Registration

Chairman’s scene-setting

EXECUTIVE TRACK

Succeeding with DevOps: It's not about DevOps. 
John Clapham, Kainos
It seems almost impossible to hide from extravagant claims about DevOps; bring operations and development together and you're almost guaranteed improved resilience, speed of execution, and quality - all at reduced cost.  In reality just starting, never mind sustaining, DevOps ways of working is challenging.  One reason is that IT seldom exists in isolation, it interfaces, and interferes, with many parts of the business. 

This talk explores why those external factors are critical to the success of DevOps, what can be done to encourage them, and how developing a DevOps culture can help, or hinder, the wider organisation.

Making DevOps Business as Usual
Graham Dick, Director, Lamri
DevOps is not just about tooling, its more, it’s a way of thinking and doing.  Applying DevOps thinking enables significant enhanced performance but only if the underlying practices are implemented as business as usual – enterprise wide.  In this talk we’ll consider the challenge of taking DevOps practices enterprise wide and look at some of the techniques we’ve successfully employed with customers to tackle this challenge.  DevOps – It’s worth the trouble!

Break

UNICOM’s Welcome

Joint Keynote with: Making Changes in Enterprise Architecture & Business Excellence through Process Improvement

How City Index bridged the Dev/Ops divide
Mike Lear, CIO of City Index in partnership with Delphix
Mike Lear joined City Index 5 years ago as Head Architect. Now the CIO he has overseen a move to Agile Development, continuous testing, continuous delivery and now DevOps. This involved refreshing and in some cases replacing the core infrastructure, adding innovative new technologies like data virtualization and building new business processes that could take advantage of such an agile platform. The result was the alignment of development, testing and infrastructure all working towards the same goal - continuous delivery.

Introduction to sponsors and supporting organisations

COFFEE

PRACTICES WITHIN DEVOPS

Chairman’s scene setting

Understanding the DevOps Tooling Landscape
Rob Vanstone, XebiaLabs
Whether you're a manager, team leader or a DevOps practitioner looking to introduce DevOps practice and culture into your team or organization, you're probably faced with the following questions:

• What is the relationship between implementing DevOps and introducing specific tooling?
• What do all these products that call themselves 'DevOps tools' actually do?
• How do I identify which tool(s) I need in my environment to meet my organization's DevOps goals?

This session is aimed at helping you provide some of the answers to the questions, but more importantly help you initiate the discussion as applicable to your own setting by considering the following points
                                                                                                                                                          
1. How introducing a DevOps culture is more than just introducing the current "Flavour of the Month DevOps tool"
2. How tooling supports DevOps principles and practices and can help you address many of the challenges in your delivery process
3. How Continuous Integration, deployment automation, release/pipeline orchestration and system provisioning/configuration management tools, cloud management platforms and integrated container systems can work together in a DevOps tooling landscape
4. How to identify your biggest challenges and choose the right combination of tools to meet them.

Continuous Delivery at 7digital - An Experience Report
Chris O’Dell, Lead Developer, 7digital                                                                                                                           
Following a short introduction to what Continuous Delivery is and its purpose, Chris dives into the story of the changes made at 7digital to enable the shift. These changes range from technical, process and cultural. The journey was long, difficult and ongoing, but rewarding. Chris finishes with data showing the impact on our Cycle Time and throughput.

Journey to Cloud Cadence
Sam Guckenheimer, Product Owner for the Microsoft Visual Studio product line. 
Sam describes a ten-year transformation at Microsoft Developer Division from a waterfallian box product delivery cycle of four years to Agile practices enabling a hybrid SaaS and on-prem business, with a single code base, triweekly delivery of new features in the service, and quarterly delivery for on-prem customers. He presents three waves of improvement and learning: first, the reduction of technical debt and other waste to gain trustworthy transparency, second, the increase in the flow of customer value, and third the shortening of cycle time to allow continuous feedback and continuous business improvement.

