Date: 12 December 2019
Towards the end of October, Assurity’s DevOps team attended the 2019 DevOpsDays conference at Auckland’s Aotea Centre.
DevOpsDays is a technical conference held in various, major international cities throughout the year covering software development, infrastructure operations and the intersection between them.
The conference includes presentations from experienced members and influencers in the DevOps space, as well as numerous time-boxed open spaces where attendees take part in their chosen focused discussions.
Assurity was a Gold sponsor and the conference also included a presentation by Allen Geer and Michael Harrod. Together, they gave an informative and humorous talk on ‘Kiwi Ingenuity – Kiwis Can Overcome Tough Problems in DevOps’ in which they shared common problems they’ve encountered while adopting DevOps practices in large NZ organisations.
Piers Chamberlain also shared demos on ‘Managing canary releases using feature flags’ and ‘Reacting to production incidents’ using Sumo Logic, CloudBees Rollout and PagerDuty. Nigel Charman and Will Robertson were also part of the organising team for the event.
On a personal front, being an Assurity graduate who has spent only the better part of a year in the world of DevOps, this was an amazing opportunity to learn about new technologies and hear the experiences of industry professionals. I was able to further my knowledge in topics such as Site Reliability Engineering, DevSecOps and GitOps, as well as being introduced to new tools such as Batect and Istio.
All in all, the conference served as a great couple of days to learn, be inspired by new techniques and technology, meet new people and hear relevant experiences. With DevOpsDays coming to Wellington next year, I can’t wait to get involved once again.
