Devops, SRE, TechOps, System Administration and the rest have a common goal toward stability, and reliability of deployment and operation of production applications. We’ll discuss how mechanization of SRE tasks, observability, consistency, and training are vital for speed and operational excellence in a scalable production environment. We’ll discuss the history of the competencies of DevOps as well as how we can work toward increasing the pipeline of new folks in the field.
Track: Practices of DevOps & Lean Thinking
Location: Ballroom BC
Day of week: Monday

Track Host: Jessica Kerr
Jessica Kerr (unique ID: @jessitron) develops development automation at Atomist. After a dozen years in Java, she branched out to Scala and Clojure and Ruby and Elm and more. Nowadays she works in TypeScript, on tools to help developers automate more of our own work -- DevOps is only the beginning! Jessica lives in St. Louis, MO with four humans and two felines. Her Pokémon Go trainer code is 5431 5140 6916.
11:50am - 12:40pm
Service Ownership @Slack
As recently as 2017, developers at Slack didn’t carry a pager. They deployed to production over a hundred times a day, and a centralized operations team took the calls in the night. Most pages were not very actionable because they weren’t set up by the dev teams that knew their systems best. Heros and knowledge islands saved day over and over. Post-incident postmortems were poorly attended and did not encourage learning.
Slowly, then quickly, all that changed. Slack moved to teams of empowered developers on-call, with embedded SREs, safer production deployments, and actionable alerts. Postmortems focus on learning, and meaningful analysis of incident patterns is done at all levels of the company.
In this talk you’ll hear all about the bumps and scrapes, triumphs and pitfalls of our journey from a centralized ops team to development teams that own the full lifecycle of their systems. It wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t impossible. Hopefully, it will inspire you to try something radically different at your company too.
1:40pm - 2:30pm
Whispers in the Chaos: Monitoring Weak Signals
2:55pm - 3:45pm
Full Cycle Developers @Netflix
4:10pm - 5:00pm
DevOps & Lean Thinking Panel
Matt Stratton, DevOps Advocate @pagerduty
Bridget Kromhout, Principal Cloud Developer Advocate @Microsoft
J. Paul Reed, Build/Release Engineering, DevOps, and Human Factors Consultant
Greg Burrell, Sr SRE @Netflix, member of the Edge Developer Productivity Team
Holly Allen, Service Engineering @SlackHQ
5:25pm - 6:15pm
Day Two Kubernetes: Tools for Operability
Proposed Tracks
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Machine Learning without a PhD
AI/ML is more approachable than ever. Discover how deep learning and ML is being used in practice. Topics include: TensorFlow, TPUs, Keras, PyTorch & more. No PhD required.
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Production Readiness: Building Resilient Systems
Making systems resilient involves people and tech. Learn about strategies being used from chaos testing to distributed systems clustering.
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Building Predictive Data Pipelines
From personalized news feeds to engaging experiences that forecast demand: learn how innovators are building predictive systems in modern application development.
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Modern Languages: The Right Language for the Job
We're polyglot developers. Learn languages that excel at very specific tasks and remove undifferentiated heavy lifting at the language level.
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Delivering on the Promise of Containers
Runtime containers, libraries and services that power microservices.
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Evolving Java & the JVM
6 month cadence, cloud-native deployments, scale, Graal, Kotlin, and beyond. Learn how the role of Java and the JVM is evolving.
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Trust, Safety & Security
Privacy, confidentiality, safety and security: learning from the frontlines.
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Beyond the Web: What’s Next for JavaScript
JavaScript is the language of the web. Latest practices for JavaScript development in and out of the browser topics: react, serverless, npm, performance, & less traditional interfaces.
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Modern Operating Systems
Applied, practical & real-world deep-dive into industry adoption of OS, containers and virtualization, including Linux on.
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Optimizing You: Human Skills for Individuals
Better teams start with a better self. Learn practical skills for IC.
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Modern CS in the Real World
Thoughts pushing software forward, including consensus, CRDT's, formal methods & probabilistic programming.
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Human Systems: Hacking the Org
Power of leadership, Engineering Metrics and strategies for shaping the org for velocity.
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Building High-Performing Teams
Building, maintaining, and growing a team balanced for skills and aptitudes. Constraint theory, systems thinking, lean, hiring/firing and performance improvement
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Software Defined Infrastructure: Kubernetes, Service Meshes & Beyond
Deploying, scaling and managing your services is undifferentiated heavy lifting. Hear stories, learn techniques and dive deep into what it means to code your infrastructure.
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Practices of DevOps & Lean Thinking
Practical approaches using DevOps and a lean approach to delivering software.
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Operationalizing Microservices: Design, Deliver, Operate
What's the last mile for deploying your service? Learn techniques from the world's most innovative shops on managing and operating Microservices at scale.
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Developer Experience: Level up your Engineering Effectiveness
Improving the end to end developer experience - design, dev, test, deploy and operate/understand.
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Architectures You've Always Wondered About
Next-gen architectures from the most admired companies in software, such as Netflix, Google, Facebook, Twitter, & more