All Day DevOps, the virtual event featuring more than 100 sessions from practitioners around the world, is happening very soon. Now in its third year, this year’s event will take place Wednesday, Oct. 17, starting at 3 a.m. Eastern. But if you don’t feel like getting up, each 30-minute session will be available on demand as well.

In this DevOps Chat, All Day DevOps founders Derek Weeks and Mark Miller, both also from Sonatype, offer a preview of what’s in store during this year’s virtual event, which is free to attend.

As usual, the streaming audio is immediately below, followed by the transcript of our conversation.

Audio

Transcript

Alan Shimel: Hey, everyone. It’s Alan Shimel, devopsy.kinsta.cloud, and you’re listening to another DevOps Chat. Really happy to have two friends of mine join us on the chat today. We have none other – those crazy guys from All Day DevOps and Sonatype, Derek Weeks and Mark Miller. Mark, Derek, welcome to DevOps Chat.

Mark Miller: Thanks, Alan.

Derek Weeks: It’s good to be here. Always happy to chat with you.

Shimel: Yeah.

Miller: Thank you, Alan. Welcome to New York, welcome back home.

Shimel: Yeah, it’s good to be home. So Mark, you know, this is an audio only, people don’t know, but you have a Fighting Okra hat on, is that correct?

Miller: You know, some of my followers from around the United States are sending me hats and right now the Delta State Fighting Okras have sent me a hat so I’m gonna be giving them a good callout during All Day DevOps. Derek, you haven’t seen this one yet.

Weeks: No, I haven’t. That’s pretty cool-looking.

Shimel: All right, a shout out to the Fighting Okras.

[Laughter]

But Mark, you mentioned All Day DevOps. We’re getting close, right? What’s the date?

Miller: We’re next – we’re gonna be on Wednesday, October 17, and as we looked at this morning, as we looked at it, we’re over 19,000 registrations this morning. Once again, the community has gotten behind it. Derek, you’ve got a bigger hand on it, too. You’ve got some ideas about what’s going on with the viewing parties even, right?

Weeks: Yeah, I think the – you know, we’re at 19,000, I think we’re easily headed over 30,000 by the time we get to the conference, and I think part of that is what we’ve seen with the viewing parties this year. So, you know, it’s an interesting kind of evolution of the conference where we started this thing as, hey, let’s have this virtual conference so that everyone can attend wherever they sit, and then people said, “You know, I want to participate but have others in my company or my community participate as well, so we’re just gonna gather in a place to have this viewing party.” In the first year that we did it there might’ve been 10 because it wasn’t a formalized thing. Last year we kind of encouraged people to do it but didn’t have anything on the site that really mentioned it too much, and I think we had 35 viewing parties.

This year we have 115 viewing parties that have registered in 24 countries, and the interesting thing is not only has that changed the conference and how it evolves and how people share this education within groups but we’ve heard some amazing stories just come out of this community where organizations like RBC in Toronto, they’re planning for up to 1,400 people in RBC to attend their viewing party. State Farm in Dallas has 500 people that they’re planning in their viewing party. National –

Miller: They went up to over 800 this weekend.

Weeks: Yeah. National Australia Bank; you know, they’re planning, I think, 250 people in their viewing party. And when you think about the size of some DevOps conference that all three of us have been to, anyone having 500 people at a DevOps conference has a successful DevOps conference. The fact that one company, you know, is setting up a viewing party just for our conference that’s as large as some DevOps conferences out there it’s pretty interesting. But, you know, the same point – and this is a conversation I had with someone this morning in Munich, he said – you know, we’ll get into talking about Club 20 – but he said, “Hey, do we have 20 people registered yet because we want to get our company into Club 20,” and I hadn’t heard of this organization really before.

And I looked; they had 16 people. Now they actually have 20 so they’ll make the list. But I said, “I’m curious; how many people in your organization could attend All Day DevOps that, you know, are DevOps practitioners?” And he said, “You know, like I want to get on the Club 20 list, but I think we could get 100 people at our viewing party and in a perfect world we could have 1,000 people participate in All Day DevOps.” And that – you know, Mark, as we started this whole thing, that was really the aim, like how do you get to those 1,000 people and give them some free education?

