Welcome to the conference, housekeeping, and introductions

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CAST AI goes beyond monitoring clusters and making recommendations; the platform utilizes advanced machine learning algorithms to analyze and automatically optimize clusters in real time, saving customers 50% or more on their cloud costs, improving performance and reliability, and bolstering DevOps and engineering productivity.

Thank you to our Happy Hour sponsor!

As a developer, getting good at working in the cloud is essential to improving your upward mobility and keeping yourself marketable. While there is no silver bullet to solving cloud development challenges, there is one strategy that will help you troubleshoot any strange were-error message the cloud can throw at you: building your own mental model of how cloud networking works. AWS, Azure, and Google clouds are all built on APIs and software-defined networks. Every "weird" problem I've faced in the cloud had some network-related defect at the core of it. In this talk, we'll discuss a clear, concise, easy to understand mental model for reasoning about cloud networking that you can use to solve any problem you'll face working in the cloud. Come with your questions, stories, and scars: this is a safe place for us all to heal and learn!

Testing is an integral part of any software development process, including DevOps. Most DevOps processes have a bucket of functional tests which are run as part of the build process in order to verify the build quality of individual software components. But what about system level testing to ensure that all these components work together in a fully integrated system? In other words, how do you incorporate system testing as part of DevOps?
In this session we will share our experiences in doing just that. We will describe our environments where we use JMeter to continuously load and stress our system test applications. When new builds complete, we use Jenkins to kick off jobs that deploy updates to our test applications and test environments running on both on-prem and cloud platforms. Finally, we run processes to analyze log files for errors, and collect metrics so that we can better monitor the usage of our environments.

Discover how GitHubCopilot can help in common coding tasks and learn about its benefits and challenges. We'll cover code generation, unit test automation, smart commit messages, and more. Find out what makes GitHub Copilot unique and how it integrates with other tools. Whether you're a seasoned developer or just curious about AI in coding, this session is for you!

One of the worst interview questions is "how would you design and scale Twitter from scratch on a whiteboard?" This is a very complicated question and typically used to gauge your knowledge of how things scale. This is also something that is limited to folk knowledge, so in this talk I will show you how you get from "humble beginnings" to "globe spanning monstrosity".

Many public sector organizations are dealing with the reality of decades of applications that have formed a gnarled, twisting nest of dependencies and constraints that are a headache to manage and maintain. One of the best methods to solve this complexity is to “decompose the monolith” by taking parts of the application portfolio and refactoring them using modern software development techniques and removing dependencies. However, going from managing on-premises data centers using virtualization technologies into a team capable of building a platform using techniques suitable for cloud-native applications is a HUGE jump for teams to make. We’d love to share our experiences in helping public sector teams learn the ins and outs of platform engineering along with helping others avoid the mistakes we’ve made.

In this session, the audience will hear the story of a successful, large-scale, public sector organization that realized the following outcomes from their platform engineering investments:

• The process to build a new secure platform capable of deploying and maintaining a modern application stack hosted entirely in AWS GovCloud.
• Evolution from quarterly releases of legacy applications into building and running cloud-native applications that see frequent, daily releases of features and improvements.
• A deep investment into quality engineering to reach nominal velocity while keeping developers informed, involved, and engaged.
• How security, developers, and platform teams partnered to ensure the safety and integrity of citizen data through DevSecOps.

The reason DevOps is slowing down, or halted in progress at many organizations is Security. Not security people. This talk is about Security with a capital "S". Security the ideal. It is this very Security that has caused illogical or irrational behavior in IT for many years, and now it's latest victim is DevOps.

We'll outline the most common ways that Security inhibits or blocks organizational change and identify the people, processes, and tools that will form your techniques for combatting these problems as they arise.

How much money have you left on the table, either in negotiating salary or a severance package? What do you think the amortization of that loss of compensation truly is?

In this talk, I'll be sharing my insights and experiences with OpenTelemetry, an open source project that offers protocols, APIs, and SDKs for collecting metrics, traces, and logs from applications and services. I will cover the tools provided by the OpenTelemetry Community, including the Language SDKs, the Collector, and the OTLP formats for Metrics, Traces, and Logs.

Have you been laid off? quit? "mutually parted ways"?

How did you balance the soul-crushing anxiety of no longer getting a paycheck with the uncertainty of the job market and still take time to recover?

I'd like to share some strategies I've used in the past few years that helped me get back up again.

They're never gonna keep you down.

We're going to ask for volunteers to come up and improvise a 1-minute talk to 4 randomly generated slides (it likely will be a number of memes). It's a lot of fun!

