Gene Kim

Hi, my name is Gene Kim, and I'm your MC here at DevOps Enterprise. I'm so happy you're here, because we've created an amazing program for you that you'll get to experience over the next three days.

I know it will be an amazing experience, as good as any that we've created at our other conferences, especially compared to being stuck on endless video conference calls that we've all been stuck on for months.

So this morning, I'm going to go through what our goals are, both at the highest levels and what's different about this conference, especially because it's in an online format made necessary by the COVID-19 global pandemic.

Each year, I start by posing the question: why are we here? As in previous years, I think it's the same. We believe that DevOps is important, that DevOps creates genuine value because it helps our organizations survive and win in the marketplace, because it enables us to best serve our customers and all our stakeholders, and because we believe that DevOps makes our work humane. As John Smart says, we create better value sooner, safer, and happier.

Over the last seven years, we've done 10 events, and I'm so proud that we've created what I believe is the best conference for technology leaders to help them succeed and their organizations win. Since 2016, we've been running a conference both in the US and in the UK, and so the mission goes on, global pandemic or not. In fact, I will make the claim that the mission is even more important in times like this. We are in the middle of the largest economic crisis of our lifetime, caused by the largest health crisis of our lifetime.

You may be thinking: what is this mission that I'm talking about? To motivate that, let's go back to the very beginning. DevOps Enterprise started in 2014 as a conference for horses by horses, with no unicorns allowed. We define horses as large, complex organizations that have been around for decades or maybe even centuries, whereas unicorns were the tech giants: Facebook, Apple, Netflix, Google, and Microsoft. Over the years, over 200 enterprises have presented across almost all industry verticals.

Over the years, if you look at the talks, you may make a couple of observations. The people presenting are more senior. It's because some of them who have presented have been getting promoted, so we get to follow them along in their journey, but we're also attracting more and more senior executives because our work matters to them. You'll find that presenters are often co-presenting with their colleagues from audit, security, or compliance. These are typically stakeholders outside of the classic DevOps value stream. Often they're co-presenting with their business counterpart. These business leaders are not just tolerant or just standing alongside the technology leaders. They are talking about how the achievement of all their goals, dreams, and aspirations have come true because of the work that you are doing.

Over the years, we've heard from CIOs, CTOs, CFOs, chief people officers, leaders from lines of business, and even CEOs.

Someone once asked me what my specific goals around the programming are. I shared my answer with the programming committee, but I'm going to share it with you for the first time now. My goal is to have a CEO from a Fortune 50 company present to you on the DevOps Enterprise stage by 2025.

You may be asking why. What does that have to do with me? I would claim that this is very important because for seven years, the top obstacle, as verbalized by you and the community, has been: how do I get my business leadership on board? I want you to be able to share that video of that CEO presenting with your business leadership because that story will be told by the people they listen to, describing how the work that you are doing matters. We'd be showing that our work is important for the people that matter, that the capabilities you are building in your organizations are those that will help your organization survive and win in the marketplace.

Here's the crazy part: I think we're very, very close to achieving that. Last year, Jenny Wood, the chief operating officer for services at RBS, presented. We had Chris O'Malley and Joe Aho, the CEO and CFO of Compuware respectively, present on a panel. I am so delighted that this year we actually have our most senior people speaking ever. Tomorrow, Patrick Eldridge, the chief operating officer of Nationwide Building Society, the largest organization of its type in the world, will be presenting with Janet Chapman, one of the three mission leaders. I'm also very excited that later in the year in the Vegas conference, we will have a chief operating officer of a Fortune 100 company presenting, as well as a president of a company that is publicly traded. We have verbal commitments; we're just not quite ready to announce it, but we are getting so close.

I've talked so far about the mission that we're on together. What I'd like to do now is share with you the structure of this conference and how it differs from previous years, the most obvious being that we're now in an online conference.

