Day 1 - Presentations
Nigel Dalton - REA - Keynote
A talk about some of REA's journey towards DevOps from a management point of view. This was underpinned by a competition which was presented as a IP address on Nigel's shirt. This felt a little like splitting the audience where those with laptops and an interest were trying to solve the treasure hunt, and those listening to his talk. Some interesting points of view especially from the management perspective. A take away from this talk was about mixing your own team's and process to find something that works for you rather than trying to buy something off the shelf.
Javier Turegano - The DevOps Lab
This talk was all about changing team structure to introduce a mix of dev and ops in product teams. Although I had seen this presentation previously there was still something to take away from it - experimentation. Experiment with teams and what works for your company and don't be afraid to learn and shake things up.
Lindsey Holmwood - Continuous Deployment for infrastructure
This talk started with the principles underpinning DevOps with some examples - such as the CI/CD pipeline, code as infrastructure, testing as a first class citizen and measurement. Lindsey did talk about changing and testing one thing at a time - for example change web tier, test the web tier - however he didn't touch on how this is completed when there is a dependency between tiers. One other take away from this talk was fast feedback, it's required and necessary to make sure your changes are validated.
Day 1 - Ignite
Accenture - Maturity models - Interesting in the fact that my current company do the same thing - allows you to focus on where you efforts will be best spent
IOOF - Centralised logging - Using logstash and the scaling problems associated with that, nothing really new here just that logging is very necessary (but we already knew that right?)
Thoughtworks - Mobile Dev and microservices - Interesting in the fact that the focus was on the development of a new product and some solutions around how different versions of the code can work by ignoring events that it doesn't recognise - no automation of infrastructure - surprising but maybe not depending on the focus on the project.
Day 1 - OpenSpaces
There wasn't a large amount of talks as I think the audience was not overly comfortable with the format of the OpenSpaces. I suggested one myself and it was scheduled towards the end of the day - it was on microservices. It was good that a number of people came to my room, and I was able to get some information from people on how they were solving problems such as monitoring and problems associated with versioning and dependencies between services.
Day 1 - Afterparty
This was really good, having a chance to relax and mingle with the audience and talk about some of the presentations that day. All coupled with good pizza and arcade games - bonus nerd points.
Day 2 - Presentations
Panel - The platform roadmap
Questions posed by a facilitator and answered by a number of companies around Australia and how they were solving the problems.
One of the key take aways, and indeed one which was shared around on twitter, was that security is not only for the security team, it's a shared responsibility owned by everyone.
Steve Pereira - DevOps Traction
I really enjoyed this talk, it was all about the relationships that you needed to have in order to try and be successful in DevOps. It was very good as it didn't concentrate on the tools but more about the cultural significance of DevOps - which in my opinion is not given enough attention. Quote of the conference from this one as well "Empathy is a large part of DevOps" - when attempting to understand another persons point of view whether it's dev or ops.
Mujtaba Hussain - Quit your job as a dev and go do Ops
Mujtaba is a very good speaker, a funny guy that keeps you engaged with a small amount of text on his slides and a good mix between experience and a call to action about putting yourself outside of your comfort zone and doing something that you're not good at in order to learn and become a better engineer.
Shiva Narayanaswamy - Event driven infrastructure
FAAS - Function As A Service. Where you just write code (functions), which don't have dedicated servers but are run on services which the whole infrastructure is managed. Very much tailored for the AWS set of services, specifically AWS Lambda. Most interesting thing here was the potential of infrastructure to quickly respond to events.
Day 2 - OpenSpaces
Certainly more interest in the second day with about three times as many talks proposed, often multiple people suggesting several topics. The two that I was really interested in were "DevOps can't work from ground up, has to be from top down", provocative title and something which I don't particularly believe in. This was a good session talking about how we can start to implement DevOps practices even if it's between two small teams - it's still dev and ops working together more closely.
The other interesting talk was around leadership and how technical people can struggle with leadership and management when stepping into that role. Some interesting points of view and Dan Pink - Drive will be the next book that I read!
Conclusion
Overall a good experience at this conference, nothing overly eye opening in terms of what is out there, as it felt like the company that I work for are mature in terms of DevOps practices. This is worth it in itself as you get a spur on from just this fact, that others in the group were solving the same problems as I am having.
The format worked well, with the second day open spaces much more popular than the first day, as everyone got more comfortable with the format. A good event overall and I have certainly some ideas to take away and use in my DevOps journey.
Thanks for the write up. A great share for friends and colleagues who couldn't make the conference.
ReplyDeleteGlad to hear you are going to read Drive. A cracking book :)