March was an intense month. Starting off with several meetups in NYC and Chattanooga, the next conferences in Germany were only separated by a few days of relaxation. There, I was invited by the German Unix User Group's Frühlingsfachgespräche (in English: Spring expert talks). I then had to hop on a train to present in Bochum at the DevOps Gathering.
Starting my journey at 7 am in Darmstadt, I arrived around 11 am in Bochum at the G Data campus, just in time to hear Peter Rossbach speak about Docker swarm. This was followed by Maykel Moya talking about their experiences with Prometheus. After that we were invited for lunch at the on-site canteen.
After a longer break, the talks continued with Stefan Scherer presenting multi-architecture builds for Docker containers—something that is quite useful for ARM or Windows builds! Since I have run into this problem too, it was great having it explained by a Docker expert.
The next talk was very inspiring and was presented by 17-year-old Kubernetes contributor Lucas Klädström, who showed us Kubernetes orchestration on ARM devices, complete with a small cluster of Raspberry Pis and ODROIDs!
Then, the inventors of Traefik went on stage and showed off the capabilities of a modern microservice-enabled load balancer—software that has been on my radar for a while.
Following that, I gave my talk on an open stack for machine data with CrateDB. And it went well, I think. The questions and answers were particularly good.
Here are my slides from the talk:
The closing keynote was a very interesting take on how DevOps is changing business processes. And I was really struck by how DevOps as a movement is becoming more and more a movement that is improving the whole workplace environment—not just engineering.
The DevOps Gathering was great. Kudos to the organizers for pulling off a really good first-time conference.
I really felt at home there with my talk. I learnt a lot of new stuff, including how to improve my own Raspberry Pi setup. Unfortunately though, I could not take part in the open space on the following day, had a more workshop-oriented thing going on.
I am looking forward to next year's DevOps Gathering.
Maybe I'll see you there?
- Claus