Welcome from the organiser and introduction of our sponsors (Ticketmaster and G-Research)

Keynote

Looking for a place to get started with some DevOps practices?

Already trying some tooling and not seeing the return you expected?

Then, my friend, it’s time we had a chat about pipelines. Now, CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous delivery) pipelines aren’t necessarily the first thing operations teams look for when attempting to tackle a problem or implement a solution.

And I’ve heard many of the arguments – with the chief of those being, “I’m not some startup. We don’t deploy changes tens or hundreds of times a day. We deploy every 4 months and we like it (or at least that’s what we have to like contractually).”

While that may be true, my guess that your environment changes a bit more than that and the changes that happen outside those well-defined maintenance windows is what ends up causing most of our pain. Adding a pipeline to control the delivery of change forces us to slow down and think about the types of changes we make and how to automate and validate them. Once we’ve done that, making these changes becomes easier and easier. My firearms instructor from the police science program (years ago) had a saying which captures this, “Slow is Smooth, and Smooth is Fast”. By making our change process smooth, we put ourselves in a place where we can consistently deliver change on demand. CI/CD is about speed and readiness, not only about volume.

Join me for a chat about why building a pipeline for infrastructure changes, especially in slow environments, is both possible and extremely rewarding.

We’ll also look at some tooling to help make standing up those pipelines easy enough that we can try it over a lunch break.

Automating software management is simple on almost every platform except Windows. Managing software deployments and upgrades typically entails manual, homegrown, or legacy approaches. We've seen more modern approaches to managing systems, sometimes called 'DevOps'.
Behind every great modern automation approach out there is a great package manager. Windows has long been left out of the conversation for DevOps due to a lacking solution for package management. Worse, with Windows, over 80% of the management and configuration deals with software installation management.

However, over the past 6 years, Chocolatey has become the de facto software management solution for Windows. Hundreds of organizations have turned to Chocolatey due to it is extreme flexibility, common sense approaches, and building on well-known technologies like PowerShell.

Chocolatey is a universal approach designed to easily work with all aspects of managing Windows software using a packaging framework that understands both versioning and dependency requirements. Chocolatey packages encapsulate everything required to manage a particular piece of software into one deployment artifact by wrapping installers, executables, zips, and scripts into a compiled package file. Chocolatey integrates with your favorite infrastructure management platforms, including Puppet, Chef, SCCM, and PowerShell DSC.
PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) has been gaining traction as a Configuration Management framework. We'll take a closer look at configuring and using Chocolatey with DSC.

DSC is great step towards implementing SDDC.
But what when there are no readily available DSC resources for parts of your environment.
Turns out it is not too difficult to roll your own.
This session will show how I created a DSC Resource module for a VMware vSphere environment.
The session will talk about the development of the Concept behind the DSC Resource module, the choice for using classes, the testing of the resources Module, and several other features discovered on the way.

A lunch buffet will be served in the Esc networking space.

Ansible is a popular tool for configuration management and general-purpose orchestration, and its support for Windows keeps getting better. This session is for anyone who would like to know more about how to use Ansible for managing a Windows-based infrastructure.
Topics covered:
- How Ansible's Powershell integration works
- Writing your own Ansible modules
- Ansible and DSC

The Active Directory PowerShell module that comes with RSAT is versatile and comprehensive, but has its quirks, among them being execution speed and size limitations. Let's explore opportunities for building faster tools that scale well with 1000s and 1000s of objects, and finally how we can use our existing knowledge of the design concepts in Active Directory to not waste a single CPU cycle when doing complex queries.

This presentation will show you just how much fun you can have automating a Web Service (or a Citrix NetScaler) configuration by using PowerShell to make your REST API calls and using JSON payloads.
You’ll learn what information is needed to make a REST API call (and where to find it), how to create properly formatted JSON payloads with PowerShell and how to build your own Module and functions by using the Invoke-RestMethod cmdlet.
And to give the lessons learned even more flair, I’ve added some cool demo’s to show you just how easy the configuration of a more complex appliance like a Citrix NetScaler can be automated, when you have the right templates to get the job done 🙂

I'm a SQL Server DBA and a lot of my time is spent in Powershell these days. Database environments can be quite complex and in my attempts to automate setting up lab environments for (automated) testing I discovered the open source Powershell library called Lability. It has a slight learning curve and leans heavily on DSC which also has a bit of a learning curve. In this session I'll show you how to set up a fairly complex lab from start to finish and take you through my lessons learned.

Wrap Up