On 22nd March I had the pleasure along with a few other Chefs of being invited to the Computing DevOps Excellence Awards hosted at the Marriott Grosvenor Square Hotel in London. Before the awards ceremony itself we participated in the annual Computing DevOps Summit which is always great for meeting like-minded people to talk about all things DevOps.
I’ve attended a number of different conferences like this in my career and the thing that stands out for me is that how busy the Chef stand gets and stays throughout the day. Perhaps it’s due to the fantastic giveaways we have (Chef t-shirts are always popular), but I think more realistically it’s down to the fact that we are relevant for so many different kinds of people who attend these events. The attendee list varies wildly from startups with a team size of less than ten, to multi-billion dollar brands whom we all know and recognize. But the one thread that is common across all of them is that they want to deliver software faster, and recognize that we can help them do that.
During the day I had some great conversations, and quite a few were driven by the presentation from our very own Dominik Richter, Product Manager for Compliance who highlighted the need for security and compliance to be included as part of any DevOps effort. This message resonated with attendees who hadn’t expected to hear about this at a DevOps conference but acknowledged that it was an issue which pretty much all of them felt in some way or another. The great news is that we at Chef have a very compelling story for adopting continuous compliance as part of your workflow, all centered around InSpec.
On to the awards themselves, it was a very grand affair attended by a wide range of key players from the industry. We were seated with Thomas Cook, an avid Chef user who also had Maryna Veremenko from their team nominated in the Young DevOps Engineer of the Year category (incidentally Maryna won her award – congratulations again!) so an enjoyable three course meal was had by all. Chef were nominated in one of the most hotly-contested categories; DevOps Tool/Product of the Year.
I won’t keep you in suspense any longer – we won! The judging panel saw Chef Automate as a key part of any DevOps toolchain and were very pleased to recognize it as their DevOps Tool / Product of the year. Team Chef assembled onstage and were pleased to receive the award from Stuart Sumner, the Editorial Director of Computing Magazine, naturally posing for a photo too.
All in all it was a great day, centered around the knowledge that what we are doing resonates with the industry, and we have a strong story to tell.
To learn more about Chef Automate and DevOps solutions from Chef, join us at ChefConf 2017 in Austin, Texas May 22 – 24!