My experience of Velocity 2016

Hello,

Eficode offers us a capability to apply for conferences and based on how good your explanation is you get to go there. In my case after reading Phoenix Project and hearing about Velocity I wanted to see what is the state of Devops in current day.

Well what’s the state of Devops? It’s pretty much what you expect everyone was talking about containers, microservices and monitoring. Sadly Velocity talks were mostly about monitoring and HTTP 2 and how to do this efficiently. There were some good talks like for example ePBF and how to scale your elastic search cluster and of course some good keynotes such as DYN explaining what happened on that faithful DDoS attack day. There were also some really boring talks and I found out that finding a solid talk is about checking topic + company keeping the talk. Usually if you don’t recognize the company and the topic is 50/50 state for you. You will probably not like the talk.

So What did I learn at Velocity? I learnt that HTTP 2 is something to follow as it seemed to have lot of hype around it. I learnt about ePBF which was new to me I have followed Sysdig a bit more and now I got a new tech to follow. AirBnB is good and bad at the sametime (my bed made lot of noise if I moved). Inspec is something that looks very promising and that doing chatops like my team does is something most IT support teams are doing. There wasn’t that much of direct talks to me. Lot of them sounded awesome and were awesome, but there were just hints and pieces I could use in my work. But connecting those pieces is probably the thing that will help.

What I didn’t like? The lack of after party or the fact that the after party was 1 hour long. It kind of makes it really hard to meet all the awesome people. I managed to meet a lot of very interesting people and was very sad I had to keep switching tables to meet people and get to know more of what’s Devops like in Europe. I also didn’t really enjoy the distance between everything. You walk a lot in Velocity so bring your walking shoes.

What I liked about Amsterdam? Well it was nice seeing Amsterdam as it was my first trip there. Food was good and price was below Finland. Then again beer was about the same price range as in Finland. The ring shape of the city is really fun because you can navigate around easily.

So would I go again? Maybe if I get a change. How does it fare against AtlasCamp? Well it doesn’t. Two different kind of events with very different crowds. In AtlasCamp if you are and Atlassian expert you can talk to anyone about the stuff. In Velocity you need to know web, mobile and scalable development and add your Devops knowledge to this. While also understanding kernel etc. Linux and Windows to get everything out of it. It’s a diverse place with lot of different kind of people working in different tool sets and products.

Well it’s time to get back to work and creating training material for Compliance testing for Eficodeans. Stay tuned for more blogs – and well, Christmas is soon here so happy holidays!

– Kalle