The current scale of the business is that there are millions of customer accounts each on–premise and in the cloud. This hybrid situation will exist for many years, and is a necessary part of the business.

Sam will discuss both the organizational issues of transformation and give examples from monthly service reviews of key practices and metrics, such as hypothesis-driven development, funnel analysis, performance monitoring, MTTD and MTTR improvement, log analysis, root cause remediation, scale unit replication and canarying, common code base, testing cycles, georeplication, feature flags, compatibility and  compliance testing. He will share his thoughts on the lessons learned in moving from a traditional software delivery team to a modern DevOps team.

Embracing DevOps in traditional Enterprise IT
Georg von Sperling, Senior Solution Architect, Global Solutions Group, Automic
Many organisations find themselves challenged when trying to rapidly introduce new innovations on top of a traditional enterprise IT foundation. DevOps is being heralded as a game changing approach. However, DevOps comes with many disciplines that conflict with conventional best practice guidelines. This session will provide insight into what is different when applying DevOps principles in the Medium or Large Enterprise. It will highlight where to look for challenges, why they exist and provide ideas on how to overcome them.

LUNCH

Continuous Delivery in an ITIL world: The next step towards DevOps adoption.
Julian Fish, Director of Products, Serena Software
Many organizations have spent the last decade investing heavily in ITIL training, practices and implementation. These same organizations are now being driven aggressively towards Continuous Delivery and are finding DevOps approaches pressing for organizational transformation. How do companies align risk averse Operations teams with aggressive Agile and Development approaches?
In this session Julian Fish, Director of Products at Serena Software will explain how a number of market leading organizations have successfully embraced both Continuous Delivery and ITIL, supporting increased velocity of business change whilst balancing system uptime and stability. The session will cover the details of continuous delivery in practice and organizational alignment between Dev and Ops.

TECHNOLOGY IN DEVOPS: TOOLS IN DEVOPS

How to choose tools for DevOps
Matthew Skelton, Skelton Thatcher Consulting Ltd
With an ever-increasing array of tools and technologies claiming to 'enable DevOps', how do we know which tools to try or to choose? In-house, open source, or commercial? Ruby or shell? Dedicated or plugins? It transpires that highly collaborative practices such as DevOps and Continuous Delivery require new ways of assessing tools and technologies in order to avoid creating new silos. Matthew Skelton shares his recent experience of helping many different organisations to evaluate and select tools to facilitate DevOps; the recommendations may surprise you.

TEA

CASE STUDY: Build your own Heroku – an experience report
Dan North, Dan North Associates

LIGHTNING TALKS

XI: eXtreme Infrastructure - What Can DevOps Learn From XP?
Alex Wilson, Software Developer, Unruly
As a relatively young methodology, one of the major criticisms of DevOps is that it sometimes lacks the focus of other older, more battle-worn disciplines. We'll be asking ourselves, what can we take away from Extreme Programming that we can use to make our DevOps techniques even better?

DevOps should sleep at night
Hayato Shimizu, Solutions Architect Team Lead, EMEA, DataStax
DevOps engineers are one of the first point of contacts when production outages occur. How could DevOps engineers reduce these calls and sleep well at night?

DevOps isn't about culture, it's about shiny new tools
James Betteley, devopsninjas.com
A light-hearted look at some of the tools that now occupy the "DevOps space" and how they've helped raise awareness of DevOps. We've all heard that DevOps is about culture, culture, culture, but shiny new tools are important too! James will also take a look at the darker side of DevOps tools, and the negative impact they can have on creating a DevOps culture.

ROUND TABLE DISCUSSIONS & CHAIRMAN’S SUMMING UP

Joint closing plenary with: Making Changes in Enterprise Architecture & Business Excellence through Process Improvement
Beyond Silos - Scaling Effective Management.                                                                                                
Dave Snowden, Founder & Chief Scientific Officer, Cognitive Edge Pte Ltd

Close of day and drinks reception sponsored by Delphix