Check-in, grab some breakfast and coffee, and chat with the Sponsors

Welcome to the conference, housekeeping, and introductions

People over process over tools. Why do we say that when we talk about DevOps? How does that phrase explain the basics of this transformation? Let's talk about it! In this talk, we'll dig down into the fundamentals of DevOps to understand why it's still relevant today in a world full of hot takes and new paradigms like platform engineering. In particular, we'll explore the typical people problems that block organizational changes in processes, why changing tools won't fix the underlying cultural issue, and how you can use this knowledge to help your organization make a successful transformation, whether that's a classic DevOps transformation or adding the platform engineering idea to your already successful DevOps world. Whether you're an individual contributor, a manager, or an executive, let's explore why successful organizational change requires us to think of people over process over tools.

CI/CD is now considered table stakes for any modern software team. The reality, however, is quite different: DevOps and SRE teams are constantly struggling to keep static testing and staging environments up and running. If teams don't have a place to test and validate their code how can they possibly release it, let alone continuously?

Ephemeral environments have coalesced as the solution for FAANG and are starting to pick up steam for everyone else. Short-lived, isolated, and disposable environments allow DevOps and SRE teams to stop worrying about broken environments blocking deployments.

Join Natalie as she shares best practices for implementing ephemeral environments and understanding their benefits to unblock your CI/CD. She will cover test before merge, security, cost control, and ideal developer workflows.

Platform ROI: More Than Just Dollars.

You don't have to be an accountant. You just need to understand your company's culture. A brief overview of ROI and why it matters and then we will dive in to learn about:

1. Calculating ROI:

I'll unravel the mysteries of ROI calculation, making it clear and something you can do yourself.
Real-world examples and practical tips will be served with a side of humor, proving that ROI can be both enlightening and entertaining.

1. Corporate Culture Impact:

Discover the connections between corporate culture and platform ROI. We'll explore the importance of alignment that can affect ROI decisions.

1. Beyond Cost Justification:

Beyond dollars and cents, we'll delve into the world of non-financial benefits. Think of them as the hidden treasures of ROI – valuable, yet often overlooked. Improved productivity, innovation, and market gains will be showcased.

If you write code, you should review code.
That's it.
That's the talk.

There are quite a few "reasons" why developers at various levels find themselves code-review averse: impostor syndrome, time constraints, and area of expertise are a few I've heard. For code owners and project leads, it's a constant battle.

But it shouldn't be! It doesn't have to be!

Let's discuss the benefits of reviewing code, what it is, what it isn't, and how to make it more than the blind rubber stamp approvals we've grown used to. I'll show you my process and things that have helped me cultivate totally awesome code reviewers!

Mentorship is important to build into your organization. In order to maintain a cohesive culture of your organization, you must pass on a legacy. Mentorship allows you to impart values, creates a cohesive culture and shares experiential wisdom. Creating a caring, diverse, supportive environment allows your team to build the skills and attitudes they need for success. In this presentation, you will learn the Four Deadly Sins of Mentorship that will make or break your organization.

Mentorship can come from people in the same industry, people of varying ages and through various communication methods (in-person, email, video conferencing, etc.). Mentorship experiences can happen once or multiple times throughout the year. Mentorship is more about guiding others through challenging experiences that you’ve already experienced than it is about telling someone what to do.

Virtue Security is an innovative security team devoted to application security. Our penetration tests follow a unique manual process designed to identify hidden vulnerabilities in applications and infrastructure. We understand that every application is different and brings with it the need for careful consideration of the specific security implications it may introduce. Ethical hacking is our passion; by combining this dedication with years of professional experience we can identify critical threats before your applications are exposed to malicious parties.

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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!

You’ve heard about emacs vs vim , or maybe vscode vs jetbrains, I’m here to tell you there’s a text editor that is on every POSIX machine none of us know. ed, and in this ignite talk I’ll tell you everything you need to know to use it. I'm adding more characters to cover the 300 minimum required here.

When it comes to building a resilient and high-performing API platform, it’s crucial to understand that success is not solely dependent on the technology you use. During this talk, we will:
1. Discuss the recently released Platform engineering maturity model
2. Explore the intersection of people, processes, and products for platform success
3. Understand the metrics that matter for platform success

API platforms provide an API-first, self-service way of delivering and maintaining the applications that an organisation needs to grow its business. However, every organisation’s maturity is different, every team’s needs are different and subsequently, their definition of success is different!

So, how do you assess your organisation’s maturity and platform needs? What determines the success of such API platforms? What might you be missing? Tune in to find out!

Communication is key if you want to follow the principles of DevOps, but are we talking to the right people? DevOps has always meant way more than just developers and operations working together. But who else should we involve when building a product? Let's look at some questions you need to be asking about your process and see who would be involved.

Advances in generative AI like ChatGPT present new opportunities to improve learning for DevOps practitioners. In this talk, I will demonstrate how to leverage these large language models to build a customized learning assistant that helps you skill up faster. I will walk through creating your own learning assistant step-by-step, showing how it can leverage your team's documentation, tribal knowledge, and online resources to provide on-demand support. This talk will also discuss current capabilities and limitations of AI assistants with a DevOps lens. While powerful, these models still require human supervision for responsibly staying up-to-date on best practices. The goal of this talk is to start a practical discussion around augmenting our learning processes with AI while being realistic about its maturity.

There have been 201,000 people laid off over the past calendar year (as of 2024/01/31) within the tech industry. What is the IT job market been like over the past 3 years, where is it going, what should you do if you are laid off, and what to say (or not say) to peers or family members that are laid off.