Miller: Yeah. One of the topics that you just touched on – and you and I talked this morning too as we were putting together how our day was gonna go – Alan, when you think about it, can you imagine 20 people showing up at a live conference? I mean think about that. If you get four or five people at a live conference from one company you’re blowing out the budget, right, already. In this case, we can literally allow dozens and dozens of people from the same company to attend 120 sessions in a live conference. It’s a pretty phenomenal way to look at it.

Shimel: And, you know, so one way of looking at it, Mark, is wow, what would the cost be to fly in a dozen, two dozen, three dozen people to a physical conference? The other thing, you know, to make it a truly win-win is what are the benefits of a team that size sharing that common experience, right? It’s almost priceless, right? It’s like the MasterCard commercial: $45 for the conference ticket, $60 on Uber, $20 on lunch. Sharing it as a team? Priceless.

Miller: Yeah.

Shimel: And that to me is the real one plus one equals three of it.

Weeks: Yeah, I think – and that’s something that we see – you know, as we’ve seen the past two years that we’ve done this and I think we’ll see again in spades, is that we have the Slack channel set up during the conference for conversations, and last year during the 24 hours of the conference we saw 30,000 conversations on Slack, and that ability to exchange information, whether it’s with people on your own team and you have your internal Slack channel set up through your own company because, you know, you’re State Farm and that’s what you did and how you shared information, or you’re participating in the global channel, you know, I think it’s all about that kind of exchange of information and also the anonymous – somewhat anonymous level of that communication.

We all know it’s a lot easier to ask a question in a conference if no one can see you’re the person raising your hand or asking the question; you’re just one of many on a Slack channel saying, “Hey, I have this question,” and there’s – you know, it opens people up to sharing a little bit more or asking questions they might not otherwise get to ask.

Shimel: Absolutely, absolutely. Guys, I want to turn the conversation a bit if I can from numbers and viewing to content. Let’s talk – you know, people out listening to this, some of them may already be registered, some may not, some may not even know of All Day DevOps, right?

Weeks: Yeah.

Shimel: Mark, if they register – and registration’s free. You don’t have to be part of Club 20, you don’t have to have your whole company. If you’re just one person who’s digging DevOps you can register for free for All Day DevOps and sit in on 24 hours – up to 24 hours of DevOps, right? They don’t have to listen to all of it; you pick and choose what you want. But give us some of the highlights. What are some of the big hot topic speakers that you’re looking forward to?

Weeks: Mark, why don’t you go –

Miller: One of the things that you just – sure. One of the things that you just said is interesting to me, Alan. You said 24 hours of DevOps. Actually, when you do the math it’s more like 50 to 70 hours of DevOps because we have simultaneous channels happening. The things that I’m excited about seeing is, one, we have David who runs a CRE team and an SRE team at Google coming to talk about site reliability engineering. That’s a new topic for us this year, and to have Dave step in from Google, who is actually running that whole initiative for Google, it’s gonna be an exciting one for me. The other one that I’m – how do I say it?

I’m exciting that Cindy’s coming, Cindy Healy. She is the one that wrote some of the code that went on the Mars Pathfinder to send to Mars. Now that’s – the personal story behind how Cindy did that and how she became involved in it, what’s she’s doing now to encourage women in technology, that is a story that I really want people to be able to hear, so we’ve got her set up as a keynote. Derek, you’ve got some interesting things that you’re looking forward to, right?

Weeks: Yeah. You know, one is a conversation I just had last week with one of our keynote speakers, George Swan. He’s at Autodesk. Super interesting story of DevOps in the enterprise. So these guys knew, you know, the needed to transform the entire company – and I think they have about 200 products, 4,000 developers in their organization, and they needed to transition from an Agile organization to an organization that had DevOps practices top to bottom. At the same time that they were doing this they needed to transition into the cloud. They also needed to transition from a traditional license business to a subscription license business.

They had, like, four or five transformations going on at the same time – you know, become cloud-based infrastructure, transition to SaaS, transition to DevOps and some other things, and it was like, oh my gosh, one, this is a multiyear journey he’s gonna tell his story on, so it will be fascinating to kind of get lessons learned and also understand it’s not just hey, you know, transition to DevOps; it’s there are a lot of other things that are moving parts of our business that have to change, you know, along with this as the marketplace evolves for them and other participants. The other one that I’m really excited about, and a guy that I’ve got to see a couple of times at live conferences, is Navin Vembar. He’s the CTO over at GSA, the Government Services Organization.

