DevOps Enterprise Summit is a conference dedicated to helping individuals and companies navigate their DevOps journeys. Over 1300 DevOps practitioners (new and experienced alike) from organizations like Target, Disney, IBM and Walmart came together, November 13-15 in San Francisco, to share inspiring stories and cautionary tales. Many of the keynote speakers shared the importance of building internal DevOps communities and hold internal DevOpsDays style events. Target’s Sr. Director of Platform Engineering, Heather Mickman spoke about the DevOps Journey (DOJO) Assessment and it’s impact on their journey.
Watch the keynotes here.
Lean Coffee DevOps Workshops
New to the conference this year was the addition of Lean Coffee DevOps workshops. They covered topics such as Security and Leading Change, and Organizational Design. I was pleased to be a facilitator for several of the sessions. Many times, we live within the confines of our own organization, which can trap us in an echo chamber. Lean Coffee is a great way to learn about other people’s experiences with open source tools.
The Chef Booth
Chef was a Silver Sponsor again this year and we had a very busy booth. Attendees stopped by to learn about Chef and how our tools can help them embrace DevOps. Many of the attendees we spoke with shared that they are experiencing pain around container adoption. We were happy to introduce them to our newest open source project, Habitat. Habitat simplifies container management by packaging applications in a compact, atomic way to make it easier to deploy on various container runtimes.
Front of mind for other attendees are the security aspects of DevOps and how to incorporate the appropriate security gates in the development process. InSpec, our open source project for compliance automation, enables you to scan your infrastructure, cloud compute resources and/or containers to ensure compliance at every stage.
You can join the conversations about these topics and more in our Chef Community Slack channel. There, Chef employees and IT professionals from companies that use Chef share their broad range of expertise to help solve problems.
Session Highlights
One notable talk was Jez Humble and Nicole Forsgren’s session on the science behind DevOps. They reported the results of the 2016 State of DevOps survey. With 25,000 respondents, they discussed insights into security, containers, trunk-based development, and lean product management.
Also of interest to me, was Adrian Cockroft’s presentation. He discussed a few key issues in talent retention. We all know how difficult it is to find and keep talented engineers. Adrian compared several approaches to keeping top talent within your organization and ways to know if these techniques are right for you.
Dominica DeGrandis gave a very interesting presentation on controlling “invisible work”. She presented some techniques for preventing unplanned work from becoming hidden and discussed some of the dangers of unseen (and unmeasured) work.
One of the last sessions of the conference was Jason Cox sharing Disney’s DevOps journey. They’ve adopted a culture of collaboration, curiosity and courage. He emphasized that change is not easy or quick and that positive disruption, convincing others with data and feedback, and never giving up are ideas that have helped their teams.
“We are at our best when we are helping each other, serving each other, and making a positive difference” – Jason Cox, Disney
The DevOps Handbook
We’d like to congratulate Gene Kim, Jez Humble, and John Willis on the release of their new book The DevOps Handbook. Thank you Gene Kim and IT Revolution for another amazing DevOps Enterprise Summit. We are looking forward to next year!