DevOps Days London 2016 – Enterprise DevOps

The growth of DevOps continues, with 3 conferences taking place in London in a very short space of time – DevOps Days London in April, followed by the Continuous Delivery Summit in May and DevOps Enterprise Summit in July.

DevOps Days London showed how DevOps doesn’t just apply to the unicorns by inviting delegates with a focus on “DevOps in the Enterprise with specific reference to the Financial Services Industry”.  Platinum sponsors included Barclays, Microsoft and HPE.

Conference Highlights

ITSM Zone's Claire Agutter meets Phoenix Project author Gene Kim

All the tickets for DevOps Days London sold out, and with rock stars like Gene Kim and Andi Mann on the agenda it’s no wonder.  It was also great to catch up with the team from Ranger 4 including ITSM Zone mentor Daniel Breston.

The focus of the talks ranged from cultural and people considerations through to more technical topics.

What’s Fresh?

The format at DevOps Days might be different to anything you’ve experienced before at an IT service management conference.  The morning sessions are traditional slide based presentations, but in the afternoon things change a bit.

Both days featured afternoon presentations in the ‘Ignite’ format.  Presenters have 20 slides to get their points across in 5 minutes, with the slides auto-advancing every 15 seconds.  Our lead tutor Claire Agutter presented her Ignite on how DevOps and ITIL can work together, and she can testify it’s a challenging experience!  From the delegate’s perspective though, it’s a great opportunity to see some bite-sized content and to see more speakers than would be possible in traditional sessions.

The afternoon also featured Open Spaces.  Delegates get to propose and vote on the topics they want to discuss, and then organise the timetable to meet their needs.  Each Open Space manages itself, and the one on DevOps Certification was certainly worth attending.

The passion and enthusiasm of the DevOps community really shines through in the Open Spaces.

Day 3: Hackathon

Kanban in action at the DevOps Days London Hackathon

After the conference, a hackathon was organised to work on ‘Round my Bill’ – giving customers the facility to donate small change to charity when shopping online.  The hackathon was sponsored by Microsoft and Barclays, and it was a fantastic opportunity to see DevOps and Agile in action, including self-organising teams and Kanban boards.

Turnout wasn’t as high as the organisers had hoped, but those present made some great progress on functionality, interfaces and more.