Devops Days Podcast

When building reliable services unexpected user behavior can prove deadly. Yet few engineering teams make use of talent from their product and design orgs if they are working on something internal. This talk will demonstrate how a product mindset and design thinking can super charge technical discussions and build stronger systems. Don't rely on the user to be "smart!" It can trap you in an impossible architecture.

All your tech is old. Even your new stuff is already old: somebody's already building something that's better. And they're probably going to give it away for free! So, what can you do about that? I have thoughts. We all spend a lot of energy trying to discover tech debt, and eliminate it. Fat chance! In this talk, I will convince you that all tech is debt, and that it's futile to try to live debt-free. Why? Because none of your tech is an asset; it's *all* liability. From the minute it's created, it's already old. It has security vulnerabilities. It's not idiomatic to whatever the latest trends are. It's eating you from the inside! So what can you do about it? Throw away as much as you can. Let someone else build the rest. And most importantly, focus on your real assets: your people, your culture, your brand. Your customers! Technologists are an asset. But tech? That's debt.

I'm a software engineer who spends her time writing code and developing apps. I have a pretty good grasp of the vocabulary and technologies relevant to my job. But what happens when another facet of engineering, one that is gaining a lot of traction and has a large footprint of its own starts becoming more and more relevant to my day to day tasks? Well, that's exactly what happened to me last year when DevOps became a big part of my role. This is my attempt to impart all of that knowledge onto you.

Taking advantage of AWS Parameter Store and some automation magic to make secret change management a problem of the past. We will talk about: The importance of secrets management Use Cases Parameter Store vs. Secret Manager Secret Vault and Application Integration points OSS Tools for Automation

Resilience Engineering (RE) is both multidisciplinary field of study as well as a community of practitioner-researchers from multiple high-tempo, high-consequence domains such as aviation, medicine, power distribution, space operations, and critical infrastructure. In recent years, the world of software engineering and operations has become involved and more acquainted with this almost 20 year-old field and community. This talk will give a “lay of the land” on what RE is, what it is not, what efforts are relevant to the DevOps community, what attendees can do to learn more.

As developers, we take great pains to make our applications accessible to users on a range of devices and browsers. There are more adults with disabilities in the US than there are users of Internet Explorer. So why do we spend more time worrying about polyfills for out-dated browsers than we do on ensuring the accessibility of our applications for users of all ability levels? This talk will emphasize the importance of incorporating accessibility best practices throughout our design and development workflow. Simulated experiences of engaging with inaccessible software will provide insight into the realities that millions of users face day to day. Drawing on recommendations from the Department of Justice, we will discuss action steps for evaluating and improving the accessibility of software. Meg is a science and technology educator turned software engineer working in Washington, DC. She approaches new technologies with curiosity and confidence, building on her interdisciplinary education and experiences. Th

Today--Incorporating AI into applications is as easy as a single API call. Once imbued with AI, these transformed applications can improve over time as they learn from user interactions. How do we manage these new learning systems to ensure that they take advantage of all available information while maintaining accuracy and minimizing bias? This talk will discuss common problems encountered when designing and implementing AI systems and how DevOps practices can be used to address these issues. DevOps practitioners will learn the relevance of their skillset and practices to the rapidly evolving AI domain. The problem of properly managing AI applications and their underlying models is not trivial. Michael Flores is an Architect on the Strategy and Technology Team in IBM’s Federal Chief Technology Office. He has helped numerous agencies use Cloud, Artificial Intelligence(AI), Robotics, and DevOps through the adoption of open standards such as Cloud Foundry, Docker, and OpenWhisk. Michael represents IBM in T

Working technology for a political campaign involves the shortest timelines, tightest deadlines, and highest stakes you will likely ever encounter in a technology career. Come hear a tale of two political campaigns - a state measure campaign and a presidential campaign - and the application of both DevOps technologies and culture to move fast, pivot quickly, and hopefully win. One of the key challenges of politics - as well as DevOps in general - is harnessing automation without losing the critical human touch which moves hearts and changes minds. Learn how to find the line where too much automation (yes, there is such a thing) is counterproductive and you need to pull back to maintain a personal connection with voters, customers, employees, and more. You will also walk away knowing how to take the lessons and experience learned to future campaigns and projects - especially when your candidate, product, etc. does not end up winning. There is value - sometimes more value - in a loss as well as a win. Learn ho

GDPR is upon us, along with new requirements for protecting user data. Many of us in the DC ecosystem are no strangers to compliance! We have expertise in HIPAA, SOC, PCI, and of course the stringencies associated with government work. But GDPR's new requirements are taking effect at the same time that many users are demanding increased privacy and transparency about their data (as a backlash to the Cambridge Analytica scandal) regardless of regulation. We'll look at best practices for DevOps teams to respond to this increased need for privacy, transparency and security around user data. In addition to best practices, we'll explore the following questions: What does the current regulatory landscape look like, and how does that impact DevOps? How do we design our applications and our architecture (especially containers) to optimize for security and privacy? And are the current regulations helpful as guidelines, or will they become another set of checkboxes?   Elissa is a successful serial entrepreneur that

Learn how we established a service providing development teams with a continuous integration, build, test, source code management, and an issue tracking environment for building mobile apps for a large Federal Agency. Mobile phones are the world's greatest surveillance tool, containing all our private information that we willingly carry in our pocket everywhere we go. How do we develop and operationalize applications for mobile phones in a safe and secure way? Our system performs iterative tests on apps to provide insights on mobile app security and privacy, in compliance with several Federal Agencies standard operating procedures for deployments. Learn the history of the service, how it's currently working, and how you can build this service for your organization.

