{"$schema": "https://c3voc.de/schedule/schema.json", "generator": {"name": "pretalx", "version": "2026.3.0.dev0", "url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org"}, "schedule": {"url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/schedule/", "version": "0.5", "base_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org", "conference": {"acronym": "devopsdays-portland-2026", "title": "devopsdays Portland 2026", "start": "2026-09-08", "end": "2026-09-10", "daysCount": 3, "timeslot_duration": "00:05", "time_zone_name": "US/Pacific", "colors": {"primary": "#3aa57c"}, "rooms": [{"name": "Room 327", "slug": "292-room-327", "guid": "b0808a54-5b8d-5a90-9a39-1132eebe9696", "description": null, "capacity": null}, {"name": "Room 328", "slug": "294-room-328", "guid": "b55baf91-0238-5572-bb73-f47b2d3e441b", "description": null, "capacity": null}, {"name": "Room 329", "slug": "293-room-329", "guid": "3e15542c-9f08-5e68-8f48-9ccf7327fc2e", "description": null, "capacity": null}, {"name": "Vanport Room", "slug": "276-vanport-room", "guid": "52eb9439-8449-541f-a0eb-5eb7ca6f61b4", "description": "Room 338, behind the ballroom is the vendor hall.", "capacity": null}, {"name": "Ballroom", "slug": "275-ballroom", "guid": "43f6f383-44f6-577e-a9a6-480b021db281", "description": "Room 355, the main Smith ballroom", "capacity": null}, {"name": "Pacwest Patio", "slug": "298-pacwest-patio", "guid": "af94d042-4798-590d-8bb5-5d8c228dc2c6", "description": "Migration Brewing Pacwest Patio. 1211 SW 5th Ave Portland, OR 97204", "capacity": null}], "tracks": [{"name": "Main Track", "slug": "232-main-track", "color": "#d53a5c"}, {"name": "Open Spaces", "slug": "233-open-spaces", "color": "#26b22d"}, {"name": "Happy Hour", "slug": "234-happy-hour", "color": "#5471f8"}, {"name": "Workshops", "slug": "236-workshops", "color": "#d9790a"}, {"name": "Program", "slug": "235-program", "color": "#fb34f1"}, {"name": "Sponsors", "slug": "237-sponsors", "color": "#b03dfa"}], "days": [{"index": 1, "date": "2026-09-08", "day_start": "2026-09-08T04:00:00-07:00", "day_end": "2026-09-09T03:59:00-07:00", "rooms": {"Room 327": [{"guid": "6602ac92-737a-5218-bf54-1a58a86b93be", "code": "BYT7TC", "id": 6809, "logo": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/media/devopsdays-portland-2026/submissions/BYT7TC/image_9ClNi0N.webp", "date": "2026-09-08T13:00:00-07:00", "start": "13:00", "end": "2026-09-08T15:00:00-07:00", "duration": "02:00", "room": "Room 327", "slug": "devopsdays-portland-2026-6809-build-a-platform-unleash-an-agent-on-it-and-watch-it-burn", "url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/BYT7TC/", "title": "Build a Platform, Unleash an Agent on It\u2026 and Watch It Burn", "subtitle": "", "track": "Workshops", "type": "Workshop", "language": "en", "abstract": "We built a burrito-ordering AI agent, put it on Kubernetes with scoped cluster access and a live terminal, and let a room of engineers try to break it.  It is tons of fun.  \nOver three rounds they push the agent to steal customer data, deploy malicious workloads, and take the cluster down. Forkbombs anyone!   \n\nThe first round has nothing protecting the agent, and it usually falls apart in about one prompt. \n\nThe second runs the same attacks against an ordinary CNCF platform floor, which blocks most of them, though a few run up a bill before they get stopped. \n\nIn the third round attendees switch on the remaining guardrails themselves and watch how the agent's behavior and its token cost change.\n\nRunning it taught us that for most shops, AI doesn't create just brand-new security problems it also makes the ones you already have more expensive. Token spend becomes its own denial-of-service vector for example. Most of what your platform already does holds up against an agent (or for an agent), and the gap that's left is smaller and stranger than people assume.  This workshop covers the base guardrails as well as that enhanced gap that you must have for AI workloads.   \n\nWe ran this at AI Engineer World's Fair on June 29th 2026. This version covers what held up, what broke, and what we've changed since.  We have made vast improvements including model triage, provisioning and sandboxing (as an option).   This will be a very evolved, much more polished, and much more expanded presentation than the one we ran at AI Engineer World's Fair. This will be much more hands-on instead of just a web interface. They will actually get access to their own cluster.", "description": "You get a Kubernetes cluster already running a full internal developer platform with 34 components.  You also get an AI agent with access to that cluster and a BurritoBot Web Interface to that Agent. \nYour job is to make the agent do damage. Ask it to deploy a workload the policies forbid. Ask it to give itself more permissions. Ask it to change infrastructure without going through Git. Ask it to read a secret and hand you back the value. Some of those attempts get stopped by the platform. The rest get through, until you switch on guardrails built for agents specifically.\nThe session runs across three clusters. The first has nothing protecting the agent: all three attacks land, a counter on screen shows the cloud bill climbing, and a fork bomb takes the cluster down. The second runs the same attacks against the platform controls, where each one is blocked by a different thing (a NetworkPolicy egress rule, a Kyverno registry allowlist, a per-pod PID limit), though the bill still moves because the request reached the model before anything stopped it. In the third you drive your own agent, switch on the agent-specific guardrails (output filtering, input filtering, tool restriction), and watch each one change the agent's behavior on the dashboard.\nThe part most teams miss: almost everything an agent tries against a real platform is already handled by tools you probably run today, like admission control, RBAC, and GitOps. What those tools can't see is the agent's input, its output, and the tools it's allowed to reach. That's the part agents change, and it's where this workshop spends its time.  By the end of this workshop you will know what infrastructure guardrails help and where you need AI specific guardrails to fill the gaps.  \n\nYou work entirely in a browser, with a chat window to your agent and a terminal to your cluster. Nothing to install. \nEverything is CNCF or open source: Argo CD, Kyverno, Falco, Istio ambient, LLM Guard, agentgateway, kagent on Bedrock, and the rest of a 35-component platform.", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "UJ3BLE", "name": "Michael Forrester", "avatar": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/media/avatars/LPWZY8_GGjPJx0.webp", "biography": "Michael Forrester is a student, explorer, and educator working at the boundary between humanity and technology. Over 25+ years he's gone from CTO to IC across operations, AI, cloud, and platform engineering, with time at AWS, ThoughtWorks, Red Hat, and Honeywell. His training has reached over a million engineers, and he now leads AI-for-organizations work as a Principal Training Architect at Accenture LearnVantage. His current focus is agentic AI security: how the CNCF platform stack most teams already run \u2014 GitOps, admission control, runtime detection, observability \u2014 covers roughly 80% of what governs AI agents in production, and what the remaining 20% actually takes, namely agent identity, LLM input/output sanitization, and MCP tool-call governance. He speaks at KubeCon, CNCF events, and most recently AI Engineer World's Fair on Claude Code, MCP, and agent governance for platform engineers. Tools don't transform organizations. People do.", "public_name": "Michael Forrester", "guid": "f043d2b8-898f-5756-af89-f12657426ca7", "url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/speaker/UJ3BLE/"}, {"code": "SGN3FM", "name": "Whitney Lee", "avatar": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/media/avatars/3UYDTD_tKQmIkZ.jpg", "biography": "Whitney Lee is a creator and systems thinker who explores how observability, AI, and platform engineering connect across the cloud native ecosystem. She brings humor, depth, and clarity to complex technologies while building original frameworks that help others understand how systems fit together. She runs a vibrant YouTube channel, hosts Datadog Illuminated and Software Defined Interviews, has delivered two KubeCon keynotes and countless breakout talks, and combines storytelling and technical rigor to illuminate the human side of cloud native engineering.", "public_name": "Whitney Lee", "guid": "141a18de-6b6c-59ba-be09-369da6e959e2", "url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/speaker/SGN3FM/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/BYT7TC/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/BYT7TC/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "cdca8997-0b41-51c5-8869-fd09084796a4", "code": "LQKTLA", "id": 6641, "logo": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/media/devopsdays-portland-2026/submissions/LQKTLA/image_s4huzmB.webp", "date": "2026-09-08T15:00:00-07:00", "start": "15:00", "end": "2026-09-08T17:00:00-07:00", "duration": "02:00", "room": "Room 327", "slug": "devopsdays-portland-2026-6641-choose-your-own-cncf-observability-project-adventure", "url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/LQKTLA/", "title": "Choose Your Own CNCF Observability Project Adventure", "subtitle": "", "track": "Workshops", "type": "Workshop", "language": "en", "abstract": "Great observability begins with great instrumentation! We know it's hard to decide where to start your observability journey, so we've come up with a perfect introduction to this observability workshop collection getting you hands-on with the best CNCF open source cloud native observability projects available. Attendees can pick their own cloud native observability learning path (https://o11y-workshops.gitlab.io) in this session from the following workshops:\n\nOpenTelemetry (traces) - Learn how to adopt OpenTelemetry by instrumenting a sample application with spans and metrics. You\u2019ll leave with an understanding of how telemetry travels and be ready to bring OpenTelemetry to your project. The workshop is self-paced and available online, so attendees can continue to explore after the event: https://o11y-workshops.gitlab.io/workshop-opentelemetry\n\nOpenTelemetry for Java Developers (Java) - Ready to go deeper with OpenTelemetry? This workshop guides you through setting up OTel and instrumenting a Java application locally to collect and analyze trace data. You'll work hands-on across automatic, programmatic, and manual instrumentation, explore your traces in Jaeger, and link metrics to traces via exemplars. The workshop is self-paced and available online, so attendees can continue to explore after the event: https://o11y-workshops.gitlab.io/workshop-otel-developers/\n\nPrometheus (metrics) - During the workshop, you will install Prometheus, collect metrics, and learn how to effectively run it in your observability stack. The workshop is self-paced and available online, so attendees can continue to explore after the event:  https://o11y-workshops.gitlab.io/workshop-prometheus\n\nFluent Bit (pipelines) - This workshop will guide you through the open source project Fluent Bit, what it is, a basic installation, and setting up a first cloud native observability pipeline project. The workshop is self-paced and available online, so attendees can continue to explore after the event: https://o11y-workshops.gitlab.io/workshop-fluentbit\n\nPerses (visualization) - Great observability is impossible without great visualization! Learn how to adopt truly open visualization by installing Perses, exploring the provided tooling, tinkering with its API, and then get your hands dirty building your first dashboard in no time!  