00:00:06

Good morning. My name is gene Kim, and I am your MC here at the DevOps enterprise summit. I am so happy that you're here because we've created an amazing program for you that you'll be experiencing over the next three days. I know it will be an amazing experience as good as any that we've created at any of our conferences. And I know this because I've seen all of the keynote sessions multiple times. So, and I know this will be especially great compared to being stuck on endless video conference calls that we've all been stuck on for months. So this morning I'll go over what our goals are, both at the highest levels. And what's different, especially since we're in an online format this year made necessary by the COVID-19 global pandemic. So each year I asked three questions going all the way back to 2014.

00:00:51

One is we believe that DevOps is important. We believe that DevOps creates genuine value. More specifically, it helps our organization survive and win in the marketplace, and it allows us to best serve our customers and all of our stakeholders. And we all believe that dev ops makes our work more humane is in short, as John smart says, dev ops enables better value, sooner, safer, and happier. So over the last seven years, we've done 11 events and I'm so proud that we've created what I believe to be the best conference for technology leaders to help them succeed and their organizations win. And since 2016, we've run a conference, both in the U S and the UK, and so global pandemic or not the mission goes on. In fact, I would even argue that our mission is even more important in times like this we're in the middle of the largest economic crisis caused by the largest health crisis in our lifetime.

00:01:47

And I just mentioned our mission. You may be thinking, what mission are we all on? And so maybe let's go to the very beginning. Back in 2014, we formed the DevOps enterprise summit originally to be a conference for horses by horses, no unicorns allowed. So we defined unicorns as the tech giants. So Facebooks, Amazon, Netflix, Googles, Microsofts, right? We didn't want them. We wanted the horses, large complex organizations that have been around for decades or even centuries. And so over the years, we've had hundreds of organizations present spending some of the best known brands across every industry, vertical banking, insurance, retail, sportswear, manufacturing, defense entertainment, and media, healthcare, and government agencies. And so if you were to look back at the talks in 2014, compare them to this year, I think you'll notice some pretty startling differences. One is the people presenting are more senior.

00:02:43

And so part of that is because so many of the people we're presenting have been promoted and we are now following them along in their journey as they take on even larger and more important responsibilities. But also we're definitely attracting more and more senior executives because the work that is being done in this community matters to them. And so over the years, we've asked, uh, presenters to present with their colleagues from audit security and compliance. And so these are often stakeholders are outside of the classic, um, dev and ops value stream. And we often ask technology leaders to copresent with their business counterparts. So we don't want them to be just proximate to the technology leader and just tolerant of what they're doing. Instead, we want that those business leaders who say that all their goals, dreams, and aspirations are being made true, uh, because of the amazing work being done by people in this community.

00:03:34

And so over the years, we've heard from CEOs, CTOs, CFOs, chief people, officers, uh, business leaders and even CEOs. And so someone once asked me what are my goals around the conference programming? And so I shared my answer with the programming committee earlier this year, and I'll share it with you now. And it is really this, it is to have a CEO from a fortune 50 company present at the DevOps enterprise stage by 2025. And you might be thinking, why, what does that have to do with me? And it's because for seven years, the top obstacle being verbalized by this community has been, how do I get my business leadership on board? And so I want you to be able to take that talk being told by that CEO. And have you share that with your business leadership, because that story is being told by people, they listened to describing how the work that you are doing matters, and that the capabilities that you are building in your organizations are what's going to help them survive in the marketplace and win in the marketplace.

00:04:40

And the crazy part is I think we're getting so close last year we had from RBS Jenny wood, chief operating officer for services present, uh, from the copywriter team, we had the CEO and CFO present crystal, Molly and Joe ahow. And earlier this year, uh, we had, uh, from the nation building society team, the largest mutual organization of his kind Patrick the chief operating officer, and one of the three mission leaders, Janet Chapman. And I had, coily presented this slide about what might be coming for Vegas. I'm so happy to announce that we have Kimberly Johnson, executive vice president, and chief operating officer for Fannie Mae, a fortune 25 company, Ken Kennedy, EVP and president of product from CSG co-presenting with our good friend, Scott Prue, and my Liebman, EVP and CIO at American airlines presenting with a good friend, Ross Clanton. So all this shows that the work being done in this community increasingly are matters to people who matter.

