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Hello, I'm Jean Kim and I am your MC here at the 2021 DevOps enterprise summit, your virtual conference. I'm so happy that you're here because we've put together an amazing three days for you as good as any we've ever put together. So this morning, I'm going to go through what our goals are, both at the highest levels at the programming objectives level. And what's different in this online format and sharing some of the lessons learned after putting on two fantastic online conferences last year. So since 2014, we always start each conference by asking three questions. One is why are we here? So we believe that DevOps is important. We believe that dev ops creates genuine value, more sophist specifically. It helps our organization survive and win in the marketplace because it enables us to better serve our customers and all our stakeholders. And third, we believe that dev ops makes a work more humane.

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As John smart says, we are creating better value, sooner, safer, and happier. And so since 2014, we have run 12 events in the beginning. It was just a conference in the United States. And then since 2016, it was one conference in the us and one in the UK. And since 2020, uh, those conferences of course have been virtual made necessary by the global pandemic. And yet the mission goes on. In fact, the mission may be even more important in times like this. We are in the middle of the largest economic crisis, uh, in over a century, we're in the middle of the largest health crisis in our lifetime. And we are in the middle of the most important race right now. How do you get everyone on the planet vaccinated as quickly as possible? So you may be thinking, what is this mission that I'm talking about?

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And so in the beginning, we wanted to create a conference for horses. In other words, no unicorns allowed. So who are the unicorns? There were the tech giants. Facebook's Amazons, Netflix, Googles and Microsofts. We didn't want stories from them. Instead. We wanted stories from large complex organizations that have been around for decades or even centuries. And I'm so proud that over the last eight years, we've had nearly 500 enterprises present spending, almost every industry vertical from banking, insurance, retail, sportswear, manufacturing, defense entertainment, and media, healthcare, and government agencies, and more. And so as we look back over the years, another thing that I noticed is that the presenters are more senior, many people have been promoted and we are following their journey, uh, as they go down theirs. But also we're also attracting more and more senior executives because our work matters to them. We specifically ask our presenters to copresent with their colleagues, from audit security and compliance, and more recently to copresent their business counterparts.

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We want the, uh, their business colleagues. Aren't just tolerant of what we do in this community. Instead, we want those who are grateful because they know that all their goals, hopes, dreams, and aspirations depend upon the work that this technology community does. And so over the years, we've heard from CEOs, CTOs, chief financial officers, chief product officers, line of business leaders, and even CEOs. And someone asked me last year, what are my specific goals around the programming? And so I shared my answer with the program committee and I'd like to share them with you as well. And so, uh, I would say that my goal is to have videos of CEOs from fortune 50 companies, routinely being presented, uh, in the presentations here at DevOps enterprise by 2025, just as Maya Liebman and Ross Clanton from American airlines did last year in the Vegas virtual conference, which we will be playing for you later today.

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And so you may be thinking, why, why would I care about them? And the reason is for eight years, the top obstacle being verbalized by this community has been, how do I get my business leadership on board? And so through these videos, I would like for you to be able to share those stories with your business leadership, because those stories are told by people that they listened to describing how the work that you do matters, that the capabilities that you are building in your organizations are what will help your organization survive in the marketplace and more importantly, win in the marketplace. And I'm so proud that we are getting so close over the last two years, we've had so many senior leaders present from RBS. We had genuine chief operating officer for services from Compuware. We've had the Chris O'Malley, the CEO and his CFO, Joe ahow last year we had from nationwide building society, Patrick , chief operating officer and Janet Chapman, one of the three mission leaders last year, we also had Kimberly Johnson, executive vice president, and chief operating officer of Fannie Mae, a fortune 25 organization, uh, based in United States, Ken Kennedy, EVP and president of product at CSG co-presenting with our good friend, Scott Peru, and the AFA mentioned my Lehman, EVP CIO of American airlines.

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So my claim is we are getting so close. And so I've talked about the mission that we're on together. Let's talk about the structure of this conference and how it differs from previous years. The most obvious part is that we are in a virtual format. So this conference has always been made up primarily of experience reports. And it's because as adult learners, as as leaders, we don't learn from hearing what someone is thinking about doing or what someone thinks we should be doing, or a didactic classroom lectures. Instead, we learned from people describing how this solve their own problems. And that is why every experience report really follows this format. Here's my organization and the industry that we compete in. Here's my role and where I fit in. Here's a business problem that we set out to solve. Here's where we started and why here's what we did, including tools and techniques.

