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Tag: London

  • IT REVOLUTION TO OFFER PREVIEW COPIES OF SOON-TO-BE-RELEASED ‘DEVOPS HANDBOOK’ TO ATTENDEES AT DEVOPS ENTERPRISE SUMMIT LONDON 2016

    Gene Kim to Host DevOps ‘Luminaries Night’ Reception During Conference

    PORTLAND, Ore., June 9, 2016 – IT Revolution (http://itrevolution.com), the industry leader for advancing DevOps, today announced it will be offering the first look of its soon-to-be-released “DevOps Handbook” as a special bonus to all attendees at DevOps Enterprise Summit London 2016 (http://events.itrevolution.com/eu/). As the premier industry conference for leaders of large, complex organizations implementing DevOps in the UK and Continental Europe, DevOps Enterprise Summit (DOES16) London is expected to sell out and is scheduled for June 30-July 1 at the Hilton London Metropole. Tickets for the conference are going quickly, but are still available at: (http://bit.ly/doesldnreg).

    Following in the footsteps of the popular book, “The Phoenix Project,” this fall, Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois and John Willis will release “The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations.” The book is designed to be a prescriptive guide, describing the technical practices, cultural norms and architecture required to replicate the amazing transformation that Bill Palmer and team performed at Parts Unlimited in “The Phoenix Project.” Co-authors Gene Kim, Patrick Debois and John Willis will be in attendance at the conference, and IT Revolution will host a signing in its booth at the event.

    “We are excited to offer the first look of the upcoming “DevOps Handbook” for the attendees of DOES16 London,” said Kim. “Registrants of the conference will be the first to own a preview copy before its official release later this fall. It promises to reinforce all the great real-world examples of DevOps in action that registrants will see during our upcoming two-day Summit.”

    In addition, on Thursday, June 30, IT Revolution will host a “Luminaries Night” during the conference’s evening reception. “We’re assembling some of the people that the industry admires most who have helped shape the DevOps movement since the very beginning,” Kim said. In addition to the outstanding conference speakers, Dominica DeGrandis, Patrick Debois, Damon Edwards, Simon Morris, Dan North, James Smith, Steven Thair, John Willis and more will be available to meet and speak with attendees. The event will take place in the Monarch Suite of the Hilton London Metropole Hotel from 5 to 7 p.m. BST.

    IT Revolution also is hosting a chance to win a one-hour “Ask Me Anything” session with Gene Kim during DOES16 London. Attendees can spend the hour asking any questions they wish, such as, “Where did the stories from The Phoenix Project come from?” or “If there was one thing you could change about DevOps, what would it be and why?”

    IT Revolution and Premier Sponsor HPE Software are excited to present the inaugural DOES16 London event, a conference for the leaders of large, complex organizations implementing DevOps principles and practices. The goal is to give leaders the tools and practices they need to develop and deploy software faster and to win in the marketplace. The full program is available online and can be found here: (http://bit.ly/doesldnagenda).

    Join the #DOES16 Conversation

    Interested in joining DevOps Enterprise speakers for an online social media chat? DOES16 organizers will be hosting a CrowdChat on Thursday, June 9 at 11am EDT / 4pm BST. To join the conversation, please visit: (https://www.crowdchat.net/chat/c3BvdF9vYmpfMjE0Nw).

    For more information about DOES16 London, please visit: (http://events.itrevolution.com/eu/).

    Share This: Only 3 Weeks Away from #DOES16 London! Register now to get a preview copy of #DevOps Handbook: http://bit.ly/doesldnreg @DOESsummitEU #IT 

    About IT Revolution

    IT Revolution assembles technology leaders and practitioners through publishing, events, and research. Our goal is to elevate the state of technology work, quantify the economic and human costs associated with suboptimal IT performance, and to improve the lives of one million IT professionals by 2017.

