Part of the job of a Developer Advocate is the ability to demo or show off portions of your technology stack to possible users. At IBM we run many workshops and tech demos every week for our clients and conferences. We need to create, monitor, maintain and clean these assets. In this talk we will describe our automation journey from bash scripts run and maintained by individual developers to automating the creations and deletion on automatic schedule with a UI. We will discuss situation, our iterations on what we tried and the painful portions of them, and how we accidentally created a Cloud interface on top of the IBM Cloud, or easier said, we created a Cloud on our Cloud.

Ideally, we’ll show our journey and the lessons we learned along the way, and as an audience member, you’ll come away with nuggets of useful tooling to make your cloud usage more streamlined, and hopefully, you’ll see the pitfalls we fell in and you can avoid them yourself. We’ll show off some bad code, some good code, and some robust code; all open source and available to allow you to leverage it too.

In an effort to automate tasks for our users we ended up creating a cloud (kind of). In this talk we will describe our journey towards automation, and how we accidentally created a Cloud on our Cloud.