Date: 19 November 2018
Last week’s sell-out DevOpsDays Wellington 2018 attracted 350 attendees and 18 sponsors, with Assurity being a Gold Sponsor of the event.
Among the international and local speakers were Assurity’s Nigel Charman whose Ignite talk mapped organising DevOpsDays NZ onto the DevOps CALMS model and Allen Geer and Amanda Baker who talked about Continuously Testing Govt.nz. Mrinal Mukherjee also delivered an insightful and humorous presentation on ‘A DevOps Confessional’.
Nigel and Michael Harrod took a moment to pay their respects to their Assurity colleague, Peter-John Lightfoot, who was tragically killed in a car accident in October.
On stand, the Assurity team was focused on promoting PagerDuty, CloudBees and Assurity Education’s Fundamentals of DevOps course, with attendees having the opportunity to see on-stand demos of PagerDuty and CloudBees solutions. There was also a prize draw to win a Raspberry Pi Retro Arcade Gaming Kit.
Knowledge sharing
“It was a great platform to showcase Assurity and our partners” says Assurity’s Saurev Sen. “We kicked off a few open spaces’ discussions including education in DevOps, managing infrastructure as code and managing notification and got very good participation. There was a lot of interest in PagerDuty and we attracted a gathering for DevOptics and CloudBees.
“Everyone was willing to share their experiences, good or bad. This was a tremendous learning opportunity for me”.
Aya Omar also benefited from the sharing aspect of the conference. “People shared their thoughts, experiences and pitfalls, learning from each other, in the talks but mainly in the open spaces. It was great to witness how most people in the field share the same goals and have same issues. Everyone was helpful and supportive with advice and solutions. The vibe was so positive.”
Of the presentations, Michael Harrod focused on that of Anthony Borton of Microsoft who described their massive Agile/DevOps transformation that led up to the unveiling of the Azure DevOps as particularly inspiring. “It’s an astonishing example of how a juggernaut of a company, historically famous for communication problems and sluggish innovation can set a clear vision, allocate skilled resources and work tirelessly to achieve their goal. This clearly is a new Microsoft that’s attentive to the community and stands to be a great partner.”
Simon Huang was particularly impressed with Ryan McCarvill’s talk about the software transformation of Fire and Emergency NZ. “It’s a great example of the engineers utilising limited resource to achieve the architecture requirement in a DevOps way” says Simon. “His presentation skills and the content made the talk very enjoyable.”
You can take a look at Allen’s presentation here and Nigel’s here.
If you’d like to find out more about Assurity’s DevOps offerings, including PagerDuty, CloudBees and education, contact Nigel Charman.
