In a simple and informal atmosphere, we talked with members of the DevOps Live Programming Committee about how who came to DevOps, what is important for the industry now, why conferences are useful and what is lost when moving online. We invite you to join the acquaintance: you can choose to watch and listen to the full recording or read the excerpts below.
The DevOps Live conference program committee consists of 25 classy professionals with extensive experience and a wide variety of case histories. They could put together a great event just from their case studies (and it would be much faster and easier), but they don't do it to help the participants get a complete understanding of DevOps processes and practices.
Four people took part in this conversation: Timur Batyrshin, Dmitry Zaitsev, Valeria Piliya and Mona Arkhipova. And so luckily, they all look at DevOps from slightly different angles and bring different accents to the conference agenda.
Timur Batyrshin (erthad) in IT for over 15 years, during this time he participated in the construction of Linux distributions, server virtualization, when it was not yet fashionable, automated the deployment of servers on the clouds and built the architecture of cloud applications.
Timur Batyrshin: We can say that the path to the DevOpsConf program committee began in 2012-2013 with the Hangops Ru community (Hangops can be deciphered as "Ops on Hangouts", it was in Hangouts that regular conversations about the industry were held). Gradually, the community grew beyond chat, and the core of enthusiasts began to organize DevOpsDays Moscow. Dima and Lera also participated, and Sasha Titov (osminog).
Dmitry Zaitsev (bhavenger) developed DevOps and SRE practices before it was fashionable. Combined them with ITIL and Cobit while they were still in vogue. Has experience in gamedev, adtech, bigdata, fintech, marketing. He is one of the organizers of DevOpsDays Moscow, DevOps Moscow, Hangops Ru. Now Head of SRE is at flocktory.com.
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works for flocktory.com Infrastructure Engineer, maintains infrastructure on AWS with k8s. She participated in the adaptation of the Russian-language edition of the DevOps Handbook and is one of the organizers of the DevOps Moscow meetups and the DevOpsDays Moscow 2019 conference. She joined the DevOpsConf program committee two years ago, like other participants in the conversation at the suggestion of Alexander Titov.
Valeria Piliya: I joined the program committee of the conference, because I was interested to know how it works from the inside. I didn't even have any guesses how, for example, tasks were distributed between the program committee and the organizers of the event. I was driven by curiosity and was given the opportunity to satisfy it. And this is an opportunity that is not denied.
Mona Arkhipova (Mona_Sax) COO sudo.su (MIRC), before that held managerial and expert positions in the field of security and IT. In her daily work, she actively uses DevOps practices and also started when it was not yet mainstream. Mona joined the program committee after the excellent How (You) Live Without a Security Department talked about how safety is everyone's responsibility. Now bringing security to the masses, not only at security conferences, but also at DevOps Live.
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DevOps
As you already understood, Mona is promoting DevSecOps and this year there will be more security at the conference. But this will not be a security conference inside DevOps Live - all presentations are designed for any level of expertise, that is, they are suitable for those who are just starting to think about security . But for those who are already working in this direction, we will show some non-obvious points and useful tools.
Experts well-known in the field of IT security will tell you exactly how to build security, what mistakes are often made and how to make sure that neither you nor your business is painfully hurt. In a series of master classes, participants will be shown how a service can be hacked and how to protect themselves from it both from a technical point of view and from a process point of view, while remaining in modern development methodologies.
DevOps :
Of course, we will talk about general engineering problems and discuss technologies and processes at the interface with instrumental solutions that make it easier to solve problems of development, testing, and operation.
Do you know what separates a good tool report from a bad one? In a good lecture, the listener does not have the feeling of an audiobook from a manual, but the speaker talks about how to use this tool in real life, with its help to simplify life and solve their problems more effectively. At DevOps Live, we will not just get acquainted with the tools, but understand how and when to implement them and how to use them correctly.
It should be borne in mind that there are tools that are developing very quickly and approaches that change a little more slowly. We will talk about both:
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While we were talking about tools and the fact that you can talk about them, and it will immediately become easier and more fun for someone to live, or you can not tell and wait for everyone to figure it out, it became curious whether the PC sets itself the task of educating .
Valeria Piliya: It would be naive to set yourself an exclusively educational goal. It is, of course, inherent in conferences by design, but it is impossible to teach someone against their will. But you can interest, make you wonder and doubt. To help you learn something new, which may not be right away, but it will come in handy and you will get something very cool.
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DevOps
The idea behind the DevOps Live conference is to look at DevOps from different angles, in particular from a product development perspective.
As part of the DevOps approach, technical solutions must be related to business objectives. But engineers are often not very well aware of what these tasks are. For example, they believe that since the DORA Report says that cool organizations are released several times a day, then time-to-market is most important for business.
Timur Batyrshin:Like any engineer, I used to think that the main thing is to write the code well, to fine-tune its work, and everything will be fine. And then it turned out that it was necessary not only to insist on services and write code, but also to move things in the company. And in any company more than, say, twenty people, additional tasks arise to connect work groups and specialists who want different things. This is what the DevOps fathers told us: how to make everyone work together on the same tasks.
For DevOps Live Timur Batyrshin and Andrey Shorin talked to Product Owners... It turned out that time-to-market as engineers understand it - frequent releases - is not very important for them. More important is predictability, which is achieved when product teams, development, operations, and management teams work towards common goals and understand each other. Therefore, at the conference, we will focus on how to negotiate, build trust, deal with toxicity, etc.