    #

    Contact:

    Jeremy Douglas

    Catapult PR-IR

    303-581-7760, ext. 16

    jdouglas@catapultpr-ir.com

  • London Calling: DevOps Enterprise Summit and DevOps Connect: CD Connect/Jenkins Days, 2 for 1

    London Calling: DevOps Enterprise Summit and DevOps Connect: CD Connect/Jenkins Days, 2 for 1

    As is to be expected from a world capital city, London is also a hotbed of DevOps adoption. The local London DevOps community is thriving with a near constant stream of DevOps conferences. There are however two great events coming up that are can’t miss. DevOps Connect: CD Connect/Jenkins Days in May and Gene Kim’s DevOps Enterprise Summit in June are both in London. Now you can attend both for the price of one!

    Right now due to the devopsy.kinsta.cloud sponsorship of DOES London and the generosity of the sponsors of both events, if you sign up for the full £179 two-day ticket for DevOps Connect: CD Summit/Jenkins Days you will receive the full £179 back in the form of a credit towards your ticket for DOES London. You wind up attending CD Connect/Jenkins Days for free!

    So what do you get from attending DevOps Connect: CD Summit/Jenkins Days and the DevOps Enterprise London? Glad you asked. Let me give you some of the highlights to look forward to.

    First DevOps Connect: CD Summit/Jenkins Days:

    1. Two-day event, day one features keynotes and three tracks, plus lunch, refreshments, exhibit area and demo theater.
    2. Day two of the event are deep dive workshops on Jenkins, DevOps Transformation, automating deployment in Hybrid Clouds, DevOps Foundation and DevOps Lift off and the Nexus World Tour: Rugged DevOps Heroes Assemble. You can pick and choose which of these workshops to attend, there is on price for admission to all of them.
    3. The event is being held at the KIA OVAL, KENNINGTON OVAL,SE11 5SS LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM.
    4. The keynote and headline speakers for the event are pretty amazing:

    sacha-laboureySacha Labrourey, CEO and Founder CloudBees, former CTO JBoss speaking on “Why Jenkins Has Become the Engine of Continuous Everything.”

     

     

     

    sanjeevSanjeev Sharma, CTO & Distinguished Engineer for DevOps, IBM on “Adopting DevOps at Enterprise Scale.”

     

     

     
    garyGary Gruver, Author of “Leading the Transformation”, Previously executive IT positions at Macy’s and HP, speaking on Leading the Transformation: “Applying Agile and DevOps Principles at Scale.”

     

     

    After this great morning of keynotes, there are three tracks all full of great speakers and topics after lunch.  You really don’t want to miss this event and if you were planning on going to the DevOps Enterprise Summit London, you can go to CD Summit/Jenkins Days for free.

    Why go to DevOps Enterprise Summit London? Well if you want to hear about the experiences of large enterprises in adopting DevOps, there is no better place. In the previous two Summits held in San Francisco, Gene Kim and team have done a great job of shining a light on “horses” DevOps transformations. This first London edition of the franchise promises to be equally as great. It will be held at the Hilton Metropole in London.

    Some of the speakers scheduled to present include:

    geneGene Kim, Author, Researcher and Founder of IT Revolution.

     

     

     

    gareth

    Gareth Rushgrove, Senior Software Engineer, Puppet.

     

     

     

    jasoncox

    Jason Cox, Director, Systems Engineering, The Walt Disney Company.

     

     

     

    This is just the tip of the iceberg really. There will be over 25 speakers at DOES London, as well as community space, breakout sessions and more.

    While London has more than its share of DevOps events, I am not sure it has experienced the likes of these two events before. Please don’t miss them and look forward to seeing you there.

  • DevOps Days London: The Human Factor

    DevOpsDaysLondon16logo

    Day 2 of DevOpsDays London 2016 kicked off with a presentation from the legendary Gene Kim. The theme that dominated today’s proceedings was the “human factor,” (fitting, as we finished Day 1 with #humanops) nicely started by Gene’s quote from Nathan Shimek: “We need DevOps to make our work humane.”

    The second day delved beyond what makes people happy, posing questions regarding what it is to be human, and why automation is not everything when it comes to DevOps. As Gene said, “DevOps transcends the technology stack we are working with.”

    DevOps aims to supplant pain with joy and help people find autonomy, mastery, purpose and deep satisfaction in their working lives in technology. Werner Vogel, CTO at Amazon, is often quoted as saying: “You build it, you run it.” But Gene took this further as he explained how a developer had described his most satisfying working experience as coding something and deploying it and monitoring it and fixing it, too. He also touched on the power of shifting left, using Test Driven Development—and its demand that we write the test script in before we even start to code—as an example. That’s building quality in. That’s cross-skilling and cooperation.

