Josh Smith

The Treasure Map, Hands-On: Chart Your Way to Continuous Delivery

Monday, 9:00 AM EST

There is pain inherent in development - monoliths, confusing deployment processes, conflict between dev/ops/security/business… IT is complicated, and hard to do well, and the pace of change expected by customers makes it all even MORE difficult.

It can also be massively overwhelming to try to fix any of these pain points. A plan can help, but…how do you go about making that plan, and how do you share the plan with other people in a way that's easy to understand?

Join Josh and Laine as they talk about how to create a version of this map for your organization - by focusing on what you want to accomplish and the pain points in the way. You'll leave with a version of the problems in the way of accomplishing CD at your organization, along with some “huh, this isn't as overwhelming as it seemed before!”

This workshop will include a lot of discussion and interaction, and probably some feels!

How to Technology Good - Tips for Implementation at Scale

Tuesday, 8:30 AM EST

Want to bring in [new cool thing X] or [necessary technology change Y] to your company, because you know there's a need for it? GOOD IDEA! Except…now what? If your company is more than about 3 people, how do you explain, enable, and encourage the adoption of this change, especially if it will require some work on everyone’s part?

In How to Technology Good, Josh and Laine will explain how bringing in technology is subject to one of the biggest problems in IT - how to scale it. They'll also talk about tips and tricks for how to be as successful as you can, and the main things to keep track of and watch out for. They'll go through each phase of bringing in new tech, all the way from how to pick your success criteria through what to think about when it comes to maintenance.

Governance in the Enterprise: How to See and Set Guardrails that Don't Slow You Down

Tuesday, 10:30 AM EST

The hardest parts of technology are people and what they do - so, culture and process. In the center of that is how to determine the right amount of oversight when implementing technology or the processes around that technology. That “right amount of oversight” is typically referred to as “governance.”

In this talk, Josh and Laine will explain that there is no one right answer for the right amount of oversight, but there are some best practices to keep in mind. There are also some ways to make it easier to think and talk about governance as a whole, and to deliberately apply it. They'll also go over what the wrong amounts of governance look like and give some tips about how to try to correct it when you see it.

Solving Software Delivery Pain: What Hurts and Why it Matters

Tuesday, 3:00 PM EST

There is pain inherent in development - monoliths, confusing deployment processes, conflict between dev/ops/business.

IT is hard and the pace of change now makes it even more difficult. Join Josh and Laine as they talk about how focusing on solving this pain can help in a lot of surprising ways - kickstarting DevOps, speeding up product delivery, and even enabling the business as a whole.

To Hug or to Strangle: Tips for Dealing with Monolith Pain

Tuesday, 5:00 PM EST

A long time ago, in a land far far away, there were monoliths. These fabled artifacts brought consistency and stability to the land - but there was a cost in speed, agility, time, and development pain.
Whether Java EE, .NET, or something else, the big ol' integrated plexi-purpose binaries or yore (and also now…) have grown into problems that hurt developers, architects, and the execution of business goals.

In this talk, Josh and Laine will talk specifics about the pain points of monoliths, and the various strategies they've seen to alleviate that pain.

Serverless in Kubernetes: Portable Simplified Ops for Cloud-Native Workloads

Wednesday, 9:00 AM EST

Serverless! Functions as a service! DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION!

…just kidding.

One of the ideas in IT that's been gathering buzz for a while is “serverless.” Or sometimes “functions as a service,” used interchangeably. And…okay, but what does that actually mean? And…how does it help what you're trying to accomplish in your organization?

In this talk, Josh and Laine talk about what serverless is, and what it isn't, along with why you should care and how it can help with actual “digital transformation.” They'll go over the benefits and drawbacks of this method of implementing applications and show a demo of how it works using Knative (https://knative.dev/) on a Kubernetes cluster.

Kubernetes Platform Security: A framework to think about it and some practical advice

Wednesday, 11:00 AM EST

Containers enable rapid development and rapid software delivery - and with that increase in speed comes a need to shift how people think about and tackle security. Running those containers is part of this consideration - the platform and container orchestration has to figure out and handle all of the moving parts.

In this talk, Laine and Josh will give their recommendations for Kubernetes as a platform to run containers. They'll go through talking about security from the perspective of the pieces that make up the container - the ingredients, and how it runs in addition to where it runs. They'll discuss application and platform boundaries while explaining a simple model to use in order to think about and discuss this complex topic.

Coordinating Chaos: ChatOps for Human People

Wednesday, 3:15 PM EST

We have systems that can tell us in some amount what's wrong with them, but the sheer volume of data, and the sheer volume of systems, make it so that we can't do anything useful with (all of!) that information.

In this talk, Josh and Laine will talk about “wise alerting” to try to understand what both Dev and Ops teams (along with architects and dev/ops management, and even business units) REALLY need to know, along with an overview of their definition of ChatOps, or the idea of systems interacting with people via the chat platforms they use. They'll walk through how to think about parsing and forwarding alerts for maximum efficiency and action-ability, and how to build community via these typically confusing bits of data.