And it’s not only and not so much about showing product owners how they can benefit from DevOps. But also help engineers understand how their work affects the product. Because when you don't see the connection between specific technical work and the company's results, the very same problems with motivation, burnout, etc. appear. The issue of contributing to achieving common goals is occupied not only by top management, but already by middle and senior specialists.
Valeria Piliya: When a person begins to understand himself a little more as a professional and thinks about what he wants from work in the context of his whole life, it turns out that it’s not putting Kubernetes all day long. Because: "Why?" Here it is not far from the existential crisis.
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DevOps Chief-
The implementation of DevOps practices in a company is definitely not complete without the active inclusion of the CTO, that is, there are technical leaders among the DevOps Live audience. The PCs decided to determine what pains the CTO has and how to help solve them, because it turned out that there is not enough such content at modern IT conferences. Most often, more specific issues of individual teams or technical problems are considered.
It's one thing to choose between Kubernetes and OpenStack, and another - Chief-level solutions. Such decisions, firstly, have to be made much more, and secondly, most often the company does not yet have relevant experience and can only rely on other people's results, and thirdly, the cost of a mistake is high.
A person with a Chief prefix, in addition to technical solutions, is also engaged in such fascinating things as: calculating the cost of ownership and infrastructure costs, planning a technology stack, capacity management, and so on, which falls out of sight of the majority.
Dmitry Zaitsev: I want to reveal the topic of how to change something within the entire company. Now there seems to be no place to talk about it. Therefore, we want people to talk and together come to an understanding of how to implement something at the company level.
Mutual understanding at the fore
As you can see, all the themes are interconnected and are part of the puzzle. There is no need to think: "Yeah, I am not interested in product development, I am still far from the service station - only the part with engineering practices remains." This is not true.
One way or another, all the topics that will be discussed at the conference overlap, but the program committee puts additional emphasis on this and prepares special formats to involve participants with different roles in the general discussion.
Valeria Piliya: We want you to see that each of your colleagues in their place solves problems that you might not even have thought about. But all of them are aimed at developing a product to which you are also involved.
Timur Batyrshin:Surely, everyone had a situation when you were sure of the need for some technical changes, for example, you convinced the manager that you urgently needed Kubernetes, but they brushed you off that now was not the time for that. But there are always two sides to such stories, and even conference talks help to understand both.
And the point here is not only to become a “more effective team,” but also because when you understand your colleagues and trust them, it’s more pleasant for you to work and easier to live. For example, looking at the problem more broadly, you can understand what the team and the company really need right now. And as a result, speaking in a language understandable to business, to convince of the need to implement their ideas. Or to hear the arguments of the opponent and accept that this is not just a spoke in the wheels, but there really is a reason not to do it now.
It's all online
The topic that we could not help but talk about is online, where all the events have moved so far. We in Ontico have already held three test and three large online conferences (you can see how they went in the article on KnowledgeConf ), not everything is so bad. But we understand what doubts can be, moreover, they are even inside the PC.
In our opinion, there are two main online problems:
- Competition for attention, because unlike a face-to-face conference, which you come to a special place, at an online conference, participants remain in their familiar environment with all the distracting chats and other social networks.
- Lack of live communication with all its non-verbal components.
Online for the program committee is an additional challenge in terms of selecting speakers. It is really difficult to focus on a regular presentation, when you are not involved in the process, but only listen. But on the other hand, online makes it possible or more convenient to have various interactions, live coding demonstrations, work in groups and much more, which cannot be done at an offline conference. Not to mention foreign speakers who simply cannot come to Russia for a variety of reasons, but really want to participate and communicate with us, to understand what is happening in Russia. It is this year that many are happy to agree to speak at our conference.
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Mona Arkhipova: It is more convenient for the speaker as well, because there is an opportunity, at least, not to stand at the flipchart, but to sit, and even better to have coffee, a snack on hand and generally feel comfortable.
Another not the most obvious advantage of online is that we are not limited not only by space (for example, Infospace), but also by time. In the spring, we learned from our own experience that it is completely impossible to stay involved in an online conference for eight hours in a row. But we have room for maneuver: we can distribute our events over several days for several hours. The schedule will still be quite tight to keep the participants in context, but a few days, several hours at a convenient time, will provide a comfortable speed for the perception of information.
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Therefore, as such, online networking can be even more effective, and we also know how to revive it. All that remains is the fear that by the end of September we will all, in principle, be fed up with online, but it will be neutralized by the content that the PC is preparing. And diversity.
DevOps Live turns out:
- This is such a width in terms of formats: there will be reports, master classes, workshops, discussions, group and individual consultations, and this is not all the cards are revealed.
- Here is such a height from the point of view of the audience: we are waiting at the conference for engineers of different IT specialties, security workers, service stations, product managers and business owners.
- And also the depth, because hardcore stuff is bound to be there too.
We hope that this and our thorough preparation with the speakers will allow the conference to win the competition for attention, even work and social networks.
We know how difficult it is to set aside time while sitting at home to start looking at something, get involved in it, think, discuss and communicate with other people. For the sake of such people, I want to make really cool content, look for someone, negotiate, come up with new formats. Come, we are waiting for you!
DevOps Live 29-30 6-7 . 15 .
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