Thoughts on DevOpsDays NYC
I’m currently on the train on my way back from DevOpsDays in Brooklyn. The conference was great — lots of smart people facing a lot of similar problems and trying to see what we could learn from each other. The scale was small, with only like 100-ish people present and not a ton of huge, in your face sponsorship. And the venue was a college campus. And so I kept making these comparisons in my head to LUG meetings, installfests and small scale Linux conferences.
Obviously the subject matter was a bit different — talking about and thinking about running large scale production infrastructures is a little bit different than the next cool Linux distribution. This tended, I think, to more discussion around patterns and best practices than about the specifics of “you should do X to get Y to work”. So a higher level and more abstract discussion.
The composition of the audience and attendees was a pretty similar make-up. Linux events always had a strong majority of the attendees who self-identified as sysadmins and then there tended to be a smaller number of developers. And many of the latter group had ended up in that camp due to necessity. The breakdown for DevOpsDays felt pretty similar with an interesting twist where there were speakers who said they were (paraphrasing) “developers first and fell into operations because they needed to”.
One thing that felt more evolutionary than anything else was that the side channel discussion for the event took place on Twitter rather than on IRC. I have (fond) memories of many conferences where attendees sat in an IRC channel and then basically continued to interact on IRC long after the conference had ended. In fact, I made many friends in this fashion. Similarly there was an ongoing discussion on Twitter using the #devopsdays hash tag and I have followed (and am being followed by) a number of the other attendees and hope to keep in touch and call them friends in the future.
And maybe the thing that struck me the most strongly was where people were “from”. Not in the sense of where they lived but rather where they worked. The attendees were almost all from startups. We were in Brooklyn and not the heart of downtown Manhattan, but NYC is probably home to more financial services companies than anywhere else in the world. And all of those companies have *many* people working in software dev and operations-y roles. But they weren’t there.
So it feels like “the DevOps movement” is going through a similar growth and evangelism pattern as open source and Linux did years ago. Maybe that’s why it feels so comfortable to me.