The first thing I'll mention is that this conference has always been one primarily made up of experience reports, and that's for a variety of reasons. The first is that as adult learners, as leaders, we don't learn from people telling us what they think we should do, or hearing from people telling us what they might do someday, or even from classroom lectures. Instead, we really learn from people describing how they solved their problems. That's why from the very beginning, the experiences you hear at DevOps Enterprise have always followed this specific form: here's my organization and the industry we compete in; here's my role and where I fit in; here's the business problem I set out to solve; here's where we started and why; here's what we did, including tools and techniques; here's the outcomes that resulted and the challenges that still remain.

What I find so interesting is that this is actually a very similar form to the scientific method, where you state a hypothesis, you perform an experiment, and then you make observations to confirm or disprove the hypothesis, and then you repeat.

In our first conference in 2014, one year after The Phoenix Project came out, all the talks were experience reports. Here are my three observations. One is that there was a universality to the problems that leaders face in large, complex organizations. There was also a feeling that something genuinely exciting and momentous was happening. I also learned that this is a community that loves helping each other. I learned it really from these two people.

This is Heather Mickman. She was senior director of development at Target at the time. Next to her is Ross Clanton, and he was senior director of operations. They really created the grassroots movement of DevOps inside of Target. In the US, they're the second-largest retailer.

After the conference, I got an invitation from them to give a talk at Target to their senior leadership team. Given how grateful I was about them sharing their amazing story, of course I said yes and hopped on a plane. But I was so surprised at what I found when I arrived, because here's what I saw. It wasn't just me. They had invited a bunch of speakers from DevOps Enterprise to recreate the DevOps Enterprise experience for their leaders. Dr. Nicole Forsgren was there. Jason Cox from Disney was there. Scot Proulx from CSG, who you'll be hearing tomorrow, was there. Courtney Kissler, now at Nike, was at Nordstrom.

It was amazing to see what happened in that day. One of their VPs said, "Trust me, never in our history have we had an executive from one of our competitors come in and share what worked and what didn't work." It was such a revelation, because I learned how much this community loves helping each other.

It wasn't just this one day. I learned later that the teams from Disney and Target continued to work together on open source projects to secure their point-of-sale systems. It's far bigger than that. Many of them have joined the program committee to help shape this conference. I apologize for missing Dr. Topo Pal from Capital One, who has been on the committee for two years, and Scot Proulx, who asked to join earlier this year. I said with enthusiasm, "Yes, of course," because everything he touches gets better.

But it's more than just that. Since 2015, we have gathered a group of these leaders to identify the top obstacles and problems they face in their work. We gather them in Portland, Oregon, for three days, and they write guidance papers. Since 2015, they've written 75 papers, actually more than that, downloaded by the broader community over 70,000 times. Here is a group that loves working together and doing work that impacts the broader community.

I've always been in awe of this work and the work they do. For years I've wondered, what do you call this amazing dynamic? One day, I stumbled upon the word scenius, coined by Brian Eno. Brian Eno is a famous musician, record producer, visual artist, and he's known for helping bands define and reinvent their sounds, including bands like U2, Devo, Talking Heads, and more.

Brian Eno defines scenius like this: "Despite heroic mythology, lone geniuses do not drive most scientific, cultural, business, or policy advances. Instead, breakthroughs typically emerge from a scene, an exceptionally productive community of practice that develops novel epistemic norms. Major innovation may indeed take a genius, but genius is created, in part, by scenius."

He goes on: "Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is a communal form of the concept of genius. Individuals immersed in a scenius will blossom and produce their best work. And when buoyed by a scenius, you act like a genius; your like-minded peers and the entire environment inspire you."

I love that. Individuals immersed in a scenius will blossom and produce their best work. When buoyed by a scenius, you act like a genius. Your like-minded peers and the entire environment inspire you.

When I look around at the DevOps Enterprise Summit, this is exactly what I see. Mutual appreciation. Risky moves are plotted by the group. Subtlety is appreciated. Friendly competition goads the shy. Scenes can be thought of as the best of peer pressure. Rapid exchange of tools and techniques. As soon as something's invented, it is flaunted and then shared. Ideas flow quickly because they are flowing inside of a common language and sensibility. And there's a network effect of success. When a record is broken, a hit happens, or a breakthrough erupts, the success is claimed by the entire scene. This empowers the scene to further success.

