More Community, Please

Manish Aggarwal of Intel - Building Quality In
Day 2 of DevOps Enterprise Summit wrapped up yesterday and here are some random musings and observations, along with a few photos of customer presentations:

Metrics Matter

On Monday, our CTO, Anders Wallgren, spoke to a standing, sitting on the floor, line out the door-room only session on "Measuring DevOps - The Key Metrics That Matter." At breakfast Tuesday morning two attendees said it was the most helpful session they'd attended so far. They both had extensive tooling in their operations but are still struggling with which metrics to use and how. Another attendee at the table lamented the fact that she missed that session and said she would definitely be watching the replay when it becomes available.

Juan Felipe Cardona of TODO1 - Targeting 100 million users

Mainframe Challenges and "Surprises"

The Mainframe discussion panel, consisting of Anders, Torsten Volk, Managing Research Director from EMA Research, Chris Nowak, Principal Consultant from Q2 Strategies, and Rosalind Radcliffe, Chief DevOps Architect from IBM, had some real surprises and words of wisdom. First, if you're looking to "move off the mainframe," make sure you are doing it for the right reasons and you're choosing the right workloads to move. That led to a short discussion on talent. Rosalind's key comment about recruiting millennials to work in mainframe shops was to give them modern tools to use and Anders extended that by saying the mainframe is just another IP address. From there, the discussion went on to mainframe capabilities. 80% of the world's data lives on mainframes, modern tooling exists for the mainframe from automated unit testing all the way to deploying applications from a pipeline. Chris' key observation was, "This problem ("doing" DevOps on the mainframe) has already been solved." The takeaway for CloudBees (and other vendors), as well as other industry luminaries is we need to do a better job of educating the market about how well mainframes fit into digital transformation.

Erik Maziarz of AGCO - Common Processes grow the business

Voices in the Wilderness - Or Not

"We thought we were the only ones going through this kind of a problem."
"Is anyone else deploying code simultaneously on the mainframe and the cloud?"
"I'm glad I went to the lightning talks. I need to bring my whole team next year."
It's easy as a vendor to think that everyone is as up to date on the latest trends, tricks and tips. It's just as easy for a release manager or enterprise architect to get locked into the daily challenges their company faces and feel unique or isolated. Probably the biggest takeaway from Day 2 is there is still a strong need to build a community of sharing and broader common knowledge. DOES is a great foundation for that. We will be doing more to build that community and share ideas over the next year. What can you do to contribute?