Gene Kim

Good morning. I hope you had a fantastic Day 1 at DevOps Enterprise, and we have a fantastic Day 2 in store for you.

This morning, I want to give you a glimpse into the making of this conference: how we've thought about conferences for the last eight years. I want to share some of the design goals we've had and give you an idea of how we create the programming, and also what we've done specifically to help create a mutually exothermic community, and talk about how we've tried to make it as easy as possible for you to share talks from this conference with your colleagues.

Let's talk first about why people come to DevOps Enterprise. As best as I can tell, it's been the same for the last eight years. We want to transform our organizations. We want to learn what we need to learn. We want to meet who we need to meet, and also we want to get re-energized to keep up the fight.

I hear from so many people, "I come here because I get re-energized about the mission. Yes, I learn new things and meet new people, but I also get the energy I need to fight reluctant leaders who not only don't get it, but they are out actively sabotaging my efforts, and hopefully I leave with just enough energy to make it one more year."

I'm delighted that DevOps Enterprise can serve that function as well.

The goals that we set out in the program committee are to make each event the best DevOps Enterprise Summit ever. We started setting this as an explicit goal a couple of years ago, and boy, does it sure change and shape the decisions we made. I do think it's resulted in absolutely outstanding events.

In some cases, it's forced us to take more risks, and in other cases, we play it safer. I do get a little nervous sometimes about how we keep outdoing the previous events. I don't want to create the conditions where we have to do absolutely crazy things for no reason.

But what has been so rewarding for me is that creating the best DevOps Enterprise Summits ever is actually easier than I thought it would be, because the aspirations of this community are so ambitious and challenging. All we have to do is find the help we need to teach us what we need to learn. I think this playbook will serve us well in the years to come. After all, the importance of technology has increased and has no sign of getting any less important in the near future.

This is where I want to really acknowledge the programming committee. We've been meeting for almost eight years, and each year when we convene, we set out what the goals are for the conference. It is really the ambitions of this group that shape the programming that we then incorporate into the conferences.

Let me share with you the canvas that we have to achieve those goals: the different types of talks that we have. The first is repeat experience reports. One of the things I think is unique about this conference is that we often follow technology leaders over multiple years. We get to see what they've achieved and what happens to them. We get to ask: do we like what we see? Is their path worth following? Are there patterns of success? And if not, maybe these are practices that we don't want to follow.

Examples from this year include Fernando Cornago from Adidas, Jason Cox and the team from the Walt Disney Company, and Dr. Suzette Johnson from Northrop Grumman. Over the years, we've had Scott Prugh, now SVP of Product Engineering at CSG, and John Smart, whom we followed during his years at Barclays. This constitutes about 10% of the plenary programming. Incidentally, we've actually shrunk the amount of slots we've reserved for these talks over the years to make room for new experience reports, which are the next category.

Experience reports, beyond just being a great way to show how other people solve problems, are also a fantastic way to negate objections. It shows us where DevOps is possible. I think one of the top objections that you may have heard in your journey is, "We can't do DevOps here because we're a bank," or maybe, "We can't do DevOps here because we're a telco or a pharmaceutical, because we're not a Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google, or Microsoft." I'm so proud that over the years, we now have some of the largest brands across every industry vertical showing that DevOps is not only possible, but it is helping them win in the marketplace.

I love this quote from Jason Cox from the Walt Disney Company, who's on the program committee. He said, "I am always looking for new experience reports to show my leadership. It's so helpful to be able to say even X and Y are doing DevOps." I think new experience reports are always welcome. I'm also very proud of how many people attend DevOps Enterprise and are soon presenting here at this conference.

Examples of new experience reports include TUI Group, American Airlines, GitHub, Nationwide Building Society, Government Digital Service, and UK HMRC. I guess some of these are actually repeats, but they're different people presenting. These as a whole represent about 60% of all programming. The asterisk there is because this also subsumes some other categories of talks that I'll be talking about next, one of which is spanning business and technology.

