devopsdays Sydney 2016

Bridget records a live panel at DevOpsDays Sydney, held in the Sydney Masonic Centre, as a co-production with Software Defined Talk, whose Matt Ray guest hosts. Matt Ray moved to Sydney in July to build a footprint for Chef and do evangelism, and says Chef sponsors as many DevOpsDays as it can to build community. The panel is Katie McLaughlin, a first-year organizer who ended up emceeing the whole event, Lindsay Holmwood, who spoke first that morning, Matthew Jones, an organizer who runs the Melbourne meetup, and Mick Pollard, who goes by Aussie Linux and is attending. It's Bridget's first time in Australia, and Bridget wants a photo on one of the building's many thrones.

Where Sydney's DevOps Community Came From

Lindsay and Mick started the first ever DevOps meetup, in February 2010, and Matthew says Sydney's DevOpsDays in 2010 was the second one outside Ghent, making it the longest running. Mick says the reason was that at the end of 2009 Mick worked at a startup that missed its next round of funding, and everyone was fired one morning. With no name in the industry and no community events behind them, Mick did the hard slog of job hunting and decided no one should have to. So the meetup would be inclusive, not just for practitioners but recruiters and anyone else, and helping people find jobs is the only reward Mick needs. Lindsay says they're actively inclusive of recruiters, on the condition they don't cold-call the members, and sees them as allies.

Katie says the event has skipped beer at the first-day activities, with bowling instead, for the past two years, which helped attendance the next morning. Lindsay gave an opening talk at the 2013 Sydney event, and says this year's attendance was spectacular by comparison.

A Conference Where Everyone Participates

Matthew likes that half of DevOpsDays is open spaces, shaped by attendees and not organizers. Lindsay says there are no silent witnesses, and people who participate most enjoy it most. Matt Ray, as a vendor and former organizer, says a table isn't the point, since you have to show up and talk. Lindsay says at corporate events the contrast is stark, and that at DevOpsDays a vendor person is just an actual person.

The challenge is selling open spaces in Australia to people who haven't been. Mick passed along feedback from someone asking "why am I giving you money to come to a conference that has no speakers." Bridget says about 85% of any room has never been to one, so the stock template now says attendee-suggested breakout sessions instead of open. Katie calls it "a supercharged hallway track and some talks," and says the conference emphasizes that talks are recorded so you don't have to attend them all, and people travel to meet people. Mick heard a non-technical attendee say they felt very involved.

Topics: Lambda, Business, People

Lindsay's morning talk was about building teams as complex distributed systems made of humans. Lindsay came for the technology in Ghent in 2009, when people wanted agile systems administration, and found that "none of the technology problems are the hard ones in our industry. It's actually people." Matt Ray says the talks break into technology like containers, and how to do DevOps with people in the enterprise, like getting your boss to listen. Lindsay says functions as a service is a fundamental game changer, and expects the talks in two or three years to be about different technology. Matt Ray says last year and the year before were about containers, and "The people problems never go away." Matthew notes recurring topics of DevOps and the rest of the business, including an Ignite about finance and DevOps, and security. Katie says language communities are picking up on culture, hiring, diversity and inclusion, and that a linguist gave the closing keynote, and adds that organizer burnout is real, which is part of why Katie volunteers.

Australia and the US

Matt Ray doesn't sense the same fear of competition in Australia as in the States, where Amazon and Walmart are torching retail. Lindsay pitches changing technical practices to government by saying you want to go faster to deliver value and meet user needs, and that "going fast and being safe, they are not mutually exclusive." The Puppet survey stats show fast teams recover from failure faster, and Matt Ray calls it compliance at velocity. Lindsay says the government's Digital Transformation Agency supports hundreds of apps with a team of two. Matthew says Australians are open at meetups, but US and European companies moving in are bringing an NDA culture, which Matthew is mindful of as an organizer.

Where DevOps Is Going

Mick says more effort is going into what developers deliver and less into the operating system: "The OS layer is really more a utility these days," like a tap you turn on without wondering where the water comes from. Katie, who is newer to ops, says there is still gap filling and legacy work, since not everyone is running containerless Lambda functions. Lindsay says operations will consolidate, with fewer of those jobs, so learn at least one other programming language, since you can help developers who now can get things running easily. Matt Ray adds that there are more places things can go wrong, so operability wisdom still matters, and that "there's always gonna be servers somewhere." Matthew says the future is about people, and adds that everyone talks about business value but should remember the customer who pays you. Bridget ties it together with the electricity generated on a river in Appleton, Wisconsin, and says you decide what to abstract away, and which to pay someone else to do.

Bridget and special guest host Matt Ray of Software Defined Talk chat with Matthew Jones, Lindsay Holmwood, Mick Pollard, and Katie McLaughlin at devopsdays Sydney 2016.

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Open CFPs

• DevOpsDays Baltimore - closing on Dec 12, 2016
• ChefConf 2017 - closing on January 18, 2017
• Velocity San Jose until Jan 10th
• Monitorama - May 22-24 - CFP opening soon