They do all the main procurement for the U.S. government. But he is going to talk about how they transformed their organization into a DevOps practice and kind of looking at the maturity models that they use and kind of used as milestones for measuring their progress within their organization and also, you know, coming from an organization that loves silos, they love regulation, [laughs] they overly love governance sometimes, but to hear his journey, he’s a fascinating speaker and someone that I quote often, so always looking forward to hearing people like that join in.

Shimel: Sure.

Miller: Alan, the other thing is as Derek was talking I went over to the All Day devopsy.kinsta.cloud site and clicked the speaker link. We’ve got 124 speakers this year. We had so many good submissions that we actually went above our quote. We had set it at 100 and we’re at 124 right now. It’s hard to go and cherry pick out of those. What we want to make sure people understand is two things; No. 1 is we want to bring 124 practitioners to everybody’s desktop. We want you to be able to pick and choose what you’d like to hear.

No. 2, Derek and I guarantee to the community is there are no vendor pitches here. Alan, you’ve been with us long enough you know. We really hold to that creed, that what we want is practitioners, and when you come here I think that you can trust us to provide that to you.

Shimel: Absolutely. That’s another aspect I want to just highlight too, guys. You know, we – you both highlighted what – some of the ones you’re – some of the talks you’re looking forward to most. Well, Mark, there’s 124 as you mentioned. All Day DevOps is a global phenomenon, and though we may have GSA and we may have some U.S.-based practitioners, Mark, I’ve been around the world with you, right? You and I have traveled – [laughs] literally traveled the world, and DevOps is a worldwide thing, and I think the speaker lineup reflects that. Have you had any stats, like how many different countries are represented?

Miller: Yeah, Derek’s got that, but before he jumps in with the stats I got a story that you’ll recognize. You and I went to Singapore, Bangkok, Sydney and Melbourne about two months ago.

Shimel: Yep.

Miller: While we were having dinner with Rob England in Sydney, I went, “Man, you’ve got a great story, Rob. Why don’t you speak at All Day DevOps?” Meaning because of our travel, because of our ability to meet people in the community, it gives all of us the ability to say this guy’s got a story that deserves to be told, and I think that that’s one of the things when Derek and I were first putting this together we actually talked to – amongst ourselves and said what we want to do is give exposure to people that are doing DevOps that deserve more recognition for what they’re doing, and our global platform has allowed us to do that. Derek, how many countries are we dealing with now?

Weeks: I think, you know, we’re around 130 different countries participating.

[Laughter]

It’s amazing, you know, to see that list grow because some of these – you just imagine like who’s practicing DevOps, and in my head like maybe 22 countries and maybe if I stretched it like maybe 40, right? But to see participants from all over the place – you know, and I just did a quick look at the registrations in the top cities. So No. 1, Bangalore, second, London, Toronto is high on the list, Melbourne, Australia; Sydney, Australia, Atlanta, New York, Istanbul, Chicago, Singapore, Amsterdam, San Jose, Seattle, Santiago, Jakarta.

Shimel: That’s amazing.

Weeks: You know, in the top 20, right? So it’s really, you know, a global kind of phenomena that we’re seeing. You know, where is the DevOps kind of center of expertise? Where are these people around the world? It’s pretty interesting to see where they all come from.

Shimel: Agreed. You know, Mark, listening to you talk –

Miller: I don’t want to leave anybody out but when we –

Shimel: Go ahead. You go, Mark.

Miller: Go ahead, Alan, go ahead.

Shimel: No, no, you go.

Miller: Yeah, I just – I don’t want to leave anybody out, but there’s some names I’d like to give out a call to, is like Midu in India, who’s helped us so much with the community in India. Look at Bangalore; it’s No. 1 on the list. When you look at Michael Mann, you look at Mark Cluett in London; those are community people that have said this is something worthwhile and I want my community to know about it, and that’s kind of – I don’t know if heartwarming is the word, but it means that we have actually resonated with various communities, cross-cultural around the world, and that means a lot to me.

