US 2021
Day 1 Opening Remarks
Welcome to DevOps Enterprise Summit Virtual - US 2021!
GK
Gene Kim
Founder and Author, IT Revolution
JG
Jeff Gallimore
Chief Technology and Innovation Officer, Excella
Transcript
Hello. My name is gene Kim, and I am your MC here at the 2021 DevOps enterprise summit, us virtual. So this is our fourth virtual conference made necessary by the continuing global pandemic. But I am so happy that you're here because we've created an amazing program for you that you will get to experience over the next three days. So along with the program committee, we strive to make each event our best event yet. And I genuinely believe that this will be our best ever. I believe this because I've been editing all the talks, watching them over and over, and I am so excited to share with you what we have put together. I think it's something super special. It will be an amazing break from all the endless video conference calls that we've all been stuck on for the last year and a half. So this morning I will go over what our goals are, both at the highest level of terms of our programming objectives, and also how we've continued to evolve this online format, uh, based on lessons that we've learned over the last three virtual events.
And so each year starting all the way back in 2014, I started by asking the question, why are we here in each year? It looks pretty much the same. We believe that DevOps is important. We believe that DevOps creates genuine business value. We believe that DevOps makes our work humane, and we believe that DevOps unleashes everyone's creativity and problem solving potential. In short, as John smart says, if we create better value, sooner, safer, and happier. So over the last eight years, we have done 14 events and I'm so proud that we have created what I believe is the best conference for technology leaders to help them succeed and their organizations win in the marketplace. And so whether we are meeting physically or virtually, uh, the mission goes on, uh, maybe this mission is even more important. Uh, we are in the worst economic crisis that we've seen in a century.
We are in the worst healthcare crisis that we've seen in the century. And so what is this mission that I'm talking about from the very beginning in 2014, DevOps enterprise was created as a conference for horses by horses. In other words, no unicorns allowed unicorns being the tech giants, the fangs, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google, and Microsoft. Instead DevOps enterprise was intended to be a conference for horses by horses, horses as defined by large complex organizations that have been around for decades or even centuries. And I am so delighted that over the last eight years, over 500 enterprises have presented spanning almost every industry, vertical banking, insurance, retail, sportswear, manufacturing, defense, entertainment, media, healthcare, and government services. And so over the years, you may observed that a couple of things have changed. One is the people presenting are more senior. So this might be because that the people presenting have been promoted and we are following along in their journey, but also we're attracting more and more senior executives because our work matters to them.
We've encouraged over the years, presenters to co present with their colleagues from audit security and compliance. We've encouraged them to cope, present with their business counterparts. And we don't want their counterparts who are just tolerant of them. We want those business leaders who say that all their dreams, goals, and aspirations have come true because of the amazing work done by the technology leaders counterparts. So over the years, we've heard from CEOs, CTOs, CFOs, chief product officers, line of business leaders and CEOs. And so someone asked me two years ago, what are my specific goals around the programming? And increasingly it is this, it is to have videos from the CEOs of fortune 50 organizations, routinely being presented as part of these DevOps enterprise presentations, uh, by say 2025. And what delights me to no end is that this is starting to happen now, by the end of this conference, we'll have had six organizations who have done this two years ago, RBS later, nationwide building society, American airlines, Fannie Mae CSG.
And we will have one more tomorrow. So you may be thinking, why, why is that so important? And what does it have to do with me? And it is because for the last eight years we've been collecting the top obstacles verbalized by this community. And typically it has always been, how do I get my business leadership on board? And so I want you to be able to share these testimonials from CEOs, with your business leadership, because these stories are being told by people they listen to. And these stories are all about describing how work that you're doing matters. That the capabilities that you are creating in your organizations are what is needed to help your organization survive in the marketplace and better yet win in the marketplace. So that describes some of the mission behind this conference. So let's talk a little bit about the structure of the conference, how it differs from a physical event and how we've evolved, uh, the virtual format and why.
