DevOpsDays Amsterdam 2016
DevOpsDays is a conference series with events all over the globe aimed at furthering the concepts of DevOps within the community. A dedicated group of core organizers provide advice, but the events themselves are run by local volunteers. In short, if you want to hang out with the best people in this space, just go to a DevOpsDays event. The latest edition of DevOpsDays was held in Amsterdam from June 29 till the first of July and was attended by over 400 persons who participated in three days of talks, workshops and open dialogue. I had the opportunity to attend this event and are happy showing you some highlights.
People over technology
The overarching theme this time was people and culture. Erica Baker of Slack delivered the keynote themed diversity and inclusion, kicking off a conference with more female participation than seen before. Ken Mugrage of Thoughtworks discussed burnout and other psychological effects of stress. In the talk, he lays out his definition of DevOps:
“A culture where people, regardless of title or background, work together to imagine, develop, deploy and operate a system.”
Cloud-native gaining traction
While last year’s event introduced technologies like Kubernetes, this year’s topics reflected the growing ubiquity of cloud-native architecture and technology. Discussions on real-world challenges such as monitoring of containers, scaling microservices in production and more drew a lot of interest. This is also reflected with the impressive booking growth of top cloud platform vendors like Pivotal and Redhat (both had sponsor booths).
Behavior for High-performance teams
One of the interactive workshops I attended was titled “Creating High-Performance Teams With DevOps Behavior”. This workshop explored what “right behavior” is and how we could positively change the behavior of all stakeholders we interact with. Just like SMART objectives, behavior should be MACRO (Measurable, Active, Controllable, Reliable, Observable). Of course it should pass the Dead Man Test: If a dead man can do it, it ain’t behavior!
Ignite!
The ignite sessions at DevOpsDays are nugget-sized talks of 5 minutes length with 20 slides which auto-advance. This time, I presented an ignite talk where I spoke about Test Driven Containerized Infrastructure. This talk explores how a proven agile technique, – Test Driven Development – can be applied to infrastructure code. This idea of cross-fertilization of best practices was my main motivator to do the talk.
Open Spaces
I can’t talk about DevOpsDays without mentioning Open Spaces. In a nutshell, people nominate topics they would like to learn or share about. Based on interest gauged by a simple show of hands, time slots and locations are assigned. Once scheduled, one is free to attend any open space of choice. The sessions are free form discussions with whoever is present, and there isn’t generally any presenter.
To end, some DevOps trivia
Back in 2009, Patrick Debois and a few like-minded individuals organized the first DevOpsDays conference with the motto “to bring development and operations together”. A large collection of IT professionals converged at Gent, Belgium and the conference generated a great amount of discussion on social media. Debois used a shorter, more memorable hashtag #DevOps, and the movement has ever since been known by this name.
PS: This blog post was published on tmns.com.