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

Slalom is a next-generation professional services company creating value at the intersection of business, technology, and humanity.

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In this talk, Mark and his son, Benjamin, will demonstrate pair programming and test driven development by live coding a simple algorithm. If you've heard about how pair programming and TDD work, but haven't ever seen it in successful practice, this demonstration should clear up some common misconceptions and give you an idea of how it might be useful to you and your team.

Our Social Event for 2024 is sponsored by Slalom, and will be held at Westport Bar & Rec, from 5p-10p.

Check-in, grab some breakfast and coffee, and chat with the Sponsors

Welcome to the conference, housekeeping, and introductions

People are well, unpredictable. And sometimes so are their projects. In this talk we’ll go over how to embrace the possibility of breakage, all without risking a possible disruption. From conducting experiments, migrating databases, or implementing new features — we’ll walk through how to mitigate different pitfalls, and what we can learn when we design with chaos in mind.

We know we don’t live in a perfect world, so why do we build in a manner that requires perfection? Let’s explore how the development process might look if we embraced our breaking points. Attendees will learn the benefits of engineering for chaos, including understanding risk mitigation, how to build internal safety nets and the magic that can happen when you create safe spaces to experiment and explore.

The widespread adoption of test automation has led to numerous challenges that range from development lifecycle integration to simple scripting strategy. Just because a scenario CAN be automated does not mean it SHOULD be automated. Teams that adopt automation often rush to automate everything they can -- the automation firehose. For those scenarios that should be automated, every team must adopt an implementation plan to ensure value is derived from reliable automated test execution. In this session, the audience will learn how to automate both strategically and tactically to maximize the benefits of automation. Entry criteria will be demonstrated for automation in the development lifecycle along with a set of checks to determine automation feasibility & ROI.

With Infrastructure as Code becoming the de facto way we manage our infrastructure today, a lot of excellent tools have become widely adopted that each have a different set of strengths. In this talk we'd like to take a look at the evolution of the IaC landscape over the past decade, and where we're heading.

We'll examine some of the biggest Ops - DevOps / SRE / Platform - engineering challenges through the lens of IaC including disaster recovery, security, cost, performance and even where complexity factors in when choosing your tooling of choice. While many of us have already chosen our tooling, we may also like to consider migration and integration of multiple tools for different use cases and stacks. In this interactive talk, we'll allow you to decide which tools we explore - from CDK to Pulumi, Terraform, OpenTofu, Helm, ArgoCD to learn about how they stack up versus modern cloud native challenges.

DORA will publish its tenth report on software delivery performance this year, marking more than a decade of research into what it takes to build and scale high-performing technology teams.

Let's take a moment to reflect on how far we've come, celebrate the successes of today's DORA community, and make some predictions about the future.

This session will explore some of DORA's key findings including:

Speed and stability are not tradeoffs
A healthy culture is essential
Improve by alleviating your team's constraints
Software delivery performance is good for organizational outcomes and practitioner well-being

We will also look at some of DORA's neighbors, including flow metrics, the SPACE framework, and the Dimensions of DevEx.

Join us for success stories, cautionary tales, and advice about how to leverage DORA to help your team get better at getting better.

Sure sure, we all get the whole DevOps idea, right? Collaborate together, communicate more, and so on and so forth. But what about all the ways it can go wrong? How can you completely mess up a DevOps world? From buying DevOps to setting up so many ways to communicate we can't communicate at all, let's explore how the way to DevOps hell is paved with good intentions, all in 5 minutes or less.

It is easy for documentation with our projects to get stale. This can especially be true with diagrams. This powerful visualization that illustrates our systems, can quickly become misleading when they become out of date. What if we could make it easier to maintain visualizations of our systems, by removing the burden of classical diagramming tools or forcing people into a presentation building tool to illustrate their system?

Treating our documentation like code can be applied to how we build diagrams, through textual languages that can represent our systems. Quickly get a taste of how you can get started diagramming with code to communicate about your systems. After this talk, you will learn how you can stay in your code editor and build powerful diagrams with a consistent look and feel, enabling you to quickly communicate about your systems through illustration.

What if I told you that physics makes career paths, colleague interactions, software solutions, and dinner plans all the same?

Intriguing, right?

Newton's laws of motion and Einstein's theories of relativity can help shift how you think about, approach, and execute each of these things. Join me for a spin on "life science" and personal growth you won't soon forget.

The general trend in the industry is shifting towards cloud repatriation, 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 show engineers how easy and smooth it is to repatriate data from cloud to an on-prem air gap environment.

We've been doing DevOps since before it had a name!

It's true, the word DevOps is less than 15 years old but collaboration across teams working towards shared goals has been around for much longer than that.

The DevOps community has taken lessons and insights from other disciplines.

Many argue that DevOps isn't a tool or a job title.

Let's take some inspiration from another field and explore the idea that, perhaps, DevOps is a Way of Being.

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

Join Seth, an experienced Amazon technologist with over 12 years of experience working on the company's highly scalable systems, as he takes you on a journey through the unique DevOps culture at the online retailer Amazon.com. Discover the secrets behind the company's successful customer experience, and learn how "two-pizza teams" foster accountability and ownership in the systems they create and run in the cloud. Seth has worked with multiple of these teams, helping them incorporate best practices for building resilient workloads, and will share their technology and processes for running services in the cloud with you. Dive into real-world examples of Amazon's systems, such as how the search team uses chaos engineering to be ready for Prime Day, any day, and how transportation uses resilience best practices to keep the trucks rolling, Gain insights into the resilience strategies that Amazon employs, including chaos engineering, automated deployment, and multi-site architectures. Leave