My Perfect Week for DevOps @ Think 2019

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DevOps sessions at Think 2019

I’ve been asked by a number of clients for great DevOps sessions to look out for during Think 2019, February 12–15 in San Francisco. For most who are arriving on Monday, February 11, take time to get settled and see the city. If you are all-in on UrbanCode, consider spending part of your Monday with us at a special session where we’ll talk roadmap and best practices. For more details, contact Randi Anderson, Customer Advocacy Manager (Randi.anderson@hcl.com).

For those in the IBM Inner Circle, starting early Monday morning, there’s sessions around testing, mainframe DevOps, multicloud management, and more. If you’re interested, arrive Sunday night and use the agenda builder to sign up for sessions.

Tuesday, February 12: Smart Starts Here

Early risers should consider the fun run at Yueba Gardens at 6:30 in the morning.

Everyone else can sleep in, get a good breakfast, and be ready for pre-conference sessions starting at 8:30am that are only listed in the agenda builder for registered attendees. These are special limited-seating sessions and hands-on labs prior to the opening general session later that afternoon. If you’ve already registered, clients and business partners should select the option “Already registered? Edit registration details” to sign up for Smart Starts Here.

• 8:30am and 9:30am — Head to Moscone Center South, room 201, in time for Riyad Bank’s 8:30am talk on transformation and using Kubernetes (IBM Cloud Private). Stay in the room for my session at 9:30, What’s New in DevOps. This should set the tone for the week and help you decide where you want to spend your time.
• 10:30am — Now it’s time to get out of the building, head outside and over to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. At 10:30am, session 6926 Managing the Hybrid Multicloud World for Digital Transformation looks at how to tackle managing workloads spread across multiple clouds.
• 12:30pm and 1:30pm — Get lunch and head back to Moscone room 204 at 12:30pm for Modernization with Enterprises with Kubernetes and DevOps. By now you have heard some Kubes and some DevOps and its really time to put it together with a “real world” story. Then head upstairs at 1:30pm to room 302 for session 1214, How to Realize the Value of DevOps. This panel will rock, featuring an analyst, a customer, an IBM distinguished engineer, and our moderator, Alan Shimel, of DevOps.com.
• 3:00pm — Take a break and socialize before heading to the Chairman’s Address at 3:00pm, which will be filled with great customer stories, announcements, and entertainment. As that wraps, join us for the grand opening of the Expo Hall and get some demos of tools that caught your eye during the day.

Wednesday, February 13: Mainframe and DevOps

While there’s plenty of variety on Wednesday, this agenda is definitely focused on the mainframe.

• 8:30am and 9:30am — You’re starting your day at 8:30am again. Rosalind Radcliffe’s talk Fuel Digital Transformation with Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery and Open Source can’t be missed. Consider heading over to the Metreon at 9:30am to hear the team from IBM Global Business Services talk about Self-Service DevOps Pipeline Composition and Provisioning Using IBM DevOps Commander, a clever solution to standing up DevOps toolchains in a repeatable way. Pick up lessons learned for your own teams that deliver tools as a service.
• 10:30am — If you went over to the Metreon, hustle back to Moscone and choose your adventure at 10:30am. If you work anywhere near a mainframe, go to David Huber of US Bank’s talk Mainframe DevOps: Automated Continuous Testing with IBM’s Suite of Tools. He has great insights on APIs, continuous delivery tools, and test automation. For a more cloud-centric experience, go to Roland Barcia and Dave Mulley’s talk End-to-End Application Modernization. They’ve been-there, done-that when it comes to moving to containers and getting DevOps pipelines going.
• 12:30pm — Have an early lunch again and come back to Moscone for How DNB Achieved Release Automation on Proprietary Platforms with IBM UrbanCode Deploy and Release (DNB is the largest financial services group in Norway). I love their story due to its breadth and complications. They have plenty of outsourcing vendors and apps on everything from the mainframe to .Net and plenty of governance including ServiceNow integrations.
• 1:30pm — Head downstairs to the Exhibit Hall for your first “Think Tank” session Dev-Test-Deliver with Microclimate, IBM UrbanCode Deploy and IBM UrbanCode Velocity. Hear about the Microclimate developer experience for IBM Cloud Private, Jenkins, and UrbanCode Deploy and Velocity working in concert. My friend, Al Wagner, is leading this session. It’s sure to rock.
• 3:30pm — Inner Circle participants might look up the ModelOps session while everyone else stays in the Expo Hall for a discussion of the business impact of Cloud-Native (Cloud Theater F). Either way, by 3:30pm, you should be back upstairs in the Moscone Ballroom 207 for session Escaping Alcatraz: Breaking Free from Heritage DevOps with Your Modern Apps with Roland and Andrea Martinez (Cloud Garage CTO). The concept seemed funny to me until I saw more of their presentation. It’s surprising stuff—and dead-on. Go there.
• 4:30pm — This time slot offers an embarrassment of riches in case studies. Lloyds Bank will talk about DevSecOps (session 6370A), BNPP discusses bringing mainframe and distributed devs together with DevOps (session 2588A), and AllState highlights leadership from its mainframe teams in pushing DevOps with RTC and UCD (session 2810A).

Spend Wednesday night away from the busy conference. Get a great dinner at one of the fantastic dining options San Fran has to offer.

Thursday, February 14: An embarrassment of DevOps riches

You were probably tired from yesterday and decided to sleep in. That’s great, because there’s a long day ahead of us.

• 8:30am and 9:30am — If you are up early, look for Building for High Security and Compliance in a Hybrid Cloud at 8:30am. Otherwise, start your day at 9:30am with Sunil Joshi’s talk, Applying Software Engineering Principles in a Cloud-Native World. He brings forward a lot of the strong techniques we learned in traditional architectures and modernizes them for cloud-native. This is a great session for those trying to bridge between the existing and the hyper-modern.
• 10:30am — Walk down the hall to room 208 for an introduction to UrbanCode Velocity (session 7326). While you will have seen a bit of Velocity working with Jenkins pipelines so far, this session will focus on using Velocity to surface bottlenecks in your delivery process so you can drive excellence within your team or across your enterprise.

A smorgasbord of options for lunchtime—this might be the day to pack some Powerbars!

If you powered through with snacks, go find something to eat. There are good choices at 1:30pm, but you probably need a break.

Friday, February 15: The last word on site reliability engineering, continuous delivery

At 9:30am in Moscone 204, Ingo Averdunk provides the overview What Exactly is Site Reliability Engineering? Wrap-up with our dynamic duo from Germany, Thomas Mueller and Oliver Lucht, in Moscone 201 at 10:30am. Their session DevOps and IBM Cloud Private—An Unbeatable Combination dives into the relationship between cloud platforms and continuous delivery.

What a great way to wrap your week!