The workshop is self-paced and available online, so attendees can continue to explore after the event: https://o11y-workshops.gitlab.io/workshop-perses", "description": "This workshop is never the same twice as the attendees choose from a list of CNCF cloud native observability technologies and get hands-on learning about metrics, data pipelines, traces, and data visualization. Each workshop is engaging and requires attendees to solve common challenges as they learn about the open source solutions that interest them the most! Presented by a Fluent Bit maintainer and CNCF Ambassador.", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "YCRWAQ", "name": "Eric D. Schabell", "avatar": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/media/avatars/ATWAJF_g9x7oo5.webp", "biography": "Eric is renowned in the development community as a speaker, lecturer, author, baseball expert, open source maintainer and CNCF Ambassador. As Technology Advocate Lead at SUSE, he chooses roles that allow him to help the world understand the challenges they are facing with cloud native, development, and observability. He brings a unique perspective to the stage with a professional life dedicated to sharing his deep expertise of open source technologies and organizations. More on https://www.schabell.org.", "public_name": "Eric D. Schabell", "guid": "7333a56a-cd88-5724-98ef-3e533032074d", "url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/speaker/YCRWAQ/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/LQKTLA/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/LQKTLA/", "attachments": []}], "Room 329": [{"guid": "1d2fc865-62a8-5f9b-87c7-a15861ef817e", "code": "UDZRAS", "id": 6825, "logo": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/media/devopsdays-portland-2026/submissions/UDZRAS/image_417CGTf.webp", "date": "2026-09-08T13:00:00-07:00", "start": "13:00", "end": "2026-09-08T15:00:00-07:00", "duration": "02:00", "room": "Room 329", "slug": "devopsdays-portland-2026-6825-introduction-to-openvox-and-configuration-management", "url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/UDZRAS/", "title": "Introduction to OpenVox and configuration management", "subtitle": "", "track": "Workshops", "type": "Workshop", "language": "en", "abstract": "OpenVox is the modern open source implementation of the world's most capable configuration management platform -- trusted by everyone from the smallest hobbyist to operators of some of the largest commercial infrastructures in the business. With OpenVox as the engine powering infrastructure deployment and configuration, it's easy to see why the community maintained OSS fork of Puppet is becoming the industry standard in resource abstraction and drift remediation.\n\nThis workshop will introduce you to the concepts of declarative and idempotent programming as well as the tried-and-true patterns developed by the community over the last two decades. Start off with the roles and profiles method to learn how composable your infrastructure can be, and get into the weeds with your own component modules for when you have to go beyond the basics.\n\nCome get your hands dirty and learn the foundations of configuration management.", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "ECHVFA", "name": "Ben Ford", "avatar": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/media/avatars/GPGAYA_HgROclF.webp", "biography": "Ben is a software engineer and community leader with extensive knowledge and expertise in the Puppet ecosystem. He's honored to call many of you friend and learn from you every day. He's been organizing Linux Users Groups, run clubs, and roller derby teams for most of his adult life and even a bit before that. Before coming to Puppet, he taught Anthropology grad students how to code in Java and then used that experience to introduce Puppet to many of you.\n\nBen has been obsessed with collective benefit for decades and is motivated by enabling the success of others. He's been dreaming of a world in which his skills don't just feed the capitalist maw. He is a long-distance runner but isn't interested in boasting about race times; he'd rather hear how your race went for", "public_name": "Ben Ford", "guid": "fb27c830-ec40-5674-a803-1d73fc0582e7", "url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/speaker/ECHVFA/"}, {"code": "DUZQLH", "name": "Charlie Sharpsteen", "avatar": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/media/avatars/PNNAQV_enwJ8RP.webp", "biography": "Fisherman by birth. Civil Engineer by training. Charlie Sharpsteen is a Principal Solutions Engineer at Overlook InfraTech where he spends his time pulling infrastructure and configuration management tools apart to understand why the pieces work they way they do.", "public_name": "Charlie Sharpsteen", "guid": "6214a6e6-aee8-51f4-914c-d824ceecb3db", "url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/speaker/DUZQLH/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/UDZRAS/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/UDZRAS/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "b5c03da9-1797-560f-bb8c-dea049520ced", "code": "FFVUSJ", "id": 7080, "logo": null, "date": "2026-09-08T15:00:00-07:00", "start": "15:00", "end": "2026-09-08T17:00:00-07:00", "duration": "02:00", "room": "Room 329", "slug": "devopsdays-portland-2026-7080-ask-your-microservices-anything-knowledge-graphs-for-devops-rag", "url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/FFVUSJ/", "title": "Ask Your Microservices Anything: Knowledge Graphs for DevOps RAG", "subtitle": "", "track": "Workshops", "type": "Workshop", "language": "en", "abstract": "\"If the Database goes down, what breaks?\" The answer lives in a wiki page that was accurate eighteen months ago, a ticket queue nobody trusts, and one person's head. \n\nYou could point a RAG chatbot at your docs. We'll do exactly that and watch our vector search return a fluent, well-formatted, incorrect number. We'll try the obvious fix, watch it appear to work, and unpack why that's the most dangerous result of the day.\n\nThen we'll fix it properly. Working against a free graph database holding both your service topology and your unstructured ticket text, you'll build four retrieval strategies and learn exactly what each one gives up: semantic (vector) search, parameterized graph db queries, the two combined, and natural-language-to-query. \n\nYou'll build it twice on the same data: once in Python, once in a no-code agent builder. You leave with both, and a working agent you can adapt to your own infrastructure.\n\nTakeaways\n- Model infrastructure, ownership, and work-in-flight as one queryable graph\n- Choose a retrieval strategy deliberately instead of defaulting to one search approach\n- Build an assistant/agent from the ground up!\n- Recognize some specific shapes of question an LLM will answer confidently and wrongly", "description": "2 hour workshop\n\nPrerequisites: A laptop, you'll signup for a free graph database account, and will be provided with an LLM API key.\n\nNo AI agent, graph, or query-language experience needed.", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "QZNBUY", "name": "Jeremy Adams", "avatar": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/media/avatars/8KTQVV_G6EhKix.webp", "biography": "Jeremy one of those curious folks with both a technical and a strategic streak. Passionate about people and entrepreneurship, integration and automation. Through technical/business roles at Neo4j, Dagger, GitHub, Twistlock, and Puppet, Jeremy has both zoomed in and zoomed out a lot, acquiring an appreciation for the details and an ever-broader sense of the big architectural picture.", "public_name": "Jeremy Adams", "guid": "2359c4aa-a88b-5aa2-bdd7-b341f27c5bcf", "url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/speaker/QZNBUY/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/FFVUSJ/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/FFVUSJ/", "attachments": []}]}}, {"index": 2, "date": "2026-09-09", "day_start": "2026-09-09T04:00:00-07:00", "day_end": "2026-09-10T03:59:00-07:00", "rooms": {"Vanport Room": [{"guid": "5b527b2d-317c-5e8d-9f83-12ad359cf080", "code": "UGWCGA", "id": 7065, "logo": null, "date": "2026-09-09T08:00:00-07:00", "start": "08:00", "end": "2026-09-09T09:00:00-07:00", "duration": "01:00", "room": "Vanport Room", "slug": "devopsdays-portland-2026-7065-0-vendor-hall", "url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/UGWCGA/", "title": "Vendor Hall", "subtitle": "", "track": "Sponsors", "type": "Other", "language": "en", "abstract": "Wake up with your morning coffee and chat with our friendly sponsors who make this whole thing happen. From cloud vendors to local meetups with the coolest stickers, you'll see them all and come away with some neat swag.", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/UGWCGA/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/UGWCGA/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "c03da75f-f4f2-53ea-8db3-6753522b672a", "code": "UGWCGA", "id": 