Category → Intro
DevOps
Hi,
Jan Gelin, VP of Technical Operations at Rubiconproject. http://www.rubiconproject.com!
This blog is intended to give guidance and reveal some of the things going on in my world.
So what is my world?
The TechOps team at the Rubiconproject!
So where did I come from?
I feel like an old timer in the industry. DEC, AltaVista, Yahoo, Fox, it’s been a fun ride so far. But this one is my biggest adventure. Why you might ask? Technology and Open Source has come a long way from where we used to burn VGA connectors writing our own drivers for AlphaServers. But that was fun too! I feel like we are in an era where Open Source makes sense and there is a business model with a lot of things based on support and service level. Rubicon as a company is not adverse to support the companies we work with and run together with.
I have done a lot of development in my past. But here at Rubicon is where development and operations come together, in terms of methodology and approach.
Rubicon, currently 1600 servers in 5 data centers, all managed by puppet, func, cfengine, graphite. The first time I heard about graphite was from Shopzilla. I liked the idea of having timestamp, key, value to be the input. That would make it easy for developers to create business metrics. Today we have more than 190.000 metrics in our system. It requires a lot of memory in the boxes, believe me. Thanks Orbitz for making this piece of technology available for us.
So let us start with the term “DevOps“. To me “DevOps” is a methodology and not a team or something that you can touch. We started to be devops 2 years ago now. And it is like Buddhism, you never graduate. Our road has been rocky and filled with challenges. Although I have to say we have come a long way.
To start things off here is a little video we made about what I call Network Operations Center (NOC). It is not your usual NOC. Here is where people get started in Infrastructure Development. https://vimeo.com/39365287
BTW all those TV’s 
Powered by 2 power macs with the maximum number of DVI connectors you can have. Makes a great display wall for 1/4 of the cost:). One little word of advice, order the DVI converters with USB power. Or it will not work http://store.apple.com/us/product/MB571Z/A#overview.