00:05:37

So I've talked about the mission that we're on together. So with that, let me talk about the structure of this conference and how it's going to be different because it's in an online format. So like all years, there are really two types of talks that you'll hear at this conference. The first is our experience reports. So as adult learners, as adult leaders, we don't learn from having someone tell us what they think we should do or what they are thinking about doing or classroom lectures from ivory towers. Instead, we really learned from watching other people describe how they solve problems. And that is why for every one of these experience reports, they follow a very specific form. Here's the organization and the industry that we compete in. Here's my role and where I fit in the organization. Here's the business problem that we set out to solve.

00:06:21

Here's where we started and why here's what we did, including specific tools and techniques. Here's the outcomes that resulted. And here are the challenges that still remain. And what I love so much about this format is it closely mirrors, the scientific method where we state a hypothesis, we perform an experiment we specifically confirm or disprove our hypothesis, and then we repeat. And so this year we have an amazing lineup of experience with pours across so many different industries. And I'm so excited to be sharing them with you at this conference. And by the way, one of the things that I get specific delight out of is seeing where these experiences come from. So this is our friend, John Starsky, uh, who was presenting from KeyBank in 2017. And when you ask, how did he get there is because he attended this conference in 2016 and went back with a sense of mission and urgency and took advantage of a crisis that presented itself, which was all of the consumer banking properties going down and used his knowledge to spark a revolution of his own and was then presenting in 2017.

00:07:25

And see, you'll see the same pattern at work this year. It delights me so much that this keeps happening. You'll hear from Duane Holmes, who telling his story about how he built one of the largest container platforms, that process over $30 billion of revenue at one of the largest hotel companies and Jennifer Hanson and team telling their amazing experiences transforming one of the largest business units at capital one. So that's the experience report format. Let's talk about the other format that you'll see here, a DevOps enterprise, which are the expert talks. So these are the invited talks of experts in their domain with knowledge that we believe this community needs to best achieve our goals. So I'm so proud that over the years, we've had some amazing experts share their insights, whether it's Dr. Forester and talking about the state of DevOps report, Dr. Spear talking about his decades of research in dynamic learning organizations, Dr.

00:08:16

MASAC teaching us about workplace burnout, Dr. Martin and Dr. Ameda talking about workplace engagement, Dr. Cook and Dr. Decker talking about, uh, resilience engineering and safety culture and Dr. Kirsten talking about his flow framework. Uh, and I loved last year that we had an expert panel. We had representatives of each one of the big four teaching us that dev ops is not only possible, uh, in their audit clients, but it's actually necessary because they want the clients to still be around in 10 years. So this year we have an amazing lineup of expert talks, uh, that you'll be learning more about as we go through the three days, I want to talk a little bit about the community that has emerged from the conference. So these are pictures that were taken at DevOps enterprise 20 14, 1 year after the Phoenix project came out. And this was a conference that was almost entirely experienced reports, which made it even more obvious that there was something very interesting happening.

00:09:13

One is that there were a universality to the problems being faced in large complex organizations. Everybody felt that there was something genuinely momentous and exciting happening, but it took me over a year to realize to what extent this is a community that loves helping each other. And for years, I was looking for a word to describe the amazing dynamic that you find within this group. And that's when someone introduced me to the work of Brian Eno and the term seniors. So Brian Eno, of course, is a musician record producer, visual artists. And he's best known for helping define and reinvent the sounds of some of the most popular bands of the eighties and nineties, such as you to Divo talking heads, Dave Bowie, and many more. And he used the word seniors to describe this, that despite heroic mythology, lone geniuses do not drive most scientific cultural business or policy advances.

