I’m in Vancouver for ApacheCON NA 2011, where I’ll be speaking on Friday 14:30 about DevOps, From Dev to DevOps, my take on DevOps for people like me interested in DevOps and automation coming from the dev side, and expanding the dev lifecycle all the way to deployment to production. I have previously posted the slides from a another event and will post the updated ones after the talk.

If you are at the conference, come over and say hi!

The DevOps movement aims to improve communication between developers and operations teams to solve critical issues such as fear of change and risky deployments. But the same way that Agile development would likely fail without continuous integration tools, the DevOps principles need tools to make them real, and provide the automation required to actually be implemented. Most of the so called DevOps tools focus on the operations side, and there should be more than that, the automation must cover the full process, Dev to QA to Ops and be as automated and agile as possible. Tools in each part of the workflow have evolved in their own silos, and with the support of their own target teams. But a true DevOps mentality requires a seamless process from the start of development to the end in production deployments and maintenance, and for a process to be successful there must be tools that take the burden out of humans.

Apache Maven has arguably been the most successful tool for development, project standardization and automation introduced in the last years. On the operations side we have open source tools like Puppet or Chef that are becoming increasingly popular to automate infrastructure maintenance and server provisioning.

In this presentation we will introduce an end-to-end development-to-production process that will take advantage of Maven and Puppet, each of them at their strong points, and open source tools to automate the handover between them, automating continuous build and deployment, continuous delivery, from source code to any number of application servers managed with Puppet, running either in physical hardware or the cloud, handling new continuous integration builds and releases automatically through several stages and environments such as development, QA, and production.