This year I attended DevOpsDays detroit. Like last year, the organization of the event and the general feel of the experience were both outstanding. Two days seems like a lot at first, but it flies by. Special thanks to the RightBrainNetworks team.
The Personal Element
It was interesting to see a lot of returning teams from local enterprises, and hearing how far they’ve come in the past year. Different companies have tried different paths, and hearing the realities of their experience can absolutely be valuable to those on the verge of similar paths. Some were downright inspiring. The speakers were also fascinating. Talked to some after the fact and they were all keen on elaborating about their stories further.
Ignite Talks
I think I enjoyed the ignite talks more than most people. Maybe I’m in the minority, but I would like to see more of these. I’m a person who enjoys as much diverse exposure as I can get at gatherings. It’s a real challenge for the speakers to distill big ideas and a big message to such a small window. From my perspective, I think thats what makes them so attractive (somewhat like a TedTalk).
Breakout Rooms
The participation in the breakout rooms was also great. There were some new topics for ideas I had not heard before, and some of the conversations really made me think about new things. The process where people walk up to stage and gave their idea works, but I think a suggestion + voting app could be better in some ways. I’m sure there are apps out there for this.
Braindump
For those wondering what actually was discussed, here’s a braindump of things I personally heard about and found interesting. These are from organizers, break-out rooms, vendors and 1-on-1’s.
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Embedding security information in the DevOps pipeline is a challenge. There are clever solutions for treating “security as code” some involve PGP.
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People are making Kubernetes work on numerous scales and platforms. Still evolving, and the new federation feature might be a necessity at large scale.
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There are still many IOT devices and use-cases with very limited memory, where having a network stack with TCP is still not possible.
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GE trying to encourage use of IOT platform, all built on Cloud Foundry.
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Positive review of ProGet for .NET shop doing CI/CD for SAAS. Some people trying chocolatey for enterprise use.
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Immutable infrastructure is still an awkward solution for IAAS use cases. It might never be a good fit. Active Directory join is part of the issue, but even without this, problems still exist.
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There are software companies trying to bring DevOps to IBM systems, Mainframe specifically, not sure about AIX or ISeries.
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When votes were taken for breakout rooms, there were almost no hands for “Monitoring” discussions.
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A lot of people were interested in the discussions about challenges when working from home.
