From Wednesday the 22nd till Friday the 24th of June, Pakhuis de Zwijger in Amsterdam was filled to the brim with tech enthusiasts. During these three days, the tenth edition of the DevOpsDays Amsterdam took place, and we as Devoteam just had to be here.
The first day
The first day was filled with workshops in different disciplines that have to do with DevOps, from a 3-hour Terraform course to a workshop on saying “No!” more often when working on a project.
The second day
The second day started with the opening keynote that was given by Emily Freeman. She talked about the way tech has been handling incidents and how we can change this for the better. Over the years most problems, errors, and alerts have been sent to DevOps engineers. This has led to a growing number of skills needed to handle these incidents and a higher workload. But what if we already accept that we will have incidents and make them boring, repeatable, and predictable? Isn’t it better if we would share these fields of tech between the layers of tech so we are all up to an extent responsible and accountable? It really gave us something to think about!
The state of DevOps
Before one had time to process these interesting philosophies, the stage was taken by Amanda Lewis and Nathan Harvey, both developer advocates at Google. They presented ‘The State of DevOps’. A yearly report by the DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment) team in collaboration with Google that researches the latest trends in DevOps by doing a large survey amongst developers and following the latest trends in tech. The report brought forward the importance of good documentation for the implementation of DevOps, the importance of a healthy team culture when facing big challenges, and the fact that the highest performing teams are the ones that keep implementing new technologies. The key seemed to be to keep getting better at getting better, something a lot of people found so inspiring and motivating!
TechRadar
After these talks, it was time to get back to our Devoteam booth where we presented our TechRadar. It was great to see that a lot of visitors engaged with this and it sparked good discussions about the way we look at some technologies.
Cloud Migration
Around noon there was a talk about migrating entire companies to the cloud followed by a talk by Amber Vanderburg about leading remote teams. This was one theme that came back more often during these days. After working from home for so many months we started seeing the advantages and challenges of remote working. Luckily there were a lot of tips and tricks on how to overcome these challenges and work at your highest potential without seeing your team in person.
After a great lunch in the sun, we went back to the main hall where they started lightning talks. The most inspiring one was about the combination of support and DevOps work in an agile team. We have all experienced the effect that giving support has on your performance and concentration when you are working on a project. This talk suggested a dedicated support role that changed everything. They went as far as automating a support phone number and slack account that was synced with their Google calendar automatically.
In the afternoon there were open spaces where people could suggest their topics for smaller discussions with topics like ‘the future after cloud’ and ‘Infrastructure as code horror stories’. After their yearly BBQ in the evening, we went back home to get some rest for the third and last day.
Final Day of the DevOps Days
The day started with a keynote by Job van der Voort who used to work remotely for GitLab and had a lot to tell about techniques for remote working.
Thereafter there was an inspiring talk about containerless Kubernetes. It was explained that WebAssembly is being used more and more in Kubernetes environments because of its high performance and security. Many upcoming tools were highlighted and their features were explained. The project is still under development and not ready for development yet but we certainly need to keep our eyes open for these developments!
After all, it was a very energizing and inspiring 3 days and a lot of new insights were given about a combination of the latest development in the cloud and about working agile and remote. Now all that’s left to do is look forward to the next edition!
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