00:10:06

Breakthroughs typically emerged from a scene and exceptionally productive community of practice that develops novel epistemic norms, major innovation may indeed take a genius, but the genius is created in part by a seniors. That senior stands for the intelligence and intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is a communal form of the concept of genius. Individuals immersed in a seniors will blossom and produce their best work. When bullied by a seniors, you act like a genius, your like-minded peers and environment inspire you. I love that. So he talks about specific practices. Mutual appreciation, risky moves are applauded by the group, salty, appreciated, friendly competition, goats. The shy seniors can be thought of the best of peer pressure, rapid exchange of tools and techniques as something is invented. It is flaunted and then shared ideas flow quickly because they're are flowing inside of a common language and sensibility and network access affects of success.

00:11:08

When a record is broken, a hit happens or a breakthrough erupts that success is claimed by the entire scene. This empowers the scene to further success. And so I can't think of a better way to describe the dynamics of what you will see, uh, within the DevOps enterprise community. And so I think the mission that we're all on is that we all share this belief that the technology function is vastly misunderstood by senior business leaders. And it is often over delegated to technology leaders. Instead, everyone needs to know that amazing business outcomes are created when technology is fully integrated into all aspects of strategy and operations. So I believe conferences are magical. I cannot overstate how much I've learned at conferences. I've met almost all my co-authors and collaborators at conferences. So here's a picture of John Allspaw and Patrick DBaaS. I met in 2010 Dominican to Grandison 2011.

00:12:02

I met Dr. Nicole Forrester and finally at a conference. Uh, here's my quote, fellow coauthors of the DevOps handbook, just humble and John Willis and Dr. Mccarsten, I all met at conferences. It's also the program committee for this conference, and I am so grateful to this group of people. Everything that you've seen in this conference for the past six years is a result of their work. We meet weekly. And if you knew what they had to put up with, you'd rightly wonder why they're on the program committee in the first place. But I think it's because like you, we all have goals and aspirations and things that we want to learn. They're advanced by this event. So we thought deeply about how do you create the same sort of magic in an online format? And so much was inspired by this one, quote from Bob Bejan, the Corpus reefy of global events and Microsoft, he said, live events are a theatrical event, but online events are a cinematic event.

00:12:52

And this informed so many of the choices that we made leading up to our London event that we held in June. And I'm so proud at how that turned out. In fact, uh, Jerry Cluedo said having attended the 2017 DevOps enterprise summit in London, I actually enjoyed the virtual experience even more. It's incredible Testament that that magic can happen in a virtual format. We pre recorded all the talks. We encouraged everyone to interact in common areas inside of slack. I thought the results were amazing. I personally had so many great interactions. We had over 30,000 slack messages during those three days. And to put that into perspective, that meant that we blew out the free tier of 10,000 messages in slack in less than a day. Uh, by the way, don't let that stress you out. We've made a slack archive of all the public channels.

00:13:38

So leading up to the London conference, I wrote a blog post called love letter to conferences that was almost 7,000 words long. And it was my goal to actually just think through what are the specific forms that you find in a conference and examine which forms are universal, whether virtual or physical and which ones could we change to take advantage of the online format. So let me go through what types of format you see in this conference. The first is the general session or plenary session, and that's where we're in right now. How, so this is where the dungeon master controls the game. This is where we show off success stories, where we celebrate what we think are the best successes that inspire us, that elevate the bar. These are where we set the language and norms, and this is where we modeled them from onstage.

00:14:24

And this is where we bring in experts to teach us things that we believe everyone in this community, uh, needs to know that an amazing dynamic is created when speakers pre-record their talks and are available for question answers while they're presenting, which definitely can't happen in a physical format. So after the keynote sessions, we have the breakout sessions. So where the keynote sessions, the dungeon master controls the game, the breakout sessions is where you control the game. This is where you choose to talks that you want to see. This is where you seek out. The people that you want to interact with is often so frustrating to have to choose between two talks. There happened simultaneously. We have made available all the track talks, they're all available for you in the video library. And so it makes it easier to find out which ones, which talks to the ones that you want to see.