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Here's the outcomes that resulted. And here's the challenges that still remain. And what is so lovely about this is that this very much fits the scientific method, where we stayed at hypothesis and we perform an experiment which would confirm or disprove a, then we discuss and then repeat. And so this year's experience reports are amazing. We have a Adidas H and M group nationwide building society, Procter and gamble, the Walt Disney company, UK HMRC, UK government, as a platform, American airlines to regroup and get hub and so many more. And so those are experienced reports from technology leaders, uh, who are all helping their organizations win in the marketplace, which leads us to the second type of talk that we have here at dev ops enterprise. These are the expert talks, and I'm so proud of how many people with PhDs who've shared their expertise with us, whether it was Nicole, Forsgren sharing, uh, her research about what high-performance looks like, Dr.

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Steven spear, about what dynamic learning organizations look like. Dr. Christina, talking about workplace engagement and burnout, Dr. Andre Martin and Dr. Dave Almeida talking about, uh, organizational learning, Dr. Richard Cook, and Dr. Sidney Decker talked about resilience engineering. Dr. Mccarsten talking about how to maximize developer productivity, but this conference is so much more than people with just PhDs. One of my favorite examples, uh, was something we did in 2019, where we assembled a panel of auditors. Uh, we got someone from each one of the big four auditors who taught us that not only is DevOps possible to do in a secure and auditable way, but they view it as necessary in every one of their large clients, because they want their clients to still be around in 10 years. So this year is expert talks include Norah Jones, Dr. Mccarsten Corey Quinn, a former chief of Naval operations, Admiral John Richardson, Dr.

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Jake Hussamy Smith, John smart, Dr. Chris , Eileen. You should tell. And Dr. Ron Westrum, uh, who, anyone who studied the state of DevOps research will be familiar with, because he is the author of the famous Western organizational typology model. So in 2014, we held our first conference. It was one year after the Phoenix project came out and almost all of the presentations were experienced reports and one couldn't help, but notice a couple of things. One is that there was a universality to the problems being presented that we all face in large complex organizations too, is that there was a feeling of genuine excitement, a feeling that there was something genuinely momentous happening. And I also learned that this is a community that really loves helping each other and observing the dynamics between people within the ops enterprise community reminded me of a term coined by this person, Brian Eno, who coined the term seniors.

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So Brian Eno is a musician, a record producer, visual artists he's best known for helping define and reinvent the sound of some of the most popular bands of the 1980s and nineties, including U2, Divo, talking heads, David Bowie, and many more. So here are the key elements of seniors, despite heroic mythology, lone geniuses do not drive most scientific cultural business or policy advances. Instead breakthroughs typically emerged from a scene, a an 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 the seniors. By the way, I finally looked up the word epistemic, and it is defined as of, or relating to knowledge or knowing. And I'll just make a side note. You're all leaders who are on the frontier of knowing, all right, two senior stands for the intelligence and intuition of a whole cultural scene.

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It is a communal form of the concept of genius individuals immersed in a scene as will blossom and produce their best work. When bullied by a senior, you act like a genius, your like-minded peers and the entire environment inspire you. So there are three key features of a seniors. All of which I think are so brilliantly evidenced in the DevOps enterprise community. One is mutual appreciation. Risky moves are applauded by the group. Subtlety is appreciated, friendly competition, goads as shy seniors can be thought of as the best of peer pressure. And there are so many examples of this, whether it's the DevOps dojo pioneered by Ross Clanton, 2014, the state of deadass research that I got to do with Dr. Nicole, Forsgren just humble, uh, from 2014 to 2019 project to product, uh, worked on by Ross Clanton and Dr. Mccarsten all rapidly being disseminated, uh, throughout the industry.

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It's to rapid exchange of tools and techniques. As soon as something is invented, it is flaunted and then shared ideas flow quickly because they're flowing inside of a common language and sensibility, and three network effects of success. When a record is broken, a hit happens. A breakthrough erupts to success is claimed by the entire scene. This empowers the entire scene two for the success. And so here is a common journey that I think we are all on that the technology function is vastly understood by senior business leaders. And it is often over delegated to the 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. And now you are going to see some amazing examples, how that is being advanced and the presentations over the next three days. So 14 months ago, when we were first challenged to figure out how to run an online conference, I started writing a blog post called my love letter to conferences.