When I think about the DevOps Enterprise community, this is exactly what I see. This is how the invention of the dojo at Target by Ross Clanton quickly spread throughout the community. The State of DevOps Report by Dr. Nicole Forsgren and Jez Humble, since 2014, disseminated so quickly through this community. Project to Product, originally thought through and formed by Ross Clanton and Dr. Mik Kersten. We see rapid dissemination of practice from Disney to Adidas to BMW. It's so exhilarating to see how practices are picked up.

For you science nerds, this may actually sound familiar. For those of you familiar with the work of Dr. Thomas Kuhn, I think you'll see that this is exactly what he talks about in his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Dr. Thomas Kuhn introduced the terms paradigm shift and inflection point. When he studied scientific revolutions as we went from Copernican to Newtonian to Einstein, it always looks like the work of one person. But if you zoom in, it turns out there's always a cohort of scientists trying to explain anomalies, sometimes in cooperation, sometimes in competition. One person usually gets the credit, but it almost always happens within a scene.

I think this is the big challenge for us in our scenius: the technology function is so often misunderstood by senior business leaders and is often over-delegated or even abdicated to those technology people. Instead, what we all know is that amazing business outcomes are created when technology is fully integrated into all aspects of strategy and operations. This is why I'm so excited by the seniority and the people showing up on the DevOps Enterprise stage.

How do we get there? I've talked about experience reports. I'd like to talk about the second type of talk that we have here at DevOps Enterprise, and that's expert talks.

This is one of my favorite examples of this. In 2017, we assembled an amazing panel from the best experts from safety culture and the lean movement. On the left is Dr. Sidney Dekker, on the right is Dr. Richard Cook, and in the middle is Dr. Steven Spear, who you will hear from later today. On the edges are John Willis and me. It was amazing to hear them explore the intersection and reveal how these movements support each other.

Another one of my favorites was last year in Las Vegas, where we had representatives from each one of the Big Four auditors busting myths that DevOps can't be done in large, complex organizations. I love that they said, "We actually need you to adopt DevOps because we want our clients to still be around in 10 years." As Corey Quinn said, "Only at DevOps Enterprise do people cheer when the auditors arrive."

Over the years, we've invited so many experts to share and teach us what we need to know. Dr. Nicole Forsgren teaches about the State of DevOps. Dr. Christina Maslach talks about burnout. Dr. André Martin about learning organizations. Dr. Mik Kersten about Project to Product. Dr. David Almeida about one of the largest workplace engagement programs I've ever seen.

But this conference is so much more than just people with PhDs. This is John Rzeszotarski from KeyBank presenting in 2017. How did he get here? He attended the conference in 2016 and went back with a sense of mission and urgency and took advantage of a crisis, which was all their online banking systems for consumers going down, and used that to spark a revolution of his own, and was back the next year to present their story.

I love that you see this pattern over and over. It delights me so much that this year the same thing has happened. Paul McMahon from Coats attended DevOps Enterprise last year. He's presenting on day three. Patrick Eldridge from Nationwide Building Society, already mentioned, is presenting tomorrow, and he's doing that because he attended the conference last year.

It's not just about people becoming speakers. Really, the most important interactions are the ones that happen away from the stage. The talks are there to give us something to emulate, to surface problems that we need to solve together, to help create the peer groups that everyone needs in order to solve the problems that matter to you.

That's why I ask every speaker to end with a talk that says, "Here's the help I'm looking for," or, "Here's the obstacles that still remain," because this opens the opportunity for you to help others or others to help you. When I see pictures like this, I see a vibrant community that is mutually exothermic, helping each other achieve their own goals.

By the way, here's a bunch of pictures I put together while writing a blog post called "Love Letter to Conferences." It was so fun to collect the 700 pictures of my favorite photos of conferences over the last 10 years. I pulled out a couple to show you how meaningful conferences have been for me. You'll see John Allspaw in the upper left, who I met in 2011, who's presenting later today. I met Dominica DeGrandis there the same year. I met Patrick Debois the year prior at DevOpsDays, and I'll go into more about him later. I finally met Dr. Nicole Forsgren at a conference. In fact, I met almost all my co-authors at conferences.

