DevOpsDays Halifax 2025
The opening keynote will be delivered by Jennifer LaPlante, Deputy Minister of the Department of Cyber Security and Digital Solutions, Nova Scotia. With a strong background in artificial intelligence, innovation, and digital transformation, she is leading the province’s efforts to strengthen cybersecurity resilience, deliver modern digital services, and drive forward the responsible adoption of technology for both government and citizens.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
We’re excited to welcome a last-minute addition to the DevOpsDays Halifax lineup! The talk, titled “DevOps Lessons from the Cycling Guide App,” will draw from real experiences building and learning from a unique app project.
Since this session came together on short notice, we don’t have a full description from the speaker—but that’s part of the fun. Think of it as a surprise talk where the audience gets to discover the insights live. Expect a mix of practical takeaways, storytelling, and fresh perspectives on DevOps, all framed through the lens of the Cycling Guide App.
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.
ArticiPay is tackling a persistent, overlooked problem in academic research: recruiting and compensating human participants efficiently, ethically, and at scale. Designed specifically for Canadian researchers—including graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty—ArticiPay addresses the inefficiencies of traditional recruitment methods like email blasts, social media posts, and word-of-mouth referrals. These outdated tools often result in delays, low diversity, and compliance risks.
In this talk, I'll present how ArticiPay uses an intelligent AI agent to streamline the participant recruitment process through a secure platform that offers verified participant pools, built-in eligibility screening, and automated compensation. I'll share insights from working with researchers at U15 institutions and explore how technology can support ethical, human-centered research in fields like psychology, social sciences, HCI, and public health. This session is relevant for tech builders, academic innovators, and anyone interested in the intersection of research, compliance, and scalable digital infrastructure.
As Gen Z developers enter the workforce in greater numbers, retention is becoming less about salary or perks and more about culture. This talk shares a perspective from the next wave of engineers: what younger developers expect from modern DevOps teams, what happens when those expectations clash with reality, and why the gap can quietly drive new hires away.
Based on recent experience as a Computer Science student and FinTech intern, the session highlights cultural practices that foster engagement and productivity, such as transparency, psychological safety, and strong learning culture, and contrasts them with conditions that risk losing junior developers before realizing their full potential. Practical steps for senior engineers and teams will be outlined to build environments where new developers not only succeed, but also choose to stay.
By reframing culture as a core component of engineering success, the talk opens a conversation on bridging the student-to-professional gap in DevOps.
I had the opportunity to contribute to an industrial automation project that is transforming one of manufacturing's most overlooked but critical challenges: the design-for-manufacturing (DFX) review process for advanced 3D electronic packaging.
Traditional DFX reviews often rely on fragmented 2D EDA design data and manual 3D modeling checks, which lead to long cycle times, frequent errors, and poor collaboration between electrical, mechanical, and manufacturing teams. At Presence Technologies, the team addressed this by developing an in-house 3D-DFX review platform that integrates CAD and EDA data, enforces rule-based quality checks, and automates approval workflows. This solution includes a centralized SQL metadata structure, Python-based validation pipelines, and custom GUI tools to visualize inspection results and communicate design risks clearly to engineers.
During my time working on this project, I helped design data processing pipelines and test early interface concepts. I want to share this story to help more people see how even small, focused software solutions can make a real difference in traditional industries. As a woman in tech, I believe highlighting these kinds of efforts is essential for encouraging more diverse voices to contribute to industrial innovation. Today, this software is already being used in the construction of spacecraft, and I’m committed to exploring and developing new application areas for it in the future.
You have vendors. Your vendors have vendors. It's vendors all the way down. When one of your vendors has an incident or outage, your customers feel it, and your customers don't care who your vendors are. So it's up to you to manage expectations even when you can't facilitate fixing the problem.
Open Spaces give attendees the opportunity to talk about anything they’d like. Read more about DevOpsDays open spaces here.
As industries accelerate their digital transformation, the convergence of Industrial DevOps and Generative AI is reshaping how complex, safety-critical, and cyber-physical systems are built, tested, and delivered. Industrial DevOps, grounded in 9 key principles that enable the rapid and secure development of systems across domains such as aerospace, defense, energy, and manufacturing. The advent of Generative AI introduces unprecedented capabilities in automating documentation, generating system models, code synthesis, test case generation, and anomaly detection. This paper explores how Generative AI amplifies the impact of Industrial DevOps by reducing cognitive load, accelerating feedback cycles, and enabling dynamic collaboration across traditionally siloed engineering functions. We present real-world use cases and emerging patterns that illustrate how the synergy between Generative AI and Industrial DevOps supports faster delivery, improved resilience, and increased innovation in regulated environments.