DevOpsDays Kansas City 2018

Matty records at devopsdays Kansas City 2018, the third year for the event and Matty's first, with Jessica DeVita of Microsoft as guest co-host and a panel mixing attendees, organizers and a speaker. Ben Clayton is a director of DevOps who runs a local user group, Ana Medina works on chaos engineering at the startup Gremlin and gave the morning keynote, Dan Barker is chief architect at the National Association of Insurance Commissioners and an organizer of DevOps KC and devopsdays KC, and Monica Hart is a technology associate at VML Y&R at a first devopsdays. The cold open is Monica on "the amount of smart and knowledgeable people" at the conference.

What Changed in Year Three

Dan says the event started in a much smaller theater and has kept the theater theme, with better chairs than last year, new workshops, and an Ignite karaoke tradition where a visitor from another city does one about Kansas City, and a local does one about the visitor's home. The event has "doubled pretty much our attendees in the last 3 years," and there is a video wall and roaming cameras. Dan also notes this year was the first with volunteers, who helped with registration and other tasks.

A First DevOpsDays

Monica, from a non-tech background, was struck by the amount of talent and the differing views on how DevOps is used at work, plans to tinker with Kubernetes afterward, and admits to nerding out in front of speakers. Dan shares that feeling when learning Mike Julian had submitted. Monica says the DevOps community is "a really judgment-free zone," where people ask why you think so, instead of dismissing you.

Chaos Engineering

Ana's keynote was an introduction to chaos engineering in a fun manner. The reasons start with scale: systems are getting more complex, and downtime is expensive, with a report of "around $300,000 for every hour that a company is down." Chaos engineering gets teams thinking about resilience first-hand, can help onboard people to on-call, and frees engineers for development by reducing incidents. Jessica says talks on the practice only recently appeared at devopsdays events, and Ana says antifragility is becoming part of the conversation, and that while Ana has done this for three years, the practice is about ten years old, coined by Netflix with Chaos Monkey, with other companies doing it quietly.

Matty says it's been a year of resilience and notes the re:Deploy videos had just been released, with talks from Nora Jones of Netflix and John Allspaw of Adaptive Capacity Labs, and adds that "our systems are always in a state of some type of degradation."

User Groups and Volunteers

Ben says the virtualization community has realized it has to embrace DevOps culture, and tells engineers at VMUG to learn at least scripting and DevOps principles. Ben appreciates that this event is volunteer-led.

Open Spaces

Matty says the morning talks exist to give people something to discuss in the afternoon's open spaces. Matty shares that Andrew Clay Shafer said at devopsdays Chicago that in the first devopsdays, Andrew and Patrick mainly cared about open spaces and had talks only because companies would pay for them. Monica's favorite was an open space on workforce transformation, hearing common issues that aren't usually discussed. Jessica urges people to run open spaces at their company, like a lean coffee, since "It's not PowerPoint and presentation. It's conversation." About three quarters of the room were first-time attendees, which surprised Dan.

What Surprised Them

Matty says the variety of topics made Matty better rounded, including a keynote on flintknapping that left Matty thinking "I might want to make Paleolithic tools as a hobby." Ben sees a community change, with companies once hesitant now sending many people. Ana, based in San Francisco, says it's good to see Kansas City's conversations match the ones on the coasts, about monitoring, Kubernetes and chaos engineering. Dan was surprised by the number of first-timers and of companies not historically involved in DevOps.

Asked to describe devopsdays Kansas City in three words, Ben says "Culture, fun, and networking," Ana says "that was rad," Dan says "Growth, community, and challenge," and Monica says "Mind-blowingly awesome."

Matty (with special guest host Jessica DeVita) is joined by Ana Medina, Dan Barker, Ben Clayton, and Monica Hart at DevOpsDays Kansas City 2018.