In my opening remarks yesterday, I talked about how one of the largest constraints facing technology leaders is to what extent can they find a business colleague who is willing to co-create outcomes. Increasingly, the obstacle to many technology leaders is that we can't get product leadership on board, or business leadership, or project management, information security, legal, and compliance.

We are always looking for technology leaders who can co-present with their business partner, and I don't mean just stand next to and acknowledge the presence of that technology leader. We are looking for business leaders who can articulate how all their goals, dreams, and aspirations hinge upon their ability for their technology leader to make it so.

Examples of spanning the business and technology divide this year include H&M Group and Procter & Gamble. This represents about 14% of programming, and we're always looking for more. In other words, this number should be a lot bigger, and so we're also looking for your help.

The next category of talk is overcoming older ways of working. These are stories about how technology leaders have had to overcome powerful, entrenched orthodoxies in enterprises. This might take the form of InfoSec, compliance, ITIL, project management, and audit. Often, this requires building bridges and creating mutually respectful and beneficial relationships. Where that isn't possible, it involves creating a competitive relationship and showing that there's a better way of working with or without you. These represent about 20% of all programming. Incidentally, it was actually in this category where most of the call-for-presentations were categorized.

The next type of talk that we have is next-generation operations and infrastructure. This came from a conversation that Jason Cox and I had. In this picture, he's saying, "Gene, this is my unhappy face." Once again, this was a really great conference for dev, but it wasn't as great for ops. So we created a whole track that Jason leads. The goal is really to create a track for innovative, experimental ways of showing what next-generation operations and infrastructure looks like.

One of the key themes in The Unicorn Project is really to what degree can we unleash developer productivity, and that is not possible without creating platforms where the best knowledge of information security, operations, and infrastructure are in the platforms that developers use in their daily work.

Incidentally, where did the spanning business and technology track come from? It came from Courtney Kissler, now CTO of Zulily, basically saying, "I want what Jason got." And so we made that so. Those are the talks that take the experience-report format.

The other type of talk are what I mentioned in the Day 1 opening remarks: the subject-matter expert talks. I love studying the bookshelves of technology leaders. They all look pretty much the same. My interpretation of that is that we're all trying to piece together the body of knowledge that doesn't quite yet exist. It's my prediction that in 10 years, everyone will know, but in the meantime, we are still questing for them.

In previous years, we've had some of the pioneers in lean safety culture present. We've also had people from the unicorns present stories about how the culture was created at Google, at Amazon Prime Now, and Microsoft. This year, here are our expert talks: talks about operations and cloud building; safety culture and studying incidents; OKRs; leadership development; creating inclusive organizations; and creating learning dynamic organizations. Again, this is what I feel we need to know in order for us to get from here to there.

I mentioned that I love conferences. I mentioned also that in the first year of this event, over 50% of the speakers were people that I met at conferences. Some of my favorite collaborators I met at conferences. Our program committee loves conferences. I have a strong suspicion that you have or will meet collaborators that will last your entire careers, just like it did for me.

Conference programming can help achieve some of those goals, but I think there's another aspect of conferences that either help or hinder creating this atmosphere of sharing, collaboration, and great relationships. I've had the personal experience where I felt like I was on the other side of a velvet rope, that everyone I wanted to talk to was unreachable on the other side of that velvet rope, or I found myself in situations where I wanted to talk to someone about a certain topic, whether it was X, Y, or Z, and I didn't know where to find them.

The things that Jeff talked about yesterday are specific things we did to hopefully never make you feel like that, so that you can always find the expertise that you are looking for. That is why I have every speaker here at DevOps Enterprise always end with a slide that either says, "Here's what we don't know how to do yet," or, "Here's the help we're looking for." They're broadcasting the help they're looking for, and if you are an expert in those, that is an invitation for you to connect with them. The ideal response back is, "Holy cow, thank you so much." By doing this, my fondest hope is that we are helping foster a community that is helping each other, in other words, a mutually exothermic community.

