Host Intro (Gene Kim)

Good morning. I hope you had a fantastic day one here at DevOps Enterprise, and I assure you we have a phenomenal day two in store for you.

So this morning, what I'd like to do is give you a glimpse into the making of this conference. I want to share some of our design goals, our program objectives, which shape the programming that you see here today. I want to share what we've done to help make sure that we can create a community that is mutually exothermic, and I want to talk to you about how we've tried to make it as easy as possible for you to share the talks from this conference with your colleagues and peers.

So, let's talk about what we want to achieve here in this community. We want to attract people who want to transform their organizations, organizations that have been around for decades or even centuries, and this is a lot of time to fall into bad habits. We want to learn what we need to learn in order to achieve that objective. We want to meet who we need to meet. And we want to stay 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 recalcitrant leaders who not only don't get it but are actively out to sabotage my efforts. And I leave with hopefully enough energy to make it one more year." And so that's certainly one of the objectives within this conference.

So what are the goals that we have for DevOps Enterprise 2021? A couple of years ago was the first time that we explicitly set out a goal that that event will be our best programming ever, and we have continued that tradition for now, I think three, four years. And boy, does it sure change and shape the decisions we make as a programming committee. And I do think it's resulted in absolutely outstanding events. In some cases, it forces us to take more risks with fantastic outcomes. In other cases, we choose to play it safer. Sometimes I do get a little bit nervous how we will continue to outdo the previous events, but it has been easier than I thought it would be because the aspirations of this community are so ambitious and so challenging. I feel like all we have to do is find the help that we need to teach us what we need to learn.

However, I am confident that this goal forces the programming committee to truly study the needs of this community, and if we keep doing that, I am sure we will all get the outcomes that we want. I'll talk more about why this is so important that every attendee achieves their goals and how we structure the programming to help accommodate that. But first, I want to talk about the programming committee.

I'm so grateful to everyone who's been on the programming committee. Everything that you've seen here since the beginning is a result of their work. So we meet weekly for the majority of the year. I ask them to bring their most parochial, selfish goals to the programming, and I think by doing that, we help move the entire community forward.

So I've talked a little bit about goals and aspirations. So how do we actually translate that into specific programming objectives?

There are a couple of different types of talks here at DevOps Enterprise. I will talk about experience reports, but there's a special type of experience report that we have called repeat experience reports. This is where we ask technology leaders to come back and continue sharing the story of their journey. By doing this, we get to see how the journey is treating them. Do we like what we see? Is their path worth following? Is this a pattern of success?

So this year, examples of this include Capital One. This time it's Girija Rao, Danay Ferguson, and Jennifer Miles. We have Nationwide Insurance, Steve Farley, VP of Infrastructure and Operations. Comcast, we have Michael Winslow coming back and presenting. And Siemens, Dr. Peter Fassbinder and Claus Baumgartner. This represents 10% of all programming. You can see that we've actually reduced the percentage of repeat experience reports over the year, partially because there are so many great experience reports that people are sharing. But I think this is a very important part of the DevOps Enterprise programming.

So that gets us to the other type of experience reports, the new experience reports. One of the fantastic things about experience reports is that they are a phenomenal way to negate objections. Something that I've heard throughout my entire career is that we can't do X, Y, or Z because, say, we're not a bank. Or if they're a bank, they might say, "We can't do X, Y, or Z because we're not a telco." Or if they're a telco, they might say, "We can't do it because we're not in retailing." And retailing might say that we can't do that because we're not a bank.

And so, over the years, we have nearly 500 experience reports from all industry verticals. And as my friend Jason Cox, who's on the programming committee from Disney, said, "I am always looking for new experience reports to show my leadership." He'll be able to say, "Hey, did you know that even this company is doing DevOps?"

So examples of new experience reports this year include Government of Canada. We had Denise Skinner and Mark Brouillard present yesterday. National Security Agency. Later today, we'll have Discover Financial Services, eBay, and Sean Mack from Wiley. So these represent about 60% of all programming.

