business strategies. If you are looking for ways to reduce time to market and are considering a realignment of traditional assumptions about the roles of development and operations, you require knowledge of new tools and new approaches.

• Contents
• Full Briefing
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• Related Companies

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1. Table of contents                                                                                                            
2. Executive summary                                                                                                    
3. Introduction                                                                                                                 
4. What is continuous delivery?                                                                              
5. Trends driving continuous delivery                                                              
6. What is devops?                                                                                                        
7. Technologies                                                                                                            
8. Constructing a continuous-delivery pipeline                                          
9. Infrastructure as code                                                                                      
10. Tips for success                                                                                                       
11. Ancestry.com: a case study                                                                                
12. Key takeaways                                                                                                            
13. List of resources                                                                                                    
14. About Dave Ohara                                                                                                    
15. About GigaOM Pro          

Amazon looking for someone to automate its data center control system

Found this job posting Amazon.com.  Looks Amazon is looking to optimize and automate their data center operations.

Controls Engineer (Process Management)

US, WA, Seattle • Job ID 225173 • Amazon Corporate LLC

Job Description

At Amazon, we're working to be the most customer-centric company on earth. To get there, we need exceptionally talented, bright, and driven people. If you'd like to help us build the place to find and buy anything online, this is your chance to make history.

The Data Center Global Services team is looking for exceptional individuals to join our Controls & Technology organization as Controls Service Manager (BMS/EPMS), responsible for the building automation systems within Amazon data centers. If you are passionate about the Customer Experience, think and act globally and have the ability to contribute to major new innovations in the area of building controls and automation this is the challenge you are looking for!

The ideal candidate will possess a management, mechanical, electrical or technology background that enables him/her to undertake the challenges of sophisticated controls platforms and a demonstrated ability to think broadly and strategically in aligning building controls and automation with the larger objectives of the business.

Role Responsibilities and Requirements:
· Understanding of: building operations, control diagrams, industrial HVAC, electrical diagrams.
· Ability to ascertain customer needs to help develop project scope and specifications.
· Ability to manage scope of work relative to the site specifics and customer needs.
· Perform department administrative and personnel management duties including vacation and expense report approval, performance evaluation, recruitment, and promotion, in a timely and accurate manner.
· Organizing and supporting personnel training both in classroom and on the job, with the aim of continually improving the technical, commercial, and organizational knowledge and skills of team members
· Communicating important business information and requirements associated with administrative, field assignments, priorities, etc., to all personnel.
· Assisting in budget and forecast development.
· Development and implementation of IPS-Controls Construction team growth strategy.
· Maintaining strong and regular communication with all internal and external stakeholders including management and counterparts in Data Center Global Services.
· Foster teamwork and employee involvement, with processes to encourage innovation and growth.
· Position requires occasional domestic and international travel
· Work as part of a team to develop processes and procedures to ensure availability to our end customers, and on time delivery, every time.

And there are bunch more controls engineering jobs.

Controls Service Manager (ID 220436)	US, VA, Ashburn
At Amazon, we're working to be the most customer-centric company on earth. To get there, we need exceptionally talented, bright, and driven people. If you'd like to help us build the place to find and buy anything online, this is your chance to make history. The Data Center Global Services team is looking for exceptional individuals to join our Controls & Technology… Read more and Apply
Controls Engineer (EMS) (ID 219956)	US, CA, Hayward
At Amazon, we're working to be the most customer-centric company on earth. To get there, we need exceptionally talented, bright, and driven people. If you'd like to help us build the place to find and buy anything online, this is your chance to make history. The Data Center Global Services team is looking for exceptional individuals to join our Controls & Technology… Read more and Apply
Controls Engineer - Building Mgmt Systems (ID 220441)	US, OR, Boardman
At Amazon, we're working to be the most customer-centric company on earth. To get there, we need exceptionally talented, bright, and driven people. If you'd like to help us build the place to find and buy anything online, this is your chance to make history. The Data Center Global Services team is looking for exceptional individuals to join our Controls & Technology… Read more and Apply
Controls Engineer (Colo) (ID 229202)	US, WA, Seattle
At Amazon, we're working to be the most customer-centric company on earth. To get there, we need exceptionally talented, bright, and driven people. If you'd like to help us build the place to find and buy anything online, this is your chance to make history. The Data Center Global Services team is looking for exceptional individuals to join our Controls & Technology… Read more and Apply
Controls Engineer (Process Management) (ID 225173)	US, WA, Seattle
At Amazon, we're working to be the most customer-centric company on earth. To get there, we need exceptionally talented, bright, and driven people. If you'd like to help us build the place to find and buy anything online, this is your chance to make history. The Data Center Global Services team is looking for exceptional individuals to join our Controls & Technology… Read more and Apply

Warning playing yourself in the DC is not something you usually promote

The following is good for a laugh, and a different way to see a press announcement.

