DevOpsDays +1

Coming back from Paris devopsdays, these 2 lasts days have been very rewarding and pushed me to write down some lines about it.

Devops Reminder

I won't make a full desccription of DevOps 'cause 1- It's a buzzword & 2- you'll find everything on the Net or just have a look at Patrick Debois (@patrickdebois) slides on slideshare. But basically in our IT world we've got 3 kind of people: Users/Devs/Ops. And unfortunately, companies are used to build huge silos and putting walls between these roles. So, as for the Babel Tower, every one as the same goal but each has its own language.

So DevOps is like Agile Method for Devs & Ops; yet another way to help people working/talking/cooperating together. Involving Ops teams as soon as possible in project to prevent firefighting and also bringing some Devs concept into the Ops world (testing, Configuration Management, automation, etc.). Another ways to define Devops is:

• Culture
• Automation
• Sharing
• Measure

So now let's go back on the event.

The presentations

The first big (good) surprise of the event has been the topics. Indeed, as many of the attendees,  I guess, I was expecting  huge tools demos: Puppet, Chef, CFengine, logstash and so on but NOT AT ALL. Good? Bad? I don't know... I don't care. If I reuse a famous quote

• Great minds discuss about idea
• Average minds discuss about process
• Small minds discuss about tools

What I liked was to see the DevOps concerns through many many prisms!! First of all the speakers were very good and they did not fell in the trap of presenting theorcial stuff which only work at Google-like companies, all along the speakers have been value-oriented.Information Technologies must support some business activities . We (IT) are an invest and all the speakers kept this fact well in mind. 

Indeed, if I (and I guess many of the attendees) came to the event is because we identified some problems (waste of time/money, lack of productivity, etc.) in our company. Devops speackers helped us to address this problem and giving us some leverages based on their own experience.

The Ignite talks

I fell in love with these presentations!!! Basically, they're  5 mins long presentations with the slides advancing every 15 seconds. It's a kind of elevator pitch with 20 slides. It's the perfect format for commercial announcement. You MUST have a look at Partick's talk:

http://www.slideshare.net/devopsdays/what-if-devops-was-invented-by-coca-cola

For further information about the Iginite just have a look there:

http://igniteshow.com/.

The Open Spaces

The open spaces were discussions with other attendees. So, the topics were propose at the beginning of the afternoon, and then you just chose the ones you want to assist.To be frank  I was a bit frustrated by these open spaces, they looked more like group therapy than problem solving workshops.

But well is always interesting to compare its very own problem to the other organization. First, because you can learn (a bit) from someone's errors and you can also help someone to fix its issues. Then, sharing with the other also help to calibrate its very own organization. So I very appreciated to notice that at the end my organization is not that bad, and in fact we did a quite great job until now.

Conclusion

So bad it takes only 2 days, but I think the organizers will sleep all the week end now ;) So quite satisfied by this very first devops days in Paris. One thing which I did not mention is the importance of the social network and meetings are kind of boosters! I met some very valuable people and growth once again the list of contacts (aka. potential future help) and this is, IMHO, the more under-estimated aspect of these events

I would dedicate the very last words to all the devopsdays crew, thank you guys!