    It resonated with the audience when Gene said there was one single question that, when answered, tells us everything we want to know about an organization’s DevOps maturity: “To what degree do you fear deployments?”

    We came back to this question later in Jeromy Carriere‘s talk about his experiences of scaling at Google. Going the gym for the first time is painful—we have to build muscle memory, he said. We need to practice these processes until they are like breathing.

    Gene made a book recommendation:  “The High Velocity Edge,” by Steven J Spear. When we do DevOps we are aiming to transform into a dynamic learning organization. We should not expect but be required to talk about problems. No fear, no blame. Everyone in an organization should be trained to run a blameless post-mortem—or a healthy retrospective, if you prefer. As Claire Agutter put it: “Improving daily work is more important than doing daily work.”

    Gene then outlined the DevOps Enterprise Summit London event coming up at the end of June and the extraordinary stories of experiences people share about their DevOps journeys during DOES events. He said: “Often the transformation leader was putting themselves in personal jeopardy.”

    I can testify to that. It takes courage, optimism, conviction and tremendous amounts of energy to be a change agent.

    The human theme continued into the panel discussion as the COO of Technology at Barclays explained how its command and control structure, waterfall-ruled development and volume of changes resulted in total gridlock. He said that the big challenge is trying to re-engineer the organization to behave differently: “Changing HOW we do our work is the hardest thing.”

    Changing human behavior is very challenging indeed; as Joanne said, measurements have to change and we have to focus on customer value. Gareth Rushgrove also majored on the human angle in his talk on DevOps and microservices. He said: “Microservices are as much about people as technology,” and, “Which comes first: the software or the team?”

    Essentially, DevOps and microservices help us to make lots of small bets—spreadbetting, if you like—spreading risk and accelerating feedback. And we need small teams to be able to do microservices and move away from monolithic applications.

    One particular Ignite talk stood out from the rest, and won the hearts and minds of the audience: @coldclimate from Server Density. Through a personal story of a back injury brought on by prioritizing work over looking after himself, the #humanops message: “You are not immutable, you are not highly available!” struck home hard.

    So there we have it. My key takeaway from DevOpsDays London 2016? DevOps is less about technology and automation and more about happy, healthy humans.

  • DevOpsDays London 2016: Making Happy

    DevOpsDaysLondon16logo

    We haven’t had a DevOpsDays event in London since 2013. The audience size was about the same at this year’s event, held April 19-20, as I remember from last time, but about 85 percent of the audience were attending a DevOpsDays event for the first time. It was great to see so many new faces, and I guess the high proportion of first-time visitors could be a sign of the maturing and proliferation of DevOps thinking.

    I’m delivering a webcast April 26 titled, “DevOps for Architects,” so on the way to the event I read this book in preparation. At Ranger4 we ask people a lot: “Are you having a good day?” or, “How do you know you are having a good day?” Something has always discomfited me slightly about this, in the same way that “What does good look like?” and, “Just good enough,” trouble me. Can’t we aim higher? What does “great” look like? In the book, the authors talk about “happy days,” and this makes me happy. And this was the theme I took away from the first day at DevOpsDays London 2016—DevOps makes happy.

    Here are a few reasons how:

    First up on the stage was Bridget Kromhout, a DevOpsDays organizer I last saw speak at the DevOpsDays five-year anniversary in Ghent in 2014. Her talk was titled, “Cloudy with a Chance of DevOps”—a succinct introduction to DevOps as it looks today with some key takeways:

    • “Automation is not everything.” Most people get this now, but we meet a lot of people who started with automation and realized they’d skipped to the end. Start with culture.
    • “DevOps is practiced, not purchased.” You might be surprised to find us supporting this, since we make a living out of selling DevOps. But we don’t. We believe that the best way to help organizations transform using DevOps principles is to partner with them—to coach, motivate, guide, challenge and help them move through their journey. This is what we do.
    • “It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.” This is a quote from the “Godfather of Lean,” Deming.

