On October 7th, Chef participated in the first ever DevOpsDays Boise event. After attending several DevOps events around the country, Julie Gunderson of Taos wanted to bring the joy of DevOps to her home town of Boise. Julie assembled an excellent group of leaders to help her organize the event and then called in an amazing group of speakers to present.
To kick off the event, Kelsey Hightower gave a spirited talk about NoOps, with a healthy emphasis on how Kubernetes can speed up deployments. He demonstrated an application deployment system created by connecting Kubernetes to Jira, thereby allowing a gated self-service approach to deployments. Kelsey helped make and demonstrate the case that operations teams should be producing systems to drive the business, not deploying ourselves.
From there, the event picked up steam. We were treated to excellent presentations from Netflix, Jet Propulsion Laboratories (JPL), HP Enterprise, Microsoft, CA, JFrog, and many more.
From Chef, Seth Falcon presented his journey from Individual Contributor to VP of Engineering. He shared insights from his experiences along the way. Seth provided encouragement and useful lessons to inspire others to reach for maximum potential in their career development.
I presented on a variety of DevOps topics, drawing from Henry Ford’s experience and providing a perspective on the utilization of people, process and tools within DevOps. Check out the recording of my presentation:
As new technology trends emerge, such as Docker, Service Discovery, and Secrets Management, Chef customers and enthusiasts alike are finding ways to integrate these solutions together to solve new problems and improve existing processes.
We got a sense of how unique this type of event was in Boise when the local news station showed up with a camera crew! Several people were interviewed and a short clip was shown during the evening news. They offered a discount code for people to attend on Saturday. We were delighted to see a handful of people who came from this news! This reaction shows just how impactful events like DevOpsDays can be on small communities, demonstrating that great technologies can come from anywhere, not just the Silicon Valley.
The DevOpsDays organization has done a wonderful job of bringing world-class content to local communities. By inviting non-local attendees and speakers to participate, these folks get a great opportunity to visit amazing destinations they might not otherwise visit. Boise may not be very popular or famous, but it is a beautiful city with a great local culture. It was clean, safe and inviting. I’m definitely looking forward to going back to Boise again next year!