The State of DevOps: Has DevOps Hit a Wall?
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.
John Willis is Senior Director of the Global Transformation Office at Red Hat. Prior to Red Hat, he was the Director of Ecosystem Development for Docker, which he joined after the company he co-founded (SocketPlane, which focused on SDN for containers) was acquired by Docker in February 2015. Previous to founding SocketPlane in Fall 2014, John was the Chief DevOps Evangelist at Dell, which he joined following the Enstratius acquisition in May 2013. He has also held past executive roles at Chef and Canonical. John was one of the earliest cloud evangelists and is considered one of the founders of the DevOps movement. John is the author of 7 IBM Redbooks. He is also the co-author of the “DevOps Handbook” and “Beyond the Phoenix Project” along with author Gene Kim.
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.
Michael Clark has worked in large enterprise computing for over 25 years, first in operations and engineering, and for the past decade in architecture and strategy. He began his career in network and server platform engineering at Bausch & Lomb, where he was instrumental in developing B&L’s global network infrastructure and in launching their first website.
Mike then moved on to Fidelity Investments, where he ultimately took on management of desktop and server operations for Fidelity’s Retail Operations group, merged 19 technology support organizations across the U.S. into 1, and ran network and telecom operations for the Boston region. He spent his final 5 years at Fidelity in the Enterprise Architecture group focused on various platform infrastructure initiatives, including leading the effort to develop a unified server strategy for the firm.
Mike has spent the last 5 years engaged in global professional services activities. He recently became a Partner at Exceptional Leaders International, where his focus is on working with mid-market companies, many of them private-equity owned, to synchronize their business imperatives and technology strategies. He has deep experience in global networking and cloud implementations.
Mike is currently the Technology Industry and IT Consulting Executive at Renaissance Tech & Media. He has been with the company since 2010.
Now Boston-based, Mike hails from Canada, where he received his undergraduate education at The University of Western Ontario. He has since done graduate work at both Brandeis and Harvard.
In his spare time Mike enjoys photography, traveling, and digital audio recording.