Here's another thing that conferences enabled for me. This is Michael Nygard. I met him at the Velocity conference in 2011. Here he is two years later, where he's actually showing me this crazy programming language called Clojure that just befuddled me. It didn't even look like code. Yet four years later, in 2016, I fell in love with Clojure, and it became my favorite programming language that reintroduced the joy of coding back into my life. I now self-identify not as an ops person, which I've done for 20 years, but as a developer. I wrote this blog post called "Love Letter to Clojure."

Then three years later, I meet Rich Hickey, the inventor of Clojure, at the Clojure/conj conference. Here I am listening to him as he's teaching me about architectural coupling and why it's so damaging. That moment will be one of the moments I cherish most in my professional career.

I know these types of experiences are those that you're having, too. Let's face it, it's not just about learning and helping each other. I know that this is a group that loves hanging out with each other, too, where lifelong relationships are formed. What is amazing to me is that I am having fun, too. This conference is one of my favorite things to do in any given year. One of the greatest things about it is that my wife and my boss, Marguerite Kim, is the one who makes this event possible. This is what, for me, makes for a great conference: high learning, high networking, and high fun.

There will be no pictures like this this year because, as you know, this is a virtual conference. We had a unique opportunity in April to do some experiments. I mentioned the DevOps Enterprise Forum, which is where we write the guidance paper every year. We announced that it would be virtual, and some of us were so skeptical that this could work virtually, that we could actually generate the written guidance when none of us could meet together, that we could actually have the serendipitous, rewarding interactions that make these physical conferences so great.

Yet it blew me away that when I made a graph of my energy level over the three days, it was so similar to how I felt in previous years when it was physical: the same highs of learning, the same joys of hanging out with friends who I admire, and even the remorse that I felt on the beginning of day two from staying out too late with friends on day one.

For the last three months, we have been studying deeply online events. I love this quote from Bob Bejan: "Live events are theatrical. Online events are cinematic." That was such an aha moment for me, and this resulted in a whole cascade of decisions. One of the biggest implications is that we decided that all talks would be prerecorded. One of my experiences is that it's very frustrating when you're trying to watch a talk and you spend the first five or 10 minutes watching the speaker trying to get their audio working. We wanted to neutralize that risk by making sure that all talks are prerecorded beforehand.

But the decisions go far further than that. The reason why I wrote this 7,000-word blog post, "Love Letter to Conferences," was that I wanted to understand what elements are universal in a conference, whether it's virtual or physical, and which ones could be changed to take advantage of the online format. I love this quote: "In order to think clearly requires you to often write clearly." That has been so true of many things in my career.

Here's the plenary session. This is where the dungeon master controls the game. That means most of this remains the same, because we use the plenary session to put on stage experience reports that are success stories, that we celebrate, that inspire us, that elevate and raise the bar, that drive us forward. This is where we set the language and norms and model them on stage. This is where we bring in experts to teach what we all need to know to get from here to there.

One of the things that we wanted to address was the missing engagement between the speaker and the audience. What was so exciting is that we are making all speakers available. They will be on Slack while their talk is playing. Many of them are actually making additional time to interact with you later in the conference. I think that is something that is awesome, and I can't wait to see how that goes.

That's the general session. Let's talk about the breakout sessions. In the plenary, the dungeon master controls the game. In the breakout sessions, you control the game. You choose the talks you want to see. You seek out the people you want to interact with. As a bonus, we all know the feeling of seeing a bunch of great talks that we have to choose between that are happening simultaneously. That will never happen now, because we're making all breakout talks available, and they're already published. This allows you the most freedom to explore and find out who are the right people that you want to go meet and interact with.

The last portion of a great conference is the networking time. We've more than doubled the amount of networking time compared to previous years. We thought very carefully about how to maximize the chances of useful and even serendipitous interactions. Jeff will describe that in more detail later. Here's my advice: use this time well. It has been my experience that the best conference experiences tend to involve planning and being intentional. Networking is more than just being friendly. It's about finding the right people to help you achieve your goals. Sometimes it's seeking those who have expertise that you need, or those with connections, or maybe recruiting helpers or finding fellow travelers. I'll just remind you: the best way to get help is to offer help first. Give before you get.