    Bridget was followed by Joanne Molesky, the co-author of “Lean Enterprise,” a frequently cited must-read for DevOps enthusiasts.

    Key messages from Joanne’s talk were her assertion that technology is no longer the bottleneck, particularly now that conventional business models are under attack. Joanne also cited quantum computing as the key disruptor she sees coming through in the near future. It was particularly interesting to think about what she said about Tesla disrupting not because the company has designed a better, more affordable electric car, but because it is changing the game in terms of how individuals will access the power grid.

    Following on from Bridget’s recognition that not all companies are any where near delivering on the velocity promise of DevOps and the subsequent happiness, key barriers Joanne identified include slow decision-making processes and conflicting goals embedded into many enterprises that have been around for a significant amount of time. She described “process madness” and how most enterprises “plan, do” and forget the “check, act” part of the PDCA cycle. She explained how many organizations have created walls of “no’s”—effectively, “Culture says no”; a sentiment shared by many individuals we spoke with after her session.

    A popular quote that was tweeted multiple times from Joanne was: “You only fail when you fail to learn.”

    Speaking with organizations that are moving to agile and DevOps, many of them talk about their difficulties moving from project-centric thinking to product-centric thinking, a point reiterated by Joanne. She recommended the three horizons framework as a useful tool to plan and enact change while managing the current state. She also had some very useful advice for organizations trying to tackle regulatory requirements: “Understand the intent.” Organizations have a habit of misconceiving and conflating what the regulations say.

    “The best code is that which you don’t write”—a bit like the advice to writers: “kill your darlings.” This is about being lean, planning properly and removing extraneous effort.

    Close to our own hearts, Joanne also emphasized the importance of measuring the things that matter. Similarly, she pointed out that organizations that have a classic “command and control” structure have no hope of being able to do DevOps. When organizations perform cultural change, they must amplify their feedback loops at all levels. By using principles like holacracy, organizations can understand who the sensors are in their business and learn to hear ideas, how to make the process madness sane and let ideas germinate and blossom.

    I frequently quote John Willis:

    “DevOps finally proves how IT can be a strategic advantage that allows a business to beat the pants off the competition. This is the moment we’ve all been waiting for.”

    For far too long IT has been seen as the guys in the dungeon, (ever seen the IT Crowd?) but as John said, these are exciting times for us in IT. As Joanne put it, we used to say IT supports the business, then we said IT is aligned to the business, now we say IT is integrated to the business or, even better IT is the business. This should make us all happy.

    Kris Saxton followed Joanne with a talk we were anticipating highly: “Bi-Modal IT and other snake oil.” We’ve been challenging this term recently, too, so I was happy to find more support that this is an oversimplification of the situation organizations are in and is counterproductive, undermining the type of culture we are trying to create by creating more silos, more “them and us-es.” Put succinctly, Kris said: “Bi-modal IT is poison.”

    As Jez Humble recently said:

    “Gartner’s model rests on a false assumption that is still pervasive in our industry: that we must trade off responsiveness against reliability… This assumption is wrong.”

    Kris said there is a “happy place” where we can have both responsiveness and reliability, velocity and quality, speed and stability. DevOps helps us do this by shifting left, having multi-disciplinary teams, a people-focused culture working to small, scalable scope—and more.

    The rest of day one was filled with slots from the many sponsors of the event, a demo from Pivotal, Ignites and Open Spaces. The last three thoughts I’ll leave you with though were:

    1. Sponsor ServerDensity used its pitch to highlight health and well-being in IT; #hugops. The company is setting up a MeetUp group in London for HumanOps, emphasizing that DevOps is not just automation and it’s here to make humans happy
    2. Microsoft’s Thiago Almeida shared stats on how DevOps initiatives at Microsoft have positively influenced employees’ work/life scores
    3. John Clapham spoke on how he set fire to his car and what this taught him about the currency of empathy and how this can be used to improve life at work

    Check back for coverage of Day 2 of DevOps London.

  • What to Expect: DevOps Enterprise Summit London

    What to Expect: DevOps Enterprise Summit London

    After the success of the first two years of the U.S. DevOps Enterprise Summit, people have been asking us to host a similar conference in other locations, specifically in Europe. This summer, we’re hosting our first DevOps Enterprise Summit in London!

