2018 DevOps Days Baltimore

DevOpsDays Baltimore 2018

Where- Baltimore MD When 22 - 23 March 2017
Official Site - https://www.devopsdays.org/events/2018-baltimore/welcome/
Schedule - http://devopsdaysbaltimore2018.busyconf.com/schedule
YouTube Channel - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxpCqO1jg-xyTB8uZo049Bw Slides - https://www.slideshare.net/devopdsaysbaltimore/presentations

Summary

Conference about Devops

Take Aways From Keynotes

The best keynote of the conference was a keynote put on by USDS (United States Digital Service) about dev ops in government spaces. It was set up like a panel, and the discussion was centered around struggles of dev ops in government spaces, ways to work around those problems, and the future of dev ops. USDS seems committed to bringing the government into the 21st century in the arena of dev ops.

I also enjoyed the keynote that was around how to fail using the waffle house methods. The speaker talked about how waffle house refuses to shut down in the face of anything. If they lose power, they are able to use the griddles because they use gas. if they lose gas, they can make waffles and microwave food, but eggs or off the table. As long as they have access to clean water, they can remain open. The speaker turned this around in software and talked about how to have your systems set up so that when one thing goes wrong, the whole site doesn't go shut down.

Another really good keynote in my opinion was the last keynote of the conference, which was a panel of all of the event organizers comparing the struggles they faced with a last minute rescheduling of the event with dev ops. Because of the late snow storm, the organizers originally had no contingent plan in place. One of the ideas behind dev ops is to fail fast and have plans for when the failures occur. The organizers needed to contact the sponsors, the catering, the attendees, and the venue to make sure moving the conference was even possible. They showed the slack threads from the days leading up to the conference, and talked about the lessons they learned for future conferences. I enjoyed the comparisons of real life scenarios to the dev ops ideologies.

Takeaways from Ignite Talks

My favorite Ignite talk was an ignite talk where a man crated a fake season of black mirror all surrounded around dev ops. He talked about the equifax breach and how the cause of it was an issue in apaches that had been patched for years, and they never got around to patching it. He also made an episode around knight capital where a software glitch caused them to lose $440 million in 30 minutes. The way he framed them as episodes of black mirror was a cool way of keeping interest.

Open Spaces

I attended a few really good open spaces. One was focused on a continuation of the keynote talk from USDS about dev ops in government spaces. However no one from tUSDS ended up attending, so it was a bunch of contractors telling horror stories about contracts, customers, etc and how we cleared those hurdles.

I also attended an open space where the discussion was on automated deployment. The different deployment strategies were being discussed like red/blue and canary, which I had never heard of but it seemed to have its merits as well. I like the open spaces specifically because it lets me learn things and ask questions in a much more intimate environmnent.

I put most of my votes into playing werewolf, but even though it ended up with more votes than other talks, I guess the organizers wanted to put dev ops related open spaces up instead, so it didn't get picked. They ended up picking it the second day as the last open space, which I took as an opportunity to leave early and beat traffic, but I really thought that woulda have been a cool way to meet and interact with people.

The second day of open spaces, I actually pitched an idea I had for one that was actually selected. I titled it A/S/L but it wasn't age/sex/location it was Application/Stack/Language. Basically I wanted to talk about the emerging JS libraries and frameworks out there, specifically ones that allow JS to be bother front and back end. I wanted to discuss how people are deploying them, what they are running them on, what they like about them, what they dislike, etc. What the talk ended up being was an old guy telling me to use Java to solve all my problems. Everyone in the talk kept steering the conversation back, but whenever there was a small window, he would start in again about Java. I explained I'm currently working on a java application, and it works fine, and we have it automated for builds, and it's in production, and I understand that it works, I was interested in new things, and he kept saying things like "why change". It was enlightening to see people are still out there with their head stuck in the mud refusing to change or evolve their skillset. It ended up being a really good talk, but for a completely different reason than I initially intended.

After that talk, I was pulled aside by a few developers from paypal, and we talked about nosql db's. What we liked and disliked about them, and had a pretty good conversation there too.

All in all, another good year with devops days. I think next year I'd like to get on board earlier and possibly run an ignite talk surrounded around the conversation we had in the open space.