I'm going to turn it over to Jeff shortly, but I do want to say this first. As I'm recording this, I've seen every one of the keynote talks at least twice, some of them many, many more times. Based on what I've seen, I know that this is the best programming we've ever done. I'm so excited to share what we've put together for you for over the next three days.

Before we go into the amazing talks, Jeff is going to present the user's manual for this conference. One of my experiences attending a bunch of online events is that it is so easy to get lost. Where did everybody go? What button am I supposed to push? Or even having profound fear of what happens when you push the button. Jeff's job is to keep the trains running on time and to make sure that everyone gets to where they need to go. Speaking from personal experience, I know that there is no one better at this than Jeff. Jeff, over to you.

Jeff Gallimore

Hey everybody, and welcome to the DevOps Enterprise Summit 2020 in London, and because we're virtual, around the world.

Gene and the programming committee have put together an amazing lineup of speakers who will blow your mind with the things they've done and the things that they know. You're definitely going to get a lot of incredible insights from their talks. But those talks are primarily one-way sharing from the speaker to you in the audience.

We all know that 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. Now let me run through some of those opportunities.

In past years, we've gotten together in person, and this year, obviously, we're not doing that. We're virtual. But we still have a lot of the same things that made the DevOps Enterprise Summit great. 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. So the learning and the community are still great.

But because we're virtual, some things are going to be a little bit different. We have new ways of interacting with speakers and attendees and sponsors, and what's obvious is we're watching this through our browsers. The ways to learn and interact are going to be a little bit different than when we've gotten together in person.

As I mentioned, we'll be watching the talks primarily through our browser and interacting with others primarily through Slack. 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 in the top-level menu for the event website. See the talks that are happening right now on the schedule. Or you can navigate to Schedule in the top-level menu, find the talks that 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, and 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. The Slack workspace is going to continue on. You can get onboard at this link on the slide, or you can go to the Networking menu in the top-level menu for the event website.

There are some Slack channels that are relevant and you should be paying attention to, and I'll explain each of these as we go through the orientation to the event.

First, engaging with speakers. This is the opportunity that you have to ask the amazing speakers some questions. Because we're virtual, we get to do something a little bit different. In a physical event, when we're getting together, the speakers on stage are, well, speaking. In this case, the speakers will be available in Slack during their scheduled presentation time. You can post your question in the corresponding Ask the Speaker channel in Slack, @mention the speaker, both during and after their presentation. If you have thoughts on a question someone else asked, please contribute.

As I mentioned, we have different Slack channels corresponding to the different programming tracks on the schedule. We have one channel for the keynotes, and we have one channel for each of the four tracks in the schedule. Make sure you're asking your question in the right channel.

We have lots of great 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.

Let's go through each one of these. The first one is Birds of a Feather. These are sessions for you to find other attendees and interact with other attendees who share similar interests. The way that you join a Birds of a Feather conversation is to first join the Birds of a Feather Slack channels for topics that interest you. Each of those channels starts with BOF. Join the active call in the channel at the networking time to join the live video discussion. Post in Slack during and after the discussion, and then after the Birds of a Feather session ends, continue the conversation.

We have 10 different Birds of a Feather channels, so there should be something that interests you.

The second networking opportunity is Lean Coffee. Yes, we're bringing this back from the physical summits that we've had in the past, and Dominica DeGrandis, our Lean Coffee leader, is leading Lean Coffee again. She's found a way to do this virtually, so we'll be using Zoom breakout rooms and MURAL, which is a collaborative virtual whiteboard, to do this. Just join the Zoom call and we'll take care of the rest.

The last networking opportunity that we have is Chat Roulette. This is an experiment we're running for this virtual event, and this is for you to have one-on-one conversations with other attendees with similar interests. Join the Snack Club channel in Slack, answer a few questions to build your profile, and then type /snack to be randomly paired with another attendee when you're ready to chat.

For those of you that have been to other conferences and events, you might be familiar with the law 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.