7065, "logo": null, "date": "2026-09-09T11:50:00-07:00", "start": "11:50", "end": "2026-09-09T13:30:00-07:00", "duration": "01:40", "room": "Vanport Room", "slug": "devopsdays-portland-2026-7065-1-vendor-hall", "url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/UGWCGA/", "title": "Vendor Hall", "subtitle": "", "track": "Sponsors", "type": "Other", "language": "en", "abstract": "Wake up with your morning coffee and chat with our friendly sponsors who make this whole thing happen. From cloud vendors to local meetups with the coolest stickers, you'll see them all and come away with some neat swag.", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/UGWCGA/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/UGWCGA/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "2a3f1158-0039-55a9-b258-b8de3c14fe0c", "code": "UGWCGA", "id": 7065, "logo": null, "date": "2026-09-09T14:05:00-07:00", "start": "14:05", "end": "2026-09-09T16:15:00-07:00", "duration": "02:10", "room": "Vanport Room", "slug": "devopsdays-portland-2026-7065-2-vendor-hall", "url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/UGWCGA/", "title": "Vendor Hall", "subtitle": "", "track": "Sponsors", "type": "Other", "language": "en", "abstract": "Wake up with your morning coffee and chat with our friendly sponsors who make this whole thing happen. From cloud vendors to local meetups with the coolest stickers, you'll see them all and come away with some neat swag.", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/UGWCGA/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/UGWCGA/", "attachments": []}], "Ballroom": [{"guid": "7fd0f602-6a28-5f32-b477-79a1b8dc05ef", "code": "PLKMWD", "id": 7068, "logo": null, "date": "2026-09-09T08:00:00-07:00", "start": "08:00", "end": "2026-09-09T09:00:00-07:00", "duration": "01:00", "room": "Ballroom", "slug": "devopsdays-portland-2026-7068-0-registration", "url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/PLKMWD/", "title": "Registration", "subtitle": "", "track": "Program", "type": "Other", "language": "en", "abstract": "Checkin and registration will be just inside the ballroom door.", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/PLKMWD/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/PLKMWD/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "2defd57c-6802-52e8-8bc4-bfc09ac522ce", "code": "W9KPSR", "id": 7069, "logo": null, "date": "2026-09-09T09:00:00-07:00", "start": "09:00", "end": "2026-09-09T09:15:00-07:00", "duration": "00:15", "room": "Ballroom", "slug": "devopsdays-portland-2026-7069-0-opening-and-welcome", "url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/W9KPSR/", "title": "Opening and Welcome", "subtitle": "", "track": "Program", "type": "Other", "language": "en", "abstract": "Welcome to DevOpsDays PDX! Each morning, we'll share logistics for the day.", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/W9KPSR/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/W9KPSR/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "d4fe93ef-3ca8-55a6-bc9c-e2593c7955bc", "code": "H9F7DJ", "id": 6706, "logo": null, "date": "2026-09-09T09:15:00-07:00", "start": "09:15", "end": "2026-09-09T09:45:00-07:00", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom", "slug": "devopsdays-portland-2026-6706-the-ebbs-and-flows-of-portland-s-devops-scene", "url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/H9F7DJ/", "title": "The Ebbs and Flows of Portland's DevOps Scene", "subtitle": "", "track": "Main Track", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "A look at the history of the DevOp scene in Portland and how our city fits into the worldwide community. We will explore its ebbs and flows. Finally, what does the advent of AI infrastructure mean for the local DevOps community?", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "7B9VTN", "name": "Alex Williams", "avatar": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/media/avatars/ZGNYEN_u5zkGMP.webp", "biography": "Alex Williams is the founder of The New Stack, a news site that explains and analyzes what's pertinent to engineers as they develop scaled-out infrastructure for today's complex applications.. After a 12-year run, Alex has retired. He loves the DevOps world and plans to spend the years ahead traveling, writing, cooking, and playing golf as much as possible. 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But what they talk about is up to them; they may pitch their product, they may promote an idea. They may even raffle off a fun prize! You'll have to be there to see.", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/8HJXAX/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/8HJXAX/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "bb7a896a-0aa6-5f46-affa-d454c8153429", "code": "3P9HFW", "id": 6365, "logo": null, "date": "2026-09-09T09:55:00-07:00", "start": "09:55", "end": "2026-09-09T10:25:00-07:00", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom", "slug": "devopsdays-portland-2026-6365-when-the-ai-is-the-incident-preparing-your-team-for-a-new-kind-of-failure", "url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/3P9HFW/", "title": "When the AI Is the Incident: Preparing Your Team for a New Kind of Failure", "subtitle": "", "track": "Main Track", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "Your on-call process was built for software bugs. A service goes down, an alert fires, someone pages the right engineer, and you work the problem. But AI systems fail differently: they degrade quietly, hallucinate confidently, and resist the clean root cause analysis your runbooks were written around. If 2025 was the year of AI adoption, 2026 is shaping up to be the year everyone finds out their incident response process wasn't built for this.\n\nThis talk examines what's genuinely new about AI incidents: the failure modes, the metrics that matter, and why your existing playbooks miss them entirely. We'll dig into what needs to change across process, roles, and communication, and what teams handling this well are already doing differently, before the next AI failure exposes the gap.", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "TMECBU", "name": "Kat Gaines", "avatar": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/media/avatars/202101016-9651-Edit_luRKIq0.jpg", "biography": "Kat spent years leading technical support teams on the front lines of incident response before moving to the stage to talk about it. As Senior Manager of Developer Relations at PagerDuty, she leverages 12+ years of experience to help teams communicate clearly when everything is on fire. She speaks at conferences globally on sustainable incident management practices, cross-functional collaboration, and career development. When she's not wrangling incidents, she's wrangling two rabbits (Lupin and Ginny), a dog named Violet, and an ambitious collection of houseplants.", "public_name": "Kat Gaines", "guid": "7624fa13-f0c6-5230-965b-4451f4a6b379", "url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/speaker/TMECBU/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/3P9HFW/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/3P9HFW/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "d8ce4b0e-f2e8-5e38-8acc-dc2d8ae2b3ac", "code": "HJUQWB", "id": 6629, "logo": null, "date": "2026-09-09T10:40:00-07:00", "start": "10:40", "end": "2026-09-09T11:10:00-07:00", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom", "slug": "devopsdays-portland-2026-6629-so-you-want-to-devops-an-llm-a-field-guide-from-confusion-to-clarity", "url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/HJUQWB/", "title": "So You Want to DevOps an LLM: A Field Guide from Confusion to Clarity", "subtitle": "", "track": "Main Track", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "What does it actually take to run LLMs in production and why is it so hard to find clear answers?\nThis talk is a practical walkthrough of the core MLOps concepts behind modern LLM systems, built from scratch out of necessity. Faced with a scattered ecosystem and limited end-to-end guidance, I set out to piece together how everything fits: from GPUs and custom silicon, to ML pipelines and fine-tuning, to the realities of serving models at scale.\nIn 30 minutes, I will try to lay out the fundamentals, such as hardware tradeoffs, model optimization techniques like quantization, and the mechanics of high-performance inference such as KV caching, batching, and distributed serving. \nThis isn\u2019t a polished framework or step-by-step guide, but it is a cohesive map of the basics. If you\u2019ve struggled to understand how to \u201cDevOps\u201d LLMs, this talk will help you bridge the gaps and build your own mental model.", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "XGZRGV", "name": "Maarika Teose", "avatar": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/media/avatars/3EAURF_ra0zgHX.webp", "biography": "Maarika Teose is a technology leader with over a decade of experience driving innovation across diverse industries. She is currently the Head of DevSecOps for a global automotive OEM, where she focuses on delivering secure, scalable software development platforms for next-generation Advanced Driver Assistance Systems. Previously, she led DevOps for Powell\u2019s Books, and was a Release Manager at Jama Software. She is passionate about leadership and developing high performing teams. She is a proud mom of two kiddos and loves to dance.", "public_name": "Maarika Teose", "guid": "80cd7e32-f1bf-5de4-a4de-8536524b9a9e", "url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/speaker/XGZRGV/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/HJUQWB/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/HJUQWB/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "ca2ef042-0eaa-51a2-b13d-2b5f8498bac9", "code": "8HJXAX", "id": 7074, "logo": null, "date": "2026-09-09T11:10:00-07:00", "start": "11:10", "end": "2026-09-09T11:20:00-07:00", "duration": "00:10", "room": "Ballroom", "slug": "devopsdays-portland-2026-7074-1-sponsors", "url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/8HJXAX/", "title": "Sponsors", "subtitle": "", "track": "Sponsors", "type": "Other", "language": "en", "abstract": "And now a quick word from our amazing sponsors who make events like this possible. But what they talk about is up to them; they may pitch their product, they may promote an idea. They may even raffle off a fun prize! You'll have to be there to see.", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/8HJXAX/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/8HJXAX/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "f9a4c07a-4e5c-5087-ac94-fb9faf29ed7c", "code": "GDDBWE", "id": 6648, "logo": null, "date": "2026-09-09T11:20:00-07:00", "start": "11:20", "end": "2026-09-09T11:50:00-07:00", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom", "slug": "devopsdays-portland-2026-6648-swapping-the-engine-mid-flight-migrating-a-live-decision-system-with-zero-behavior-change", "url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/GDDBWE/", "title": "Swapping the Engine Mid-Flight: Migrating a Live Decision System with Zero Behavior Change", "subtitle": "", "track": "Main Track", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "We replaced the engine behind a high-traffic, real-time decision system - while it kept running, with no user-visible change. This is the honest story of de-risking a high-stakes migration from a legacy rule engine to a new platform, and the techniques that made it survivable.