Announcing Egypt’s DevOps
Assalamu Alykom Everybody,
I know that this blog has almost been dead and you can only see my twitter updates laying around (seen this line before ?! well, it is the most famous line that bloggers write when they stop writing for some time, — Back to the topic chatty !! –)
So i have been working in the Egyptian market for quite some time now in the field of UNIX-like/Linux Systems administration, dealt with a lot of technologies like: web operations/scalability, Infrastructure management, web farms,VoIP, Security systems and whole bunch of stuff, which gave me some idea on how do sysadmins (or systems engineers whatever you like 
) do and achieve their goals.
The point is, I DON’T LIKE IT, WE ARE BEING KILLED BY OUR JOBS, Systems are evolving and we are not ?! ..
Virtualization and Cloud Computing brought a whole lot of machines, and we still manage them using “almost” the same technologies ?! ..
If you are like me and have been searching for a solution for the past year or two, You will see around the internet that people are talking about “Agile Systems Administration”, “Infrastructure As Code” , “Command and Control”, “Configuration Management”, “Server Orchestration” and “DevOps”.
So I started asking people working on our industry, and there is almost NOBODY individually or an enterprise in Egypt that started working with those technologies, just some tiny trials and i just cannot stand the time/power we are wasting on managing our servers “Old School”. (If your Enterprise is using some of the technologies mentioned above, please tell us in the comments or mail me personally, I would love to have a chat about that.)
So within the next days isA, i will start doing some steps to get us out of the misery , may be creating some collaboration channels, contacting key professionals on that topic, who knows may be even making and event/sessions about it ..
But first I need your trusty comments, What do you think of the technologies mentioned ? Do you see it applicable at your employer ? Did you start using it ?
Dear Ahmed,
I’m with you in every word you’ve written, I don’t know if it’s the bad IT management here in Egypt or the lack of development or the fear of change. Every country is racing at IT and trying new technologies to be always at the top of the pyramid as every thing is run now by Computers.
Also there is no specialities here in Egypt your title should be “Computer Guy” and any task escalated to you even if the printer papers ran out and this is making me very angry. How can I develop and try new technologies while I work everything as a systems administrator. For the sake of better IT community we should practice those new technologies with ourselfs and it’s a very good idea to build a community for this Ahmed.
I think the main issue is there is not real research and product engineering in most of the companies so how would we be updated to series and new techs projects and implement them live in our work environment. It will be a good start to gather our selfs and make a community to research in all new techs to not be eventually like who left the train to development and our status as a virtual machine paused and forgotten.
Regards,
Well, I’m trying to introduce this into TEData, however, to do this you need real commitment from the management (which I currently have el hamd l Allah), and funds -lots of it- …
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I gotta tell you, I have tons of ideas that are just pending for resources and time to get them done the right way, however, I cannot share them by any means, as they’re considered as company secrets, sorry
The old school Unix/Linux Admin is fading away, the true systems engineer (which is my favorite naming) should have plenty of time engineering not troubleshooting and maintaining…
In reply to Ahmed Abdo, it’s sort of a mix between lack of funds and/or time, lack of commitment, lack of enough good resources (human resources you can rely on), and -best of all- being simply sucked in the tornado of daily problems and troubleshooting issues and trying to catch up with the competition just to keep the wheel of life spinning (I’m sure you both understand what I’m talking about) …
Cheeeeers
kalam zay elfol
Salam Ahmed,
Thank you a lot for raising this area of focus.
Regarding the devops and such stuff, they are not new actually, I’ve made and worked on this in production 3 years ago (in the dev. cycle) before I work in virtualization, and when I shifted my focus to cloud and virtualization I tried to combine both the dev cycle along with the infrastructure management. it is very nice area by the way, and has a great revenue on the businesses and impact their way of work a lot. it is a also a mindset that actually needs the IT people and developers to shift their way of thinking and to adopt to it and be aware of its advantages to their productivity.
Salam Mohamed,
It’s an honor to see your comment on my blog, Thanks for your comment.
You are totally correct about DevOps not being new, it is has around for quite some time, the point is since this “stuff” got the name DevOps it started to be a culture that people are embracing in a speedy fashion ..
Also, DevOps tools are in a very mature state right now, you also have choices to achieve a single purpose with flexibility on how you work with those tools, and of course open source software is the major player now in this field ..
I really hope i can push the idea even further within the upcoming days isA …
Thank Ahmed.
You know, in our field there are topics/technologies that we consider new, but the fact they are very old but they have been re-branded to fulfill ‘new needs and demands’.
People with vision and have good awareness of how the technology started with its history, can easily bring the old ideas, remove the dust covering it and re-brand it to help fulfilling needs and demands.
A very known example for this is the virtualization and cloud computing itself! virtualization idea back to 1960s when IBM created the very first virtual machine in its platforms.
In short: study the history well, and open your mind to future with passion and vision, you will see the gems and opportunities that make you one of those who initiate these innovative ideas
Good luck Ahmed in your effort and thanks again to bringing this to discussion!