For decades, developers have relied on testing, design patterns, and teamwork to create quality code. At last, the rise of AI coding assistants has deprecated these by removing programmer error with no caveats whatsoever. Right? Surely, nothing could go wrong. Are there any lessons from the past we could look to for guidance with these new tools?

Thank you to our Gold sponsor!

I am going to lead a meditation session consisting of devops and SRE affirmations.

Thank you to our Gold sponsor!

Drawing a comparison between my past and current professions. Looking at stages of baking in preparing, mixing, baking, and selling while comparing to DevOps stages of planning, building, deploying, and feedback.

The RackN Digital Rebar platform is a vendor-neutral life-cycle automation workflow and control plane that uses IaC architecture to ensure reuse, composability and resilience for bare metal and virtual infrastructure.

Tigera - Container security with built-in network security. Secure networking and comprehensive protection for containers.

Thank you to our Gold sponsor!

Thank you to our Gold sponsor!

Let's do some Open Spaces! Learn more at https://devopsdays.org/open-space-format/

Artifact + Build Promotion Workflows

TBD day of. Learn more at https://devopsdays.org/open-space-format/

Success & Horror Stories

AI

Security vs Dev Experience

User Groups (Anything!)

Front Left of Connally (in front of AV)
* Head Count
* Hiring
* Salary

Onboarding to DevOps life (esp after full stack life)

Better Support for Full Remote in Hybrid

Going from bare metal to Kubernetes

Home Automation

Lean Coffee & Effective Team Meetings

TBD Day of. Learn more at https://devopsdays.org/open-space-format/

And how can I improve it?

Autism and DevOps

Decoupling architecture

Open to closed source

TBD day of. Learn more at https://devopsdays.org/open-space-format/

Using cloud costs to drive good behavior

How have acquisitions and exploding vendor costs affected your company/strategy?

Data Lifecycle Management/Data Lake becoming a data landfill

Come share what you've learned and get the directions to happy hour!

Thank you to our happy hour sponsors! Head over to Scholz Beer Garden at https://maps.app.goo.gl/oJWPbACzfAWbKLZG7

Welcome back! We'll start with open space formations before our keynote.

Complex distributed systems in our industry are always in a degraded state of brokenness all the time. While we are comfortable with this decade-old statement about our infrastructures, the same could be said about a typical technical organization. This talk draws parallels between our systems and our orgs being in this degraded state. It also identifies ways in which each of us can return to our orgs in our roles with insight in how to improve this brokenness. Developing and shipping software for money in tech orgs is a social sport!

Civo is a cloud provider that enables companies to host core applications with ease. Helping speed up development, increase productivity and reduce costs.

Texas Mutual, the state’s leading provider of workers’ compensation insurance, is on a mission to develop the insurance talent of the future and build a stronger, more stable and secure Texas.

Bare metal to Kubernetes - take 2

Daily tools with AI

Mentoring formerly incarcerated retro / homelab

What to do when there is too much to do

Who do you piss off less? Navigating career politics / Tech Hostile Takeover

Who is on a "devops team" and who should be on a "devops team"

Writing and Publishing books

Airgap GenAI in homelab discussion

Devops and Autism take 2

EKS Upgrades / Automation Strategies

Growing Internal application to subscription based tool

Paytalk 2

Why SLOs s*ck

Why WTF Lead, Mgr, Director, Exec

Join us in exploring the intersection of engineering and storytelling, and discover how you can become a more effective communicator and influencer in your technical endeavors. In this talk, we delve into the art of storytelling within the realm of engineering, focusing on how engineers can effectively communicate insights to stakeholders through the use of narrative techniques and data visualization. Drawing from personal experience in DevOps and research across related engineering and scientific domains, we'll explore best practices that empower engineers to transform technical data into compelling stories.

When you’re a small company with a handful of operationally minded folks, it can be hard to justify investing in the more advanced security solutions with limited time and funding. While tools like SOPS provide a simple alternative, they have some inherent tradeoffs that can complicate its usage and auditing process. In this talk, I will discuss and demonstrate advantages to using a tool like 1Password, something most (if not all) people at your company should be using, to manage operational secrets at different scales.

We're going to ask for volunteers to come up and improvise a 1-minute talk to 4 randomly generated slides (it likely will be a number of memes). It's a lot of fun!

What is DevOps? Let's answer this question in 300 seconds with the example of a postal shipment.

Chef exists to improve lives through software automation.

In this 5-minute lightning talk, you’ll hear about the roots of DevOps in the Theory of Constraints, how 12-Factor principles can guide your microservice and cloud migration refactor efforts, and how an optimal strategy for the use of Internal Developer Portals within your organization can tie all of these concepts together.  We’ll close by looking at the future of DevOps and how platform engineering is evolving to address the next set of bottlenecks, hiding within the developer experience.