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And my goal was to clarify my own thinking, what made conferences so worthwhile to me and how conferences are structured to enable that outcome. And the result was an almost 7,000 word blog posts. And here's what I've learned. I've mentioned many times that I feel like I genuinely, oh, my entire career to conferences. And it's so true. It's a conferences where I learned what I needed to learn. I met who I needed to meet, and many of them who have become some of my favorite collaborators, some going back over a decade. And part of that was made so clear when I went through all of these photos. So I met John Allspaw in 2011, and that's actually where I met, uh, Dominica to grant us. This was at the first DevOps stays being held in the United States by Patrick Dubois. I finally met Dr. Nicole Forsgren at a conference.

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I met Jess humble at a conference. Um, and as well as Dr. Kirsten, in fact, I met the entire programming committee, all of these people at conferences. And so the people on this programming committee, everything that you see over the past eight 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 that even be willing to be on this program committee. But I think it's because like you, we all have goals and aspirations and things we want to learn that are advanced by being a part of this event. So we all studied online events and, uh, we all love this quote from Bob Bijon, corporate vice president of global events at Microsoft. And he said, live events are a theatrical event. And online events are a cinematic event. This was such an aha moment for me.

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And this drove so many of our design decisions. The biggest implication was that we chose to have all talks be prerecorded, because it's so frustrating as an attendee to watch a speaker, spend 10 minutes just trying to get their audio working. And we also tried to design the interactions, uh, to enable those serendipitous interactions that we love so much, uh, in a physical event. And I'm so delighted at what the feedback has been over the past year. So jury cloud, uh, went to the DevOps enterprise London event in 2017 and said, I have to say that I enjoyed the virtual experience even more. It was easier to keep track of what was going on to engage with other attendees in the zoom sessions. I had more Holloway conversations than three years ago, and the talks have been so super herb. I thought the two online events last year were amazing.

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I had so many great interactions. We had over 36,000 slack messages in our last online event to put that into perspective, the free slack tier, uh, only allows 10,000 messages. So we were actually rolling over messages in less than a day. So don't let that stretch you out. We've made a slack archive available of all the public channels, uh, since, uh, I think 2015. So I mentioned that that love letter to conferences was 7,000 words long. I've always believed that in order to think clearly requires you to be able to write clearly. And so I want to understand what forms were universal, where the virtual or physical, and which ones would be changed. Should you take advantage of the online format? So the general slushing or other words known as the plenary sessions, this is where the dungeon master controls. The game just remains mostly the same.

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Uh, the goal here is to provide success stories that we all celebrate that inspire us, that elevate the bar. This is where we set the community language and norms and model them on stage. This is also where we bring in experts to teach us what we all need to know. So then the question becomes, how do we address the absence of engagement that we get in a real life conference? Uh, the fact that all presentations are prerecorded, actually, it allows for an amazing dynamic that isn't possible in real life. While speakers presentations are being aired, the speakers are available for Q and a during their talk in slack and many will actually announce additional times where they're available to interact with you. So that is amazing. So the other type of session is to breakout sessions or track talks. So this is where the player controls the game you choose, which talks you want to see, and you seek out the people that you want to interact with based on what you want to learn.

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So bonus is in an online format. You never have to choose between two simultaneous talks because we have published all track talks in the video library already. So it makes it even easier to find out who you want to talk to and make arrangements as necessary. And incidentally, all of the plenary sessions will be available at the end of each morning or afternoon. So the videos and slides, and now in many cases, transcripts will be available for you to share right away, no more waiting weeks or months for them to be published. So before I turn it over to Jeff, uh, let me just say this. As I'm recording this, I've seen every keynote talk at least two times some of them many more. And based on what I've seen, I think this is some of the best programming we've ever done. I am so excited to share what we put together for you over the next three days.

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But before we go to those amazing talks, let's go to Jeff. Who's going to present the user's manual for this conference. One observation I will make after attending a whole lot of online events is this it's super easy to get lost. You may ask where did everyone go? What button am I supposed to push? You may experience fear of pushing the wrong button. And you may be wondering, what should I be doing right now? So thank you in advance, Jeff for keeping the trains running on time and making sure everyone gets to where they need to go. And from personal experience, I know there was no one better at doing this than Jeff over to you.