So from the very beginning, this has been, the conferences primarily made up of experience reports. And the reason for this is that as adult learners, as leaders, we learn less from when someone tells us what they are thinking about doing or worse yet what they think we should be doing, uh, or giving us dry classroom lectures. Instead, we learn best by hearing how other people solve similar business problems. And so almost all of the presentations that you will hear here at dev ops enterprise follows experience, report format, which looks something like this. Uh, here's the organization that, uh, I'm in. And here's the industry that we compete in here is my role and where I fit in the organization. Here's the business problem that we set out to solve. Here's where we started and why here's what we did, including tools and techniques. Here's the outcome that resulted, and here's the problems that still remain.
And what I love about this is that so closely matches the scientific method, where you stayed a hypothesis, you perform an experiment you confirm or disprove that hypothesis. And then you repeat, in other words, we get to see whether the actions taken in that experience report are promising enough to do ourselves. And so in this conference here as a sampling of the amazing experience reports that we have for you, uh, from retailing, we have targets, we have capital one discover financial nationwide insurance, uh, Vanguard, Comcast, the government of Canada, the national security agency, Suncor E-bay, uh, and Google. So I am so delighted that we have so many amazing experience reports from so many different industry verticals. Uh, and the national security agency is for me, it's something that if he had told me about 10 years ago, I would have laughed at you. Uh, so I'm so excited about this presentation coming up from them, uh, later today.
So we talked about experience reports. Uh, let's talk about the other type of talk that you will see here at DevOps enterprise. And that is the expert talk. So over the years, we've had so many experts often with PhDs sharing their area of expertise with us, things that we need to learn in order for us to get from here to there. And so over the next three days, we have amazing experts. We'll be sharing things that we need to know, but this conference is not just about people with PhDs. One of my favorite expert talks was the big four audit panel that happened in 2009. We assembled a panel of auditors from each one of the big four auditors who taught us that DevOps is not only possible to do in a secure audible way, but they view it as necessary in their large clients because they wanted large clients to still be around in 10 years.
So over the next three days, we have some amazing expert talks for you. John will be teaching us about learning from incidents. We'll be learning about blamelessness in a medical environment from Dr. LA Alvarez. Co-presenting with his friends, Christina and Kurt from blameless. We'll be learning about leadership from Kimberly Johnson, the chief operating officer of Fannie Mae presenting, uh, with Chris Porter hit her CIS. So we'll be learning about leader development from Admiral John Richardson, former chief of Naval operations, uh, from the us Navy, uh, we'll be learning about leadership and remote work from Amanda silver corporate vice president of the developer division at Microsoft. We believe learning about observability from Shelby Speece from Equinex metal and Liz Fong Jones from honeycomb. We'll be learning about the structure of great organizations from Dr. Steven spear and Dr. Rusto. And we'll be talking to us about culture and information flows.
So in 2014, that is when we had our first DevOps enterprise summit in San Francisco. That was one year after the Phoenix project came out and it was all experienced reports. And what was amazing to me was that there was a universality to the problems that everyone was facing in large complex organizations. There was also a sense of something genuinely exciting, afoot something. Uh, we felt that something momentous was happening. And I also learned that this is a community that truly loves helping each other. And so it has been amazing to watch that it damaged between people within this community. And it reminded me of a term that was coined by this person, Brian Eno, who coined the word seniors. Brian Eno is a musician, a record producer and visual artist he's best known for helping define and reinvent the sound of some of those popular bands in the eighties and nineties, such as U2, Divo talking heads, uh, David Bowie, and more.
And what you said is that despite heroic mythology, lone geniuses do not drive most scientific cultural business or policy advances. Instead breakthroughs typically emerged from a scene, an exceptionally productive community of practice that develops novel epistemic norms. So major innovation may indeed take a genius, but that genius is created in part by a seniors. And recently I actually looked up the word epistemic, which means of, or relating to knowledge or knowing. So you are the leaders within the DevOps community who are on the frontier of knowing, because I think all of you model the fact that it's hard to lead something or get good outcomes. If you don't know what you're doing. So let's continue Sr stands for the intelligence and intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of genius. Individuals immersed in a seniors will blossom and produce their best work.