One of the more unique and complicated areas of devops is dealing with database updates, especially those for databases with pre-defined schemas like relational databases. Databases generally: Need to stay online during updates Should not be destroyed and re-created Frequently have changes that can be long running and have impacts to the running application code Have implied or explicit dependencies between the database schema and application code or across shards in a sharded database Still have the same requirements as application code for being traceably updated And should be updated in an automated fashion as part of your devops strategy This talk will cover tools and strategies the speaker has identified in over 15 years of working with automated database migrations for making sure your persistence stores are smoothly integrated into your devops workflow. We will cover: Handling database updates via database migration tools: how to get started and what in the speaker's experience is and is not importa

The cornerstone of bringing together "development" and "operations" is collaboration. Collaboration sounds great on paper, but when the scales tip, you may end up with anarchy, or a dictatorship. How do you balance all of that while still managing to get things done? Enter: improv. Learn from theatre artist Melanie Harker and artist/developer Sean Paul Ellis how to taking a more fluid and fun approach to your DevOps work will allow you to build empathy, a common language, and ultimately, an environment for innovation to cultivate.

This is a deeply personal talk where I share my experiences as a woman in tech. Even though I'd worked for NASA and co-founded my own successful company, rampant sexism in IT and bad experiences speaking in public nearly destroyed my career. That continued to have ripples in my life until I found the DevOps community and the safe spaces it creates. I will examine common constructs about diversity and propose ideas to bring productive change to continue to build upon the solid foundation of inclusion we have created.

Interviews and insights from participants of DevOpsDays DC 2017.

The standard approach for web application security over the last decade and beyond has focused heavily on slow gatekeeping controls like static analysis and dynamic scanning. However, these controls was originally designed in a world of Waterfall development and their heavy weight nature often cause more problems than they solve in today’s world of agile, DevOps, and CI/CD. This talk will share practical lessons learned at Etsy on the most effective application security techniques in todays increasingly rapid world of application creation and delivery. Specifically, it will cover how to: 
 1) Adapt traditionally heavyweight controls like static analysis and dynamic scanning to lightweight efforts that work in modern development and deployment practices 2) Obtain visibility to enable, rather than hinder, development and DevOps teams ability to iterate quickly 3) Measure maturity of your organizations security efforts in an attack-driven defense model

For the past two years my team and I worked with a large federal agency to deploy & migrate to a new container-as-a-service platform based on Docker. The migration has enabled development teams to isolate components of their code for faster, more reliable development. But, we also saw that the additional tooling - such as monitoring technology - supporting these services doesn’t yet map to the model that developers need to efficiently monitor their own services. In essence, the Develop->Test->Monitor loop is still broken for modern environments. So how do you fix it? This presentation is based on my real-world experience with container platforms. Based on this work, I’ll address: How do you effectively instrument your systems, without pushing too much burden on to developers? How do you isolate data, dashboards, and alerts in a way that improves security while simplifying analysis? What can you do to give developers deep information when troubleshooting, without giving them the keys to the kingdom? How do

In Greek Mythology, the Gods cursed Sisyphus to spend eternity rolling a large boulder to the top of a mountain, where it would fall back of its own weight. In DevOps, we're forever rolling boulders uphill. We're making deploys faster, cheaper, smoother, and quicker. And once the boulder reaches the mountain top, the engineers rearchitect the application and the the process begins again. At Upside Travel, Slack is our central command hub. We run our full operations through Slack ChatOps. Engineers request code reviews, product managers examine tickets, and the Slack-integrated NOC works slack-alerted events. We also manage our full continuous integration and deployment process through a custom Slackbot named, aptly, for the DevOps Greek hero, Sisyphus. Sisyphus's simple promote command hides a complex dance of builds, tests, promotion, deployment and management. Upside combines Github, CircleCI, Artifactory, Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes and AWS to deploy code from nothing to something in 3 minutes and it tak

In 1982, the city of Detroit saw 15,000 vehicles roll of its production lines every day. To achieve this goal, Detroit's line workers were being measured on velocity, often at the expense of quality. At the same time, auto workers in Japan -- applying lessons from W. Edwards Deming -- were implementing new supply chain management practices which enabled them to manufacture higher quality vehicles, for less cost, at higher velocity. As a result, from 1962 to 1982, the Detroit auto industry lost 20% of its domestic market to Japan. The parallels between the auto industry of 35 years ago and software development practices in place today are remarkable. DevOps teams around the world are consuming billions of open source components and containerized applications to improve productivity at a massive scale. The good news: they are accelerating time to market. The bad news: many of the components and containers they are using are fraught with defects including critical security vulnerabilities. This session aims to e

• Daniel Willis - Putting the R in Sports• Mark Morris - You, Me & StatsD• Sara Cowles - If you want to have an impact, Devops is not enough• Jason Hand - The Emergence of ChatOps• Matt Stratton - DevOps in the Machine