DevOps for University Students
author: | Lance Albertson |
title: | Director / Sysadmin |
company: | OSU Open Source Lab |
email: | lance@osuosl.org |
twitter: | @ramereth |
Attribution-ShareAlike CC BY-SA ©2014-2015
About me
- OSU Open Source Lab Director
- Systems Admin background
- Been at OSL since 2007
- Experienced in:
- Virtualization (Ganeti/OpenStack)
- Chef, CFengine, Puppet
- Mentoring students
- Open source project hosting
Session Overview
- Current Learning Environment
- OSL Student Experience
- Devops Bootcamp
- Next Steps
Current Learning Environment
There be dragons!
Theory vs. Applied
- More focus on theory than applied
- Classwork rarely mimics real-world
- Difficult to apply theory
Student Jobs
Finding experience on campus
- Limited roles and access
- Limited availability
- No structure
Insufficient Mentoring
- No dedicated staff/faculty
- LUG's help, but not the solution
- No centralized program
- Need a place for advanced students to excel more
- Also need an environment for "newbies"
OSL Student Experience
Giving students real-world experience and mentorship
OSL Overview
- Provide hosting for FOSS projects
- Services we provide
- Co/Location
- Virtualization (Cloud)
- Managed/Unmanaged hosting
- Email, DNS, mailing list, etc
- Development focused on supporting hosting
- Media communications team
OSL NOC
OSL Student Experience
- Given full "root"
- Spend six months mentoring
- Mix of full-timer and senior student mentorships
- Work on support tickets and customers
- Interact with people internationally
- Ownership of a project
- Treated like a full-timer
Scaling problem
- Balancing FTE to Student ratios
- A lot of time and resource is put in mentoring
- Represent less than 1% of total OSU CS population
- Budget and staff constraints on hiring more students
DevOps Bootcamp
Expanding DevOps beyond the OSL...
http://devopsbootcamp.osuosl.org
Portland State "Braindump"
- Weekly meet up to teach being sysadmin
- In-depth teaching on specific topics (DNS, Apache, etc)
- Graduated system
- Start out with helpdesk support
- Get "non-root" access to systems
- "Rooter"
- Year long program
- Starts out with 60+ end up with ~10 solid recruits
Adapt PSU's Braindump
Making it work for the OSL and OSU .. and DevOps Bootcamp was born!
Goals:
- Teach basic system administration skills
- Introduce FOSS development
- Discuss modern technologies
- Publicize all the content
- Eventually integrate into EECS program
Program Structure
- Weekly/Bi-Weekly meet ups about a specific topic
- Weekly content planning meetings
- Simple homework each week
- Both lecture and hands on
- Communication
Tools
- Vagrant
- OpenStack
- Github
- Sphinx-doc and Read The Docs
- Google Hangouts Live (for recording)
Curriculum
- Linux fundamentals
- Editors, Git and Github
- Simple scripting
- Web applications
- Linux boot process and filesystem hierarchy
- Databases
- Security & Authentication
- Networking overview
- DNS
Curriculum (continued)
- Development tools and debuggers
- Contributing to open source
- Configuration management
- Continuous integration
- Web application frameworks
- Testing and development
- Containers
Roots in CS312 Sysadmin class
- Previously taught in 2009, more recently in 2015
- Content was retooled this year with a DevOps focus
- More advanced, modern and focused topics than DevOps Bootcamp
- Approved to be taught in Winter 2016 term
- Content Creative Commons Licensed and available on Github:
DevOps DayCamp
- Dual-tracked day-long conference: October 3, 2015
- Second year running
- Beginners track
- Hands-on Linux Basics training
- Advanced track
- Similar to DevOps Days content
- Roughly 100 in attendence
- Submit your CFP for the advanced track at DayCamp!
- http://devopsbootcamp.osuosl.org/daycamp/
What we've learned two years in
- Attendance ranges from 30 at the start and dwindles towards 15 near the year
end
- Weekly meetings are a bit too much for many students
- Creating quality content takes time and practice
- Learn to be flexible with the schedule and topics
- SSH Keys, Vagrant and VirtualBox are a PITA for beginners
- OpenStack is a great tool, but Horizon isn't the right frontend for beginners
Next Steps
Plans
- Continue to build more content (and tweak it)
- Develop new curriculum in EECS program
- Create a side track focused on DevOps and open source
- Integrate into eCampus EECS post-bac program
- Invite more outside speakers from the industry
- Invite more contributions from external sources
Questions?
Attribution-ShareAlike CC BY-SA ©2014-2015