Agenda

We’ll kick off Deserted Island DevOps 2021 with a special live musical performance by Sam Aaron!

As a person who made a career transition from musical theatre to the world of tech, there have been a lot of shiny tools, processes, and buzzwords, that my brain has had to absorb and adjust to. While some have been more difficult to adapt to than others (I’ll take an audition over whiteboarding ANY day!), I’ve discovered that as a human with ADHD applying DevOps to my day to day life has helped made me a more reliable, agile, and collaborative human. In this keynote, I’ll share some ways that I’ve applied DevOps to my day to day life, relationship, and mental health practices to make sure that I am better able to evolve, improve, and be a more reliable human.

Some adventures are fun and rewarding. Some (like 2020) are just exhausting. In order to keep on adventuring, it’s important to develop empathy, not only for your fellow adventurers, but also for yourself. Using tales from a year of running a remote Dungeons and Dragons campaign as a backdrop, this talk will cover practical strategies for practicing and leveling up your empathy. From character creation, we can learn how to be kind to ourselves and build individual resilience, even when the dice don’t roll our way. As we build up a balanced party well-set to brave some dungeons, we can look at ways to effectively interview and build stronger teams. And when we step back to look at the big picture story, we can learn valuable lessons for how to make the industry more inclusive and think about how the work we do affects the world around us.

One of the biggest hurdles that documentation writers face in maintaining documentation is staying on top of everything as it changes. We need to know what’s going on in the organization to be aware of pending changes to the code, so we’re not blindsided by code changes that may break documentation links, and cause docs to be incorrect or outdated. Sometimes it can feel like we’re just trying to catch up with what everyone else has done, which can be exhausting and frustrating. Devops teams tend to move fast and break things, and that doesn’t always work with how technical writers want to operate.

Ideally, engineers would update the documentation as they update code or add functionality, or work with you to update them as the coded feature is being worked on, but that doesn’t always happen. Additionally, the documentation team often has a better grasp of what is important to document for the end user, and is the team that bridges the knowledge gap between the engineers and the end users.

In this talk, we’ll go over strategies for keeping your documentation up to date when you have many engineers and fewer documentation writers.

Distributed tracing is a powerful observability tool, and its value becomes apparent when you have tons of services sending spans. You might be an engineer who has read the Jaeger docs and understand conceptually what distributed tracing can do for you, but how do you get management on board to give you money and engineering time? How do you get your org’s APIs to take that initial plunge or getting your company’s platforms sending spans? If you’re asking yourself these questions, please come along on this adventure! The key takeaway is how to make a successful pitch for a shared service that makes engineers happy and leadership happy!

Is your DevOps toolkit a deserted island of inaccessible tools? Are you unsure if you have enough bridges and ramps for people to get around your island? In this session, I will give you some guides on how to make your tooling usable and easy for differently-abled people!

Our priorities inform what we do with our money. What do you really need those bells for? Are you trying to add an extension on your home or get a five star island? How will what you buy help? How do you plan to get those bells?

One of the ways to make bells is the selling of fruits and turnips. Fruits are an abundant sellable resource that requires space on your island (infrastructure) and a friend’s island to sell (connections). The return rate is steady but not time blocked. Turnips appear once a week with ten selling windows a week that can vary wildly on price where taking a loss is pretty common.

Knowing this, I’ll demonstrate how spend can tell us what our priorities were and the pros and cons to each approach. Cost management is more than cutting costs, but making sure the costs that are made support those priorities.

How large DevOps investments will ensure you, your team, and your organization can spend more time focusing on developing new features (and/or playing Animal Crossing) and less time fiddling with config.

Pick up Apache Kafka and learn how it can enhance a tech stack with distributed real-time event streaming. Hear about how Apache Kafka works, practical use cases, and how to get started. At the end, join my island villagers and myself preparing to host a dinner party demonstrated with Apache Kafka! Afterwards, maybe you too could come up with your own Animal Crossing Apache Kafka themed demo!

We might have just spent the last year mastering the art of having the perfect flower field around our home, keeping the weeds out of our island, or just trying to build relationships with our neighbors. The skills and the lessons we’ve mastered through building our islands can also help us in real life, from staying connected to building stronger engineering teams and applications. Let’s take a moment to see the similarities of the work we’ve done on our islands, ourselves, workplaces, and celebrate all we’ve learned.

DevOps as a field is intimidating, with a Google search turning up corporate webinars and complex diagrams. At Bit Project, a tech education nonprofit, we introduce DevOps tooling as a natural part of the curriculum to develop and ship apps.

During the session, Senior Engineer Daniel Kim and High School student Emily Chen will discuss their experience making DevOps accessible for beginner developers. In addition, they will present student projects that have incorporated CI/CD and Infrastructure in unique and interesting way

Building community can be challenging, but it can be very rewarding. In this presentation we will explore how to build personal resilience during times of struggle, explore the concept of resiliency and how it can impact our lives, learn tips for creating strong foundational building blocks as the basis for a thriving digital community, and how to foster connections in unconventional places–Like Animal Crossing!

It’s lovely to spend time decorating your house and grounds while tanukis come in mysteriously and upgrade your house when you’re not watching. It’s also lovely to build on top of other tooling so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. However, what would happen if Timmy and Tommy decided to tell Mr. Nook that they’d rather watch for shooting stars one night? Do you understand how your third-party tooling works, or, more importantly, why it was built in the first place? Many platforms have been built on third-party tooling without thinking about the full implications of what happens when different systems might go down, and those platforms fall apart when there’s an issue because the folks who built them don’t understand how that third-party tooling they relied on works in the first place. We want to avoid that reckoning, but how? How can we be sure our houses will get upgraded if Timmy and Tommy were to go on strike? Let’s talk about it.

Telemetry agents (collectors, sidecars) run in isolated environments with expensive communication bandwidth, like an island! Agents are operated remotely and have to be brought up with limited observability. Until the agents become operational, they are operated by field technicians who are usually not experts in observability. After the agents become operational, they are expected to be very reliable, which means they have to meet the highest standard for observability.

This talk will cover the successes and challenges we found, using the OpenTelemetry-Go SDK to instrument the OpenTelemetry Prometheus Sidecar agent at Lightstep.