00:15:13

And so that gets us to the last format, which is the networking time. So we have more than doubled the amount of networking time. And we thought very carefully about how to maximize the chances of useful serendipitous interactions. And Jeff will describe this in more detail later. My advice is use this time. Well, in my experience, the best conference interactions tend to involve planning and being intentional networking is more than just being friendly. It's about helping find the right people to help you achieve your goals. And sometimes that will be finding people with specific tastes that you're looking for or connections or people to help you on a project or fellow travelers. So again, the best way to have people help you is to help them first. So the last thing I want to talk about is Patrick Debois without him, uh, we would not be here.

00:16:02

He invented the term dev ops in 2009, and he built so many elements that you see in this conference platform. So I want to just thank him specifically. So before I turn it over to Jeff, I just want to say this as I'm recording this, I've seen every keynote talk at least two times, some of them many, many more, and based on what I've seen, this is the best programming we've ever done. And I'm so excited to share with you what we have put together for you over the next three days. So before we go to those amazing talks, let's go to Jeff, who is going to present the user's manual for this conference. One observation about attending a lot of online events is that it's super easy to get lost. You ask where did everybody go? What button am I supposed to push? Uh, sometimes even being afraid to push the wrong button, wondering what will happen when you do so, thanks to Jeff for keeping the trains running on time and making sure that everyone gets to where they need to go from personal experience. I know that there is no one better at doing this than Jeff.

00:17:10

Hey, everybody. And welcome to the DevOps enterprise summit, 2020 Las Vegas. And because we're virtual around the world, gene and the programming committee have put together an amazing lineup of speakers who will blow your mind with what they've done and what they know. You'll definitely get a lot of incredible insights from their talks, but those talks are primarily one way sharing from the speaker to you in the audience. And we all know we can get a ton of value from two way interactions in two way sharing. And we want to create those kinds of opportunities for interactions between you and the speakers and between you and each other. Let me run through some of those opportunities, but I need to set the stage. First in past years, we've gotten together in person and this year, obviously we're not doing that. We're virtual, but we still have a lot of the same things that make the DevOps enterprise summit.

00:18:09

Great. We have great speakers. We have great attendees. We have great sponsors. We have great networking opportunities. We're interacting through slack. We have a code of conduct. So the learning and the community are still great, but because we're virtual, some things are going to be a little bit different. We have new ways of interacting with speakers and attendees and sponsors. And what's obvious is we're watching this through our browsers. So the ways to learn and interact are going to be a little bit different than when we've gotten together in person. As I mentioned, we'll be watching the talks primarily through our browser and interacting with others primarily through slack. So let me show you how to get around the event in your browser and in slack for watching the talks in your browser, navigate to watch and the top level menu for the event website, you can see the talks happening right now on the schedule, or you can navigate the schedule and the top level menu find the talks you want to watch and click on watch to watch them to help you find the talks you want to watch.

00:19:14

You can filter the schedule using the topic, just select the topic of the talks you want. And the schedule will filter across all three days of the event. We're also interacting in slack. Many of us use slack for our daily work, especially these days. So we're going to use slack for what we use it for in our daily work. We're going to engage with speakers, sponsors and each other, both during and after the conference. And the slack workspace is going to continue on beyond the conference. You can get on board at this link on the slide, or you can go to networking in the top level menu for the event website, there are some important slack channels you should be paying attention to. And I'll explain each of these. As we go through the orientation to the event, we'd really appreciated. If everyone would edit their slack profile, to include more information about yourself, name, image, organization, title, pronouns, whatever you feel comfortable sharing with this community to help us learn a little more about you. It will improve your experience and the experience of everyone else by making things just a little more human.

00:20:25

Now, let's talk about engaging with speakers. This is the opportunity you have to ask the amazing speaker, some questions, and because we're virtual, we get to do something a little bit different in an in-person event when we're getting together in person, the speakers on stage are well speaking. In our case, the speakers will be available in slack during their scheduled presentation time. So you can post your question in the corresponding, asked the speaker channel in slack, and at mentioned the speaker during their presentation. If you have thoughts on a question, someone else ask, please contribute. We have different slack channels corresponding to the different programming tracks on the schedule. We have one channel for the plenary talks and we have one channel for each of the four tracks in the schedule. Just make sure you're asking your question in the right channel. And if you want to carry on a conversation after the speaker scheduled time, you can take that conversation into the, ask the speaker more channel.

