Velocity Conference 2016

I have just made it back from Velocity Conference in Santa Clara, covering all things DevOps and Web Performance in the heart of Silicon Valley. Unlike the AWS Re:Invent conferences, there was a broad spectrum of presenters including engineers from Google, Akamai, Fastly, Microsoft and Facebook along with the usual Etsy, Netflix, New Relic, Github crowd. The event is refreshingly vendor agnostic, people were free to say positive and negative things about vendor products. During the Netflix presentation Jonah Horowitz joked “Yes we do run Chaos Monkey in production, but AWS is Chaos Monkey as a Service!”

Major themes at Velocity 2016
Most of these topics will be quite predictable to engineers working in the DevOps space.

Girls in Tech!
Wow did Velocity really nail the girls in tech industry wide push. I estimate a ~40%/~60% female/male split between presentations and the girls won with the most engaging talks. Less salesy, with more humour and heart. Australia we have a long way to go in this area compared to the US of A, let alone Scandinavia.

Elainor Siatta’s (Security Architect @ Etsy) presented on how security teams can better enable technology teams instead of being the NO team.

Alice Godfuss’s (SRE @ New Relic) presented on managing Rockstar, Builder and Janitor style work in software development and operations team, calling for the need to balance and rotate this out across the entire team.

Rockstars need to do the janitor work too! Janitors need room to become Rockstars
HTTP2

Multiple presentations showcased the performance gains that can be achieved by adopting HTTP2. But the availability of HTTP2 is still thin on the ground. Akamai is offering it in beta still, Verizon (EdgeCast) and Fastly wasn’t able to provide any dates yet on when they will support it. And getting Apache H2 packages that run on Centos and Ubuntu is a PITA too. This is odd given the HTTP2 spec was released May 2015 and adopted by most browsers by the end of 2015.

Akamai presented a cautionary demonstration of HTTP2 increasing rather than reducing page load times, especially for sites not using progressive image download - so careful testing is needed on a site by site basis as they are migrated. Previously mentioned HTTP1 anti patterns like combining files, using sprites and sharding have been proven out in the wild to still be a good idea in HTTP2.

DevOps and Organisational Culture

Velocity conference tends to attract more of an Ops crowd, so Devs On Call, and owning releases right through to production were frequently mentioned to cure all ills hurting Ops teams sleep and job satisfaction.

“You Code it, Ship It and Own it”
Tools: New hotness

The usual composable infrastructure solutions and performance monitoring tools were touted to enable teams to move faster and handle businesses scaling up. Ansible seems to be getting considerable tractions for new startups without an existing investment in Puppet.

SOASTA: One nice surprise was how far the SOASTA offerings have come since I last saw a demo 18 months back. Their new Activity Impact Score capability enables us to see which front end performance issues actually matter to the end user - prioritisation gold. Many APM tools highlight far more issues than anyone has time to fix without a clear sense of which issues to fix first.

Signal FX: The new kid on the block in the APM space had a saucy offering with a plethora of pretty graphs and plugins. Its looks worthy of consideration as an alternative to New Relic.

ChatOps

ChatOps all the things in Slack/HipChat/Flowdock. Trigger releases, pull down logs & graphs and restart applications straight out of your favourite chat tool. Github's presentation demonstrated ChatOps as a great way to increase visibility in the team of what each engineer is doing and when they did it thereby improving team communication, cross skilling and efficiency. They also demonstrated a sweet Duo 2FA integration so sensitive ChatOps commands can be issued more securely.

Hashtag Serverless Computing everywhere!
Often mentioned, but quite often in jest too..

“Lets face it’s just servers you can’t SSH into!”.
Lambda, Heroku, Google App Engine were the main platforms of interest for microservices, typically written from the ground up with serverless in mind rather than migrating existing services.

Containers
Docker containers along with Kubernetes, Mesosphere and Swarm were HOT as expected although with a healthy dash of skepticism on how suitable containers are for most production workloads. O’Reilly Media already have mini books out on Docker Security and Kubernetes.

Notable topic absences
Just like climate change, getting traction on poor old IPv6 and the impending IPv4 apocalypse didn’t get any air time.

Summary
Overall an excellent conference to attend if you can convince your manager for a trip. I would say AWS has more dazzle and excitement, but that might just be the lure of Las Vegas talking. Check out the keynote speeches at https://www.youtube.com/user/OreillyMedia/videos