Which gets us to one of my favorite types of experience reports, which are those that span the business and technology divide. I mentioned yesterday that we don't want business leaders just who acknowledge technology leaders. We want rabid fans who are so grateful because all their goals, dreams, and aspirations are being made possible by the incredible work of engineering excellence made possible through technology leadership.

So examples of spanning the biz-tech divide this year include the amazing presentation that we heard from Target yesterday from Brett Craig, SVP of Digital, and Luke Rettig, Senior Director of Merch Capabilities. And later today, you will hear from Suncor. We're going to hear John Hill, SVP of Digital and Information Technology, co-presenting with Joey Roa, Director of DevOps and Digital Delivery Services, co-presenting with Lindsey Deluca, Director of Maintenance and Reliability. This is such a cool presentation because they'll also be sharing information on the famous safety culture that they have there.

So spanning the biz-tech divide, that makes up about 14% of all programming, and in the ideal, this number would be a lot larger. So if you have a story that you can share with a business leader, make sure to contact me.

Which gets us to the next category of talks, which are those experience reports that talk about overcoming older ways of working. These are stories about how people have struggled to and battled with powerful, entrenched orthodoxy that you find in large, complex organizations. It could be information security or compliance or ITIL or project management or audit. This often may require building bridges and building mutually respectful and beneficial relationships with them, or it may also be about out-competing them. These talks represent about 20% of all programming.

So that gets us to the last category of talks, which is next-generation infrastructure and operations. The birth of this came from Jason Cox from Disney, and as the caption says, "Gene, this is my unhappy face." This was a really great conference for developers, but it wasn't as great for operations, and thus, this track was born. And so this has typically represented about 16% of all programming, and it's probably about double that this year. And this is actually one of the most fun tracks because it's all about platforms, creating new ways of working, and elevating developer productivity. It's very hard to imagine achieving the goals ahead of us when developers are mired and cannot get the work they need to get done, done.

Incidentally, the birth of the spanning business and technology divide came from Courtney Kistler when she basically said, "I want what Jason got," and thus was born a separate track that's specifically about spanning the business and technology divide.

And so that covers the experience report talks. So let's talk about the subject matter expert talks. This is all about bringing in the expertise that we need in order for us to get from here to there. I've always loved studying the bookshelves of technology leaders, and I think to a great degree, they look so much the same. And I think what this means to me is that we're all trying to piece together a body of knowledge that doesn't quite exist yet. That's really my prediction: in 10 years, everyone will know what we know. But in the meantime, we are still questing for them.

And so in previous years, we brought in some of the best experts in lean, safety culture. We brought in unicorns talking about the birth of automated test culture at Google, the birth of Amazon Prime Now, the birth of the One Engineering System at Microsoft.

So this year, our expert talks include John Allspaw, who's going to teach us about how we can better learn from incidents. Dr. Ale Alvarez from Stanford Medical, who will teach us about blamelessness in the medical profession with Christina Tan and Kurt Andersen at Blameless. We're going to learn about leadership and psychological safety from Kimberly Johnson from Fannie Mae and Chris Porter. We're going to learn about leader development in the U.S. military from Admiral John Richardson. We're going to learn about leadership and remote working from Amanda Silver, Corporate Vice President of the Developer Division at Microsoft. We're going to learn about observability from Shelby Spees and Liz Fong-Jones. We're going to learn about the four necessary characteristics of structure in our organizations later today, and we're going to learn about information flow and culture from Dr. Ron Westrum.

So we've talked about experience reports and subject matter expert talks. Let's talk about attendee goals. I've mentioned so many times about how much I love conferences. 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 programming committee I mostly met at conferences, and they all love conferences too. I have a strong suspicion that you already have or will meet collaborators that will last your entire careers, just like I did.