    This conference is for technology leaders who are driving transformations in large, complex organizations. These are successful enterprises that have been around for decades (and, in some cases, for centuries!), with thousands (or tens of thousands) of employees, and billions of dollars in annual revenue. These are organizations with massive and complex daily operations, and all the resulting processes and bureaucracies that come with it. In many ways, these complex operations and bureaucracies are the very things that create the worst-case conditions for DevOps transformations!

    We’ve heard amazing case studies from Barclays Capital, GE Capital, Disney, Marks & Spencer, Bank of America, Capital One, Telstra and many more, where leaders have created amazing DevOps outcomes that are more typically associated with organizations such as Google, Amazon, Facebook and so forth.

    For this inaugural year of DevOps Enterprise Summit London, we’ll be bringing some of our “greatest hits” from the United States, but the rest of the programming will feature DevOps transformations in organizations residing in the U.K. and continental Europe. (And we’re still holding the DevOps Enterprise Summit in San Francisco, so feel free to join us there as well!)

    New World and Old World DevOps

    The speakers at DevOps Enterprise are pioneering the practices of how large, complex organizations transform and deliver software. It’s my belief that these principles are universal, regardless of what continent or country the organization resides in.

    One of the biggest surprises from co-authoring “The Phoenix Project” has been how many people have told me that the book describes their organization, seemingly independent of company size, industry vertical, for-profit or nonprofit or the continent they’re writing from. This validates that the problems that result when Dev and Ops can’t get along are universal.

    The good news is that the DevOps solutions we deploy to fix the problems also have lots of commonalities!

    It’s always inspiring to hear how these leaders have overcome the challenges they faced. I see our speakers as genuine heroes who have put themselves in personal jeopardy, often risking their careers and livelihoods, to achieve something they believe is genuinely important. They  possessed the clarity and conviction that the capabilities they were creating for their organizations were needed to win in the marketplace—or maybe even just to survive.

    I think one of the interesting statistics is that more than 25 percent of DevOps Enterprise speakers have been promoted in the last two years—some more than once! It’s a fantastic testament that the organization values the contributions they have made, and their risk-taking and heroism paid off.

    The DevOps Movement Matures

    Every year at the DevOps Enterprise Summit, I have asked all speakers to share what problems they didn’t know how to fix or the problems that they were looking for help on. What I’ve found is that the answers have evolved. From year to year, we are seeing trends on the obstacles facing the DevOps Enterprise community.

    In 2014, attendees’ stated problems were about needing better strategies and tactics for creating automated tests for legacy applications, as well as the culture and leadership aspects during transformation, information security and compliance practices and identifying metrics to best improve performance with DevOps initiatives.

    In 2015, the problems were focused on people and organizational design. Examples included the need for effective strategies and methods for leading change in large organizations. Speakers and attendees also wanted to know what the organization charts looked like for organizations successfully adopting DevOps. What were the respective roles and responsibilities, and how had they changed from more traditional IT organizations?

    Now, as we approach DevOps Enterprise Summit 2016, we are seeking to address the next phase of challenges facing the community: What are the modern architectural and technical practices that every technology leader needs to know about? What are the technology practices for managing infrastructure, environments and automated testing? And what are the transition patterns to get there?

    From the HR perspective, how do you go about reskilling the workforce and employing these new design patterns? Lastly, we are seeing compliance and security discussed more often, including: What are concrete ways for DevOps to bridge the information security and compliance gap to show auditors and regulators that effective controls exist to prevent, detect and correct problems?

    The programming committee always invites a handful of speakers to return from year to year. While to some this might appear redundant, it’s actually quite fascinating to witness their journeys unfold. It’s like an episode of, “Where Are They Now,” and the speakers never cease to amaze!

    Solving Problems Together

    As a vendor-neutral conference, DevOps Enterprise Summit curates stories that are from the enterprise point-of-view. Most of the presentations follow a very specific “experience report” structure—speakers describe their organization and their industry, the business problem they faced, where they started their transformation, what they did and the business outcomes. It’s a simple format but very powerful because it helps other people facing the same problems learn how other people solved the problem, and it often reveals practices that can be used in other contexts.

