My DevOps Talk in Tampa

 The full event

What was talked about

 I spoke about what DevOps is and the basics of getting started. The slides for this presentation can be found here. I mainly covered Terraform, Bash and Github Actions. A resource that is helpful for those new to DevOps is a roadmap.

TampaDevs

 I have not given any technical talks like this before and I did find that I over prepared for the event. I had about double the amount of material than what I had time for. Thankfully the event ended right on the final deploy of my first of two demos I set for the night. This was done by creating a Terraform pipeline on Github Actions which would deploy a EC2 instance.

 Terraform

resource "aws_instance" "al2" {
  ami           = var.al2_ami
  instance_type = "t2.micro"
  key_name      = aws_key_pair.pub_key.key_name
  vpc_security_group_ids = [aws_security_group.tampadev.id]
  tags = {
    Name = "al2"
  }
}

 This Terraform was ran by Github Actions which was simply running a terraform apply command

 Github Actions

- name: Run Terraform
  working-directory: ./terraform
  run: |
    terraform init
    terraform apply -auto-approve

 However, this is just a bare Amazon Linux 2 AMI with nothing on it. For the demo I wanted to show something so I have a repository with a small Three.js application. So, I would install git, node and nginx to download and serve the application. I used a Github Actions Marketplace action called appleboy/ssh-action. If I were to redo this demo I would replace this with a more reputable configuration tool like Ansible. The bash script ran can be seen here to startup a web server of the application.

 Configuration Bash script

curl -sL https://rpm.nodesource.com/setup_16.x | sudo bash -
sudo yum install nodejs -y
sudo yum install git -y
sudo amazon-linux-extras install nginx1 -y
sudo systemctl enable nginx
sudo systemctl start nginx
git clone https://github.com/CodaBool/tampa-dev.git
cd tampa-dev
npm ci
npm run build
sudo cp -TR build /usr/share/nginx/html

 That completed the first demo and I had ran out of time. I prepared a much more advanced demo which involved Docker and a scalable usage with Fargate however, it would have ran over the event time.

Looking back

 I had a lot of fun after the event talking with people. I got to talk about Git for a good amount of time with someone and actually enjoyed it. They had given a talk on the tool and had lots of knowledge on Git. It was fun to be around developers who know their stuff. I like to be in a room with a ton of smart people. It helps me learn and also the environment there was uplifting.

 So many of the people I talked to just love to learn things. Which is exactly how I would describe myself. So, finding people just like myself was absolutely a highlight of the visit to Tampa for this talk.

The Community

 Vincent and me

 I got to also spend time with Vincent. His TampaDevs community has grown extremely fast and it is all thanks to his effort into the community. He is such a likeable guy and I would be happy to help out at any of his future events. I already asked him to give another talk on Docker. So, maybe by the end of this year I will be in Tampa again to do another event.

Thanks for reading 👍