ThoughtWorks Geek Night - Agile Systems Administration August 6, 2009

Agile Systems Administration
Paul Nasrat

In contrast with the software development community there seems to be much less open discussions about principles and practices within the field. Yet we need to adapt to constantly shifting demands of responsiveness and agility to serve the business practices such as automated infrastructure, continual deployment, A-B testing, scalable capacity all have massive impact on our field yet there are few forums to discuss this.

This talk and discussion covers the challenges and problems for System Administration and how Lean and Agile ideas can be applied to fix them, taking into account the realities of the day to day demands on systems teams time.

Paul is a experienced systems administrator, systems architect and software developer. He is currently employed as Lead Systems Integrator at the Guardian. He's worked a lot with Agile teams helping bridge the gap between systems and operations and enable smooth delivery of software. Paul is active in the Open Source community around systems tools, and is currently a contributor to Puppet - the configuration management solution.