With the seminal IT conference DevOps World 2022 in Orlando September 26 to September 29 upon us, I think about the pivotal industry conferences and events critical to my path to the cloud, DevOps and cloud-native. It brings me to this brief retrospective, highlighting some of the most significant influences that still guide my path today.
I highlight these for you as conferences, books, emerging development tools, and changes in infrastructure delivery all played critical roles in my completely rethinking of how we create software through DevOps.While leading IT for a global R&D industry consortium from 2010 to 2016, I was unknowingly in the middle of a significant shift from designing network protocols to entirely moving to the cloud, creating self-service development portals and automating the development process.
This journey began partly when a friend and colleague, Alan Shimel, creator of the then-new DevOps.com site, said, “Check out this thing called DevOps … and you gotta read this book!” Looking back at my Amazon order history, I see I first purchased The Phoenix Project in November 2013. The book immediately became the main topic of discussion among my engineering team. While we didn’t label it as a DevOps tool then, Jenkins established the basis of our DevOps toolchain across multiple software-based research projects. Other technologies, including Artifactory, Maven, Git, GitHub, Bamboo and OpenShift, for example, quickly followed, enabling us to spin up development environments for many new software projects. In less than a year, we completely retooled IT from a significant bottleneck to becoming the easiest path to creating new software projects by equipping teams with DevOps, development tools, environments and cloud platforms.
Jenkins World (now DevOps World) helped me understand the central roles CI and CD played in creating automated workflows and delivering software more quickly from development into test environments. The first AWS re:Invent helped me rethink the cloud, from a data center scarcity mindset to making compute, storage and bandwidth resources harnessed through automation and a credit card. I wrote my first post about DevOps in 2014, The DevOps Journey, where I did my best to make sense of precisely what DevOps is.
As I go back and reread that post, I’m surprised how much of those thoughts still apply in 2022. Today, I continuously read many technical books, learn from thought leaders and attend influential conferences, including this year’s DevOps World. I wonder what will change how we think about and create software again in the next decade!
If you can, join us in Orlando for DevOps World. Techstrong.TV will be broadcasting live from the event; if you can’t make it, we’ll keep you updated on all of the developments announced there. Also, join us in November for our own DevOps Experience virtual event, which will highlight DevOps Everywhere: The Edge and Beyond. Hope to see you soon!
