{"id":381,"date":"2010-02-05T09:14:13","date_gmt":"2010-02-05T15:14:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.webadminblog.com\/?p=381"},"modified":"2010-02-09T15:21:43","modified_gmt":"2010-02-09T21:21:43","slug":"opscamp-debrief","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.webadminblog.com\/index.php\/2010\/02\/05\/opscamp-debrief\/","title":{"rendered":"OpsCamp Debrief"},"content":{"rendered":"

I went to OpsCamp<\/a> this last weekend here in Austin, a get-togther for Web operations folks specifically focusing on the cloud, and it was a great time!\u00a0 Here’s my after action report.<\/p>\n

The event invite said it was in the Spider House<\/a>, a cool local coffee bar\/normal bar.\u00a0 I hadn’t been there before, but other people that had said “That’s insane!\u00a0 They’ll never fit that many people!\u00a0 There’s outside seating but it’s freezing out!”\u00a0 That gave me some degree of trepidation, but I still racked out in time to get downtown by 8 AM on a Saturday (sigh!).\u00a0 Happily, it turned out that the event was really in the adjacent music\/whatnot venue also owned by Spider House, the United States Art Authority<\/a>, which they kindly allowed us to use for free!\u00a0 There were a lot of people there; we weren’t overfilling the place but it was definitely at capacity, there were near 100 people there.<\/p>\n

I had just hears of OpsCamp through word of mouth, and figured it was just going to be a gathering of local Austin Web ops types.\u00a0 Which would be entertaining enough, certainly.\u00a0 But as I looked around the room I started recognizing a lot of guys from Velocity<\/a> and other major shows; CEOs and other high ranked guys from various Web ops related tool companies.\u00a0 Sponsors included John Willis<\/a> and Adam Jacob (creator of Chef<\/a>) from Opscode<\/a> , Luke Kanies from Reductive Labs<\/a> (creator of Puppet<\/a>), Damon Edwards and Alex Honor from DTO Solutions<\/a> (formerly ControlTier), Mark Hinkle<\/a> and Matt Ray from Zenoss<\/a>, Dave Nielsen (CloudCamp<\/a>), Michael Cot\u00e9 (Redmonk<\/a>), Bitnami<\/a>, Spiceworks<\/a>, and Rackspace Cloud<\/a>.\u00a0 Other than that, there were a lot of random Austinites and some guys from big local outfits (Dell, IBM).<\/p>\n

You can read all the tweets about the event<\/a> if you swing that way.<\/p>\n

OpsCamp kinda grew out of an earlier thing, BarCampESM<\/a>, also in Austin two years ago.\u00a0 I never heard about that, wish I had.<\/p>\n

How It Went<\/h3>\n

I had never been to an “unconference” before.\u00a0 Basically there’s no set agenda, it’s self-emergent.\u00a0 It worked pretty well.\u00a0 I’ll describe the process a bit for other noobs.<\/p>\n

First, there was a round of lightning talks.\u00a0 Brett from Rackspace noted that “size matters,” Bill from Zenoss said “monitoring is important,” and Luke from Reductive claimed that “in 2-4 years ‘cloud’ won’t be a big deal, it’ll just be how people are doing things – unless you’re a jackass.”<\/p>\n

Then it was time for sessions.\u00a0 People got up and wrote a proposed session name on a piece of paper and then went in front of the group and pitched it, a hand-count of “how many people find this interesting” was taken.<\/p>\n

Candidates included:<\/p>\n