Devopsdays Amsterdam 2018: reflection

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#conference #devops #docker #elastic #go #kubernetes #opinion

About a week has past since devopsdays Amsterdam. Time to write down some of my thoughts.

The conference

This has been the third time I went to devopsdays Amsterdam. And I love this conference!

Some of the reasons:

  • The organizers manage to get great speakers with interesting talks on stage each year.
  • Pakhuis de Zwijger is a great location.
  • Excellent Wi-Fi.
  • Great atmosphere.
  • Good food.

The workshops

Go

I had heard about Go, some of my co-workers have some experience with it, but I never wrote anything in the language. I was curious about it though.

The workshop from Michael Hausenblas was a nice intro. Based on what he told and showed us I cannot say that I expect that Go will replace Bash and Python for me. However, I will make some time to actually write some code myself to get a better feel for it.

Monitoring with Elastic

We are already using the Elastic Stack in some places at work, but I have not used it for monitoring purposes. (I gravitate towards Prometheus combined with Alertmanager for alerting and Grafana for dashboards with graphs.) However, Philipp Krenn showed us that you can also do very interesting things with Kibana in the monitoring and debugging realm. Especially since you can correlate metrics with logs in the same tool.

Kubernetes

I could say that Bridget Kromhout’s Kubernetes workshop was a nice refresher of what I had learned in the Kubernetes workshop last year but, to be honest, that would be a lie. I am glad I took this workshop.

It was a good workshop with lots of hands-on tasks. But it went a bit too fast to make it stick. I would have to spend more time on a Kubernetes cluster to really understand everything and get fluent with it. Luckily there is lots of information on container.training (including the sheets of this workshop) and there are plenty of cloud providers where you can get a Kubernetes cluster without having to create or maintain it yourself.

The talks

The talk that resonated most with me this year was the one from Waldo Grunenwald about product teams. Perhaps because (in my opinion) this is something that could be better in my job. Product management, development and operations are three different teams with different managers. Then again, I currently try to be the “ops guy” in our development team so that’s also DevOps, right? :)

The other most memorable talks for me were:

Miscellaneous

I have been using Emacs for quite a while. I was a Vim user in the past, but switched somewhere between 2007 and 2009. (The first time I wrote about Emacs here was in 2009.)

I have tried PyCharm a couple of times and it is a really nice editor with very useful features. It just never stuck with me and I always went back to Emacs after a while.

During the conference I used Visual Studio Code to write my notes. And I have to say I quite liked it. I intend to also give it a go at work. Who knows, I might even switch…