Velocity 2016

A few weeks ago, I was able to attend the O'Reilly Velocity Conference.  It was my first time at this particular conference, and I was very impressed with the breadth of coverage.  As with all conferences, some sessions were much better than others.  I rarely enjoy the infomercial-style sessions, of the "we need to change our culture" whining sessions.  But here were several excellent technical sessions, and a few great sleepers (e.g. the one on anxiety in IT ops).

I put together a tl;dr list for my team:

• It’s still a “choose your own adventure” experience in monitoring
• Monitoring means different things to different people
• There are lots of tools, and lots of new tools being created
• The big guys still mostly roll their own or stitch together open source tools with custom code (lots of “dev” in their “ops”)
• Anybody can build something, but to build something maintainable and effective requires specialization and a deep understanding of the tools available
• Microservices on containers: everybody was talking about them, but most were saying “no silver bullet” and “it’s a mixed bag”
• Advanced mathematical analytics is hard, and someday we’ll be able to use it without a PhD…but probably not today
• To provide real value make your services as easy as possible for the customer (engineering, ops on call, et al) – create tools, ChatOps, APIs, UIs, data access, etc.
• SRE/DevOps = 60% development/automation + 40% operations (the work is more dev than ops)

Slides and videos can be found (at the moment) at http://conferences.oreilly.com/velocity/devops-web-performance-ca/public/schedule/proceedings