\nI'll walk through what actually worked: shadow/replay testing that ran old and new side-by-side on real traffic and diffed every response; a switchable flow that let us flip and instantly un-flip the traffic without a code change or deployment; automated configuration-drift detection between the two systems; and a staged rollout where rollback was a designed feature, not a panic button. You'll hear the decisions and tradeoffs behind each choice, the bugs that equivalence testing caught but code review missed, and the things we still got wrong.\nIf you're staring down a scary migration of something that can't go down, you'll leave with a concrete, reusable playbook and a more honest sense of what \"zero downtime\" really costs.", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "FSCBZT", "name": "Ankit Agarwal", "avatar": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/media/avatars/YSVNCR_F5yHpyM.webp", "biography": "Ankit Agarwal is a Senior Software Engineer at TikTok, Inc. in Seattle, Washington, with over ten years of specialized experience across four of the most technically demanding organizations in the global technology industry. Ankit began their career at SAP SE, contributing to backend itinerary services infrastructure within the enterprise travel division of a company serving over 400,000 customers across 180 countries. Ankit then joined Amazon, where they engineered real-time fraud detection systems on the buyer fraud prevention team - work that directly protected the financial integrity of one of the world's highest-volume transactional platforms, serving hundreds of millions of customers. At Microsoft, Ankit served as a software engineer on the Azure Container Registry team, contributing to the cloud-native artifact infrastructure that underpins deployment pipelines for enterprises globally. Ankit currently holds a critical role on TikTok's Decisions Platform team, responsible for the real-time decision infrastructure serving over one billion users. Key contributions include leading the live migration of a production decision engine with zero behavioral change, designing a shadow and equivalence testing framework to validate correctness under live traffic, building configuration-drift detection systems, and pioneering the integration of AI tooling into production DevOps workflows. This decade-long trajectory across SAP, Amazon, Microsoft, and TikTok reflects a sustained record of original, high-impact engineering contribution at a level characteristic of a professional at the top of their field.", "public_name": "Ankit Agarwal", "guid": "48e5e27b-4c5d-5c01-afeb-8b4914e9abb0", "url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/speaker/FSCBZT/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/GDDBWE/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/GDDBWE/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "e8bd569f-d04b-59ea-88e9-e85a06118bfd", "code": "9HJXBM", "id": 7070, "logo": null, "date": "2026-09-09T11:50:00-07:00", "start": "11:50", "end": "2026-09-09T12:10:00-07:00", "duration": "00:20", "room": "Ballroom", "slug": "devopsdays-portland-2026-7070-0-open-spaces-opening", "url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/9HJXBM/", "title": "Open Spaces Opening", "subtitle": "", "track": "Program", "type": "Other", "language": "en", "abstract": "Open Spaces are self-organized semi-structured conversations. The sessions are created onsite and will be distributed amongst available space in the three classrooms (327-329). Please come with ideas of topics you'd like to discuss.\n\nSee https://devopsdays.org/open-space-format/ for more information.", "description": "The opening is a quick explanation of the mechanics of the Open Spaces format and the timeline. Then individuals who'd like to propose topics for the day each have a quick minute to explain what they have in mind for the conversation.\n\nEach topic is added to the board, then as we break for lunch, each individual is invited to vote for the topics they're interested in with a hash mark. We will then fill the space we have with as many sessions as we can fit in.", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/9HJXBM/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/9HJXBM/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "eba16a11-c5d1-501b-bfd5-9df1ae4df666", "code": "VBZWPB", "id": 7067, "logo": null, "date": "2026-09-09T12:10:00-07:00", "start": "12:10", "end": "2026-09-09T13:30:00-07:00", "duration": "01:20", "room": "Ballroom", "slug": "devopsdays-portland-2026-7067-0-lunch-break", "url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/VBZWPB/", "title": "Lunch Break", "subtitle": "", "track": "Program", "type": "Other", "language": "en", "abstract": "Forage out and find sustenance! There are many great lunch spots in walking distance, from Thai to sandwiches to poke.", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/VBZWPB/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/VBZWPB/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "5e85d057-a252-55ec-82e5-a3c4e1ac13f2", "code": "ZBKT7D", "id": 7072, "logo": null, "date": "2026-09-09T13:30:00-07:00", "start": "13:30", "end": "2026-09-09T13:35:00-07:00", "duration": "00:05", "room": "Ballroom", "slug": "devopsdays-portland-2026-7072-0-ignites-intro", "url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/ZBKT7D/", "title": "Ignites Intro", "subtitle": "", "track": "Program", "type": "Other", "language": "en", "abstract": "20 auto advancing slides\n15 seconds a slide\n5 minutes on stage\n\nTalks get to the point and get there quick. They're clear and concise and every word counts.\n\nReady? Go!", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/ZBKT7D/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/ZBKT7D/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "48f9fe02-d0ef-5b1e-82fb-dec9c86e499a", "code": "C9DDKA", "id": 6818, "logo": null, "date": "2026-09-09T13:35:00-07:00", "start": "13:35", "end": "2026-09-09T13:40:00-07:00", "duration": "00:05", "room": "Ballroom", "slug": "devopsdays-portland-2026-6818-are-you-ready-for-short-lived-certificates", "url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/C9DDKA/", "title": "Are you ready for short-lived certificates?", "subtitle": "", "track": "Main Track", "type": "Ignite", "language": "en", "abstract": "This talk is a call to action to audit your certificate usage. What's your certificate automation story and how will you handle 47 day certificate lifetimes?", "description": "There's been a lot of talk about 2025 CA/Browser Forum ballot SC-081 which establishes 200, 100 and 47 day certificate lifetimes over the next 3 years. This ignite talk is a call to action to make sure you won't be caught off guard. Come hear what Let's Encrypt is doing to prepare for these deadlines and what you can do today to ensure your ACME clients are ready.", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "VWRG8C", "name": "Brad Winckler", "avatar": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/media/avatars/LBWYWY_ctED2GS.webp", "biography": "I currently work for ISRG as an SRE on the Let's Encrypt project.\n\nIn the past I have worked for Tripwire, Oracle, Yahoo! and BlueBox, usually doing something between system administration and writing code.", "public_name": "Brad Winckler", "guid": "118e099f-4a82-5cbc-8a30-16177976fee1", "url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/speaker/VWRG8C/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/C9DDKA/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/C9DDKA/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "c1bceb72-cda8-5c24-a82c-95543e7b5419", "code": "RHHRUZ", "id": 6558, "logo": null, "date": "2026-09-09T13:40:00-07:00", "start": "13:40", "end": "2026-09-09T13:45:00-07:00", "duration": "00:05", "room": "Ballroom", "slug": "devopsdays-portland-2026-6558-devops-is-women-s-work", "url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/RHHRUZ/", "title": "DevOps Is Women\u2019s Work", "subtitle": "", "track": "Main Track", "type": "Ignite", "language": "en", "abstract": "Running a developer platform successfully is a daunting undertaking, one of navigating a multitude of technologies (Kubernetes? Pulumi? GitHub Actions? AWS?) and of being the support base for other developers to ship their product. When things run smoothly, no one thanks you as it is just the status quo, upheld. When things break, you\u2019re woken up at 4am to fix it. You watch as the product teams get the kudos, the promotions, the excitement, and access to the product managers. And yet\u2026you love seeing their success. You just wish that you could share in it some more.\n\nBut upholding the computing status quo is invisible work most of the time. Preventing outages is just not as noticeable as that new shiny feature. And moreover - it takes a completely separate skill set to be a good DevOps engineer.\n\nI am here to tell you that in order to grow as a DevOps engineer, you should try running a household the way that worldwide, (mostly) women are expected to do. From laundry and meal planning to ensuring everyone washes their hands and gets their shots, to presenting a friendly environment people like to live in, the parallels are everywhere once you know where to look. And yes: the flip side of this coin is for society to stop undervaluing women\u2019s work and recognize its importance.