We welcome speakers of all backgrounds and experience levels. DevOpsDays Portland is about sharing real stories, practical lessons, and building community.

There are three ways to propose a topic for this event:

• A regular presentation (~30 minutes)
• An ignite talk (5 minutes).
• A workshop (90-180 minutes). Note that we also accept sponsored workshops.

Ignite talks are five-minute talks with 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds. If you aren't familiar with the Ignite Talk format, you can find some examples at: http://ignitetalks.io/.

To increase your chances of being selected, we encourage proposals that align with the themes below and reflect the spirit of DevOpsDays: learning through experience, not theory.

🎯 Topic Areas

We’re looking for talks across the following themes:

1. Platform Engineering & Cloud-Native Systems

• Platform Engineering and internal developer platforms
• Cloud and multi-cloud operations
• Infrastructure as Code and configuration drift
• Reliability engineering, SLOs, and incident response

2. AI in Operations (From Hype to Reality)

• AI-assisted operations (incident triage, observability, automation)
• LLMs in DevOps workflows (CI/CD, debugging, runbooks)
• Running AI systems in production (evals, drift, cost, safety)
• Human-in-the-loop vs autonomous systems

3. Security, Sovereignty & Trust

• DevSecOps in practice
• Software supply chain security (SBOMs, signing, provenance)
• Digital sovereignty and data governance
• Combating disinformation and protecting system integrity

4. Sustainable & Responsible Systems

• GreenOps and cost-aware engineering
• Efficient system design (compute, storage, AI workloads)
• Tradeoffs between performance, cost, and environmental impact

5. People, Culture & Real-World DevOps

• DevOps in large or traditional enterprises
• Team structures, cognitive load, and developer experience
• Health, stress, burnout, and sustainable pace
• Lessons learned from failures, outages, and incidents

🔥 What We’re Especially Excited About

We prioritize talks that:

• Share real-world experiences (successes and failures)
• Show before/after transformations, ideally with metrics
• Focus on decisions and tradeoffs, not just tools
• Highlight unexpected lessons or counterintuitive results
• Connect tools → context → outcomes

🧭 What Makes a Great DevOpsDays Talk

• Personal story beats theory. Tell us what actually happened.
• Clarity over depth. Avoid deep technical dives—focus on what others can apply.
• Context matters. Help the audience understand why decisions were made.
• Honesty is valued. Talks that include mistakes or things that didn’t work are often the most impactful.

🌍 Community & Inclusion

• Local voices: We’re especially interested in stories from the Portland and Pacific Northwest community.
• Underrepresented voices: If DevOps hasn’t historically included people like you, we want to hear your perspective.
• Broad backgrounds: You don’t need a traditional “tech” role to have a valuable story.

🆕 Originality

We welcome talks that have been presented elsewhere, but we strongly prefer:

• New material
• Updated insights
• Local or context-specific perspectives

🚫 No Vendor Pitches

We value vendors and sponsors, but talks must not be product pitches.

• It’s fine to mention tools you used
• The focus must be on the problem, your approach, and what you learned
• Sales-driven talks will not be accepted
• No third-party submissions: This is a small community-driven event, and speakers need to be directly engaged with the organizers and attendees. If a PR firm or your marketing department is proposing the talk, you’ve already shown that as a speaker you’re distant from the process.

🎤 Final Thoughts

If you’re unsure whether your idea fits—submit it.

Some of the best DevOpsDays talks come from:

• First-time speakers
• Non-traditional backgrounds
• Stories that don’t feel “perfect”

If you learned something the hard way, chances are others will too.

Submissions close on 2026-07-06 23:59 (US/Pacific), 1 month, 1 week from now.