DevOpsDays Halifax 2025

Enterprises and governments around the world are racing to adopt AI, cloud computing, and digital-first strategies to improve service delivery, operational efficiency, and application innovation. But despite heavy investments, many digital transformation initiatives fall short of expectations—not due to lack of ambition, but because of persistent gaps that are often overlooked.
In this keynote, I will dive into the critical gaps that challenge digital transformation efforts in both the public and private sectors. These gaps span organizational silos, fragmented cloud adoption, under-utilized data assets, security blind spots, rushed AI adoption, and the lack of strategic alignment between IT teams and executive leadership.
Through case studies from enterprise modernization projects, I will highlight what successful transformation looks like when governance, innovation, and agility are prioritized together. I will also address the importance of digital talent development, architecture standardization, and platform interoperability to ensure long-term resilience.

Getting your app running in one region is hard enough. Getting your app running in multiple regions is at least twice as hard. What about getting your app running in 10 regions with each region potentially being able to be authoritative? Today I'll show you how global replication can help you scale your app to however big you want across as many regions as you want by covering how Tigris works.

In the course of your day as a DevOps/SRE/Developer/SysAdmin/etc, your knowledge and expertise are in high demand. You can’t do every task every person in your org needs from you without the help of comprehensive automation.

Developers dread debugging failures in CI—but what if they didn’t have to? In this session, we’ll dive into strategies for building self-healing CI that’s trustworthy, reliable, and cost-effective.

According to a number of cloud vendor usage studies, cross-availability zone (AZ) data transfers regularly account for at least 25% of the public cloud users’ production cost. Cutting down these costs can affect your bottom line and your application affordability. All major cloud vendors provide daily aggregated cost metrics for the cross-zone network traffic, however oftentimes, these reports lack the granularity of information to tell which pods or workloads are responsible for the elevated cross-zone traffic.

This talk is about using OSS observability tools that will help you effectively identify cross-AZ traffic and allow you to understand how to slash your cloud bill costs.

Developer Experience is Dead! Long Live Developer Experience!

In this keynote-style session, we’ll take a detailed, granular look at the barriers to productivity developers face today and modern approaches for removing them. 10x developers may be a myth, but 10x organizations are very real, as proven by the influential study performed in the 1980s, ‘The Coding War Games.’

Right now, here in early 2025, we seem to be experiencing YAPP (Yet Another Productivity Philosophy), and that philosophy is converging on developer experience. It seems that with every new method, we invent to deliver products, whether physical or virtual, we reinvent productivity philosophies to go alongside them.

But which of these approaches works? DORA? SPACE? DevEx? What should we invest in and create urgency behind today so we don’t have the same discussion again in a decade?

Automated incident resolution isn’t new. But in 2025, AI-powered tools are making promises that almost sound too good to be true. The key question is: Can AI really be trusted with production systems?

In Agile environments, high-performing teams rely on more than just technical expertise, they succeed when emotional intelligence, empathy, and inclusivity are central to their culture. In “Leading with Empathy: Building Inclusive, High-Performance Teams in Agile Environments,” I’ll share how leaders and teams can foster a supportive, diverse, and collaborative atmosphere that leads to stronger outcomes. Attendees will learn actionable strategies to create psychological safety, enhance communication, and embrace diversity, ultimately building teams that perform at their best.

With over 4.5K providers, Terraform has become the de facto tool for Infrastructure as Code, yet there are many scenarios where codifying your infrastructure still requires undesirable workarounds. Whether it's a service not being supported by its respective provider, bugs within the provider, or limitations with existing resources, the workarounds these situations introduce ordinarily are not in harmony with Terraform. So how do we go from workaround to reliable and maintainable code?

In this demo driven session, I'll introduce the open-source TerraCurl project, a streamlined approach to using Terraform for making dynamic, user-configured API calls to any endpoint. Attendees can expect to learn:
- When and how to use TerraCurl
- How to manage API response data from TerraCurl API calls
- What the future of the project looks like now that we've hit 1M downloads.

This talk explores how edge computing and cloud technologies revolutionize marine industry and research through two edge computing approaches: simple data transmission devices and intelligent edge processors. Showcasing how MLOps and DevOps brings intelligence and automation to the ocean’s edge by building pipelines from ocean to us, humans by applying containerization and ML pipelines to marine environments, we unlock new possibilities for understanding and exploring underwater ecosystems and life.

The marine industry is increasingly adopting edge solutions to overcome challenges faced by environmental condition during exploration. I will walk through a complete pipeline from data collection at underwater sensors, through edge processing for immediate insights or processing data on our end on the cloud for easy processing and to gather analytics through visualization. By connecting these technical dots, we can transform how we monitor ecosystem health, track marine life, and respond to any environmental changes.

Discover how AI-driven misconfigurations expose secrets in containerized supply chains, leading to security breaches and compliance risks. This session explores real-world incidents where leaked credentials and misconfigured AI-powered deployments nearly caused major disruptions. Learn how Generative AI is transforming threat detection, secret management, and automated remediation to prevent unauthorized access. Gain actionable insights on securing CI/CD pipelines, mitigating AI-driven risks, and ensuring compliance with evolving regulations like the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) and NIST SSDF.

If you are a software engineer in 2025 you almost certainly have access to an AI Code assistant at work. This talk will go over how to get the most out of your AI assistant based upon my experience migrating Split's API wrapper code to use Harness endpoints after Split was acquired by Harness last summer. We will start with a brief overview of how LLM assistants work and then proceed to review what worked well and what didn't work well. We will go over how to design a good prompt, some examples of good prompts and bad prompts, and also go over how the order you make changes in matters for the LLM. Backtracking and knowing when to start over with your changes will also be discussed.

The Kubernetes API is awesome and so tempting to use, especially when building Observability Solutions. Nobody wants to just get raw IP addresses and ports in their network or request telemetry, it’s much better to see your pod and service metadata. But what’s even better is that getting information about all the nodes in your cluster can help you produce amazing service graphs.

This talk is a story of how we took down the Kubernetes API in our biggest production cluster at Grafana, by deploying observability tools which make heavy use of the Kubernetes API.

Open Spaces give attendees the opportunity to talk about anything they’d like. Read more about DevOpsDays open spaces here.

In this closing keynote, we’ll dive into how modern DevOps teams build resilience through culture, empathy, and practical adaptability in fast-paced, high-stakes environments.