\n\nDevOps is to engineering what is (traditional) women\u2019s work to the rest of humanity - unseen, unsung, full of chores, and absolutely vital to the continued existence of society. Buckle up; we\u2019ve got work to do.", "description": "We'll learn about DevOps foundations from the perspective of the logistics of daily life.", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "YH7XU7", "name": "Guinevere Saenger", "avatar": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/media/avatars/83KU3G_5pI4OX4.webp", "biography": "Guinevere Saenger started out her professional life as a classical pianist, and after a few adventures transitioned to a second career in tech. She found her happy place in the world of SRE/platform engineering and developer tooling, and today, she works on open source cloud provider plugins for Pulumi.\nGuinevere has been active in the Kubernetes community, where she has created documentation and workshops for new contributors, and served as Release Lead for the 1.17 Kubernetes release.\nShe is @guincodes on Bluesky, @guineveresaenger on GitHub, and can be found on the Kubernetes and Pulumi community slacks as well.\nA resident of Seattle, Guinevere enjoys music, food, and the outdoors.", "public_name": "Guinevere Saenger", "guid": "1bcf43e1-1378-55a3-b306-eeda45b763b0", "url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/speaker/YH7XU7/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/RHHRUZ/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/RHHRUZ/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "7aca498a-1f7e-581c-8793-e62e3c144739", "code": "7YDC9K", "id": 6776, "logo": null, "date": "2026-09-09T13:45:00-07:00", "start": "13:45", "end": "2026-09-09T13:50:00-07:00", "duration": "00:05", "room": "Ballroom", "slug": "devopsdays-portland-2026-6776-reproducibility-and-dx-can-you-have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too", "url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/7YDC9K/", "title": "Reproducibility and DX: Can you have your cake and eat it too?", "subtitle": "", "track": "Main Track", "type": "Ignite", "language": "en", "abstract": "Every project starts with a dev environment that works on your own machine. But the moment you try to share with a teammate, anything can (and does) happen. The first solution that most people try is container-based development, but even though this solves the reproducibility problem, it's a horrible developer experience. Another solution that people try is a virtual environment (venv, nvm, rbenv), and they're great, but if you have a polyglot app things start getting cumbersome again (and none of these help you manage system dependencies).\n\nIn this talk, we'll go over the tradeoffs between reproducibility and developer experience on an engineering team, and talk about a third solution that the audience should consider: Nix. Nix treats your dev environment as code, all the way down to glibc. We'll show how `nix develop` can give you a development environment that's reproducible across operating systems and ecosystems, while still giving you access to your development tools. But we'll also be honest about the complexities of Nix, as there are good reasons why not everyone is using it today to manage their development environments.", "description": "The talk follows a journey most engineers have lived, with a tradeoff at each stop:\n\n1. Local setup: fast and native until anyone on a different OS (or a new laptop) tries to run it\n2. Containers: reproducible but isolated from your IDE, debugger, and local tooling\n3. Virtual environments (venv, nvm, rbenv): great DX, but ecosystem-specific (not great for polyglot apps, especially if you need to manage system dependencies too)\n4. Nix: define your development environment as code (all the way down to glibc) for maximum portability across operating systems\n\nThe closing slides show a minimal flake.nix for a polyglot project, what `nix develop` gives a team in practice, and a few caveats about Nix's learning curve. We won't go into depth, but we'll include some resources at the end for people who want to learn more about Nix.", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "RJNC9J", "name": "Daniel Sauble", "avatar": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/media/avatars/YEGULG_CSJv8if.webp", "biography": "Daniel is a product designer and Oregon native. By day he works at Flox on developer tooling for environment and package management. By night he spends his time training for and running ultramarathons. 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You'll have to be there to see.", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/8HJXAX/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/8HJXAX/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "9c4dec64-503f-5919-84b3-740cda8255f9", "code": "TTTQPG", "id": 6829, "logo": null, "date": "2026-09-10T10:05:00-07:00", "start": "10:05", "end": "2026-09-10T10:35:00-07:00", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom", "slug": "devopsdays-portland-2026-6829-the-diff-that-looked-fine-catching-malicious-iac-changes-your-scanner-misses", "url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/TTTQPG/", "title": "The Diff That Looked Fine: Catching Malicious IaC Changes Your Scanner Misses", "subtitle": "", "track": "Main Track", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "Scanners like Checkov and tfsec are great at flagging the misconfigurations we already have rules for, and nearly useless against the one someone introduces on purpose. After watching SolarWinds and Codecov turn CI/CD pipelines into the front door, I went looking for a better way to catch malicious changes in Terraform, Kubernetes, and GitHub Actions pairing old-fashioned syntax-tree analysis with a small language model that reads a diff in context, the way a security engineer would. This is the real story of what worked, what threw so many false positives it nearly broke developer trust, and where AI earns its keep in DevSecOps versus where it just adds noise.", "description": "Every team running infrastructure as code has the same setup: a scanner wired into CI, a wall of findings, and a quiet agreement to ignore most of them. Those tools catch the mistakes we already know about a public S3 bucket, an over-broad IAM policy, a missing encryption flag. They are much weaker against the change someone makes on purpose: a swapped module source, a subtle permission escalation, a workflow step that quietly ships a secret out the door. Look at how SolarWinds and Codecov actually played out and the pipeline itself was the attack surface and most IaC tooling would have waved those changes right through.\nSo I set out to answer an uncomfortable question: if someone slipped a malicious change into our Terraform, Kubernetes, or GitHub Actions config, would anything stop it? The approach I landed on combines two things that are individually old news abstract syntax trees to understand the structure of a change, and a small, cheap language model to read the diff in context and judge intent. Neither is magic on its own. Together they caught changes that pattern-based scanners never flagged, sorting the boring diffs from the dangerous ones about nine times out of ten in testing.\nThis is not a victory lap, though. I will spend real time on where it went sideways: legitimate security-hardening changes that looked identical to attacks, refactors that tripped every anomaly check, and a false-positive rate that would've trained developers to click past the tool inside a week if I would let it auto-block. That's why it ended up with a human in the loop for anything ambiguous and automatic blocking only when it was very sure. You'll leave with a grounded sense of where AI helps in DevSecOps and where it's just noise, a way to think about your own IaC as something an attacker will target, and a strong opinion about the fastest way to kill a security tool: make people stop trusting it.", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "UW9QFP", "name": "Shalini Sudarsan", "avatar": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/media/avatars/NHLB3U_EaXsDi3.webp", "biography": "Shalini Sudarsan is a DevSecOps Engineering Leader at KinderCare Learning Companies, Portland, OR, USA. Designing reliable, secure, and cost-optimized data and AI platforms. A Forbes Technology Council Member, Fellow of IETE and Women in Engineering (WIE) Oregon section, she drives enterprise AI adoption with a governed operating model that speeds time-to-market while lowering risk and spend. Shalini\u2019s expertise spans BI strategy, data platform architecture, MLOps, observability, and value realization. She is known for translating complex engineering into measurable business outcomes. Shalini brings deep technical rigor and business expertise in the areas of DevOps and Reliability Engineering.A committed advocate for advancing technology, Shalini regularly presents at international conferences and contributes to IEEE and ACM as a technical reviewer.", "public_name": "Shalini Sudarsan", "guid": "b34e127c-2039-5d59-ad96-64107a56181c", "url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/speaker/UW9QFP/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/TTTQPG/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/TTTQPG/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "a507586c-9675-5f3d-9ef8-b5731c631f65", "code": "HVH3KG", "id": 6461, "logo": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/media/devopsdays-portland-2026/submissions/HVH3KG/image_wOzdAHX.webp", "date": "2026-09-10T10:50:00-07:00", "start": "10:50", "end": "2026-09-10T11:20:00-07:00", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom", "slug": "devopsdays-portland-2026-6461-observing-the-stream-building-open-source-monitoring-for-video-infrastructure", "url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/HVH3KG/", "title": "Observing the Stream: Building Open Source Monitoring for Video Infrastructure", "subtitle": "", "track": "Main Track", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "Streaming platforms have unique observability needs. Learn how we built a full open source monitoring stack using Grafana, Prometheus, FFmpeg, and TSDuck to get real-time visibility into live video infrastructure.", "description": "Before DevOps was involved our streaming platform had no complete visibility into what was happening across live and on-demand video workflows, and the result was predictable: errors were caught late, incidents escalated before anyone noticed, and the commercial monitoring tools the industry recommended cost more than the team could justify.