HICSS 2014 Minitrack in Software Technologies
System Operations

Overview
System operations have recently undergone dramatic changes. Cloud computing allows automation and outsourcing tasks that used to be core competencies of operators such as procuring and installing server hardware or provisioning of shared storage space. Operations staff need to cope with new environments and different scales: a single administrator may be responsible for as many as 100,000 cores. Simultaneously, the integration between development and operations has become very popular, summarized under the terms DevOps, agile development, and continuous deployment.

Challenges in the field are mountainous ¡V e.g., Gartner research estimates: ¡§Through 2015, 80% of outages impacting mission-critical services will be caused by people and process issues, and more than 50% of those outages will be caused by change/configuration/release integration and hand-off issues.¡¨ These challenges provide a fertile area for research.

We solicit high-quality original research papers in the area of system operations including empirical studies of problems in practice, lessons learned from specific incidents and novel solution approaches.
Proposed technical area & topics

Authors are invited to submit novel contributions in the above mentioned problem domain, which are not under consideration elsewhere. Specifically, relevant topics include, but are not limited to:
- Technical areas
o System upgrades and changes
o Configuration management
o Release integration
o Operation hand-off procedures
o Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery planning and execution
o Dependency analysis
- Types of Contributions
o Human factors in system operations
o Tools for system management
o Analysis of issues leading to significant outages
o Empirical studies on practical operations challenges

Submission Instructions
Manuscript should be no more than ten pages, single-spaced. Reviewing is double blind and so submissions should not contain author names. Detailed submission instructions are provided by HICSS centrally: http://www.hicss.hawaii.edu/hicss_47/apahome47.htm

Organizing Committee
Len Bass, NICTA, Sydney, Australia
Ingo Weber, NICTA, Sydney, Australia