Infracoders June Meetup

I’ve set myself the goal of attending one software meetup per week. I enjoy attending conferences, and meetups are like micro-conferences. You meet people, you learn something and often there is beer and food at the end like this evening.

This evening I attended Infracoders (http://www.meetup.com/Infrastructure-Coders/), a devops group focused on tools that make devops easier and more fun. Given my current focus on Biarri’s overhaul of infrastructure and development workflows these sorts of tools are on my mind a fair bit.

The presentations were interesting. First up was Alexey Kotlyarov and Ross Williamson from Infoxchange talking about some Docker tools called Pallet and Forklift (https://github.com/infoxchange/docker-forklift). Their talk was rather information dense and I found it a little hard to follow. From what I understood with my small knowledge of Docker is they automate some common development and deployment tasks in a platform/language agnostic manner. They look like they have a similar stack and problems to Biarri in many ways with lots of projects and a fragmented environment, so I will be looking into it deeper.

They also linked to some interesting things in their talk which are worth looking at:

• Zato (https://zato.io/), a python ESB and application server. I am not clear on what its value proposition is yet but it has something to do with managing SOA which is something I am spending a lot of time thinking about right now.
• The twelve-factor app (http://12factor.net/), a set of guidelines or principles for building SaaS applications. I’d not seen this before and at first glance looks like good reading.
• Serf (http://serfdom.io), cluster management.

The second presentation was by Colin Panisset from REA Group about Credulous (http://credulous.io/), a AWS credential management system. He was an excellent and amusing speaker but Credulous solves a problem we don’t have and unlikely to have in the medium term at Biarri. It does look like a good solution if you have a large team with access to your AWS infrastructure. His lack of usage of GPG as a tool to solve the key sharing and encryption part of Credulous’ bothered me a little, but his criticisms of the installation and setup of GPG weren’t without merit. He did highlight some aspects of AWS security that I had not considered and will discuss with my co-workers.

The evening concluded with free beer and dumplings which was nice. I will certainly consider attending again, there seems to be significant overlap with the Devops Melbourne meetup, though perhaps their focuses are different.