Join us at DevOpsDays Portland - September 8-10, 2026 at Portland State University!

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 closed on 2026-07-06 23:59 (US/Pacific).