One of my data center friends sent this link to a DatacenterDynamics post.

IO'S MODULES DEEMED MORE EFFICIENT THAN IO'S RAISED FLOOR

Year-long data collection effort finds 19% efficiency gain

20 August 2013 by Yevgeniy Sverdlik - DatacenterDynamics

 

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An IO.Anywhere module

IO, data center provider known primarily for its modular offering IO.Anywhere, has conducted a comparison study to see which design approach – modular or traditional raised floor – is more energy efficient.

The provider has both types of data center space at its Phoenix facility, which it used to collect power usage data over a period of one year. IO handed this data to Arizona Public Service (APS), the electrical utility serving the area, for third-party evaluation.

The results, confirmed by APS, showed a 19% reduction in overall energy use by the modular solution over raised floor. The average annual Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of the raised-floor environment was 1.73, while the modular environment's PUE was 1.41.

So, if play by yourself you win.  Or do you lose as you accuse yourself of cheating? You argue you are playing fair.  Watch this video when a person plays by yourself.

I wonder how many of you out there will follow the lead of IO to play with yourself to outperform your past.

The press announcement says the new PUE saves 19% energy.

IO, a global leader in software-defined data centers, today announced that a third-party evaluation by Arizona Public Service (APS) showed that a modular data center technology installation in IO’s Phoenix facility has achieved 19% energy cost savings quantified by its improved Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) ratings.

1.73 - 1.41 = .32 / 1.73 = 19%

Another way to calculate the numbers is .73 for overhead - .41 = .32 divided by .73 = 44% reduction in power used by electrical and mechanical overhead.

If you are going to play by yourself to show you can beat yourself, it sounds better that there is 44% reduction in electricity in the power and mechanical systems.

A peak into how Google Designs its Data Centers, can you see the hidden?

DatacenterDynamics has a post on DLB Associates, a company who has designed Google's Data Centers.

IN SEARCH OF GOOGLE'S DATA CENTER DESIGNER

The engineer and his company behind the design of Google's data centers

5 August 2013 by Ambrose McNevin - DatacenterDynamics

 

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Don Beaty began his engineering career working on large water treatment plants. After graduating as an electrical engineer he spent his early career as a staffer before setting up set up DLB Associates in 1980 “with no money”.

DLB Associates for quite a while has had a case study up on its web site on Google Data Centers.

Google Data Center Campuses, Worldwide

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Description

DLB has designed and managed the construction of Google’s global data center campus program from its very inception in 2004. During that time, the program has continuously redefined the data center industry and remained way ahead of the curve.

...

Joe Kava, Ben Treynor and Urs Hoelzle of Google with our president, Don Beaty, addressing the staff at DLB Headquarters

Put your mindset in a "Sherlock Holmes" mode and you can see things that are not evident to the novice.  With two pieces of data it is easier to see things.

Outages don't affect all companies the same, the big ones survive

There have been series of outages at Google, Amazon, and Microsoft.

Amazon.com down briefly, following Microsoft, Google outages

Posted by Brier Dudley

 

The Amazon.com portal went down today in an outage that’s likely to cost the Seattle e-commerce giant millions of dollars in lost sales.

There are plenty of vendors and consultants who will scare you that the cost of an outage is expensive.  The cost of the amazon.com outage is covered by the media as $5 mil.

Amazon.com's website went down midday Monday for about 40 minutes. The reason for the outage was unclear, although it appeared to have been widespread.

The outage could have cost the company an estimated $4.72 million in lost sales, based on an estimate that the company takes in $9,823 every five seconds.

Realistically how much did Amazon.com lose?  How many users just came back later?  What is the revenue rate at the time of the outage.  Only Amazon.com knows how much money it lost, and what were the overall impact to sales.

Did this outage cause users to lose faith in amazon.com for shopping?

Outages are a fact of life for those who deliver  services over the web.  Nothing is perfect.  How fast your recover and how you handle the outage is many times more important than the short term revenue hit.

A mistake was made somewhere.  Amazon is up and running again.  It only affected North America.

The big companies can survive an outage.