That gets to networking time. I feel like we finally got this right around 2019, where we finally created a dedicated band of time that has no programming in it. It is just for networking time, whether it is the classic running into people in the hallway, Birds of a Feather sessions, Lean Coffee, and so forth. Prior to that, we always had some programming going on, so people would often skip networking time because of the fear of missing out, or FOMO. They wanted to make sure they weren't missing a great talk.

So we actually created a band of time just for networking. This is something that we deeply studied last year and debated. What we did is we actually doubled the amount of networking time because we realized that conferences are for conferring, as my friend Jeffrey Fredrick said last year. It is one of the few places where you can find kindred spirits and fellow travelers. We more than doubled the amount of networking time, and we thought very carefully about how to maximize the chances of useful and/or serendipitous interactions. Our use of Gather this year is to make it even easier to find interesting conversations and those serendipitous interactions.

My personal advice to you here is use this time well. It has been my observation that those people who get the most value out of conferences tend to do a lot of planning and are very intentional. Networking is more than just being friendly. It's about how to find the right people to help you achieve your goals. Sometimes that might be finding expertise you're looking for, connections, helpers, fellow travelers. If this is important to you, then I think you can't go wrong by following this guideline: give before you get. In other words, go out and actively seek to help people with things that they are looking for help with, and I suspect you'll find that investment will return itself in spades.

Which gets to the last thing I want to talk about, which is the video library. We want to make it as easy as possible for you to share the videos that you've seen with your colleagues and your peers. We know that you want to do this right after the talks aired. As you've seen yesterday, we've been posting links to all the plenary talks at the end of each segment. That link will go to not just the video, but also slides and, in many cases, the transcripts too.

By the way, in previous years, this used to be super hard. It would often take us months to get the videos and slides published, although we did get better at it over the years. I am so proud of the breakthroughs we've made in the last year, and we'll definitely be bringing this into when we return to physical conferences.

The video library: our goal is to make this video library the best place to watch DevOps Enterprise talks and for technology leaders to learn what they need to learn. We've copied all the talks into the video library, so there are now 721 talks, up until this conference, from 2014 onwards. Obviously, we'll be adding at least 70 talks over the next three days, and we'll be adding transcripts and other speaker metadata soon.

We've made organizational passes available so that you can make the video library available to everyone in your organization. The average org pass has an average of 45 users, and each one of those people are watching, on average, 96 minutes of video and an average of 12 video starts. This is actually five times higher than the broader population. The people who aren't in an org pass are only watching 19 minutes. It just shows how different those two populations are.

I had mentioned that we are making these videos as easy to share as possible. All videos in the video library are freely available. All someone needs to do is register with an email address, and they get up to 10 free watches per month. However, for the three days of this conference, the free users are temporarily limited to five watches.

I will end by stating the help I'm looking for. If you have a fantastic business leader who loves the work you do that you think you could co-present with, let's talk. Contact me by sending me a DM in Slack. Also, if you have any ideas on how physical conferences can be made better based on what we learned in virtual conferences, again, contact me. If all goes well, we will finally be having conferences in real life starting next year.

Thank you so much, and I'm going to turn it over to Jeff.

Jeff Gallimore

I hope everyone is fired up for a great Day 2 of the DevOps Enterprise Summit. Just a quick update from yesterday's virtual happy hour and running around in Gather: I am happy to report no donuts, lots of croissants. Everyone was open to new people and new conversations.

Not a lot of time for opening remarks this morning, since we used all the time to bring you even more amazing programming. Check out the general channel in Slack for all the things you need to know to start the day.

If you're not in Slack yet, you definitely need to do that. That's where a lot of the action is happening with announcements and interactions with speakers, sponsors, and other attendees.

Just to keep you oriented to all the things, the top-level menu for the event, right up there, is your friend. Watch the talks, visit sponsors in the virtual expo hall, see the schedule, discover networking opportunities, get into our virtual space in Gather, play games, win stuff, and dig into the video library from all the talks from previous summits. There's a lot to see, do, and learn.

With that, get ready for a fantastic Day 2. Gene, let me hand it back to you to introduce today's first speakers.