    I’m so excited to share some of the initial speakers we have slated for DOES London:

    • Chris Jackson, Director of Cloud Product Engineering at Pearson
    • Robin Hughes, Head of Development Services at LV=
    • Justin Dean, SVP, Platform and Technical Operations at Ticketmaster
    • Jeremy Waite, Chief Digital Strategist at Salesforce
    • Gareth Rushgrove, Senior Software Engineer at Puppet Labs, Inc; ex-UK GDS
    • Antony Collard, Deputy Director at HMRC
    • Finbarr Joy, Group CTO at Lebara
    • Amy Philipps, Head of Test at Songkick
    • Jason Cox, Director, Systems Engineering at The Walt Disney Company
    • Rosalind Radcliffe, Distinguished Engineer, Chief Architect for DevOps for Enterprise System at IBM

    What also amazes me about DevOps Enterprise is the concentration of talent in the technology leaders who attend—they’re all people who are passionate about technology and helping teams win, and willing to do disruptive things to get there.

    Ross Clanton from Target (a large U.S. retailer) told me he valued being surrounded by people who were not only trying to solve the same problems that he was facing, but were the best in the game—and there’s a huge intrinsic value of being surrounded by those kind of people. I can definitely relate; I learn something in every one of my interactions at the conference, and I have no doubt that the practices this group is pioneering will be commonplace within a generation.

    Like in any aspect of life, peers are important. As Buzz Aldrin said, “Show me your friends, and I will show you your future.”

    DOES is a unique opportunity to meet some very talented and inspirational new friends who can help shape your career path. We hope you’ll join us in London.

    DevOps Enterprise Summit London

    June 30 & July 1, 2016

    Hilton London Metropole

    225 Edgware Road, London, UK

    @DOESsummitEU

    Early Bird £600 +VAT (ends May 2)

     

    DevOps Enterprise Summit San Francisco

    November 7–9, 2016

    Hilton San Francisco Union Square

    333 O’Farrell Street, San Francisco, CA

    @DOESsummit

    Early Bird $1,450 (ends May 16)
    Check out videos from previous DevOps Enterprise Summits on YouTube.

  • There is only one DevOps Connect

    There is only one DevOps Connect

    They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. If that is true I guess the folks over Informa Telecoms and Media Ltd are very, very sincere. Why else would they change the name of their DevOps Conference from “DevOps Summit” (which name they “borrowed” from the Sys-Con folks) to DevOps Connect Europe.  No matter that we here at devopsy.kinsta.cloud have already held several events in Europe and London specifically with our DevOps Connect name. No matter that we have a website and own the domain http://www.devopsconnect.com.  Why shouldn’t they just use our name and employ the “colorful” technique of registering a hyphenated play on the domain name? I guess that alone should tell you all you need to know about this company and the events they produce.

    Now of course we can go hire some International copyright attorneys and litigate first usage and ask for injunctions and damages. But why bother? I am a big believer in letting the market be the judge, jury and executioner.  I am perfectly fine with using devopsy.kinsta.cloud to get out the word about these kinds of business practices and letting the market act.

    The event these people want to put on will probably be no better than the several DevOps Summit events they put on previously. I have heard from exhibitors, speakers and attendees of those events that they were less than successful. Mind you I haven’t attended any, just reporting on what I was told. Ultimately though if they were successful they wouldn’t be trying to rebrand using someone else’s name.  Hard to argue with that logic.

    I am asking our readers (and there are many of you in London,  as it is our single biggest city for viewers) to let this company know that copying others business names will not stand. The best way to do this is to not attend, don’t participate and get the word out that this is not the way business is done.

    Don’t be fooled by the attempt to piggyback our brand and success, we have nothing to do with that event. In fact we will be holding several DevOps Connect events in London and elsewhere in Europe in the fall.  Details will be announced shortly but there will be lots of opportunities to participate.

    Some of you may ask, “you haven’t given us the link to this event?” You’re right, I have not and for good reason. I have already given this company and their event more ink than they are probably due.

    So be aware of imitators, remember there is only one DevOps Connect and those are the events put on by us at devopsy.kinsta.cloud. We hope to see you at them and will be sure to let everyone know when we do. Until then don’t reward imitators.