See You at Boston DevOps Days 2016

OnPage is proud to be a Gold Sponsor at DevOps Days Boston taking place at the Boston Park Plaza on August 25-26^th.  If you’re attending, please stop by and get one of our very cool t-shirts and enter to win one of the many prizes we’re raffling off. If you want to schedule a time to chat or see some of our newest features, please sign up for a meeting with us. We’d love to speak with you.

Uniqueness of Boston DevOps Days – where to start

When Patrick Debois and Andrew Shafer coined the term DevOps back in 2009, they probably did not expect their concept for bringing together agile development and code deployment to become a worldwide phenomenon. However, today cities around the world host DevOps conferences and each conference has its own flavor. Boston’s attendees are not surprisingly from the high tech and biotech communities. Attendees from these groups are often looking at how to better deploy DevOps into software for gene sequencing and pharma. But even 7 years later, many of those who will be in attendance at the Boston conference will be DevOps novices.

This reality doesn’t surprise Boston conference organizer Dave Fredricks. Dave recommends the Open Spaces for those looking to learn more about DevOps as well as Sara Jarjoura’s talk on STEM through Minecraft for showing how to develop DevOps skills. Of course, there will be higher level discussions like Matthew Barr’s on how to keep workflow moving through security and audit and Barak Chamo’s talk on building serverless applications. The conference intends to have something for most everyone because at its core, DevOps Boston wants to grow your DevOps network, teach and evangelize.

Goals of DevOps Days Boston

Regardless of your knowledge level, there are 3 key actionable steps the conference organizers hope to impart to participants:

1. Grow your network

Organizers want you to meet people in the DevOps community so you can grow your understanding of the methodology and your ability to use the components of DevOps at your office. Effective implementation is predicated on having a network of skilled individuals to lean on and ask questions of when you are unsure of next steps. Use your interactions and conversations at the conference to find people who can become your personal wise counsel.

2. Absorb key lessons about DevOps

Learn the key lessons of DevOps and leave the conference with a few DevOps nuggets of wisdom. For example, you need everyone on board in your organization in order to effectively implement DevOps. Any friction against implementation will derail the efforts and make them moot. Worse, you’ll end up spend more time arguing over methodology than moving development forward.

3. Evangelize the DevOps culture

No surprise that the conference organizers want you to “drink the Kool-Aid”.  Organizers want you to go back to your workspace and peers and let everyone know the benefits of working in sprints and having engineers own their own code through deployment

As a company that actively encourages the use of DevOps in software development and deployment, OnPage would be remiss if it didn’t add a fourth point:

4. Learn about the tools DevOps engineers use to be effective at their job

Engineers often like shiny tools and are attracted to them like a moth to a flame. However, what is often most effective for engineers is not the newest tool but the one that is easy to implement and easy to use. OnPage falls into this category.

Critical Alerting is key to DevOps

DevOps would not be to where it is today though without the infusion of monitoring tools to augment the benefits and take automation to new heights. Owning deployment through integration and achieving agile implementation would not be possible without tools like Nagios and BigPanda (OnPage integration set for October 2016) which enable monitoring and rapid detection of IT issues. Key to effective monitoring though is effective alerting and this is where OnPage makes its mark. OnPage is key to alerting the correct engineer based on prioritized failures. If a critical failure happens, OnPage doesn’t provide JUST an email or a phone call or a beep on your smartphone. No. Instead, OnPage provides a loud and very audible alert to your smartphone as well as the “Email and Phone Call“. When your monitoring tool picks up a failed deployment or system failure, OnPage will let you know immediately. With OnPage, critical incidents are unable to occur without being heard.

There are many opportunities for critical alerting in DevOps and the Boston conference will clearly bring to light many new opportunities. We look forward to seeing you at DevOps Days Boston. Be sure to follow the conversation on Twitter @On_Page.