#DevOpsDays Auckland #NewZealand

Paul Colmer
05 October, 2017 10:19
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Paul Colmer

Lead digital architect ALC Training and Consulting
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Paul Colmer is the lead digital architect ALC Training and Consulting. He is responsible for creating and running all the cloud security courses, which include CCSP, AWS, Azure, Office 365 and cloud foundation certifications.

I've just got back from Auckland this week after my first experience of #DevOpsDays and without doubt, it is one of the best experiences I have encountered and a winning formula for a community-based conference. They bring the open to open-source.

I've been to a few conferences in my time, ranging from the Health Informatics Society through to the Gartner ITExpo and DevOps Days in New Zealand is one of the best.

I think because DevOps is really about a community that wants to improve the way that IT is perceived. To move away from the perception that IT is there as the business prevention service, and move towards a perception that the technologists are leading the way, helping businesses move to market faster and coaching end-users on how to get the best from their technology investments. Whether it's showing clients how to make the best of AWS Lambda for serverless computing, through to how to integrate automated receipts scanning apps into Xero. There is a real desire for change and a desire to lead the business.

There are 3 cool things that I wanted to share, that I think really made the conference special:

Open Spaces: chairs are arranged in a circle, and discussions around a particularly topic are lightly moderated. This provides an environment that is not dissimilar to an open-source forum online, but instead it happens in real-time, face to face in conversation.
Organisers are all Volunteers: All the organising and facilitation across the 2 days is all done by volunteers who give up their own time for FREE. Some of them travelling from overseas. This provides a real sense of community, which I strongly connect with, particularly as one of my passions is helping communities after significant storm events in Brisbane through my State Emergency Service volunteer work.
Presenters are Real - they have real-world DevOps experience and are simply sharing their stories in a free, open and collaborative way. Allowing extensive questioning after the sessions, as well as participating in many of the social activities. This provides all participants with an opportunity to connect with real DevOps leaders.

So, if you're serious about DevOps and want to learn more, you'd do worse than to attend a local DevOpsDays near you.

I noticed that there is some confusion, even amongst DevOps leaders, around where continuous integration / continuous delivery / continuous deployment fit within the DevOps toolchain.

Firstly these 3 terms have very specific definitions and meaning, aligning to the DevOps Institute Foundation certificate examination:

Continuous Integration (CI) – a development practice that requires developers to commit code into a shared repository at least daily.
Continuous Delivery (CD) - a methodology that focuses on making sure software is always in a releasable state throughout its lifecycle.
Continuous Testing - the process of executing automated tests as part of the deployment pipeline to obtain immediate feedback on the business risks associated with a software release candidate.
Continuous Deployment - a set of practices that enable every change that passes automated tests to be automatically deployed to production.

Secondly, AWS seems to be a very hot platform in use at the conference, so I thought it would also help to map these concepts against the tools that AWS now provides, as a way of giving something back. This comes from our AWS Technical Essentials 1 Day course we run to anyone who wants to understand, and see, the AWS core services: