Gene Kim

Good morning. Welcome to the sixth U.S. DevOps Enterprise Summit and our second year here in Las Vegas. I am so happy that you're here because we have an amazing three days prepared for you.

Over the next 18 minutes, I'd like to describe the construction of this conference and tell you what we hope to achieve over the next three days.

Why are we here? I think we're here because we all believe DevOps is important, that DevOps creates business value and better societal outcomes, and that DevOps makes our work more humane.

In 2016, with my co-authors, we wrote The DevOps Handbook, and this is the definition we put forward: DevOps is the architectural practices, technical practices, and cultural norms that enable us to increase our ability to deliver applications and services quickly and safely, enabling rapid experimentation and innovation, as well as the fastest delivery of value to our customers while preserving world-class reliability, security, and stability. Why is this important? So we can survive and win in the marketplace.

As much as I like that definition, it does not actually say what DevOps is. It describes the outcomes we want. I think there is a better definition, and it comes from John Smart, back when he was head of Better Ways of Working at Barclays and now at Deloitte: "Better value sooner, safer, happier." That is my preferred definition, and it is difficult to argue why that is not a good thing.

One of the things I loved about The Phoenix Project was a line from Erik: "I want to improve the lives of one million IT workers over the next five years." Looking back six years ago, I realize one million technology workers is far from adequate. According to IDC, there are about 18 million developers on the planet. What this DevOps Enterprise community has done so well is show what operations and infrastructure can do to enable developers to be productive, elevating their productivity so they are as productive as if they were at Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google, or Microsoft.

Why are we here today? We all have a common goal and belief that we can genuinely transform our organizations. We are here to learn what we need to learn to make the changes we want to make in our organizations, to meet the people and fellow travelers who can help us on this journey, and to get re-energized to keep up the good fight. I just want to make it one more year and get re-energized to do what I think is the right thing to do.

Specifically, our goal with the program committee is to make this the best DevOps Enterprise Summit ever. That goal is surprisingly difficult and intimidating when we feel like we have already pulled off the best programming. But making this the best summit ever is easier than I would have thought because the aspirations of this community are so ambitious and grand that all we have to do is find the right experts to help us achieve those goals.

I want to acknowledge the help of the programming committee, some of whom have helped from the beginning in 2014. They worked tirelessly to define the objectives, find the right speakers, leverage their networks, and find the speakers who can help achieve the outcomes I described.

The talks over the next three days are primarily experience reports. The first category is repeat experience reports: people who presented in the past, where we want to hear how their journey has gone. Did it really work this year? Is the path worth following, or is it something we do not want to do in our own journey? This represents about 10% of the programming. Based on feedback, we reduced the number of repeat experience talks; the number of people who have spoken before has gone down from 45% to 25% to make room for new experience reports.

Experience reports are valuable because they show DevOps is possible everywhere, regardless of industry vertical, organizational size, or organizational age. Over the years, we have assembled over 250 case studies from technology leaders. Jason Cox from Disney said he is always looking for a new experience to bring back to show his leadership, because it is helpful to say that even organization X or organization Y is doing DevOps. We have many new experience reports, about 20% of programming.

Another type of experience report we seek spans the business and technology divide. Increasingly, obstacles are outside the classic dev and ops value stream: product leadership, business leadership, project management, information security, legal, and compliance. Driven primarily by Courtney Kissler from Nike, we want technology leaders presenting with their business counterparts, not someone merely proximate to the business. We want business leaders who are rabid fans, genuinely grateful that technology is helping them achieve their goals, dreams, and aspirations. These have traditionally been the toughest stories to find, and we are presenting more of them this year than any year prior.

Those include executives from BMW describing the biggest change to how business is conducted at BMW in 20 years; Fernando Cornago and Benjamin Grimm from Adidas, with Benjamin representing the business side of .com; the CEO and CFO from Compuware, explaining from the CFO perspective how technology helps and how to talk to people like him; and teams from Comcast and U.S. Bank. Titles are not the most important thing, but having such senior people speaking shows that our work matters to people who matter.

Another part of the conference is about overcoming ways of working. So much of the heroic journey in this community is rebellion: a small group trying to change a powerful ancient order with clear ideas of how work should be done, namely the way it was done 20 years ago. We have talks with subject matter experts from InfoSec, compliance, ITIL, project management, and audit, to better understand their world and how we can get them on board or, in some cases, better compete with them.

I am especially delighted that tomorrow on the plenary stage we will have the Big Four audit panel. One of the top impediments voiced by this community is compliance, internal audit, external audit, and regulators. Thanks to Sam Guckenheimer from Microsoft and Dr. Tapabrata Pal on the program committee, we will have representatives from all Big Four auditors on stage myth-busting the idea that DevOps is unsafe, impossible to secure, or impossible to audit. These are not consultants; they are from assurance and attestation, showing how DevOps is good for them and, because they still want customers over the next 50 or 100 years, good for you. There will also be a breakout session called Ask an Auditor Anything, where attendees can ask for genuine help dealing with auditors.

The last category of talks is bringing in the expertise we need, drawing on the bodies of knowledge needed to achieve our goals. In previous years we brought in central figures from the lean community and safety culture; people who helped build the automated testing culture at Google; the person who helped drive the engineering of Amazon Prime Now; and people from the transformation at Microsoft. This year our focus is organizational learning: the chief people officer from Kronos, Dr. Andre Martin from Nike, Target, and Google, Dr. Nicole Forsgren sharing the latest State of DevOps report with Dr. Dustin Smith, Dr. Christina Maslach on burnout, and Dr. Mik Kersten on the continuation of the project-to-product journey. We also have next-generation operations talks that show the best days of operations and infrastructure are not behind us but ahead of us, because they are about making developers productive.

The last programming goal is announcing the launch of The Unicorn Project, coming out November 26. The book is inspired by and dedicated to the achievements of the DevOps Enterprise community. The why behind the book is that you can do all the things in The Phoenix Project and still lack understanding of the invisible structures needed to truly enable developer productivity. Many organizations are stuck in decades of technical debt. There is also an orthogonal problem: how do we get data to where it needs to go? Just as the DevOps community identified how to get code to production, there is a universe of data stuck in enterprise data warehouses and systems of record that needs to reach developers doing daily work. There is still strong opposition to new ways of working, and ambiguity about what behaviors leaders need to support transformation.

This book is based on stories from the DevOps Enterprise community. One key learning is that this is not just a technology problem; it is a business problem. Risto Siilasmaa, now chairman of Nokia, wrote about learning as a Nokia board director in 2010 that Symbian OS took 48 hours to build. It felt like being hit in the head with a sledgehammer, because as a technologist and founder of F-Secure he knew that if it took two days for a developer to know whether a change worked or had to be redone, there was a fundamental and fatal flaw in the architecture that doomed near-term profitability and long-term viability. That is why Nokia abandoned Symbian OS for Windows Mobile.

Every tech giant has had to confront technical debt as existential risk: Microsoft after Nimda and Code Red, when Bill Gates sent the memo saying that if a developer must choose between security and a feature, choose security, leading to a year-long security stand-down and feature freeze across product lines; and eBay, Google, Amazon, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Etsy. That is the core goal of The Phoenix Project: to elevate this issue.

In The Phoenix Project we had the Three Ways and Four Types of Work; in The Unicorn Project we use the Five Ideals: locality and simplicity; focus, flow, and joy; improvement of daily work; psychological safety; and customer focus. I will bring these up over the next three days.

Anyone who has created something like a product or a book can relate to the doubt, remorse, and guilt over everything you wanted to include but could not. I went through that. But over the last couple of days, listening to the audiobook version to find errors before shipping it with the book, I love it. I am very happy with how it came out. I find myself laughing out loud at the absurdities this community puts up with and the heroic acts required to get from here to there. Fernando Cornago said he liked it 100 times better than The Phoenix Project, and Chris O'Malley from Compuware said it is the Civil War novel every technology and business trailblazer must read.

Thank you to this community. It gave me the courage to write this book and target developers. My highest aspiration is that it is read by developers, good enough to be read by technology leaders, and maybe good enough to be read by business leaders. That is the community we need to activate so they know how important our work is and support it. That is why I decided to aim for the national bestseller list and have it listed alongside the books they read. Looking at the opening week of The DevOps Handbook, all we need is 2x higher performance, and this is possible. Over the next three days you will hear about what we are doing to make that possible, including a book signing at 6:00 PM today where attendees will get The Unicorn Project book, sponsored by CloudBees.

Before I turn it over to Jeff, I want to talk about conferences. I love conferences. In the early years of this conference, I met almost every speaker at a conference, and almost all my co-authors at a conference. Conferences have tremendous value if you use the time well. But I have felt that all the people you want to talk to are on the other side of a velvet rope you cannot cross, or that you are in a crowd and do not know who you should talk to.

Our goal in the programming is to create as many ways as possible for you to connect to who you need to reach. First, every speaker should have as a last slide: here is what I do not know how to do, here is the help I am looking for, and here is a way for you to help. That may lead to friendships and relationships that last for decades. We are also doing other things to create a community that is already so good at actively helping each other, mutually exothermic. To help make that happen, let me invite out Jeff Gallimore, a longtime friend of the DevOps Enterprise community, co-founder and CTIO at Excella.

Jeff Gallimore

Thanks, Gene. I am psyched to be here in Vegas for the 2019 DevOps Enterprise Summit. How many summit alumni do we have out there? Outstanding. Welcome back, and for all of you first-timers, welcome. Everyone is in for an amazing three days. Gene and the programming committee have put together an incredible lineup of speakers who will blow your mind with what they have done and what you will learn.

The thing about speakers and talks is that, as great as they are, they are one-way interactions from the speaker on stage to the audience. We want to create opportunities for two-way interactions with the speakers and with each other, so we have created a lot of opportunities for everybody to do that.

The first opportunity is the Attendee Hub mobile app. Download it from your device's app store, search for the DevOps Enterprise Summit event, and select the Las Vegas event. It gives you session information, the opportunity to provide session feedback, and updates throughout the conference.

We also have Slack. I have already seen a lot of traffic in the few days leading up to the event. Everybody who was in the Slack instance last year is active again. Get onboarded. A lot of information and updates will happen in Slack. To be clear: use the mobile app for session feedback and the schedule, and use Slack for interactions.

We have carved out networking time in the afternoon today and tomorrow. The first opportunity is Speakers' Corner in the Chelsea Mezzanine, where you can ask speakers questions and sometimes get pictures with them. The speakers from the day will be spread around the mezzanine. Find the speaker you want, ask your question, get the answer, and then let someone else ask a question too.

If you miss the chance to ask in person, ask the speaker in Slack. We have an Ask the Speaker channel. Post your question, tag the speaker, and wait for a response. If you have a thought on someone else's question, contribute your thoughts too.

We also have Lean Coffee, led again by Domenica DeGrandis, right outside these doors in the Chelsea Foyer. You will learn from each other, set the agenda at your table, and walk away with insights from your peers.

We also have Birds of a Feather in the Belmont Corridor, upstairs toward the expo hall and to the right. This is your opportunity to talk about whatever topic you want with peers. If you have a topic, post it in the Birds of a Feather Slack channel. If you want to participate, upvote it or signal your interest, then find each other in the Belmont Corridor today at 3:15. Post notes and discussion points in Slack afterward for everyone's benefit, and continue the conversation. Nothing says that conversation must stop at the end of networking time.

You may know the open-spaces law of two feet, also called the law of mobility: if you are in a group where you are neither contributing nor learning, it is your responsibility to respectfully move to a place where you can. There are many ways to connect, learn, and interact. Choose based on your learning goal, whether it is specific or general, your afternoon energy level, and how much you want to contribute or consume.

We have a code of conduct. We are all part of the same community, and we want to treat each other well. The TL;DR is: if someone else is sharing, listen well. If you have something to share, share well. Respect everyone at all times. Speak up if you hear or see something inconsistent with the environment we want for this community. If you have problems, issues, or questions, email help@itrevolution.com or direct-message me, jgallimore, in Slack. To put the code of conduct into action, turn to the person next to you and give them a fist bump, then turn to the person on the other side and give them a fist bump. Well done. We're locked in.

Big thanks to our founding sponsor, IT Revolution. This event would not be happening without them. Thanks to our Platinum Plus sponsors BMC, Broadcom, CloudBees, HCL Software, Sonatype, Tasktop, and XebiaLabs; Platinum Classic sponsors Deloitte, GitHub, IBM, JFrog, Nutanix, ServiceNow, and Tricentis; our gold sponsors; our silver sponsors; and sponsors creating evening opportunities today and tomorrow. Lightning Talks are tomorrow, sponsored by Sonatype. The Unicorn Project event is happening tonight and is sponsored by CloudBees.

The thanks to sponsors are genuine. They are here because of this community and want to help us on our journeys. Go to the expo hall, spend time talking to them, and learn about their stuff. They can help us. Sponsors add sparkle.

We have Wi-Fi, but unlike this community's capacity to learn, Wi-Fi capacity is limited. In consideration of fellow attendees' ability to surf, Slack, text, and tweet, please limit use to two devices, and since you are here in person, do not live stream.

A few safety notes: keep your bags with you, listen to PA announcements, and if you have concerns or problems, talk to hotel staff or IT Revolution staff. IT Revolution staff will have a white lanyard and yellow staff ribbon. If you need help, post in #summit-help in Slack, email help@itrevolution.com, or direct-message me at jgallimore. Take a picture of this. Three, two, one. Have an amazing time.