The 2019 National DevOps Conference, hosted at the world-renowned British Museum, was another great success this year, playing host to 350 attendees, 50 speakers, and, with many vendors and sponsors coming from around the world – was a plethora of limitless DevOps information!

Rounding off with a great presentation from Dave Hahn, Netflix‘ manager for cloud operations and reliability engineering – the conference featured 44 practical presentations, 8 keynote speakers and 6 workshops.

The National DevOps Conference brought together professionals and individuals from the world of DevOps to interact, network and discuss what it means to be a part of the new wave of the overlapping Development and Operations communities.

Keynote speakers included experts from companies such as the BBC, Netflix, IBM, Zurich Insurance, the Institute of Physics, Hotels.com, Verizon and Container Solutions, among others – and the end of each day saw a lively Q&A session where delegates had the opportunity to put to the panel any burning questions they might have had.

The two-day event was an excellent opportunity for delegates, speakers and exhibitors alike to network, meet new clients, learn new information and discover more about the needs and future of this ever-growing community.

Attendees of the 2019 National DevOps Conference said:

“We got to connect with most of our customers that we already work with, but they were amazed to see what we are presenting… which was a good thing!” Akshay, manager, cloud and infrastructure services, Wipro.

“I’m enjoying it a lot, met a lot of great folks, made a lot of good business insights. People are doing a lot of really interesting things here, so it’s really good to see that… We’ve taken away a couple of insights that we definitely didn’t have coming here, like data centres and data redundancy, multi-zone availability and things.” Taylor Otwell, Linode.

“We came last year, we really enjoyed it and we found the talks really interesting. There are some really interesting people to speak to and a lot of people who want to understand about the future of DevOps and what we can do. I think it’s really great that you have a lot of really interesting companies here as well, not just speakers, but vendors as well who can explain where the future’s going and how it can help.

“There’s been some really great Q&A panels I found interesting, obviously that’s where you can ask the best questions and ask what’s been happening throughout the day and I think all the best stuff comes at the end of the day… The BBC talk that I went to yesterday, that was really, really interesting.” James Dobson, Container Solutions.

“My talk was about dashboards and culture and how if you want to get the Dev and the Ops teams talking together, and one way in which they can think the same way, and how one way in which you can do that is through dashboards… The talk was about one way of bringing them together and then some of the consequences of how it changes people’s behaviour, so the Dev guys are more understanding of the Ops teams and vice-versa – so the friction goes and things just run a lot nicer… What I’m looking for is some insight into what other people are doing and thinking about our tools and our open source things and bring them here, showcase them and just get people interested.” Steve Poole, IBM.

“There’s always something you don’t know, there’s always something you miss, there’s always something you can learn from, and I think as long as you can keep on learning, that’s always part of staying relevant to what’s happening in the wider world… I was talking about DevOps and Agile have some cultural similarities” Rick Alan from Zurich Insurance on what brought him to the conference.

Mark Bentley – speaker on The Human Journey to Create High Performing and Agile DevOps Teams, and Agile Coach for Airbus, said: “I’m really passionate about sharing with other people, and all these different companies, we’re all trying to solve different problems and the more we share with each other, the more chance we have at succeeding. My talk is about how you take people on that journey and how you really create a learning culture to really help people. There’s a lot to learn in DevOps and in Agile and it’s just about creating the time and space in an organisation to help people to learn.

When asked what brought them to the event, Matt King from Marsh & McLennan, said: “We are still trying to find our feet in this space, in the infrastructure space and we’re trying to drive elements from the infrastructure side. But we are also aware of lots of advocates around business, who are perhaps more from the developers’ side, and we are just trying to hook up the two in our organisation and this is a good opportunity to learn what our peers are doing and learn how people are achieving it and understand where we’ve got similar problems.”

Whilst Alan Carse from the same company, said: “It’s understanding what our peers are looking at from a DevOps perspective and what challenges they’ve had along the journey. Seeing what tooling we need to look at from an automation perspective… Just understanding what’s going on in the industry.”

Robert Adams from OutSystems, when asked about his best points at the conference, said: “Having chats with people, hearing about their pinpoints, their use cases, it validates us and it’s interesting to hear situations and having that tick box to be able to say, wow, we’d be a great fit… Also, just hearing what other people are doing. I think we will be coming back next year… I saw the talk about microservices, I got drawn into it and it was great to hear.”

Thanks to all those who attended, delivered talks or exhibited – we can’t wait to see you all next year!

Grace Barnott Palin