When buoyed by seniors, you act like a genius, your like-minded peers and the entire environment inspire you. I love that. So here are the features of seniors. The first is mutual appreciation as defined by risky moves are applauded by the group, subtlety, appreciated and friendly competition, goats to shy. So seniors can be truly thought of as the best of peer pressure, which gets to number two rapid exchange of tools and techniques. As soon as something is invented, is flaunted and then shared ideas flow quickly because they're flowing inside of a common language and sensibility. So of course, in my mind, this evokes the ideas of the DevOps dojo pioneered by Ross Clanton in 2014 at target the state of DevOps research that I got to participate in with Dr. Nicole Forsgren and Jess humble that we started in 2013 and project to product pioneered again by Ross Clanton and Dr.
Mccarsten, these were widely and rapidly disseminated between organizations, which gets us to number three, network effects of success. When a record is broken, a hit happens, or a breakthrough erupts, the successes claimed by the entire scene, this empowers the scene two for the success. And so I think the problem that we are all trying to solve is this, the technology function is often misunderstood by senior business leaders and is often over delegated to technology leaders. Instead, we all know that everyone needs to know that amazing business outcomes are created when technology is fully integrated into all aspects of strategy and operations. So a year over a year and a half ago, when we were challenged to figure out how to run an online conference, I wrote a blog post called my love letter to conferences. And the goal was to clarify my own thinking about what made conferences so worthwhile to me and how conferences are structured to enable that outcome.
And so the result was almost 7,000 words, and I got to share with you some of the top things I learned. I've mentioned many times that I feel like I owe my entire career to conferences, and it is so true. It's at conferences where I learned what I need to learn. I met who I needed to meet many who have become some of my best and favorite collaborators going back some over a decade. And part of that was made so clear when I went through all my photos from conferences. So here's why I met John Allspaw back in 2011, uh, who is presenting on day three. I met Dominica to grant a stair to, I met Patrick Chippewa in 2010, and I met Dr. Nicole Forsgren and many of my co-authors at conferences. In fact, here's the program committee. And I met almost all of them, also at a conference.
And I am so grateful to them for their help, everything that you've seen here over the last eight years is a result of their work. We meet weekly for most of the year, and I'm so grateful that they are bringing in all their goals and aspirations things. They want to learn all of which we try to achieve and advance through this event. So I want to share with you this wonderful quote from Bob Bijon, he's a corporate vice president of global events at Microsoft, and he said, this live events are a theatrical event. Whereas online events are a cinematic event, and this was such an aha moment for me. And so much of how we've designed these virtual conferences was based on that aha moment. And so many of the design objectives and design decisions that we made for the last two years are because of this.
One of the most obvious ones is that all conference talks are prerecorded as an attendee. There's nothing more frustrating than watching the speaker, try to get their audio working for 10 minutes there. So many more decisions than that. So here's our friend, Jeffrey Fredrick, author of the book, agile conversations, and so much more. And he said, conferences are for conferring. And so, yes, that is very much one of the design goals for this programming. And so we wanted to make sure that we have ways for us to find fellow travelers and fellow learners to create mutually exothermic communities, uh, where we are actually actively helping each other. And I must say over the last two years, I've actually grown to love the virtual format. My friend, Dr. McPherson said the average transactional cost of each interaction in virtual events is much lower than in physical events.
And the average enjoyment level is higher. There's a lot to love about this. And I know that I'm not the only one Jerry Cluedo from Cisco Meraki said I've been into the in-person DevOps enterprise London event in 2017. And I have to say, I enjoyed the virtual experience more. It was easier to keep track of what is going on to engage with other attendees in zoom sessions. And I had more hallway conversations in three years ago and all the talks have been superb. So I want to just talk a little bit more about what I've grown to love over the last two years. I admire how people have been using the virtual format, uh, integrating video into their talks. I love that we are getting access to expertise that we might not have had access to had it been a live event. And I think the quality of presentations has been absolutely exceptional because we have the freedom to edit before the conference goes live.
