This is the first time, I have been to a meetup in Silicon Valley, despite attending a lot of meetups in San Francisco. I happened to be in the neighborhood and stopped by SV DevOps meetup, hosted by Intuit. (Very nice office).

There were a couple of presentations.
1. Creating Self-healing Systems” by Vlad Novikov – This talk was a new approach to monitoring site uptime or performance. The idea was to build a central control unit, which understood the health of applications and can spin up more instances on the fly as and when required, which is particularly tied to deploys.

2. Autonomic Application Delivery” by Victoria Livschitz, Founder & CTO of Qubell
The last few years has seen a lot of advances in containers, virtual boxes, platform as a service. For instance, it is very easy to launch an instance on Heroku today. While it is pretty fast, packaging an entire architecture – databases, nginx, app servers, memcache etc in a single system can be non-trivial. Qubell might be able to give you this, without Puppet. Think of a UI, which has the power of puppet and is editable.