My 10 Key Takeaways from the DevOps Enterprise Summit 2021

The DevOps Enterprise Summit is one of the key conferences I make a point to attend since it's full of nuggets of DevOps experience from the Enterprise IT World.

This year was no different and had a great time learning from others as well as leading thinkers in the DevOPsoftware engineering space.

Here are my 10 key takeaways from the summit as I caught up with all the presentations:

1.????Many companies magnanimously shared their DevOps journey and learnings. Notable ones being – Target, Nationwide Insurance, eBay, US Bank, Aflac, Comcast, Metlife, State Farm Insurance, Vanguard, Capital One. It was great to see some companies coming back and continuing their stories from last year.

2.????Multiple talks on Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and people’s learning on the same shows that SRE is gathering steam in Enterprise IT. The talk on SRE by Google folks (Jennifer Petoff & Christof Leng) was the highlight but great experience sharing from Vanguard, British Telecom & Comcast as well. SRE still seems nascent in Enterprise IT but great to see the early adopters.

3.????Value Streams, Flow Engineering & Flow metrics seemed to be another theme that came up in multiple presentations and good to see the latest thinking from the likes of Dr. Mik Kersten (from Tasktop) & Steve Pereira and flow metrics adoption story from the Bank of New Zealand. A couple of good resources – https://inside-out.work?& https://flowframework.org/

4.????Even the Government is using DevOps !!!! If they can, you can. Multiple presentations from the likes of the US Navy, NSA, DoD, The Canadian Government, The US Airforce showcased how they are leveraging DevOps to improve different outcomes. Yep the US Airforce is doing Cloud Native DevOps & the NSA is using DevOps for a better developer experience. Loved the NSA talk and the bureaucracy hacks that were shared !!!

5.????Metrics Matter. Great presentations on using OKRs, how to misuse DORA metrics ? , flow metrics, Using metrics for learning & combining DORA metrics with feature management.?Good to see some metrics frameworks getting standardized and?real-life stories of adoption.

6.????Security first mindset. It's DevSecOps after all. There has to be security-related presentations and the software supply chain was a hot topic !!! The one that stood out for me was the talk?about thinking upstream about Whitehouse Cybersecurity Exec Order. Gave a good perspective and made it real. Also, good presentation by Cisco on how they used automation to embed security into their products.

7.????Observability is key to the 2nd way of DevOps and there are a few good presentations on it (though some of them were vendor presentations). A good resource that I came across – https://Opentelemetry.io

8.????Cloud & Platforms continues to gain adoption. Multiple presentations brought forth best practices and learnings in the area - Vanguard’s story of cloud migration, the DoD Platform One, Truist’s story of building their internal platform in a bank (Special mention to Sanjeev for the Loki reference), Syntasso’s presentation, and their coining the term “Platform Gap” (the chasm each team must cross between the infrastructure and their meaningful product value) and how to treat the platform as a product and Discover’s journey on parallel adoption of Cloud & DevOps (Single backlog for Dev & Ops? What a novel idea ?).

9.????Leveraging community, Dojos, Book Clubs, Working during the Pandemic & building a learning organization – all these were the very relevant topics of presentations and good stories related to each one of these.

10.?And last but not least. The 2 big presentations/keynotes were very insightful. The first one was by Ron Westrum on Information Flow Cultures where he talked about his famous Generative, Bureaucratic & Pathological information flow cultures and used Boeing as the prime case study among others. The second one was by Gene Kim & Dr. Steven Spears (both of whom I have huge respect and admiration for) on the Four Characteristics of Structure needed to get great dynamics. When asked Gene about this concept (during the Happy hour), he described kind of a “Theory of Everything” on how companies achieve the outcomes they want through the structure of the organization & corresponding technical system. BTW, the 4 characteristics that Dr. Steven Spear described were Simplification, Standardization, Stabilization & Synchronization. Interesting to hear about the different use cases that fit the 4 characteristics. Very much looking forward to their book on the topic !!!!

And I think the biggest takeaway was that we are not alone !!! The problems & challenges in the community are more similar than dissimilar. The lean coffee, birds of feather & happy hour were great for sharing experiences and war stories.

BTW, the videos of the conference are available here - https://videos.itrevolution.com/ .You will need a subscription to access these and previous conf videos, but very much worth it !!!