So let me share with you the structure of conferences, whether it is virtual or physical, and specifically share how, what we changed in the virtual format. So in the beginning and the end of the day, we have the general session or otherwise known as the plenary talks. So these are the main stage presentations where there are no other tracks going on. This is where the dungeon master controls the game. So this remains mostly the same. The types of talks that you see in the general session are success stories that we want to celebrate. Those stories that inspire us and that elevate the bar that pushes a community forward. This is where we set language and norms and model them. This is where we bring in experts to teach us things that we all need to know. And so how do you address the absence of engagement?
So what I have grown to love is that all speakers are available for Q and a during their talk. So while the talk is airing, that will be in the slack channels with us fielding questions, posting links, as we go. I love the level of engagement that we see in these virtual conferences. Last year at the DevOps enterprise summit us, we had 36,000 slack messages over three days. So just to put that into perspective, the free tier allows 10,000 messages before we start losing history. And so we rolled that over three times, but don't let that worry. You, we archive all the slack traffic that's available for you to search. The other type of talk that you'll see are the breakout sessions or the track talks. So this is where you get to control the game you choose, which talks you want to see. You can seek out the people that you want to interact with.
And what is a bonus is that you never have to choose between two talks that are going on simultaneously. All of the breakout talks are already in the video library and all the plenary sessions are available at the end of each morning afternoon, the videos and slides. And now in many cases, the 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, I just want to say this as I'm recording this, I've seen every keynote talk at least two times. And some of them, uh, many more than based on what I've seen. I think this is some of the best programming that we've ever done. I'm so excited to share what we put together for you over the next three days. But before we get to these amazing talks, let's go to Jeff.
Who's going to present the user's manual for this conference. One observation about attending a lot of online events over the last year and a half is that it's so easy to get lost. Where did everyone go? What button am I supposed to push? Uh, I have this great fear of pushing the wrong button, wondering what I should be doing right now. And so thank you, Jeff, for keeping all the trains running on time and making sure that everyone gets to where they need to go from personal experience. I know there's no one better at doing this than Jeff over to you.
Hey everybody. And welcome to the DevOps enterprise summit, 2021 in the U S and because we're virtual around the world, Jean and the programming committee keep raising the bar for every summit to make it the best programming yet. And they think they've done it again. We hope you agree. As you see the talks from the amazing lineup of speakers over the next three days, but at most conferences, those are talks are primarily one way sharing from the speaker to you in the audience. We all know we can get a ton of value from two way interactions and 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, 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. 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. 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 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 network 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 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 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 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 add mentioned the speaker during your presentation. If you have thoughts on a question, someone else asked, 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 to make sure you're asking your question in the right channel. And if you want to carry on a conversation after the speakers scheduled time, you can take that conversation into the, ask the speaker more channel.
Now 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 ad here or at channel. We have some terrific 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 could 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 gatherer 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 right after the morning stocks right before we break. Now, let's go through the opportunities during the networking time. 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 gathered virtual space and head to the birds of a feather room. I'll show you how to get there. Just a moment when you're in the room, just move to the area that has the topic you're interested in. 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 an end, after the session and after the birds of a 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 over head over to the right side of the virtual space.
Just go through the door marked by the 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 in contribute. Great. If you want to watch and listen, great. If you want to discretely disengage to go do something else, you can do that too. We have four different birds of a feather sessions on all three days. So there should be something that interests you. We'll also have one special birds of a feather session each day that I'll let you know about right before the break each morning.
The second networking opportunity is lean coffee. Yes, we're bringing this from the in-person Simons we've had in the past into the virtual summit. We're having now. And Courtney Kissler is back again as our lean coffee leader. We'll 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 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.
You can access all the videos for all the talks through the video library, just navigate to library and the top level menu. The videos of the plenary talks are available after the air. The videos of the breakout talks are actually available right now. 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 easier to do that. Just check out slack for more info. We also have the session slides available. Just find the talk you want in the video library, and then click on the link to the slides to get them easy peasy.
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, 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 your support in creating 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. All right. Fantastic. Thank you so much. The DevOps enterprise summit is brought to you by it revolution, 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 premier sponsor. LaunchDarkly we'd also like to say a big thank you to our virtual BFF 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. Now, 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 and 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 for speakers.