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by Aaron Brady.
Original Post: FLOSS DevOps Spring Conference 2015
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A couple of weeks ago some ofmycolleagues and I
travelled to York for the FLOSS UK Spring Conference (now named DevOps Spring
in some places, but not in others…), and in the spirit of blogging things, I
thought I’d write up the experience.
The Spring Conference was my first conference experience at work (in 2011)
and is the first place I gave a proper talk (in 2013). It’s also
perfectly timed for us at work because it happens before April, when Ubuntu
LTS releases come out.
We use the LTS cycle to implement changes to our infrastructure, so new things
that we learn at the conference can potentially be put to work right away and
it gets the operations team out of the office and able to gather our thoughts
for the next cycle.
We got our first taste of Ansible from jpmens‘ talk in 2013, and
that’s transformed how we work, so it’s been good value so far!
Anyway, that’s the conference in general, but I’m writing up this one
specifically.
York is a great location, it’s central, pretty and on a major train line. The
Hilton, where the conference was held, was great — although it has an
amazingly expensive bar — and the facilities and catering were great.
Projection, which is fraught with problems at most community conferences,
worked well and the whole conference was recorded by a professional AV
crew (speakers wore lapel mics and everything!). I’m keen to see the video
that comes out of the conference this year.
That said, when the rooms were joined it would have been great to have
amplification. Staffs Web Meetup has PA, and that’s for a single room
with about 50 attendees. Maybe I’m spoiled, but it makes a big difference, and
acknowledges that not everyone has perfect hearing.
Sponsors
Google, 2nd Quadrant, Eligo and O’Reilly had stands set up with merchandise,
prize draws and puzzles. There’s a standing discount on O’Reilly books for
UKUUG members, so it’s actually a great time to pick up a book, especially if
a talk has ignited an interest in something new.
The Google draw was for a Chromebook, which none of us wanted enough to go out
and buy, but were oddly drawn to when the chance to win one for free came
up :). Like most Google presence at conferences, there are quick tests and
puzzles and a form to fill in with recruiterish information (like what level
of education you have, and what your GitHub account is).
{ Disclosure: I won a spot prize! I got 100% on the SRE test, which
only me and Stu Teasdale managed. The SRE test was definitely easier
than the software development one, though, or maybe that’s my bias showing. }
The “keynote” was by John Leach, who gave a great introduction to what Docker
is, how it works and when to use it (and not use it). His presentation timing
was great and the whole thing was pretty engaging. He kept questions to the
end (good!) and, considering he was addressing a space the size of three
rooms, was audible from the back.
Keynote is in scare quotes because I tend to think of keynotes at conferences
as being general interest and largely non-technical - this was a good talk,
but could have gone in any talk slot. PyCon UK, for example, uses these
slots for invited guest speakers and things that affect the whole community.
I know that the original speaker for that slot pulled out at the last minute,
for which affordances should be made, but the second day keynote by Stu
Teasdale was similarly a technical talk suited to any slot.
Talks
I enjoyed the talks that I went to: Enhancing SSH for Security & Utility,
Shipping your product with Puppet code, Open Source Monitoring with Icinga,
Build Management with a dash of Prolog, Beyond Blue-Green, Introduction to
Btrfs, and Kerberos - Protocol and Practice.
{ Here’s the Lanyrd page if you’d like more
detail on any talk }
The speakers all did a good job and everyone was pretty good at keeping to
their time. FLOSS is the kind of conference where attendees will
just shout questions at you in the middle of your talk and I wish the session
chairs would intervene when talks are being pulled off course: it’s stressful
enough presenting when you’re just sticking to your prepared material and
there is dedicated Q&A time, after all.
The lightning talks were also fun (more disclosure: Ed and I gave one
each) though unusually stressful to present as seeing the presenter struggle
to finish in their time-slot seems like part of it. I particularly found
the bash shortcuts useful as they mostly work in zsh and, well, I use a
shell every day.
It’s not easy to put on a conference, and I don’t really have good suggestions
for improving the following things, especially because my main issues are
around the talks and people at the conference, which are just about the
hardest things to change.
The second day was a lot thinner than the first, it had fewer talks in
general and they were less relevant to our industry than the first day. The
conference actually ended up being wrapped ahead of schedule, and while that
meant getting home earlier (yay) it does really mean if you excluded closing
notes and the prize draw, it’s really a one and a half day conference, not a
two day one.
Also, despite rebranding as a “DevOps” conference, the material is largely the
same as it has been every year that I’ve gone: reasonably technical Unix
material.
No one agrees on what DevOps is, but at other DevOps-themed conferences I’ve
seen a lot more focus on solving business problems and workflows which
integrate developers. DevOps, IMHO, is not just throwing Puppet and Ansible at
a problem.
Unless you count Perl, developers are heavily under-represented at the Spring
conference. As are business people. I’d actually consider the whole conference
to be a bit anti-dev and anti-business, too, which is a little sad because it
perpetuates the BOFH stereotype and cuts of avenues for growth.
The conference could be a one day event and have a better pace, but then
people may not want to travel for a single day event — which could lead to a
lower attendance and potentially even fewer talks.
Even if the organisers did want to create a more inclusive DevOps event (for
example: with devs), where would they find them? The pool that they’re drawing
from is largely organisations that are UK Unix User Group members, and that
isn’t growing.
iWeb is generous enough to send us to a conference (sometimes more than
one) every year, but that means that we need to be choosy about where we go
and it’s getting harder to choose the Spring conference over other events.
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