QCon is a practitioner-driven conference designed for technical team leads, architects, and project managers who influence software innovation in their teams.

<< previous speaker next speaker >>

Jeremy Hughes, OSGi Apps & DevOps Architect at IBM

Jeremy Hughes

Biography: Jeremy Hughes

Jeremy Hughes started work life on Speech Recognition technologies at IBM, then worked with IBM Research applying new technologies to customer projects. He mentored students in Cambridge, Mass on the IBM Extreme Blue internship program which, in the summer months, brings undergraduates to IBM to develop new technologies into potential products. Subsequently, he brought the program to the Europe initially across 3 countries. In 2001 he started work with WebSphere Application Server and open source, web services technologies. More recently, runtime architect for the OSGi Applications capability, and lead within the product for DevOps technologies, such as Chef. He is committer and Apache PMC chair of the Apache Aries project.

Twitter: @jpjhughes

Presentation: DevOps & WebSphere: Experiences in Chef enabling the IBM WebSphere Liberty Profile

Track: Solutions Track Wednesday 1 / Time: Wednesday 16:50 - 17:40 / Location: Westminster Suite

Several years ago, in IBM development labs across the world, a ground swell of software developers faced a challenge to evolve WebSphere Application Server to become the 'Devs' choice for writing Web Applications. By 'Ops' people, it was, and is, well known for its solidity and performance. But Devs were having a hard time. They told us they wanted to be free to make small changes to their code and see it reflected in the running server before coffee entered their minds. Free to use just the parts of the product their application needed, keeping memory footprint low and Cloud friendly. And to use it while developing their applications, for free. The result: IBM WebSphere Liberty Profile. WebSphere Application Server reformed into a lightweight, flexible and easy to use runtime with a rapid restart time and fidelity with the existing product editions.

Meanwhile, the DevOps movement was extending the idea of agile development to push the process all the way through to production. OS, middleware and application deployment automation in a reliable and repeatable way were enabling incremental and frequent delivery of software to production. Result: new capabilities delivered step by step to running production systems, amplifying the customer 'feedback loop', gaining a competitive advantage.

Could the ease of configuration, deployment and speedy start time of the WebSphere Liberty Profile work well with the DevOps technologies providing Infrastructure as Code, such as Chef, to bring further value? With a small team we've been learning DevOps with Chef, and fitting the WebSphere Liberty Profile into the Infrastructure as Code model. This talk is about all of the above and our experiences in getting where we are, with plenty still to go.