Global Nerdy

DevOpsDays Tampa Bay, our local edition of the DevOpsDays conferences, takes place next Thursday, September 21st, at Armature Works! Tickets are $150, and there are deals for students. Register before it’s too late!

DevOpsDays is the name given to a series of community-run technical conferences covering topics where software development (the “dev” part) and IT infrastructure operations (the “ops” part) intersect. A DevOpsDays conference isn’t a commercial affair; instead, it’s a labor of love made possible by volunteers from the community, for the benefit of the community. This makes for a friendly “community” feel, which I love in a conference.

Nora Jones keynote!

Nora’s name is often mentioned in the same breath as the phrase “chaos engineering,” which is “the process of testing a distributed computing system to ensure that it can withstand unexpected disruptions.” Or, to put it more succinctly, “f*** around and find out.”

She started doing chaos engineering as a team lead and senior developer at Jet.com (it’s since been acquired by Walmart), continued doing it at Netflix, and at Slack, she held the title of Head of Chaos Engineering and Human Factors. She’s also the co-author of the O’Reilly book Chaos Engineering: System Resiliency in Practice. These days, she’s at Jeli, where she’s the founder and CEO.

DevOpsDays Tampa Bay will start with her keynote, How do we talk to each other?, which will run from 9:00 – 10:00 a.m.

Here’s the abstract:

How surfacing communication patterns in organizations can help you understand and improve your resilience.

As a system increases in inevitable complexity, it becomes impossible for a single operator to have a clear, unambiguous understanding of what’s happening in the system. Understanding the system requires a joint effort between teammates and technology. Often, we are too focused on the single-operator experience to improve this. In this talk, we will uncover how communication patterns in organizations can reveal how systems actually work in practice, vs how we think they work in theory — and use this knowledge to improve the resilience of our systems.

Talks

Here are the conference talks, which will run from shortly after 10:00 a.m. to 2:45 p.m.

• Realigning DevOps: Customers and Learning First, with Kishore Jalleda
• The Startup DevOps Playbook – Making It A Success From Day One, with Aman Sharma
• Building Resilience: A Journey of Crafting and Validating Our Disaster Recovery Plan, with Yedidya Schwartz
• The Power of DevOps in the Real World, with Randy Pagels
• Simplifying Cloud Native Chaos Engineering: A Deep Dive into Chaos Mesh, with Soumyadip Chowdhury
• Best Practices for Securing CI/CD Pipelines, with Lizz Parody
• The OpenTelemetry Hero’s Journey: Working with Open Source Observability, with Josh Lee

Open Spaces

From 2:45 to 4:30 p.m., there will be Open Spaces, which are unscripted and spontaneous breakout sessions on any DevOps topic. Who determines what the topics are? You do!

DevOpsDays Tampa Bay’s Open Spaces will follow the Open SPace principles, which are simple yet powerful guidelines:

• Whoever comes are the right people.
• Whatever happens is the only thing that could have.
• Whenever it starts is the right time.
• Whenever it’s over, it’s over.
• Wherever it happens is the right place.

Armature Works!

And finally, there’s the venue itself: Armature Works, Tampa’s food hall, and my favorite local conference venue. It’s a great space to hold an event, and the food and drink there make conferences so much better. I know I’m going to get a Buddy Brew Coffee and a Bake’N Babes cookie while I’m there.

How do you find out more / get a ticket?

Head over to the DevOpsDays Tampa Bay site to find out more, and to get a ticket, visit their “purchase a ticket” page.