\n\nIn this talk we'll see how a DevOps engineer approached that problem with open source tooling and what we learned along the way, including what went wrong.\n\nWe'll cover:\n\n- What makes streaming infrastructure observability different from a typical web application, from player metrics, origin health, CDN behavior, encoding pipelines, to real-time stream health where all need to be correlated simultaneously\n\n- The challenge we didn't see coming: metrics in streaming are not universal. A value that signals a critical error on one stream configuration is completely normal on another \u00a0and getting that wrong nearly derailed the whole project, but forced us to build a more flexible and configurable solution\n\n- How we designed and deployed a monitoring stack using Grafana, Prometheus, Kubernetes, Helm, ArgoCD and extended with video-specific tooling like FFmpeg and TSDuck to capture stream health signals at the transport layer\n\n- The concrete outcomes: catching errors earlier, improving real-time visibility into live streams, and replacing expensive commercial alternatives with a maintainable open source solution\n\n- What any DevOps engineer can take from this approach, regardless of their \u00a0industry\n\nThis is not a theoretical talk. Every decision was driven by a real operational problem, and every outcome, including our mistakes, will be shared honestly.", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "WPYGH3", "name": "Erika Alvarez", "avatar": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/media/avatars/LZTZ3J_2xiDR01.webp", "biography": "Erika is a DevOps engineer specialized in video and streaming media infrastructure. Based in Montevideo, Uruguay, she works at the intersection of traditional DevOps practices and the unique operational demands of live and on-demand video platforms. She holds the AWS Certified Solutions Architect \u2013 Associate certification and has hands-on experience building cloud-native infrastructure for streaming workflows using Kubernetes, ArgoCD, Prometheus, Grafana, FFmpeg, and TSDuck. She has also worked in other big industries as Airlines and Gaming.", "public_name": "Erika Alvarez", "guid": "7002c63a-9a73-564d-9d14-841feef71545", "url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/speaker/WPYGH3/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/HVH3KG/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/HVH3KG/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "75078c04-55e8-5301-91d4-bf047dadcfcd", "code": "8HJXAX", "id": 7074, "logo": null, "date": "2026-09-10T11:20:00-07:00", "start": "11:20", "end": "2026-09-10T11:30:00-07:00", "duration": "00:10", "room": "Ballroom", "slug": "devopsdays-portland-2026-7074-3-sponsors", "url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/8HJXAX/", "title": "Sponsors", "subtitle": "", "track": "Sponsors", "type": "Other", "language": "en", "abstract": "And now a quick word from our amazing sponsors who make events like this possible. But what they talk about is up to them; they may pitch their product, they may promote an idea. They may even raffle off a fun prize! 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Databases, however, have often remained harder to evolve. Even with migrations, automated tests, and disciplined delivery practices, many teams still struggle to experiment safely with database changes, validate refactorings against realistic data, and collaborate effectively across developers, DBAs, and platform teams.\n\nThis talk builds on the foundations of Evolutionary Database Design and applies the framework of values, principles, methods, practices, and tools to an emerging capability: database branching. New approaches from technologies such as Lakebase, Neon, PlanetScale, Supabase, and others are making it possible to create isolated database branches that fit modern development workflows, in some cases as full-fidelity, copy-on-write clones of production-scale data.\n\nWe will explore how database branching changes the developer loop: start work, develop, test, merge, and deploy to the next environment. When teams can create realistic database branches quickly and safely, database refactoring becomes less risky, feedback loops become shorter, and experimentation becomes part of everyday delivery.\n\nThe session will focus on three key shifts:\n\n- Self-sufficiency: enabling teams to work more independently without waiting for shared database environments.\n- Collaboration: moving DBAs and data specialists from gatekeepers to active design contributors.\n- Innovation: allowing teams to run more experiments, compare alternatives, and discover better database designs before committing to production paths.\n\nAttendees will leave with a practical understanding of how database branching supports DevOps principles, improves flow, and opens new possibilities for evolutionary database development.", "description": "-", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "EVGFYL", "name": "Pramod Sadalage", "avatar": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/media/avatars/ABYR8X_WlsAHaC.webp", "biography": "Pramod Sadalage is Distinguished Engineer at ThoughtWorks leading the Modern Data Architecture service for North America, he enjoys the rare role of bridging the divide between database professionals and application developers. He is usually sent in to clients with particularly challenging data needs, which require new technologies and techniques. In the early 00\u2019s he developed techniques to allow relational databases to be designed in an evolutionary manner based on version-controlled schema migrations.\n\nHe is co-author Refactoring Databases: Evolutionary Database Design, co-author of NoSQL Distilled: A Brief Guide to the Emerging World of Polyglot Persistence and continues to speak and write about the insights he and his clients learn.", "public_name": "Pramod Sadalage", "guid": "70e03a89-3d98-5fdd-9a48-3316c429b2eb", "url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/speaker/EVGFYL/"}, {"code": "9TUN38", "name": "Kevin Hartman", "avatar": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/media/avatars/VYBF8R_YHge0kj.webp", "biography": "Kevin Hartman leads the Partner Solutions Architects team at Databricks, who help consulting partners build Data and AI solutions on the Databricks platform.\n\nKevin has been solving complex problems using technology and data for over 3 decades. His specialty is formulating high-impact solutions that leverage emerging technology innovations. He has inspired, influenced, and led the creation of hundreds of digital products \u2014 working from both inside and alongside teams of researchers, scientists, designers, engineers, and enthusiasts.\n\nKevin has a bachelors degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois and a masters degree in Information and Data Science from UC Berkeley, and invited as faculty member to the later program. He is based in Chicago.", "public_name": "Kevin Hartman", "guid": "d89d5fba-2818-5d1f-9780-13c8a2a36560", "url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/speaker/9TUN38/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/WKJ33Y/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/WKJ33Y/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "296acd0d-882f-5881-803a-975da82b3903", "code": "9HJXBM", "id": 7070, "logo": null, "date": "2026-09-10T12:00:00-07:00", "start": "12:00", "end": "2026-09-10T12:15:00-07:00", "duration": "00:15", "room": "Ballroom", "slug": "devopsdays-portland-2026-7070-1-open-spaces-opening", "url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/9HJXBM/", "title": "Open Spaces Opening", "subtitle": "", "track": "Program", "type": "Other", "language": "en", "abstract": "Open Spaces are self-organized semi-structured conversations. The sessions are created onsite and will be distributed amongst available space in the three classrooms (327-329). Please come with ideas of topics you'd like to discuss.\n\nSee https://devopsdays.org/open-space-format/ for more information.", "description": "The opening is a quick explanation of the mechanics of the Open Spaces format and the timeline. Then individuals who'd like to propose topics for the day each have a quick minute to explain what they have in mind for the conversation.\n\nEach topic is added to the board, then as we break for lunch, each individual is invited to vote for the topics they're interested in with a hash mark. We will then fill the space we have with as many sessions as we can fit in.", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/9HJXBM/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/9HJXBM/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "2397d73d-31ad-55a1-9044-9137ba526a40", "code": "VBZWPB", "id": 7067, "logo": null, "date": "2026-09-10T12:15:00-07:00", "start": "12:15", "end": "2026-09-10T13:35:00-07:00", "duration": "01:20", "room": "Ballroom", "slug": "devopsdays-portland-2026-7067-1-lunch-break", "url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/VBZWPB/", "title": "Lunch Break", "subtitle": "", "track": "Program", "type": "Other", "language": "en", "abstract": "Forage out and find sustenance! There are many great lunch spots in walking distance, from Thai to sandwiches to poke.", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/VBZWPB/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/VBZWPB/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "1cb93009-ee74-51f5-9fcb-c81a4b0a829e", "code": "ZBKT7D", "id": 7072, "logo": null, "date": "2026-09-10T13:35:00-07:00", "start": "13:35", "end": "2026-09-10T13:40:00-07:00", "duration": "00:05", "room": "Ballroom", "slug": "devopsdays-portland-2026-7072-1-ignites-intro", "url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/ZBKT7D/", "title": "Ignites Intro", "subtitle": "", "track": "Program", "type": "Other", "language": "en", "abstract": "20 auto advancing slides\n15 seconds a slide\n5 minutes on stage\n\nTalks get to the point and get there quick. They're clear and concise and every word counts.