Yesterday marked the opening of the Southern California Linux Expo, otherwise known as SCALE. SCALE's venue this year is the Los Angeles Airport Hilton, just a stone's throw from LAX Airport. SCALE opened strong with lots of technical content, much of it about the "DevOps" movement and how you can bring its benefits to your place of business.

If you've never heard about DevOps, what it is in a nutshell is a culture... an attitude... a relationship between Development and Operations in a business that is collaborative and works together to help drive the business forward. If you're familiar with "Agile Development" and how it allows development teams to quickly address business needs, then DevOps is the other side to that equation between Development and Operations. There's been an entire DevOps track here at SCALE that's covered introductory topics like "What is DevOps?" to more advanced topics like configuration management tools like Puppet, Chef, and Cfengine. Well worth attending this track if you're a developer OR a system administrator!

SCALE had several other simultaneous tracks going today, like FOSS Mentoring, PostgreSQL, Build a Cloud Day, and Ubucon. I dropped into a few of these talks and the ones I checked out were delivered by known experts in their particular discipline, and were well received by the crowd.

After all the technical stuff wound down for the day, RackSpace hosted a "happy hour" in one of the rooms. Free snacks and drinks for the crowd, plus lots of socialization, made for a lot of happy techies, and at least two happy Linux Journal editors.

Day two of SCALE promises to be just as good - including an exhibit floor that will have lots of tech and Open Source booths. If you're in the Los Angeles area, pop on down to the LAX Hilton and check it out. You might even see our Hack Editor in his native habitat! If you can't make it in person, follow the #scale9x hashtag on Twitter -- there's a lot of activity there.