So conference programming helps us achieve some of those goals, but there's another important thing about conferences that either help or hinder great sharing, collaborations, and relationships. There's some things that I don't want anyone at this conference to feel. I remember being at a conference, and I felt like I was on the wrong side of the velvet rope. There were people that I wanted to talk to, but they were all on the other side of this velvet rope that I couldn't get to. Or I remember being in a large crowd, and I just wanted to find who can I talk to about certain topics, X, Y, or Z, and I just did not know where to find them.

So we've done a lot of things in this conference to make sure that hopefully, you'll never feel like that. One thing we've done is that I've asked every speaker to end with a slide that says, "Here's what we don't know how to do," or "Here's the obstacles that still remain," or "Here's the help that we're looking for." And the goal of this is to help enable connections. And so if you happen to have that expertise, that is an invitation for you to share that expertise, and the ideal reaction that you will get from that speaker is, "Thank you so much, and what can I do for you in return?" And it is that dynamic that I think helps create a mutually exothermic community that is actively helping each other.

In the virtual format, we've more than doubled the amount of networking time, and we've thought very carefully about how to maximize the chance of useful and/or serendipitous interactions, and Jeff will describe this in more detail later. My advice is use this time well. What I've found is that the best conference experiences tend to involve planning and being intentional, and that networking is more than just being friendly. It's about finding the right people to help you achieve your goals. Sometimes it's about seeking out specific expertise or connections or people to help you on a quest or to find fellow travelers. If I can share one piece of advice, think about what sort of help you're looking for and what kind of help you can give. I think it is always safe to say that it is always better to give before you ask.

Which gets us to the last thing I wanted to talk about this morning. We want to make it as easy as possible for you to share the talks that you see here with your colleagues and friends. We know that when you see an inspirational talk or when you see someone who solved a problem in an exciting way, you want to share that with your colleagues, often right after the talk airs. And this used to be super hard. It used to take us months to sometimes get the videos and slides published, although we did get better at it over the years. As you've seen, we've been posting links to the talk videos at the end of each segment, along with the slides, often with a transcript. So I'm so proud of the breakthroughs we've made in the last year and a half, and we'll definitely be bringing those breakthroughs with us when we return to live events.

So our goal is to make the video library the best place to watch DevOps Enterprise talks and where technology leaders can learn. All the talks are now in the video library. We have over 800 talks from 2014 and onwards. We started adding transcripts, speaker metadata. I wrote a Clojure program two days ago because I always wanted to know specifically how many organizations were represented in the library, and the answer is 481.

So, we've made organizational passes available so that anyone can access the video library in your organizations. What we found is that those organizations that have org passes, they have 45 users per organization watching on average 96 minutes. So that's 12 video starts. And this population is watching five times more videos than the population at large, which is only watching 1.6 videos.

So all videos are freely available. We want to make it as easy for you to share these videos. All they need to do is register with an email address. Everyone gets 10 free watches per month, except for the three days of this conference where free users are temporarily limited to five watches.

So, here is the help that I'm looking for. If you have a great business leader that you would like to co-present with here at DevOps Enterprise, please, let's talk. Again, by the end of this conference, we are going to have six organizations who have had videos from their CEO or COO. That's RBS, Nationwide Building Society, American Airlines, Fannie Mae, CSG, and one more that you're going to see later today. If this is something that your CEO or COO is willing to do to talk about the value of the work that you are doing, again, let's talk. We would love to hear from you.

I guess there's one more announcement to make, which is the second edition of The DevOps Handbook is coming out on November 30th. I am so pleased with the way it came out. It is so great. We have Dr. Nicole Forsgren join the authorship team. We have 15 new case studies, over 100 pages of just phenomenal content, and these case studies came through the DevOps Enterprise Community. Dr. Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, John Willis, and I will be doing a panel tonight, so I hope to see you there.

So with that, that concludes my remarks for this morning. So I'm going to turn it over to Jeff.

Jeff Gallimore

I hope everyone is fired up for a great day two 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 more amazing programming. So 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.

And 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 and win stuff, and dig into the video library with all the talks from previous summits. There's lots to see, do, and learn.

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