00:17:59

Hey everybody. And welcome to the DevOps enterprise summit, 2021 in Europe. And because we're virtual around the world, gene and the programming committee have put together yet another 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 at most conferences, 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 needed to set the stage. First, prior to last year's event, we've always gotten together in person. And just like last year, this year, we're not doing that.

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We're virtual, but we still have a lot of the same things that make the DevOps enterprise summit. Great. Whether we're in person like we were prior to 2020 or virtual, like we were last year, 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. We're bringing a lot of what we did last year to create a great virtual experience. So the learning and the community are still great. And because we're always learning and improving, some things are going to be different from when we've been together in person. And even from last year when we were virtual, we have new ways of interacting with speakers and attendees and sponsors one big way. In fact, I don't want to share the surprise just yet. Just give me another minute or two, as you can see right now, we'll be watching the talks primarily through our browser and interacting with others primarily through slack.

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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 to schedule in the top level menu, find the talks you want to watch and click on watch to watch them. 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 getting 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 network and the top level menu for the event website, there are some important slack channels you should be paying attention to.

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And I'll explain each of these as we go through the orientation to the event, we'd really appreciate it. 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 bit more about you. It will improve your experience and the experience of everyone else by making things just a little more human. Now, let's talk about engaging with the speakers. This is the opportunity you have to ask the amazing speakers, some questions, and because we're virtual, we get to do something a little bit different in a physical 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 questions in the corresponding, ask the speaker channel in slack. And at mentioned the speaker during your presentation. If you have thoughts on a question, someone else asked, please contribute.

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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 of 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 speakers scheduled, talk time, you can take that conversation into the, ask the speaker more channel. And when using slack, remember alert, fatigue is a real thing. So please be considerate of your fellow attendees and the important messages they might need to see from their teams. So please don't use at here or at channel.

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We have a lot of great networking opportunities. 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. And now for the big surprise, we've created a virtual conference venue for the summit in gather, you can walk around in it, interact, live with sponsors, speakers, and other attendees, and even play some games in there. You can enter the gatherer space by navigating to gather in the top level menu for the event, or by checking out the gathered channel in slack. Thank you to LaunchDarkly for sponsoring the space. There's more to share with you about gather, which I'll be doing after this morning's talks right before we break. Now, let's go through the opportunities during the networking time.

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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 to join a birds of a feather conversation is to enter the gather virtual space and headed the birds of a feather room. I'll show you how to get there in just a moment when you're in the room, just move to the area that has the topic you're interested in. Joining. You can also join the birds of a feather slack channels for topics that interest you. Each of those channels starts with B O F post in slack during and after the session. And after the birds of a feather feather session ends, there's nothing that says you have to stop the conversation to get to the birds of a feather room, go into gather and head over to the right side of the virtual space. Just go through the door marked by the airy arrow. And you'll be in the room where all the discussions are happening. Gather provides a remarkably similar virtual experience to the in-person birds of a feather sessions. If you want to engage and contribute. Great, if you want to watch and listen, great. If you want to discreetly disengaged to go do something else, you can do that too. We have five different birds of a feather channels. So there should be something that interests you.

00:24:44

The second networking opportunity is lean coffee. Yes, we're bringing this from the in-person summits we've had in the past into the virtual summit. We're having now. And Courtney Kissler has taken the Baton as our lean coffee leader will 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 who 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.

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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, and get up. 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 info.

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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 with 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, if you have any issues, email, help at it, revolution.com or direct message me, Jeff dot gala, more in slack. Now I'd like to enlist all of your support in creating the kind of her for 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.

00:27:33

All right. Fantastic. Thank you so much. The DevOps enterprise summit is brought to you by it revolution, the same people who bring us our favorite books, like the Phoenix project, the unicorn project, the DevOps handbook, and accelerate a huge thanks to our premium sponsor. LaunchDarkly we'd also like to say a big thank you to our virtual BFS sponsors, our virtual good friends sponsors, and also our media sponsor, who is getting the word out about this terrific community. Thanks to LaunchDarkly for also sponsoring the 2021 dev ops 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.

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The thank yous to our sponsors are genuine. This event doesn't happen without their support, the incredible people in the DevOps enterprise community. You are why we have so many awesome sponsors who want to help you in your journey. So go talk to them in the virtual expo hall, just navigate to expo in the top level menu, where you can visit each sponsor at their booth, they're ready to help you. And remember sponsors add sparkle to your dev ops journey. Finally, we have some fun games to play, navigate to games in 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 at it. revolution.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. First speaker.