In today's tech environment, both people and organizations must continuously learn and adapt to be successful. Yet study after study shows that learning is difficult for most organizations.

In this talk, we will discuss whats preventing smart people from learning new things, the development of personal and organizational growth mindset, and how leading by example proves to be extremely important for creating a learning organization.

We’ve all seen WHAT to do to secure your containers, but WHY? What’s the worst that could happen?

Somewhere in your organization, maybe on your desk, maybe in your data center, is infrastructure that isn't immutable, and it's helpful to know what's going on with that infrastructure. osquery lets you do just that with SQL, joins and all. We'll take a look at the sorts of data you can pull with osquery, and the use cases that data fits into, ranging from "is this machine set up correctly?" to "is this machine infected?".

Using Open Source software in your Business is great way to have a small team do great things, but there are some sharp edges. Especially if your startup is shooting for an Exit, or your in a big company. The goal of this talk is to go over some common license types, use cases, tooling to help you track your use of Open Source, and techniques to ensure your continued use of Open Source inside your business doesn't impede your progress.

In 2023 Datadog launched a program to increase ARM adoption and optimize the cost efficiency of our production workloads. During this process we came up with various KPIs that we used to track and measure the success of this program. The features of our process included a five step guide for engineering teams to migrate their workloads to ARM, improved documentation and communications, and executive sponsorship.

In this talk we’ll go over the lessons learned in our program, how we implemented our solutions, what worked and what didn’t and more importantly how we reduced barriers to help enable cost optimization at scale.

Over the past 30 years we've seen a quick evolution from bare metal servers and infrastructure to a reliance on Cloud Native practices, principles, and services. But have you ever stopped to think about what it was like before you could just type aws ec2 run-instances --instance-type m2.xlarge or gcloud compute instances create to spin up a new server or service? And how things actually got done when you had to wait 6 months for a server?

In this talk, Jeremy will walk through infrastructure's evolution from his time in the mid-90s as a SysAdmin at an Internet Provider and shadow IT in the 2000s, to the growth of ,today's cloud native world. He'll highlight the enduring importance of core operational principles and explore how lessons from the "dark ages" of IT, particularly regarding automation and standardization, remain vital in today's cloud-native world. You'll gain a crucial historical context of infrastructure evolution, transforming their understanding from "how" to use the cloud to "why" it works the way it does, hopefully making them better engineers, and also have a chuckle or two.

Tired of endlessly patching vulnerabilities? It’s time to rethink the game. This talk challenges the reactive approach to vulnerability management and offers actionable strategies for developers to prevent first-party vulnerabilities altogether. By focusing on cultural changes, targeting entire classes of vulnerabilities (like XSS and SQL injection), adopting threat modeling, and rethinking patch cycles for third-party dependencies, you can shift from firefighting to building resilient systems. We’ll even explore modern techniques like ephemeral infrastructure and burn-and-replace methodologies to reduce reliance on traditional patching.

Despite being over 30 years old, Vim remains one of the most powerful and efficient text editors available today. In an age dominated by containerization, cloud computing, and IDE-heavy workflows, Vim’s lightweight nature, speed, and portability make it an indispensable tool for developers, sysadmins, and DevOps engineers alike. This talk will explore why Vim continues to be relevant, how it integrates with modern development practices, and why mastering it can still be a game-changer in a containerized world.

In the evolving world of DevOps, the boundaries between technical execution and strategic vision are increasingly blurred. In this talk, I’ll share my journey of transitioning from a platform engineer, deeply immersed in technical challenges, to a platform product manager tasked with driving vision, prioritization, and stakeholder alignment. Over nearly three years as an engineer, I honed my expertise in infrastructure and automation. Transitioning into product management, however, required resetting my imposter syndrome, adopting a new mindset, and building entirely new skills.

This talk will explore the challenges of moving from solving problems to defining them, balancing technical depth with strategic foresight, and embracing the often-overlooked “glue work” that holds teams together. Attendees will gain insights into the mindset shifts required for such a transition, practical advice for others considering a similar path, and ways this experience can foster a more integrated and effective DevOps culture.

Large language models (LLMs) and generative AI tools are more accessible than ever—but do you really want to send all your data to the cloud? In this talk, we’ll explore how to build your own private AI assistant, running entirely on open-source software and self-hosted hardware.

We’ll cover:
✅ Hardware choices—from budget-friendly setups to high-performance AI rigs.
✅ Hosting LLMs locally with Ollama and picking the right models for your needs.
✅ Connecting AI to external tools—from coding assistance in your IDE to reading and analyzing legal documents.
✅ Generating images with Stable Diffusion
✅ Ditching Alexa—integrating voice-controlled AI with Home Assistant for fully private home automation.

Whether you’re looking to enhance your workflow, boost privacy, or just tinker with AI at home, this session will give you everything you need to get started—without breaking the bank or relying on Big Tech.