\n\nReady? Go!", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/ZBKT7D/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/ZBKT7D/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "43e37b15-6523-5754-885f-43eb6a1d5c79", "code": "ZQC89J", "id": 6810, "logo": null, "date": "2026-09-10T13:40:00-07:00", "start": "13:40", "end": "2026-09-10T13:45:00-07:00", "duration": "00:05", "room": "Ballroom", "slug": "devopsdays-portland-2026-6810-50-ways-to-lose-your-data", "url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/ZQC89J/", "title": "50 Ways To Lose Your Data", "subtitle": "", "track": "Main Track", "type": "Ignite", "language": "en", "abstract": "The problem is all inside your storage, they said to me; the answer is easy if you take it logically.  The speaker can help you in your struggle to be free.  Here's 50 ways to lose your data.", "description": "The problem is all inside your storage, they said to me; the answer is easy if you take it logically.  The speaker can help you in your struggle to be free.  Here's 50 ways to lose your data.\n\nIn this sing-along ignite, you will learn the many methods, both through old tech and new cloud workflows, to render your entire organzation into a set of randomized bits.  Now with AI agents!", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": true, "persons": [{"code": "7AGGSK", "name": "Josh Berkus", "avatar": null, "biography": "Josh Berkus, who works in Red Hat's Open Source Practice Office, has 20 years of Postgres experience and 11 years of Kubernetes experience, and just as much experience running open source projects.  He is local to Portland and runs the Cloud Native PDX meetup.", "public_name": "Josh Berkus", "guid": "307adfdd-1196-5d5e-9d37-d17a14823832", "url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/speaker/7AGGSK/"}, {"code": "YH7XU7", "name": "Guinevere Saenger", "avatar": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/media/avatars/83KU3G_5pI4OX4.webp", "biography": "Guinevere Saenger started out her professional life as a classical pianist, and after a few adventures transitioned to a second career in tech. She found her happy place in the world of SRE/platform engineering and developer tooling, and today, she works on open source cloud provider plugins for Pulumi.\nGuinevere has been active in the Kubernetes community, where she has created documentation and workshops for new contributors, and served as Release Lead for the 1.17 Kubernetes release.\nShe is @guincodes on Bluesky, @guineveresaenger on GitHub, and can be found on the Kubernetes and Pulumi community slacks as well.\nA resident of Seattle, Guinevere enjoys music, food, and the outdoors.", "public_name": "Guinevere Saenger", "guid": "1bcf43e1-1378-55a3-b306-eeda45b763b0", "url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/speaker/YH7XU7/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/ZQC89J/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/ZQC89J/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "bafa4658-e676-544e-8fca-6b76ef7cc359", "code": "VQWBZG", "id": 6689, "logo": null, "date": "2026-09-10T13:45:00-07:00", "start": "13:45", "end": "2026-09-10T13:50:00-07:00", "duration": "00:05", "room": "Ballroom", "slug": "devopsdays-portland-2026-6689-i-guess-i-deploy-code-now-a-product-marketer-s-accidental-devops-story", "url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/VQWBZG/", "title": "I Guess I Deploy Code Now? A Product Marketer's Accidental DevOps Story", "subtitle": "", "track": "Main Track", "type": "Ignite", "language": "en", "abstract": "I'm a product marketer. My job is words, positioning, creating content for campaigns. \n\nThen one day I downloaded Claude desktop, loaded up VS Code, connected to GitHub, and started shipping.\n\nThis talk is about what happens when I stopped observing how engineers worked and started doing it, and the slow, uncomfortable transformation of the way work is shifting for many of us.\n\nI didn't set out to become a developer. I set out to move faster and own more of my work. Once I started using the same tools (VS Code, GitHub, Claude as a collaborator rather than a ghostwriter) I couldn't unsee what I'd been doing wrong. \n\nI had been treating creating things as a linear exercise: ship the campaign, move on. Engineers ship, break, iterate, ship again. I had to learn to work that way too.\n\nYou already know this feeling. Every developer has lived through it when picking up a new language or a new framework. You're slower than you should be. The tools expose what you don't understand. You make embarrassing mistakes. Then at some point, something clicks.\n\nAI has lowered the floor enough that someone like me can step through the door. A new wave of people are using AI to write and deploy code without traditional engineering backgrounds. They're learning. They're building real things. They need what every junior developer has always needed: experienced people willing to explain the reasoning behind the thing, not just review the output.\n\nHere's what I found and will share in this talk:\n\n- Things get dramatically worse before they get better. Shipping code as a non-developer is humbling in ways no amount of AI assistance fully cushions.\n\n- The tools don't flatten the learning curve. They just change the shape of it. AI let me move faster through the parts I understood and ran me straight into the walls I didn't.\n\n- The mindset shift was harder than the technical one. Iterating on a deployed thing felt wrong. I had to unlearn \"done.\"\n\n- Human in the loop turned out to mean something specific: I had to stay the author. The moment I stopped understanding what I was shipping, the work collapsed.\n\nThis talk is part story, part ask. I'll tell you what crossing over looked like from my side. In return, I want to make a case for why welcoming people like me (vibe coders, accidental developers, curious non-engineers) will make the DevOps community stronger.", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "9XSMLU", "name": "Anna Daugherty", "avatar": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/media/avatars/PhotoRoom-20230207_175631_wGWdm6p.png", "biography": "Anna Daugherty is the Senior Product Marketing Manager at Arnica where she spends her days trying figure out application security in an increasingly agentic world. She has been a product marketer for more than 6 years, and in technology marketing for 11+ years. She enjoys video games, tabletop roleplaying, horror movies, and Carly Rae Jepsen.", "public_name": "Anna Daugherty", "guid": "78e38183-a56d-5d45-aa29-3d0340648090", "url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/speaker/9XSMLU/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/VQWBZG/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/VQWBZG/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "166d9049-03f2-57cf-adb5-82b0b4c6dd5a", "code": "97ACTV", "id": 6823, "logo": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/media/devopsdays-portland-2026/submissions/97ACTV/image_9DGeqDb.webp", "date": "2026-09-10T13:50:00-07:00", "start": "13:50", "end": "2026-09-10T13:55:00-07:00", "duration": "00:05", "room": "Ballroom", "slug": "devopsdays-portland-2026-6823-the-day-claude-code-deleted-my-cluster", "url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/97ACTV/", "title": "The Day Claude Code Deleted My Cluster", "subtitle": "", "track": "Main Track", "type": "Ignite", "language": "en", "abstract": "\"You have full access to the pipeline. Do what you need to do.\" Famous last words.\nI gave Claude Code full pipeline access and stepped away for thirty seconds. It wrecked the Kubernetes cluster, and two troubleshooting sessions later, while it was supposedly helping me recover, it took out the network cards on nearly every Linux box we had. I thought that was as bad as it got. Then came the 2026 edition, when it deleted 250 clusters.\nThis is the five-minute, twenty-slide version of that spiral: how \"let me help\" becomes \"I've destroyed your cluster,\" why \"the AI knows what it's doing\" is the most dangerous phrase in DevOps, and the guardrails I now enforce religiously so a thirty-second walk away can't take down a fleet. Come for the disaster, stay for the wisdom.", "description": "\"You have full access to the pipeline. Do what you need to do.\" Famous last words.\nI gave Claude Code full access to my cluster enivornment and stepped away for about thirty seconds. When I came back, it had wrecked the Kubernetes cluster. That part I could almost live with. What made it a story was what came next: two troubleshooting sessions later, while it was supposedly helping me recover, it took out the network cards on nearly every Linux box in the set.\nThat was the original. The 2026 edition is worse. This time it wasn't one cluster, it was 250, gone. I walk the actual spiral, from \"let me help\" to \"I've destroyed your cluster,\" now at fleet scale, and show why handing an agent broad access hands it a proportionally bigger blast radius by default.\nThis is a talk about nondeterministic systems and the illusion of AI understanding, and why \"the AI knows what it's doing\" is the most dangerous phrase in modern DevOps. I show the guardrails I now enforce religiously so it can't happen again, at one cluster or two hundred and fifty.