Sprinkling DevOps Magic In Other People's Environments

Many Devops shops work with VMs in clouds or data centres they have ownership of (or at least have put money into). If there's a problem then the control those Devops shops exert can help them recover, rollback and redeploy. We don't, we ship virtual appliances with a Ruby on Rails application to customers. This presents some particular problems. For instance performance discussions are much more difficult if you're telling someone their infrastructure is a problem.

This talk is part discussion of our state of the art and part discussion of how we got to where we are. It should appeal to DevOps leads and architects who are looking to use DevOps techniques to manage systems that aren't in their direct control. In order to get ourselves in order we use a combination of tools like chef and New Relic to deploy, maintain and monitor our environment. We're not sure if we're doing it right but it sure beats trying to make operations playbooks :)