Devops cloud conference heads down under

Devops Down Under aims to bring developers and system administrators together

The inaugural Australian Devops Down Under cloud computing conference is scheduled for Sydney next month and, as its tagline goes, is open to developers who administer systems and administrators who “write code”.

Conference organiser Lindsay Holmwood said the concept of “Devops” is important because it aims to bridge the gaps that have traditionally been between developers and system administrators, which can result in better quality software.

“In today’s cloud and SaaS environment you don’t have to release software the traditional way as a product and you are able deploy things a lot more easily,” Holmwood said. “What people have found is a lot of gaps in deployment, like scalability, and something explodes in production and the blame is shifted to sysdmins who deployed it, not the developers who wrote it.”

“So the idea is to get more cooperation between the two groups.”

Holmwood, who works as the “awesome engineer of superb versatility” at Ruby on Rails managed service provider Rails Machine, said Devops has taken off in Europe and there will be a conference in the US in June.

There is interest locally too, with about 30 people registered so far and 60 people expected to attend the vent in Australia.

“A lot more traditional businesses can derive value form Devops. If you have sysadmins understanding code it will result in better products,” Holmwood said, adding he would be happy to see people from traditional software companies attend.

“SaaS and cloud computing has uncovered a lot of these communication problems that have been there since the dawn of time and end up being pushed to customers,” he said.

Holmwood is now actively pursuing more developer involvement for Devops Down Under and says sysadmins have being doing more Devops-like work for about the past five years.

The content at Devops will range from process and methodology down to building better tools, with more of a focus on the former, which Holmwood says makes the conference relevant to senior IT managers in addition to operations staff.

“The second half-day will be for open sessions that could last from five minutes to an hour based on a topic of people’s choosing -- you can be as technical or as broad as you like.”

The Devops Down Under conference runs from May 1 to 2 at the Atlassian offices in Sydney. Entry is $50 per person.