From 11th to 13th of March 2019 the 3rd DevOps Gathering was held at the G Data Campus in Bochum. With 31 Speakers and 199 attendees it was a very exciting and extensive conference. But it not only was a pure conference, it also featured a nice workshop day.
Workshop day
The first day of this 3-day DevOps meetup was supposed to be all about workshops. A perfect fit for cloud-native engineers and SREs. You had the chance to learn from exciting cloud-native enablers, Docker community members, and international experts. The workshops also left room for experiments and talks with other attendees. The topics ranged from docker security to Kubernetes on Amazon EKS and Kubernetes 101. It was a kind of everything DevOps is about. On top of that there was also an introduction to agile working.
Conference day 1
With day 2 of the event the series of talks began. It started with “DevOps -It’s all about experiments” followed by “What the heck is Software Craftsmanship” held by a former epagee Benjamin Nothdurft and his colleague Sandra Parsick. This second talk was about software engineering that aims to regard software development as a skilled craft instead of a classical engineering approach.
The day continued with Kubernetes for Non-Coders, dedicated to attendees without any technical background. Bill Mulligan explained the use of Kubernetes, and how you can make the best use out of the tool HELM for your container systems with Kubernetes. The afternoon was filled with sessions about Docker containers on Windows Server 2019 held by Stefan Scherer of Docker Inc.
Last but not least the day ended with talks such as Go as a Tooling Language for the Cloud as well as some lightning talks about security as well as how to convince your company that DevOps is a transitional mode of operations and the means to a goal instead of goal in itself.
In the evening the conference party was held where I was able to talk to other attendees, and share experiences on the topic of DevOps. Of course we also had some snacks and drinks.
Conference day 2
The last day of talks started wit a slot about how Google started their DevOps path. Mario Kleinsasser and Alexander Ortner then held a very interesting lecture about how the STRABAG AG made the change from their Monolit Software architecture to a dockerized system. I think this is something most companies have to deal with. Also the talk about consumer-based contract testing from Stephan Stapel of the HERMES GmbH gave some interesting insights how HERMES deals with testing changes on a regular basis, and how they deal with changes to their contracts. The last part of the final day at the DevOps Gathering 2019 was about how you can best use Kubernetes for many clusters, and how you can use it to deliver cloud-native apps on Azure.
Summary
Visiting the DevOps Gathering is great for anyone with DevOps background or the desire to be able to use DevOps technology. Not only can you listen to talks from very experienced people, but also make use of the workshop day where you can take a deeper look into DevOps-specific work.
I personally learned a lot about Kubernetes, and was surprised how many companies face the same challenges than we do. What’s more, I got a deeper understanding of the work of our Application Management Team.
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