Mentions

Puppet, Chef Ease Transition to Cloud Computing

BusinessWeek covered the moment infrastructure automation crossed from Google and Amazon's secret playbooks into the broader enterprise market. My founding thesis for Opscode in their words: open up the tools the giants had been guarding.

“The custom tools built by Google, Amazon, and some other guys were such closely guarded secrets. Our founding thesis was to open up these tools to everyone else.”

DevOps Culture Hacks: Infecting your Boss & your Business with Awesome

DevOpsDays Boston 2011. I gave the culture hacks talk for the first time, no slides, no video, just the framework I had figured out the hard way at Amazon.

“Don't fight stupid, make more awesome.”

MIT Technology Review TR35: Innovators Under 35

The MIT Technology Review TR35 listing for 2011, citing my work on web operations, cloud, and resilience engineering at Amazon and Opscode.

Web Operations: Keeping the Data on Time

John Allspaw and I co-edited the O'Reilly Web Operations book that defined the discipline. Essays from practitioners at Amazon, Google, and the companies that set the stage for DevOps.

“The Web is changing the way we live and touches every person alive. As more and more people depend on the Web, they depend on us. Web Operations is work that matters.”

Ex-Amazon 'Master of Disaster' Animates Server Chef

The Register profiled my move from Amazon's Master of Disaster role to co-founding Opscode and launching Chef, tracing the line from reliability engineering to infrastructure as code.

The Origins of Amazon's Cloud Computing

I told Stacey Higginbotham at GigaOM the actual origin of EC2. Chris Pinkham wanted to keep working from South Africa, and I, running ops at Amazon, was at first horrified by the idea.

“I was horrified at the thought of the dirty, public Internet touching MY beautiful operations.”

Velocity: The Art of Web Operations

Tim O'Reilly's note opening Velocity 2009 tells the origin story: Steve Souders, Andy Oram, and I asked for a conference for our community. Two years in, 700 people showed up.

Five Whys: Try to Learn a Dollar's Worth of Lesson for Every One You Spend in Failure

Eric Ries quoted me in his Venture Hacks guide to Five Whys: try to learn a dollar's worth of lesson for every dollar spent in failure. The line came from Amazon GameDay practice.

“Try to learn a dollar's worth of lesson for every one you spend in failure.”