HashiDays 2018 summary

TLDR If you’re considering going to HashiDays you should definitely go, it’s worth it.

400+ people — friendly and cozy

So let me set the scene for you. In 2014, I left the IT industry. At the time I was an IT manager responsible for hundreds of bare-metal servers, in multiple data-centers across several continents. I was pretty good with scripting, automation, and configuration managers. I had 10 years of experience as linux sysadmin for high traffic web platforms (Amobee, Taboola, FlashNetworks).

I left all that to start a sharing economy startup with my friends. My main responsibility in the startup was frontend and mobile (hybrid) development.

After successfully failing at that venture I decided to return to the IT world as a part time freelancer for an Israeli unicorn company called Appsflyer. I can’t even describe how lucky I was that Appsflyer team took me on-board the rocket-ship. I still remember saying “Devops is just a linux admin who can write some code” — thank God, Ariel, the Appsflyer Devop Lead and a brilliant guy in general, ignored my non-sense.

So there I was — back into the IT world after missing 2 years and saying “What the hell happened here?” Automatic builds and deployments, secret management, spot instances and auto-scaling in AWS, service discovery and configuration management with key/value store.

That’s where I learned about Vault&Consul. For me it felt like Hashicorp were aliens from the future and, to be honest, I still think that. They just knew how IT was supposed to be designed and work even before IT professionals understood it. It felt right, it made sense, it was secured and cloud-ready, and it didn’t feel limiting.

So for me meeting developers of those amazing tools — Michell Hashimoto & Hashi-team — is a dream come true.

I’m such a fanboy

One Day Consul Training

The training felt like it was meant for beginners to medium experience level. It started with basics like setups, service discovery and of course key/value storage. Then it moved into raft and gossip protocols, Serf and some nice features like cloud-integration and tag-based bootstrapping. We covered tooling like consul-template, a bit of fabio and envconsul. The main thing for me during the training was the fact that we’re close to the actual developers so we could get as deep as we want and get answers at the design and code level. By the way, the training is hands-on so you get to practice with a real server and with a real consul cluster. I just wish there was a separate training for Consul advanced topics and maybe some troubleshooting and disaster recoveries.

This is so awesome — it’s an arcade machine to test your hashi-skills by instruqt

Overall, the Conference was great!

Here’s why, in my opinion, Hashicorp conferences are worth attending:

1. Be the first to know — announcements like Consul connect with the whole ideology, philosophy and design decisions. You get to hear it first and learn about it from the source. Roadmaps ( without timeline commitments — cause that’s how they roll ). Also, you free up your time and attention to learn those new features and products.
2. Best Practices — Hashicorp is not a consulting company so they tend to steer clear of suggesting best practices. So the way to learn about best practices is actually hearing about customers implementing large scale, beautiful and sophisticated solutions. More than 50% of the conference was by non-Hashicorp employees sharing their knowledge and experience.
3. Get inspired — talking to Armon or Mitchell, Alex or Clint Shryock is exciting. They make you want to try new things and improve your current solutions and drive-test alpha features. Share your experience with the tools with others members of the community.
4. Connect — You work with tools written by other humans, maybe some aliens too, and actually used by humans. You connect directly to Hashicorp developers, contributors, customers, system integrators, and other people who you will need the most when things are not working as they should. Actually meet contributors that are willing to mentor and on-board you to the project.
5. No aggressive marketing — I would say 97% of the conference was talking about open source features and products. The other 3% that refer to their enterprise mentioned for specific use cases where it’s relevant and even this was in “semi-apologetic” way.

They even made a consul macaroon!!!!

So there you go: Attend it! If you can’t fly get the streaming and watch it, and connect with people via Slack.