We've got a lot of networking opportunities and a lot of opportunities to learn. Which one do you choose? What is your learning goal? Is it specific or is it general? What's your energy level at the time of the networking? Is it high or is it low? How much do you want to contribute, and how much do you want to consume? Each of the networking opportunities is going to provide a different way to engage, so choose the one that's right for you.

We have the session slides and videos available. The videos of the keynote talks are available after they air. The videos of the breakout talks are actually available right now. The slides are also available for download, both in Dropbox and in GitHub.

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 gist. Listen well when someone else is sharing. Share well 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 that we want for this community.

If you have any issues, email help@itrevolution.com or direct message me, jeff.gallimore, in Slack.

Now I'd like to enlist all of your support in creating the kind of harassment-free environment that 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.

Now, the DevOps Enterprise Summit is brought to you by IT Revolution. These are the same people that bring us our favorite books, like The Phoenix Project, The Unicorn Project, The DevOps Handbook, and Accelerate. This event is in partnership with Snyk. We've really tapped into their expertise about virtual events, and we really appreciate the support in helping us with this.

We'd also like to say a big thank you to our virtual BFF sponsors: Atlassian, Digital.ai, PagerDuty, GitHub, Tasktop, Slack, GitLab, LaunchDarkly, Sonatype, and Datadog; our community sponsors; and also our media sponsors, who are helping to get the word out about this great community.

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, is why we have so many awesome sponsors who want to help you in your journey. So go talk to them in the expo hall. We have a virtual expo hall. You can navigate to the expo in the top-level menu, visit each sponsor who has a booth. They're ready to help you. And remember, sponsors add sparkle to your DevOps journey.

Finally, we have some fun games. Navigate to Games in the top-level menu of the website to learn about those games. In addition to being fun, you can also win stuff.

If you need any help or you have any questions, you can post in the summit-help channel in Slack. You can email help@itrevolution.com, or if all else fails, you can direct message me, Jeff Gallimore, in Slack.

Whew, that's it. We want you to have an amazing time at the summit. Gene, let me hand it back to you to announce this year's first speaker.

Gene Kim

Thanks, Jeff.

There's another great thing about conferences that I want to share with you. I've found in my career there are many situations where I don't actually want to learn how to solve a problem. I want to pay someone else who will solve it for me because it's their core competency, not mine.

There's one particular situation where I had a favorite tool and it got acquired by another great vendor, and they announced that they were going to sunset it. It just happened I went to their user conference, and I wanted to know what my options were. I remember asking who could help me, being passed to four different people, but it was great because they introduced me to one person who said, "Don't worry, I'll take care of you. We'll figure something out." It was great.

One of the great things about DevOps Enterprise that has always impressed me is that our sponsors bring great people. They bring their best experts, their senior executives, all of whom want to help you. So we thought deeply about how do we allow meaningful interactions between you and our sponsors, and we don't want them to send endless emails to you after the event. We want them to connect with you here. Your teams are here. Their teams are here. You're both here.

In the spirit of invention, creativity, experimentation, here's what we did. We created interest lists that every sponsor and attendee fills out to enable them to match with people with similar interests, skills, capabilities, and needs.

So here's what we did. We created interest lists so that every sponsor and attendee fills out those...

Three, two, one.

So here's what we did. We created interest lists that every sponsor and attendee fills out to allow us to match people with needs and interests with people with capabilities and skills.

Jeff mentioned the attendee code of conduct. We also have a sponsor code of conduct, and it really, really boils down to four things: be specific. In other words, don't be general and spam everybody. Be helpful, be respectful, and be a good community member.

As everyone knows, whenever you're doing experiments, it's super important to observe the results. I view the sponsor code of conduct as being just as important as the attendee code of conduct. If you have any sponsor interactions that you'd categorize as unwelcome, just contact Jeff Gallimore on Slack. Conversely, if you have amazing interactions with a sponsor, post that in Summit Stories or in the sponsors channel because we want to celebrate sponsors who are helping make this community better.

There's one more thing I want to talk about, and it's this guy. Because without Patrick Debois, we would literally not be here at this conference today.

