Patrick O’ Connor, a staff systems enginner at The Walt Disney Company, gives a presentation on SCALE Saturday at 11:30 on "Nomad - An introduction to Cluster Schedulers." The SCALE Team caught up with Patrick to ask about his talk.
Q: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your background?
A: I'm a Staff Systems Engineer working on deploying scalable solutions for The Walt Disney Company. Previously I worked at DreamWorks Animation where I supported the render farm, core systems team, and new business initiatives. Current adventures include automated deployments and SPOF (single point of failure) removal.
Q: You're giving a talk on "Nomad - An introduction to Cluster Schedulers." Without tipping your hand on the actual talk, can you give us an idea of what we might expect?
A: Nomad is a cluster scheduler created by Hashicorp; the same team that created highly regarded projects such as Vagrant, Packer, and Consul. The talk will introduce Nomad and how to use it to deploy containerized services to a cluster of machines. During the presentation, I will touch on general topics of cluster schedulers. A live demonstration will wrap up the discussion.
Q: Is this your first visit to SCALE? If so, what are your expectations? If not, can you give us your impressions of the event?
A: This will be my third time attending SCALE. SCALE has a local feel, is volunteer driven, and is always such a positive experience. We are very fortunate to have SCALE in Southern California and I always look forward to seeing familiar faces and meeting new people.
Q: What are your favorite open source projects?
A: There are so many amazing people contributing lots of time and effort into open source it's amazing! I've really enjoyed tracking the container hype that's been happening lately... Docker, Kubernetes, and Mesos/Marathon are all pretty fascinating. Using service discovery such as Consul to drive load balancer configuration is neat. Projects such as Traefik are taking that a step further and making service discovery aware load balancers, it's a cool project that I've been using for a while.
Q: Is there anything else you'd like to add?
A: I believe 2016 is going to be a great year for technology and I'm super excited for the direction that I see many projects taking. I hope to contribute back to the open source community and help support positive experiences for others.
SCALE Team interview by Michelle Klein-Hass