When building reliable services unexpected user behavior can prove deadly. Yet few engineering teams make use of talent from their product and design orgs if they are working on something internal. This talk will demonstrate how a product mindset and design thinking can super charge technical discussions and build stronger systems. Don't rely on th…

All your tech is old. Even your new stuff is already old: somebody's already building something that's better. And they're probably going to give it away for free! So, what can you do about that? I have thoughts. We all spend a lot of energy trying to discover tech debt, and eliminate it. Fat chance! In this talk, I will convince you that all tech …

I'm a software engineer who spends her time writing code and developing apps. I have a pretty good grasp of the vocabulary and technologies relevant to my job. But what happens when another facet of engineering, one that is gaining a lot of traction and has a large footprint of its own starts becoming more and more relevant to my day to day tasks? …

Taking advantage of AWS Parameter Store and some automation magic to make secret change management a problem of the past. We will talk about: The importance of secrets management Use Cases Parameter Store vs. Secret Manager Secret Vault and Application Integration points OSS Tools for Automation

Resilience Engineering (RE) is both multidisciplinary field of study as well as a community of practitioner-researchers from multiple high-tempo, high-consequence domains such as aviation, medicine, power distribution, space operations, and critical infrastructure. In recent years, the world of software engineering and operations has become involve…

As developers, we take great pains to make our applications accessible to users on a range of devices and browsers. There are more adults with disabilities in the US than there are users of Internet Explorer. So why do we spend more time worrying about polyfills for out-dated browsers than we do on ensuring the accessibility of our applications for…

Today--Incorporating AI into applications is as easy as a single API call. Once imbued with AI, these transformed applications can improve over time as they learn from user interactions. How do we manage these new learning systems to ensure that they take advantage of all available information while maintaining accuracy and minimizing bias? This ta…

Working technology for a political campaign involves the shortest timelines, tightest deadlines, and highest stakes you will likely ever encounter in a technology career. Come hear a tale of two political campaigns - a state measure campaign and a presidential campaign - and the application of both DevOps technologies and culture to move fast, pivo…

GDPR is upon us, along with new requirements for protecting user data. Many of us in the DC ecosystem are no strangers to compliance! We have expertise in HIPAA, SOC, PCI, and of course the stringencies associated with government work. But GDPR's new requirements are taking effect at the same time that many users are demanding increased privacy and…

Learn how we established a service providing development teams with a continuous integration, build, test, source code management, and an issue tracking environment for building mobile apps for a large Federal Agency. Mobile phones are the world's greatest surveillance tool, containing all our private information that we willingly carry in our pock…

One of the more unique and complicated areas of devops is dealing with database updates, especially those for databases with pre-defined schemas like relational databases. Databases generally: Need to stay online during updates Should not be destroyed and re-created Frequently have changes that can be long running and have impacts to the running ap…

The cornerstone of bringing together "development" and "operations" is collaboration. Collaboration sounds great on paper, but when the scales tip, you may end up with anarchy, or a dictatorship. How do you balance all of that while still managing to get things done? Enter: improv. Learn from theatre artist Melanie Harker and artist/developer Sean …

This is a deeply personal talk where I share my experiences as a woman in tech. Even though I'd worked for NASA and co-founded my own successful company, rampant sexism in IT and bad experiences speaking in public nearly destroyed my career. That continued to have ripples in my life until I found the DevOps community and the safe spaces it creates.…

Interviews and insights from participants of DevOpsDays DC 2017.

The standard approach for web application security over the last decade and beyond has focused heavily on slow gatekeeping controls like static analysis and dynamic scanning. However, these controls was originally designed in a world of Waterfall development and their heavy weight nature often cause more problems than they solve in today’s world of…

For the past two years my team and I worked with a large federal agency to deploy & migrate to a new container-as-a-service platform based on Docker. The migration has enabled development teams to isolate components of their code for faster, more reliable development. But, we also saw that the additional tooling - such as monitoring technology - su…

In Greek Mythology, the Gods cursed Sisyphus to spend eternity rolling a large boulder to the top of a mountain, where it would fall back of its own weight. In DevOps, we're forever rolling boulders uphill. We're making deploys faster, cheaper, smoother, and quicker. And once the boulder reaches the mountain top, the engineers rearchitect the appli…

In 1982, the city of Detroit saw 15,000 vehicles roll of its production lines every day. To achieve this goal, Detroit's line workers were being measured on velocity, often at the expense of quality. At the same time, auto workers in Japan -- applying lessons from W. Edwards Deming -- were implementing new supply chain management practices which en…

• Daniel Willis - Putting the R in Sports• Mark Morris - You, Me & StatsD• Sara Cowles - If you want to have an impact, Devops is not enough• Jason Hand - The Emergence of ChatOps• Matt Stratton - DevOps in the Machine

I hate computers. How many times have you heard those words? Or said them yourself. Systems crash and go boom all the time. The easiest thing to do is to blame the person touching the keyboard when it happens. Especially when that person touching the keyboard is you. But how do we build safer systems? How do we build humane systems, systems that ac…

It's an oft-quoted adage that too many cooks spoil the soup. But is this always true? At Etsy, we have roughly 40 Ops and Developers making upwards of 20 or 30 Chef changes per day. In this talk, I'll look at the tools, techniques and workflows we leverage to enable tens of people spread across teams, timezones and even countries to work together t…

• Jenna Pederson - Stop Blogging About Women In Tech• Michael Lanyon - Effortless WebPerf Monitoring• Larye Pohlman - Vulnerability• Jason Clifford - GameOps• Jason Walker - Empathy, Fairness, and Contentment