devopsdays Toronto 2016

Bridget records this one at DevOpsDays Toronto, in one of the open spaces on the second day, with a mix of people from the event. The guests are Dave Cliffe (PagerDuty) and Steve Pereira (Statflo), two of the local organizers, Sarah Kowalik of PagerDuty's operations team, representing a sponsor, Sean Walberg of the NFL, who spoke, and Joe Laha, the Arrested DevOps editor and a DevOpsDays Minneapolis organizer. Joe usually stays silent on these recordings, and here says the reason for coming to events like this is to "steal all the good ideas and implement them in Minneapolis."

Curating the Event

Dave says this was the third Toronto event, in a couple of venues, with a diverse audience and a growing enterprise focus. Steve says it was the second year at the same venue. Asked what they were curating, Dave says they take the code of conduct seriously and had an incident to deal with promptly, and that they look for speaker diversity. Steve is candid: they did an outstanding job on topic diversity and a poor job on representation of groups and demographics, with no excuse, and next year they need to start earlier and go out into the community. Attendees were happy with the range of culture and technical talks, and Steve says they tried to serve the enterprise audience without creating an echo chamber.

Sarah has been to a couple of DevOpsDays in Australia and notes that Toronto has more of a focus on financial tech and banks. Steve adds that Toronto has many attendees from fintech and legacy banks, but the banks don't show up as sponsors, and Steve would like to see them invest at the organization level. Joe says London was very fintech-focused, with Barclays as a sponsor.

ChatOps

Sean's talk was about the team's chatbot, Waterboy, one of two talks Sean submitted, and Sean didn't expect this one to be accepted. Sean's team is very distributed and conversations were happening in private, so moving tools into the chat room made troubleshooting collaborative and left a history. Their tools let you look at a URL and see timing, or take apart a microservice to see how the CDN affects it.

Steve is a fan of ChatOps as an easy path into DevOps patterns: everything happens in the open, is recorded, and is a single interface to many backend operations. Sarah says PagerDuty's operations team moved from deploys to provisioning, decommissioning and Chef converges via ChatOps, so the team no longer provides "keyboard as a service." A plugin that returns context for an IP or hostname means "we stop getting questions about it," a very easy metric. Sarah adds that you should log chat to centralized logging so it's searchable. Dave, a product manager, likes chat in the incident response lifecycle, such as support paging the incident commander from the bot. Steve values not having to interrupt people. Joe says the organizers run their events in Slack, and an audiovisual vendor form posted once gets found by search.

First-Timers, Open Spaces, and Failure Stories

Sean was a first-timer and had been told not to overthink open spaces. Sean enjoyed conversations about metrics, chat and incidents, and liked that the talks were "by people just like us." Dave says "you don't have to be a professional speaker in order to get up and talk at a DevOps Days." Bridget praises the talks about what didn't work, and Steve says that was curated on purpose. If you don't know what to expect, you may think the speakers are beyond your organization, so mixing success stories from companies like Shopify with teams that failed inspires people afraid to start. Dave adds "We all fail. We suck in places," which breaks down boundaries.

Sarah says open space selection was done differently than in Australia, where people pitch for about 20 seconds and others tally marks on cards. Toronto used a Trello board and a show of hands. Bridget likes pitches, since Sean pitching a talk about ChatOps beats the bare word on a board, and Sarah says a pitch framed as a problem gets a bigger response. The Toronto organizers also tried bringing the mic to people so introverts could pitch sitting down.

Getting Under-Represented Voices Into the CFP

Bridget says that as an organizer, the approach is to chase the groups you want represented before the CFP opens. In Minneapolis this year Bridget hand-fed the link to a few people, and their talks were upvoted by the rest of the team with names and companies stripped. Bridget thinks a large bank should get an invitation to tell its journey. Steve says the work is continuous, since 2017 starts as soon as 2016 ends. Sarah, who'd usually talk on ChatOps, will get voluntold to give the ChatOps talk next year, and Dave notes they won't invite Sean back: "Sean's done. He had his one chance."

Legacy Isn't Boring

Dave says the different cultural pockets inside large companies are undervalued, and the only thing that works in an enterprise is land and expand, a change agent in one area. Bridget says bimodal IT is bad because it tells coworkers that some get awesome mode and others get sad mode. Sean says "I wish people would stop treating the old stuff as boring. It's the stuff bringing in the money," and that experimentation needs the users and traffic that are on the old stuff. Bridget agrees: "if the old stuff didn't matter, you would just turn it off."

Other Events and Formats

Sean's earlier version of this talk was to federal workers in DC, where the idea of a chatbot doing work seemed foreign and the jokes didn't land. In Toronto people were far more open about their problems, which Bridget says is a hallmark of DevOpsDays, including DevOpsDays DC at the US Patent Office. Joe says single-track events have lulls in vendor booth traffic because everyone is in one room, and Steve says multi-track brings FOMO traffic. Sarah says it's recorded, so you can catch it later.

Looking ahead, Steve wants to get back to speaking, Sean has a ChefConf talk in July, Sarah looks forward to Monitorama, and Joe has t-shirts, AV and menus for Minneapolis. The thing Joe plans to steal from Toronto is a structured tech check for all the day's speakers half an hour before the event, since AV people like early testing more than "I'm speaking in 15 seconds and I haven't tested this." Steve says to take their laptops away afterward so they don't change settings.

devopsdays Toronto

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