Automated incident resolution isn’t new—Facebook’s FBAR and Dropbox’s Naoru pioneered self-healing infrastructure over a decade ago. Today, AI-powered tools promise faster root cause analysis and remediation, reducing MTTR dramatically. But can AI be trusted with production systems?

This talk explores the history of self-healing infrastructure, the evolution of AI-driven RCA, and practical strategies for adopting these tools safely. Attendees will gain insights into leveraging AI for reliability while avoiding common pitfalls—ensuring that automation enhances, rather than replaces, human expertise in modern SRE workflows.

LLMs are hotter than ever, but most LLM-based solutions available to us require you to use models trained on data with unknown provenance, send your most important data off to corporate-controlled servers, and use prodigious amounts of energy every time you write an email.

What if you could design a “second brain” assistant with OSS technologies, that lives on your own laptop?

We’ll take a whirlwind tour through our second brain implementation, combining Ollama, LangChain, OpenWebUI, Autogen and Granite models to build a fully local LLM assistant.

Let’s talk about all the things that can go wrong with software dependencies! We’ll cover a number of different scenarios including different repository configurations, vulnerabilities and advisories, licensing, and even upgrading dependencies across your organization. This lightning talk will conclude by taking a brief look at the landscape of solutions and where they’re most applicable.

DevOps thrives on the principles of learning, iteration, and adaptability, but these values aren’t just technical, they’re deeply personal. In this talk, I’ll explore how my early experiences in robotics, coding, and competitions taught me to embrace failure as a stepping stone for growth.

Through stories of failing at robotics competitions, overcoming self-doubt, and turning a near-failure of an international hackathon into a global success, I’ll share insights into the mindset that turned challenges into valuable lessons. Whether you’re debugging pipelines, onboarding new teammates, or tackling personal challenges, this session will inspire you to see failure as an opportunity to grow.

Join me to discover how fostering curiosity, experimentation, and resilience can transform your approach to both work and life.

Software development is evolving daily. It’s no longer enough to be a Full Stack Developer who simply delivers features—the best engineers are those who also understand their product inside and out. Developers who think beyond tickets, ask the right questions, and challenge assumptions create better, more impactful software. This talk will discuss how integrating DevOps practices, continuous feedback, and product thinking into your development workflow leads to smarter decisions, better engineering trade-offs, and software that actually serves its users. If you want to future-proof your career, it’s time to go beyond Full Stack—it’s time to think Full Product.

Containerization know-how is undoubtedly one of the most important skills for anyone in a software engineering role. In my 10+ years of internal and external consulting, I've taught and coached engineers of all flavors (software, quality, site reliability, product, and more) on how to use containerization to build, test, and run code in modern cloud-native environments. To use containerization effectively, you need to understand how to run products like Docker and also how they work both on your machine and in the cloud.

In this talk, we'll introduce an easy mental model for understanding how containerization works at a conceptual and technical level, demonstrate why and how it is an important strategy to apply to your software development lifecycle.

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Happy Hour will be at Meanwhile Brewing. Bring your badge, and get a wristband for unlimited drinks (alcoholic and non-alcoholic) and food at the food trucks.

The vibes are off in tech right now. The job market being what it is, there’s little incentive for companies to compete on how work “feels.” So it mostly feels bad. This talk makes the case that even in isolation this is a dumb business decision. A team that’s executing well is a team that’s fun to work on, therefore misery is a bad proxy metric for execution.

This talk draws on stories from the early days of the devops revolution and applies them to life in tech in 2024. Where should we draw organizational boundaries? Who gets a ticket queue? Will GraphQL help me avoid ever talking to my DBA again? These questions and more will be analyzed, occasionally with real math and graphs.

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Race cars are engineered for peak performance, designed to push the limits of speed while maintaining control and stability. Similarly, AI/ML jobs need a high-speed, reliable network fabric to deliver results efficiently. Just like a race car depends on a well-maintained race track to perform at its best, AI/ML jobs rely on network fabrics—such as RoCE and InfiniBand—to ensure fast, reliable communication.

In this session, I’ll cover key networking challenges impacting the performance and reliability of AI/ML jobs, such as NIC flapping and network contention. These challenges are like debris on a race track, causing slowdowns, disruptions, and even crashes not only impacting job completion times but also eating into ROI due to costly rollbacks to previous checkpoints.

Through demos, I'll illustrate how these networking challenges directly impact the reliability and performance of AI/ML jobs. Just as a pit crew stays ahead of problems by constantly monitoring and tuning the race car, DevOps teams must be equipped with the knowledge of these critical network challenges to ensure AI/ML jobs perform at full speed!

Transformations in tech make us think of looking to the future.

But while cloud computing and DevOps have barely been around for two decades, the fundamental problems they solve have been around since the dawn of IT – and even human civilization.

So to transform IT, how might the past help us see the present more clearly? And what can the long history of architecting buildings teach us about architecting IT systems?