00:21:29

We have lots of great networking opportunities, too. We have a block of networking time. Each of the three days for you to interact with speakers and with other attendees, there are no talks and no other programming during this time. So the FOMO should be low. Let's go through each one of these. The first one is birds of a feather. These are sessions for you to find and interact with other attendees who share similar interests. The way you join a birds of a feather conversation is to first join the birds of a feather slack channels for topics that interest you. Each of those channels starts with B O F joined the live video discussion during the networking time using the zoom link posted in the channel post in slack during and after the session, after the birds of a feather session ends, there's nothing that says you have to stop the conversation.

00:22:22

We have 10 different birds of a feather channels. So there should be something that interests you. The second networking opportunity is lean coffee. Yes, we're bringing this back from the in-person summits we've had in the past and Dominica DeGrandis. Our lean coffee leader is leading lean coffee. Again, she's found a way to do this virtually using zoom, breakout rooms and mural, which is a collaborative virtual whiteboard. Just join the zoom call using the link in the lean coffee, slack channel, and we'll take care of the rest. For those of you have been to other conferences and events, you might be familiar with the law of mobility. The law of mobility says this. If you find yourself in a place where you're neither learning, nor contributing, maybe like this person, then you should respectfully navigate to find a place where you can.

00:23:18

We have the session slides and videos available. The videos of the plenary talks are available after the air. The videos of the breakout talks are actually available right now. The slides are also available for download both in Dropbox and didn't get hub. You can access all the videos through the video library, just navigate to library in the top level menu, you have personal access to the video library for seven days as part of your registration. If you want access longer, or to share the videos with more people, we've created some options to make it easy to do that. Check out slack for more information.

00:23:58

And because we're all part of the same community, we should treat each other well, regardless of whether we're in person or virtual, we want everyone to have an amazing time here at the summit. And our code of conduct reflects that we've posted the code of conduct in slack, but let me give you the, just listen. Well, when someone else is sharing, Sharewell when you have something to say, respect everyone at all times and speak up. If you see something or hear something that isn't consistent with, the environment we want for this community, you have any issues, email help at it. revolution.com or direct message me, Jeff dot gala, Warren slack. Now I'd like to enlist all of your help to create the kind of harassment free environment we want for this community. I mentioned that we've posted the code of conduct in slack. So I'm going to give you a few seconds to go into the general channel in slack. Find that code of conduct post, and then just please give it your favorite emoji to indicate your support. I'll give you a few seconds to do that.

00:25:10

All right. Fantastic. Thank you so much, everyone. The DevOps enterprise summit is brought to you by it revolution, the same people who brought us our favorite books, like the Phoenix project, the unicorn project, the DevOps handbook, and accelerate a huge thanks to our premier sponsor Sona type. We'd also like to say a big thank you to our virtual BFF sponsors, our virtual good friend sponsors, and also our media sponsors who are getting the word out about this terrific community. Thanks also to dark launch Lee for sponsoring the 2020 DevOps enterprise journal. The journal is a collection of white papers tackling some of the biggest challenges facing this community. And it's a terrific resource visit the LaunchDarkly booth to get your free download. The thank yous to our sponsors are genuine. This event doesn't happen without their support, the incredible people in the DevOps enterprise community.

00:26:08

You are why we have so many awesome sponsors who want to help you in your journey. So go talk to them, find out how they can help you on your dev ops journey. And remember sponsors add sparkle to your dev ops journey. Finally, we have some fun games to play, navigate to games and the top level menu of the website to learn more about them. In addition to being fun, you can also win stuff. If you need any help or have any questions you can post in the summit, help channel in slack, you can email help@it.com or if all else fails, you can direct message me Jeff dot gala, more in slack. Okay. That's it. We hope you have an amazing time at the summit. Jean, let me hand it back to you to introduce the DevOps enterprise summits for speakers.