Black Mirror presents a haunting view of how modern technology places society a “minute away” from a dystopian future. DevOps and those of us that practice it find ourselves in a similar situation - partially mature technologies whose implications we don’t yet fully understand. Heartbleed, Equifax and now Meltdown & Spectre can make us feel like there is no escaping this dark future. But just as Black Mirror examines the extremes of these concepts as a canary in the mine shaft for society, we too can carefully employ practices that will prevent season 5 from featuring Site reliability engineer, DevOps engineer, or CISO characters.

In this talk, we'll learn how to use the powerful concepts and tools behind DevOps for good... with great power comes great responsibility....but also great opportunity to do good for our businesses, each other and our world. By working together with product, business, and external teams; embedding security into how we operate; and measuring everything we do we can empower our teams to thrive.

Many software development professionals think of themselves as cutting edge innovators who explore new and exciting frontiers. Contrarily, concepts that may be considered contemporary innovations are actually ideas that were conceived decades ago when humans strived to explore the REAL final frontier - space. Fifty years ago this June, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the surface of the moon. But behind this amazing human accomplishment was the work of countless individuals who collaborated to make the impossible happen. In this talk, we’ll re-examine what we can learn from the Apollo program and how that knowledge can help avoid pitfalls today. While shipping code directly into production might be scary for you, imagine if that code was shipped into the vacuum of space and could only use 24K of storage and 1K of memory.

In the era of cloud computing, Kubernetes has emerged as an engine for delivering reliable IT operations. Today, for organizations adopting DevOps, cloud native technology such as Kubernetes, microservices and serverless can dramatically accelerate development velocity and improve release frequency when paired with the right tooling. In this session, we will discuss - What is cloud native? Why is it important? What are the challenges of going cloud native in the enterprise? The fragmentation and hidden cost of the tooling available Solutions for enterprises dealing with these challenges.

When we want to improve the speed and performance of our applications, we often look at moving processes “closer to the processor.” But, what if the speed we want to improve is our cycle time when shipping customer value? The answer is similar - move the processes required to ship closer to the code. When we invest in continuous integration (CI), we can plateau once we have the code building and tests running. However, to deploy effectively, we need to embrace code review, dependency assurance, security scanning and performance metrics for every commit. To accelerate this cycle, all of these required processes must happen closer to the code. Learn how Kubernetes and GKE - paired with GitLab CI/CD - make this promise of CI possible, all without writing a bunch of brittle code glue.

XKCD describes itself as “a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.” What if it is more? What if XKCD and it’s creator Randall Munroe have slowly been revealing what software development, DevOps and team collaboration are all about.

In this talk, we’ll take a look at some recurring themes in XKCD comics - and how they hit home with recurring themes in DevOps. From regular expressions, vim vs. emacs to user experiences so bad...they are literally a joke XKCD finds ways to express simply the thoughts we’ve all had. We will examine these comics for their deeper meaning (deeper even than just the tooltip text Randall leaves behind) and learn from them how to make better software.