\nFive minutes, twenty slides, and one very expensive lesson about handing AI agents infrastructure access, even for a minute. Plus the blame-filled post-mortem I ran afterward with Claude Code itself. Come for the disaster, stay for the wisdom.", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "UJ3BLE", "name": "Michael Forrester", "avatar": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/media/avatars/LPWZY8_GGjPJx0.webp", "biography": "Michael Forrester is a student, explorer, and educator working at the boundary between humanity and technology. Over 25+ years he's gone from CTO to IC across operations, AI, cloud, and platform engineering, with time at AWS, ThoughtWorks, Red Hat, and Honeywell. His training has reached over a million engineers, and he now leads AI-for-organizations work as a Principal Training Architect at Accenture LearnVantage. His current focus is agentic AI security: how the CNCF platform stack most teams already run \u2014 GitOps, admission control, runtime detection, observability \u2014 covers roughly 80% of what governs AI agents in production, and what the remaining 20% actually takes, namely agent identity, LLM input/output sanitization, and MCP tool-call governance. He speaks at KubeCon, CNCF events, and most recently AI Engineer World's Fair on Claude Code, MCP, and agent governance for platform engineers. Tools don't transform organizations. People do.", "public_name": "Michael Forrester", "guid": "f043d2b8-898f-5756-af89-f12657426ca7", "url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/speaker/UJ3BLE/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/97ACTV/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/97ACTV/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "38bc274f-25c3-5d00-b588-789bae4aeb93", "code": "TULBEJ", "id": 6694, "logo": null, "date": "2026-09-10T13:55:00-07:00", "start": "13:55", "end": "2026-09-10T14:00:00-07:00", "duration": "00:05", "room": "Ballroom", "slug": "devopsdays-portland-2026-6694-beyond-commits-code-turning-ai-use-cases-into-measurable-impact", "url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/TULBEJ/", "title": "Beyond Commits & Code: Turning AI Use Cases into Measurable Impact", "subtitle": "", "track": "Main Track", "type": "Ignite", "language": "en", "abstract": "Our analytics team wanted to show how we're adopting AI tools, but faced a measurement problem: standard AI metrics focus on lines of code deployed to production which is not as meaningful for SQL pipelines and data work. We built a custom AI toolkit using IBM Bob and GitHub, and more importantly, created a tracking system that measured what actually matters for analytics teams. Six months later: 40-60% time savings, 50+ documented use cases, and a framework for measuring AI impact beyond code generation with the added bonus of sharing knowledge across the team as we all ramp and iterate our AI tool skills in real time.", "description": "This talk shares how an analytics engineering team adopted AI when standard metrics didn't apply. Most AI adoption tracking focuses on lines of code deployed to production but we're not shipping features, we're translating business requirements into metrics, building pipelines, dbt models, and optimizing SQL. We built a custom toolkit and obsessively tracked metrics that actually mattered: time to complete tasks, onboarding speed, documentation quality, and knowledge transfer, not lines of code generated. The result? 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Learn what metrics prove AI value for non-product teams, what failed spectacularly, and how to track AI adoption when you're not counting commits.", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "TB8V9P", "name": "Liz Savage", "avatar": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/media/avatars/UM3NS8_7Ntbqs0.webp", "biography": "Solutions focused data nerd currently working on Product Analytics Engineering at IBM Hashicorp.", "public_name": "Liz Savage", "guid": "ca85a8b8-af21-5075-aa6b-5f21a60eb2e4", "url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/speaker/TB8V9P/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/TULBEJ/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/TULBEJ/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "379810a9-ff5a-56fa-b272-478acf6f77ea", "code": "FPTABG", "id": 7071, "logo": null, "date": "2026-09-10T14:05:00-07:00", "start": "14:05", "end": "2026-09-10T14:15:00-07:00", "duration": "00:10", "room": "Ballroom", "slug": "devopsdays-portland-2026-7071-1-open-spaces-kickoff", "url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/FPTABG/", "title": "Open Spaces Kickoff", "subtitle": "", "track": "Program", "type": "Other", "language": "en", "abstract": "Now that everyone has had a chance to vote on the topics they're most interested in, we will assign them room and time slots.", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/FPTABG/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/FPTABG/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "2406f23d-7c7c-5ea8-b4be-cce96f910219", "code": "DRVQKJ", "id": 7066, "logo": null, "date": "2026-09-10T14:20:00-07:00", "start": "14:20", "end": "2026-09-10T14:50:00-07:00", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom", "slug": "devopsdays-portland-2026-7066-3-open-space", "url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/DRVQKJ/", "title": "Open Space", "subtitle": "", "track": "Open Spaces", "type": "Other", "language": "en", "abstract": "Open Spaces are self-organized semi-structured conversations. The sessions are created onsite and will be distributed amongst available space in the three classrooms (327-329). Please come with ideas of topics you'd like to discuss.\n\nSee https://devopsdays.org/open-space-format/ for more information.", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/DRVQKJ/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/DRVQKJ/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "0d6f393f-e882-52dc-a813-4794fd4b1a30", "code": "DRVQKJ", "id": 7066, "logo": null, "date": "2026-09-10T14:55:00-07:00", "start": "14:55", "end": "2026-09-10T15:25:00-07:00", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom", "slug": "devopsdays-portland-2026-7066-4-open-space", "url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/DRVQKJ/", "title": "Open Space", "subtitle": "", "track": "Open Spaces", "type": "Other", "language": "en", "abstract": "Open Spaces are self-organized semi-structured conversations. The sessions are created onsite and will be distributed amongst available space in the three classrooms (327-329). Please come with ideas of topics you'd like to discuss.\n\nSee https://devopsdays.org/open-space-format/ for more information.", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/DRVQKJ/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/DRVQKJ/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "8c869413-c9db-5b11-90aa-a50e061c47d0", "code": "DRVQKJ", "id": 7066, "logo": null, "date": "2026-09-10T15:45:00-07:00", "start": "15:45", "end": "2026-09-10T16:15:00-07:00", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom", "slug": "devopsdays-portland-2026-7066-5-open-space", "url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/DRVQKJ/", "title": "Open Space", "subtitle": "", "track": "Open Spaces", "type": "Other", "language": "en", "abstract": "Open Spaces are self-organized semi-structured conversations. The sessions are created onsite and will be distributed amongst available space in the three classrooms (327-329). Please come with ideas of topics you'd like to discuss.\n\nSee https://devopsdays.org/open-space-format/ for more information.", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/DRVQKJ/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/DRVQKJ/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "8109e214-2dd6-50f4-aa01-9603128d03db", "code": "MGQZ9A", "id": 6687, "logo": null, "date": "2026-09-10T16:20:00-07:00", "start": "16:20", "end": "2026-09-10T16:50:00-07:00", "duration": "00:30", "room": "Ballroom", "slug": "devopsdays-portland-2026-6687-my-kids-couldn-t-spell-because-so-i-built-an-app-that-couldn-t-afford-to-fail", "url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/MGQZ9A/", "title": "My Kids Couldn't Spell \"Because\" So I Built an App That Couldn't Afford to Fail", "subtitle": "", "track": "Main Track", "type": "Talk", "language": "en", "abstract": "My kids brought home spelling lists every week, but memorizing words wasn't improving their legibility or accuracy. So I built Bee Hunter... an app that uses computer vision to evaluate handwriting directly from a photo and provide real-time feedback.\n\nBuilding it meant applying the same reliability thinking used in production systems, but with a very different user base. When your users are in elementary school, you can't afford high latency or an outage.\n\nHere's what I learned designing for reliability when your error budget is a kid's attention span:\n\n* Why a spelling app taught me more about feedback loop latency than most production systems I've run\n* What it looks like to define an SLO when your user can't file a ticket... they just quit\n* The edge cases I had to engineer around: varying lighting, backwards letters, kitchen table chaos\n\nI'll walk through the architecture decisions and the tradeoffs I made to keep it reliable under real-world conditions. You'll see what a reliability mindset looks like in practice... and how the lessons translate directly back to the systems you're running today.\n\nSometimes the best reliability engineering happens outside the datacenter, with your kids by your side.", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [{"code": "8P7BLM", "name": "Aaron Hunter", "avatar": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/media/avatars/XFB39K_bPjf0jm.webp", "biography": "Aaron is a Principal Developer Advocate at AWS based in Frisco, TX. With over 15 years of experience spanning system administration, networking, and training, he brings more than a decade of cloud expertise to help Engineers, Developers, Builders, and tech enthusiasts master AWS technologies. His philosophy is simple: always be learning something new, and have fun while doing it! Aaron shares his knowledge through workshops, online courses, mentoring, and live streaming \u2013 making complex cloud concepts accessible and enjoyable. When he's not building in the cloud, you'll find him exploring craft beer scenes in new cities or teaming up with friends in Marvel Rivals on his PlayStation, because even superheroes need good teammates!", "public_name": "Aaron Hunter", "guid": "13bec825-39b6-5774-b04c-4742f8bcbf18", "url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/speaker/8P7BLM/"}], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/MGQZ9A/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/MGQZ9A/", "attachments": []}, {"guid": "a18f6ca7-82ce-5bde-a79d-569e540a1507", "code": "M8HYFY", "id": 7073, "logo": null, "date": "2026-09-10T16:50:00-07:00", "start": "16:50", "end": "2026-09-10T17:00:00-07:00", "duration": "00:10", "room": "Ballroom", "slug": "devopsdays-portland-2026-7073-1-close-of-day", "url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/M8HYFY/", "title": "Close of Day", "subtitle": "", "track": "Program", "type": "Other", "language": "en", "abstract": "Closing remarks and logistics each day.", "description": "", "recording_license": "", "do_not_record": false, "persons": [], "links": [], "feedback_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/M8HYFY/feedback/", "origin_url": "https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-portland-2026/talk/M8HYFY/", "attachments": []}]}}]}}}