A large crowd of DevOps fanatics gathered in Marseille, France on November 14th to participate in sessions and workshops at the 5th DevOps D-Day event. The event was held in the VIP lounges of the famous, French soccer club arena of the Olympique de Marseille, right in the heart of the city. Despite the bad weather, 1,200 people and 24 sponsors gathered for the event.
The conference featured around fifty different sessions ranging from high-level talks about how to develop a DevOps mindset to detailed examples of how companies implemented DevOps within their organization. There were numerous sessions on specific technologies as well, with Kubernetes being a very popular topic. Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and longtime partner, AntemetA, co-sponsored a large booth and two keynote sessions. These were presented by Christian Schutz who spoke about the adoption of Kubernetes in French companies over the course of 2019 and how to build a CI/CD pipeline with Kubernetes and OpenStack.
During the breaks between sessions, crowds gathered in our booth, eager to play the famous arcade game, Space Invaders. The one who achieved the highest score won a prize offered by AntemetA. Those of us on the HPE Dev team spent a lot of time conversing with interesting event attendees, such as La Poste and Airbus Helicopters, as well as many university students who came looking for swag (and jobs). We also had a drawing for a prize where we randomly chose a name from those who signed up for the HPE Dev Newsletter. The winner of our drawing was from NeoPost. He came to pick up the gift and have his picture taken at the end of the day.
The few sessions I went to focused on customer experiences, which I always find interesting. In the sessions I attended, the speakers all delivered their talk in French in a laidback, interesting way. I found two sessions particularly engaging.
The first was from the sport’s gear manufacturer, Decathlon, who discussed their DevOps implementation and the toolset they put in place for their developer teams. The speaker explained that, within Decathlon, they have a developer community that participates in regular face-to-face meetups on particular technical subjects and their technology choices are made in conjunction with suggestions from the community.
The second talk I attended was given by an IT Manager from CMA CGM, one of the world’s top container transportation and shipping companies, who talked about their DevOps transformation. It was quite funny to hear a physical container shipping company talk about software containers, and how DevOps, when not done correctly, can quickly become DevOops!
Don’t we know it! DevOps requires many enterprises to change a lot of deeply entrenched processes. These changes can be challenging for some, as evidenced in our recent blog DevOps and its impact on project management. Don’t forget to check back and see what new blogs are up on the HPE Dev site on this and other interesting topics.