It's March 2020, and we're not only attending all the online events that we can, but we're trying to learn about what it's like to run them. I'm so grateful to all of these people for being willing to talk with me and share with me what they're learning. You'll recognize many of these names from this community. Among the many things that I was trying to understand was: what was the right platform to run this conference on to make this event happen? Back then, I knew nothing useful about online conferences.

But then in April, something amazing happened. I attended the All The Talks online event, and it was created and run by Patrick Debois, the godfather of DevOps, and his teammate Sam Hepburn, and it blew my mind.

Afterwards, I told Patrick how much I loved it. For those of you who don't know, Patrick coined the term DevOps in 2009. He created DevOpsDays, the amazing event series that has created hundreds of events around the world, and he was a co-author on The DevOps Handbook. We've been friends for nearly a decade.

What you might not know is that he spent five years as a CTO at a startup, which created online events to support online TV events and online streaming, where he built up a ton of experience with production broadcast. He had hand-built that incredible platform that powered All The Talks online, and it was by far my favorite online conference experience.

I'm so grateful that Patrick spent two hours with me, sharing with me how he built it, how he ran it, and my impression was: holy cow, once again, he's on the frontier, and he's, again, showing that he's really one of the best in the game, and there was no way we could do it ourselves. In fact, when Michael Winslow from Comcast introduced me to the production operations team that supports the NBC Studios, they basically said, "Nothing like that exists. That's actually what we would build for you if we had time. You should go with it."

That's when I called up Guy Podjarny, founder and president of Snyk, with a pretty big ask. I asked whether they would be willing to mobilize the same small army it took to run All The Talks online so that we could run DevOps Enterprise on the platform that Patrick built. I'm so grateful that he said yes. Almost everything you see on the screen was created for you by Patrick: this viewer, the speaker information to your left, all the schedules that you see down below. Right now, Sam Hepburn and Patrick Debois are in the production room queuing up these videos, making sure that everything is working as they designed. Thank you so much, Sam and Patrick, for all your great work.

I can tell you this: when the stakes are high, like running an online conference, there's nothing quite like having Patrick Debois tell you, "Don't worry, Gene, we've got this."

I've had so much fun working with him and Sam, and as you know, great friends lead to great adventures, or maybe it's even vice versa. Also, thank you, Guy, for making this happen. As a small gesture of our appreciation, I'd love for you to say some words to all of you.

Guy Podjarny

Hello, everyone. I'm Guy Podjarny, president and co-founder of Snyk. I'm very excited this year to be partnering with the DevOps Enterprise Summit.

To me, the DevOps Enterprise Summit played a key role in evolving DevOps into the world of the enterprise, in allowing all of you really to share your learnings and help all of us together combine the goodness of DevOps, this notion of continuous delivery, of a fast time to market, the cultural shift that that represents or requires, and combine that with the needs that we have in the enterprise, sometimes constraints, sometimes just priorities, and successfully result in enterprises being able to tap into the goodness of DevOps. I think doing so very successfully because you can see DevOps being embraced by enterprises worldwide.

To me, security is very much the next iteration or the next step in that journey. We focused a lot on secure platforms in DevOps, but we still have a long ways to go around having great practices on how to build secure applications as they get developed and shipped so continuously.

Snyk is all about that. If you don't know us, we have an open source security offering today that focuses on finding and fixing vulnerabilities in open source dependencies. We have a container security offering that thinks about containers more as the evolution of the app than the evolution of the VM.

But above all of those, we are a dev-first security company. We focus on helping developers who we're asking to make decisions autonomously and quickly, help them make those decisions secure. Alongside that, we help governance teams, security teams, platform teams help them govern successfully while empowering those developers to make decisions, but still keeping the enterprise secure.

I'm sure you're going to enjoy many of the talks in this conference. We have some amazing talks ahead. I'm going to tune into as many of those as I can. What I would ask is: as you think about when you learn all these different new techniques and approaches to run a faster delivery process and a better one, keep in mind security. Think about how do you not just embrace these new approaches and ship faster, but also how do you ship more securely.

That's it for me. Enjoy the conference.

Gene Kim

Thank you, Guy. All right. I've talked a lot about the great programming we have for you. It's time to share with you what we've put together. As they say in showbiz, enjoy the show. Here we go.