I’ve been going to more and more meetup’s lately. Seemingly at least one a week. The latest one was the Triangle DevOps Meetup. What an interesting session. We were at the offices of Teradata, and Felix, the presenter, works at Teradata. He took the time to walk us thru setting up our own OpenStack cloud.

Probably the best advice that Felix gave was the first time you get the installation you should work, is to delete the entire setup and redo it, because it was probably a fluke.

Felix decided to do a live demo of this complex setup. Of course it didn’t work out, but it was great to see that no matter how much experience you have in setting up these environments, it is hard. And mistakes are made, which in my mind is exactly why DevOps is so important for people. Get it right, version it, test it, measure it, and automate it.

I am not sure that the demo wanted to show that, but to me, the message was received. DevOps and continuous delivery would have solved this problem, but it wouldn’t make a good demo.