Why Did I Attend?
I have a several fold interest – from living the devops dream in a start-up and a hankering to return to them one day; from the perspective of working in a public sector enterprise and trying to work out how to bring some more of the magic into the organisation; GDPR coming over the horizon and trying to work out what that is going to mean; and finally having a home “sandbox” project where I want to “do things right” and not spend an inordinate amount of time doing them.
As an engineer I’m big into repeatability and make it easier to do the right thing rather than the wrong thing. I also see that “the only defect free production line is a stopped production” and that “keeping down costs and boosting turnover are what makes profit”. Devops is very much addressing these issues. I took two days holiday and paid for it myself, so I’m keen.
Devops “all things to all people”?
Having just asserted what devops means to me. I will now list out a bunch of other things that devops means to different people. Many of the overlap or are alternative ways of looking a the same thing, and some are not.
- Automating operations
- Giving operations control to devs
- Getting operational requirements fed into the development
- Getting operations support into the development environment
- Providing representative systems to devs
- Making devs eat their own dog food
- Building dynamic teams
Event Summary
“First the housekeeping” as they always say at these things.https://www.devopsdays.org/events/2017-edinburgh/welcome/
I’ve included the schedule at the bottom of this post – in case the site above disappears and so you can Google the people or the topics. If you search on Youtube you often find the speaker giving the talk at one conference or another. The talks really exist to give the delegates something in common to discuss and to give jumping off points. Therefore YouTube is a poor substitute for being there. A good talk can be quite low grade ore in terms of hard facts.
Format
I attended all the main sessions, I will include pics of the Open Space ideas boards and mark what I attended. Ignites are 5 minute talks with the slides progressing automatically at a rate of one every 15 seconds – a bit like TED talks, they are considered to be a “thing”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignite_(event)
Rather than a sequential blow-by-blow account I’m going to split take-aways into more functional groupings. I will also be attempting to keep the elephants at the top of the page and the details at the bottom.
One of the main themes of the conference was “culture”. Diversity, Ops vs Dev vs Dev Ops, Startup vs Enterprise, New vs Established, Public vs Private sector. It was actually all very positive in this regard. People seemed genuinely interesed in sharing experiences, and learning from one another.
October 23, 2017
Registration and Breakfast
09:00 – 09:15 Opening Welcome
09:15 – 09:45 Opening Keynote: Maria Gutierrez
09:45 – 10:15 Adrian Mouat – Microservice Deployment Techniques
10:15 – 10:45 Peter Varhol – Using Machine Learning to Optimize DevOps Practices
10:45 – 11:00 Break
11:00 – 11:30 Gerie Owen – DevOps and Groupthink: An Oxymoron?
11:30 – 12:00 Abhishek Chanda – Helm and the zen of managing complex Kubernetes apps
12:00 – 12:30 Cookie Lanfear – From Software Development Bootcamp to Junior DevOps Engineer
12:30 – 13:00 Philipp Krenn – Providing and Supporting Docker Images
13:00 – 13:10 Sponsors
13:10 – 14:00 Lunch Break
14:00 – 14:30 Ignites
Jon Hall – Aligning DevOps and IT Support in the Enterprise, Through Intelligent Swarming
Philipp Krenn – NoSQL Means No Security?
Murdo Aird – Using ChatOps in an open and conversational workflow
14:30 – 15:00 Open Spaces Planning
15:00 – 15:30 Break
15:30 – 16:00 Open Space 1
16:00 – 16:30 Open Space 2
16:30 – 17:00 Open Space 3
17:00 – 17:20 Day Close
17:30 – 19:30 Drinks Reception
October 24, 2017
08:00 – 09:00 Registration and Breakfast
09:00 – 09:15 Opening Welcome
09:15 – 09:45 Paul Gillespie – The Perfect DevOps Storm
09:45 – 10:15 Charlotte Godley – Engineering a Continuous Delivery Pipeline
10:15 – 10:45 Josh Atwell – Work + Family + Self + Fast Paced Industry = _()/
10:45 – 11:00 Break
11:00 – 11.30 Neil Crawford – Repository driven development
11:30 – 12.00 Chris Van Tuin – A DevOps State of Mind: Continuous Security with Kubernetes
12:00 – 12.30 Jason Hand – Scrutinizing the Scrutiny
12:30 – 13:00 Jenny Duckett – Encouraging a culture of learning across your organisation
13:00 – 13:10 Sponsors
13:10 – 14:00 Lunch Break
14:00 – 14:30 Ignites
Ken Mugrage – The answer to the “where do we start” question
Gabriel Nepomuceno – Intelligent Diagnostics and debug
Adrian Mouat – Docker Tips and Tricks
14:30 – 15:00 Open Spaces Planning
15:00 – 15:30 Break
15:30 – 16:00 Open Space 1
16:00 – 16:30 Open Space 2
16:30 – 17:00 Open Space 3
17:00 – 17:20 Day Close