In this talk, you'll get a brief tour of the history of computers over the last century to understand how the present of cloud computing came to be.

You'll also come away with how to find inspiration from the built environment to give you a fresh look at challenges like replatforming, platform engineering, governance, and resiliency.

How can a person with limited professional experience attain success in the corporate world? What are the tools and strategies that help convert a technical education into a 9-5 career? How do you turn a foot in the door into job security? How do you transform a non-traditional background into an asset?

This talk presents a cost-effective approach to processing SQS queues by transitioning from AWS Lambda to ECS for interrupt-tolerant workloads. It highlights a standardized, developer-friendly pattern that imitates the Lambda development experience while offering teams greater flexibility to customize scaling and resource allocation.

All of our DevOps journeys have been different, but a lot of them echo similar themes. We’ve all done some things right, and some things wrong, making tradeoffs along the way. Sometimes, risks pay off, and other times they don’t. I’ll look back at my 20+ years in the tech industry to use myself as an example for younger folks to learn from, and give guidance on how to learn from others.

Many of us have been on teams where the same few people speak every meeting, and likewise, the same few people very rarely ever speak. Often, we also fall into one of those categories ourselves. Learn why this happens, why it's beneficial for everybody if the whole team participates, what happens when participation isn't equal, and practical actions to take to encourage all individuals to share their opinions and concerns.

At first glance, it can be confusing to navigate this issue. Should team members be required to say something, or called on directly? What if they truly have nothing to say? Are there any benefits from addressing this? How do we get all people to participate and share knowledge, and more than that, do so comfortably?

Regardless of your role on the team, this talk will address these questions and give you practical actions to take to help your team feel safe and get the feedback, opinions, and concerns of all of its members.

devOps practices help reduce friction to production for technologists. Once an application has user traffic, user experience should become a priority, but at what cost?

This talk will connect human centered devOps & SRE practices across compute, data, & AI value streams to explore how platforms balance developer experience against production stability over time, and how process dependencies factor into overall platform success.

this talk will Explore:
- How pipelines are value streams
- A general-purpose value stream map for platforms
- value stream maps for compute, data, & AI platforms
- Dependency (wardley) maps for platform processes
- Aligning SLIs, SLOs, & SLAs across our platform VSM
- Establishing Error Budgets
- Chaos Engineering & Complexity Science

In 2024 I billed over $60,000 securing AWS accounts for small
and medium sized companies. Here's the secret though ... It's a 3 of 10 on
the complexity scale. Anyone can do it. Let me show you how so you don't
have to add to my retirement fund.

In today’s interconnected digital landscape, secure data exchange is more critical than ever. JSON Web Tokens (JWTs) have emerged as a powerful and lightweight solution for ensuring secure, stateless communication between systems. This talk will demystify the inner workings of JWTs, exploring their structure, encoding process, and role in authentication and authorization. Attendees will learn how JWTs securely carry claims through cryptographic signing, the difference between symmetric and asymmetric key algorithms, and how to implement best practices to prevent common vulnerabilities. Whether you're a developer, architect, or security enthusiast, this session will provide actionable insights into leveraging JWTs to build scalable and secure systems.

Scaling DevOps practices across large, distributed teams and diverse technology stacks is an intimidating challenge. This talk explores real-world experiences of implementing DevOps in complex environments, focusing on what works, what doesn’t, and why. Attendees will gain practical insights into overcoming silos, automating legacy systems, and fostering collaboration between traditionally disconnected teams. The session will also cover cultural resistance, skill gaps, and unexpected technical hurdles encountered during the journey to scale. This is a candid discussion about the messy reality of scaling DevOps, offering lessons learned to help others navigate similar challenges.

The DevOps community is at a critical point as AI-driven automation continues to reshape software development and infrastructure management. Understanding AI's historical evolution, from its philosophical foundations to modern reasoning models, is key to effectively navigating this transformation. This talk will bridge historical computing, epistemology, and DevOps, showing how AI's past informs its future in software engineering. We will explore AI's evolution from formal logic and deterministic computing to reinforcement learning and agentic workflows. Attendees will leave with insights on integrating AI into DevOps pipelines responsibly and efficiently.

As the technology landscape evolves and the need for adaptability to solve modern problems grows, Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) has emerged as a pivotal strategy to meet the elasticity demands of today’s systems. However, a pressing question remains: how can we make our functions truly portable, with minimal overhead, while achieving the high level of dynamism promised by FaaS?
The answer already exists, and you don’t need the Infinity Gems to make it happen. All you need is wasmCloud, a CNCF incubating project, and a few tips to take the right path in building your own FaaS platform using WebAssembly (WASM).

In this talk, we will dive into the world of Functions-as-a-Service, sharing insights on building a FaaS platform from the ground up with WASM and wasmCloud. We’ll provide practical examples and demonstrate how to create paved paths that empower developers to build high-performance functions—effortlessly, as if snapping their fingers.

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