Weeks: Yeah, I just – you know, curious, I just looked at the list of what cities have 40 people registered – Alpharetta, Georgia – that’s near Atlanta – Johannesburg, South Africa, Istanbul, Dubai, Barcelona, Seoul, Sao Paolo, and McLean, Virginia, where I’m sitting.

Shimel: Seoul, I haven’t heard Seoul yet.

Weeks: Yeah. So fascinating, just that list of only cities with 40 is extremely diverse.

Miller: Wow.

Shimel: You know, that’s really – that’s the power of the internet and it also speaks, Mark, to the power of DevOps, is if it was all centered in San Francisco or London, great. All the cool kids, right, are doing it. But it’s not; it is – it’s diversified, decentralized. You couldn’t snuff it out if you tried. You know, Mark, listening to you talk though a little bit about we met this one here and this one there, I can’t help but think of you as sort of the Anthony Bourdain of DevOps, venturing into parts unknown.

Miller: You know, I’m a story guy. I gotta jump in there. When I was in Manila, we got Anthony Bourdain’s driver to take us around to all those places. It was fascinating.

Shimel: And I’ve been on those trips with you. You like to off the beaten path. But, you know, this is a PG-rated show and, you know…

[Laughter]

Weeks: I’m gonna give Mark a new title of the Anthony Bourdain of DevOps.

[Laughter]

Miller: I’ll take it, I’ll take it.

Shimel: Anyway, hey guys, we’re about out of time here, but I wanted to check in ’cause we are getting close. We would be remiss if we didn’t at least mention where can people go to register for All Day DevOps? Derek?

Weeks: AllDaydevopsy.kinsta.cloud. It’s that easy. It takes 15 seconds to register. You’ll get a link to the schedule once you register so you can start to build your own schedule for yourself and your organization. And like we always say, once you register yourself encourage your team to register so that everyone can watch together.

Miller: Alan, the last thing that I’d like them to look at on the site too, is once they register go to the viewing party page. With over 110 viewing parties there has to be something local, that’s relatively local, if you would like to participate with other people.

Shimel: Fantastic.

Weeks: You know, the other thing just really quick before we go is one way that we do this conference for free for everyone is we have a lot of sponsors, like devopsy.kinsta.cloud, Scaled Agile, Cisco, Puppet, Chef, GitLab, Sonatype, CloudBees and other organizations that help fund the conference to actually put this on and make this happen. We also have 245 community groups around the world that are helping us spread the word to say here’s free education for our members, and that’s really at the heart of this conference is the financial support to make it free for everyone and the community’s support to really spread the word to everyone that this is available to them.

Shimel: Excellent. Absolutely, Derek. These – as someone who’s done enough conferences, it really – it doesn’t happen without the sponsors, and a lot of people say, “Oh, the sponsors just want to spam me or contact me.” Yeah, you can talk about that all you want but they make the world go round on these things, right?

Weeks: Yeah.

Shimel: We can’t do it without them and don’t lose sight of that.

Weeks: Yeah. It doesn’t cost $10 million to run but it’s not free to run. [Laughs]

Shimel: Exactly. But we all know that. Anyway, guys, two of my good friends in the DevOps – well, not only in the DevOps space, in the world in general. Mark Miller, who I have traveled around the world with and eaten in some very –

Miller: Thank you, Alan, so much.

Shimel: – fun places – Anthony Bourdain there – and Derek Weeks.

Weeks: Thanks, Alan. Always a pleasure.

Shimel: Always a pleasure, man. I haven’t seen you in too long.

Weeks: Well –

Shimel: But hopefully we’ll see each other soon.

Weeks: Yeah.

Shimel: All Day DevOps coming to a computer near you Oct. 17, right?

Weeks: Yep.

Shimel: All day.

Miller: Starting at 3 a.m. New York Time, Alan.

Shimel: Excuse me?

Miller: Starting at 3 a.m. in New York. I’m sure you’ll be with us for the opening.

Shimel: Yes, I’ll be up bright and early at 3:00. But if you want to register, go to AllDaydevopsy.kinsta.cloud, guys. It’s free. Jump on it. It’s a great event. Have a great day, guys. Thanks for joining us. This is Alan Shimel for devopsy.kinsta.cloud and you just listened to another DevOps Chat.

— Alan Shimel