The State of DevOps: Has DevOps Hit a Wall?

Spring 2021

Industry thought leaders consider DevOps practices essential to the successful delivery of software-driven business value at scale. Yet despite the significant embrace of DevOps over the past decade, many organizations struggle to move beyond the middle stages of their DevOps journey. Many find it difficult to scale DevOps beyond their initial preliminary deployment, failing to achieve the degree of enterprise lift needed to realize DevOps’ full potential. Why is this the case? What can organizations do to salvage their DevOps deployments? This session brings together a group of seasoned DevOps practitioners to take a sympathetically critical look at the state of the field today.

Speakers:

John Willis

John Willis is an experienced IT management professional with over 40 years of experience. He is currently conducting research on DevOps, DevSecOps, IT risk, modern governance, and audit compliance, as well as Generative AI. In the past, he has held various positions such as Senior Director at RedHat, VP at Docker Inc., Founder of Socketplane (which was later sold to Docker) and Enstratius (which was later sold to Dell), and VP at Opscode. He also founded Gulf Breeze Software, an award-winning IBM business partner specializing in Tivoli technology deployment.

John Willis is also an accomplished author, having written six IBM Redbooks on enterprise systems management and four books for IT Revolution, including the DevOps Handbook and Deming’s Journey to Profound Knowledge. He is working on his latest book, The Operational History of Generative AI.

Suzan Mahboob

Suzan Mahboob enjoys everything Infrastructure Innovation. She is an active member of the technology community, speaking regularly at conferences, covering topics that are pushing boundaries and helping us transform the way we do things. She knows the challenges we face when working within monolithic, matrixed, large enterprises and hopes to bring her experiences detangling and decommissioning brownfield technologies while advancing greenfield initiatives. When she isn’t putting out production fires, she’s busy writing her blog, partnering and advocating for diversity in technology and exploring the great city of Toronto.

Anaf Durrani

Michael Thomas Clark

Michael is a veteran technologist with over 30 years’ experience in large enterprise computing. He began his career as a network and server engineer at Bausch & Lomb in the early days of distributed computing before moving on to Fidelity Investments and progressively larger systems management roles.

He finished up his time at Fidelity in Enterprise Architecture, where he focused on various platform infrastructure initiatives, including leading the effort to develop a unified compute platform strategy for the firm. Michael has spent the last decade engaged in an array of global professional services activities, working with private-equity firms and startups in healthcare data management and network security.

As a Core Organizer for the annual DevOpsDays Boston conference since 2017, Michael also co-founded “Boston DevOps Network, Inc,” a non-profit aimed at promoting DevOps learning and community-building in the Greater Boston area. Since 2015, he has worked with what is now the ONUG Cloud Native Security Working Group, where he is currently co-Chair with Forrest Bennett of FedEx. In 2019, Michael worked with Nick Lippis to launch ONUG’s first set of conference tracks focused on DevOps practices.

Today, he continues to consult on Cloud infrastructure and security projects and recently launched a new podcast series: “The Wages of Cybercrime.”