A surfeit of software philosophies have hit the industry over the last decade, all claiming to reduce friction in digital transformation. But what does that mean, how does it impact your design philosophy, and why is platform engineering suddenly the new solution to it all?

Justin Reock, Head of DevRel for Cortex.io, will take you through a fast-paced tour of modern DevOps and how we came to it, so that you never again have to utter those fallacious and all-to-common words: "There are lots of definitions of DevOps."

Thank you to our Gold Sponsor!

In a world where Cloud gives us the ease and flexibility to deploy and scale your apps we often overlook security and control. The fact that resources in the cloud are still shared, the hardware is shared, the network is shared, there is not much insight into the infrastructure unless the logs are exposed by the cloud provider. Even an air gap environment in the cloud is truly not air gapped, it's a pseudo-private network. Moreover, the general trend in the industry is shifting towards cloud repatriation, it's a fancy term for bringing your apps and services from cloud back to on-prem, like old school how things were run before the cloud was even a thing. This shift has caused what I call a knowledge gap where engineers are only familiar with interacting with infrastructure via APIs but not the hardware or networks their application runs on. In this talk I aim to demystify on-prem environments and more importantly show engineers how easy and smooth it is to repatriate data from cloud to an on-prem air gap environment.

Thank you to our Gold sponsor!

Thank you to our Gold sponsor!

Thank you to our Community sponsor!

Test engineers have always faced more limited prospects, but in the current job market even more so. This talk aims to show how test engineers can use their existing skills to make the move to DevOps and how DevOps engineers can embrace test engineer skills to increase their value in an increasingly competitive job market. Like the best session musicians, knowing more than one part can help you get the gig!

We can hide complexity behind a Dev Portal curtain, but there’s still automation doing heavy lifting somewhere. In this hands-on lab, we’re going to learn how to create Backstage.io scaffolding that connects to actual infrastructure. By the end of the session, you’ll be able to build a simple working self-service portal that requests a cluster of servers.

The Mobile SRE team at American Express has developed an architecture that defines their traces, metrics, and logs through an event-based approach that hides the telemetry implementation from developers. This session will show how we got there, and why we find this approach to be more effective than the alternatives.

Platform teams don't just enable the 10x developer -- they enable the 10x team. Innovative teams at companies like Netflix bring a platform mindset not just to infrastructure, but to the entire stack. From infrastructure provisioned with Terraform to the microcopy shipped with a headless CMS, teams are streamlining software delivery with platforms that provide better integration, composability, self-service, and reuse. Learn about some of the tools and best practices that highly effective platform teams use to better collaborate and ship features faster.

Developer Experience (DX) is not just describing the "frontend" experience - it's about every aspect of the experience your developers (internal and external) have with your product, tooling, systems, etc. Platform engineering has emerged as this general way to remove developer toil, but DX is more than that, encompassing everything from deployment pipelines to IaC practices to developer efficiencies to even UI/UX. In this talk we will seek to bring into focus some of the principles of DevOps (collaboration, communication, shared responsibility) and how a strong DX mindset can bring Dev and Ops together.

In the past few years, there has been a notable emphasis on Platform Engineering as a distinct component within the broader DevOps framework. Central to this concept is the recognition that our releases, whether internal or external, ultimately revolve around delivering products. It is imperative to extend the product-focused mindset to every facet of our releases.

This experience report is about our DevOps journey, and how Testers are helping make progress shipping on a B2C platform with hundreds of services faster and more frequently.

We have automated deployments. Infrastructure is in code. UI tests written by “Full-Stack” QEs are defined in jobs, and have unit and UI tests in PRs and builds. We’re tracking DORA metrics by service. But we’re still releasing with bespoke validation/signoff processes. We can ship in minutes/hours, but it takes live coordination and approvals to enable deployment.

It’s time to bring it all together. Our Platform Engineering Team, QEs, and product engineering teams are collaborating to rapidly iterate on tooling that lets our engineers merge to Main and walk away. Results are promising, and we’re widening support towards GA this summer.

We’ve learned, and solved technical and social/process problems. I’ll share what we’ve done, what we think we’ve learned, and ask for your feedback.

Argo Workflows

CRM Dynamics 365 Power Platform DevOps

Employee Empowerment 2024

Home Lab

Keynote Follow-up: Fallacies of Distributed Organizations

Mentorship to Org turnover

Tech for special needs

During this time, all conference participants come to the Connally Ballroom to share learning from Open Spaces group discussions.

All conference participants should be present during this time - we'll hold the drawings for sponsor giveaways, and you must be present to win!