DevOps Conference 2015

DevOps Conference 2015 in Munich - three days consisting of a workshop day and two conference days.
I've chosen The Docker Basics Workshop (in German) by Peter Roßbach. This workshop was very well prepared and led us through some typical tasks of building and running Docker containers with a good mixture of tips and tricks around managing those containers.
On the first conference day I attended the following sessions:

1. A keynote entitled DevOps State of the Union by John Willis. He talked a lot about culture, CAMS and ICE. Here you can find a collection of his recent talks.
2. Define Delivery Pipelines in Jenkins easily with Workflow DSL (in German) by Bernhard Cygan. It was an introduction into the Jenkins workflow plugin which provides a nice DSL for workflow definitions within Jenkins - but there seem to be some substantial differences between the commercial and the open source version ... not so nice.
3. Running Docker on AWS by Jonathan Weiss - a good wrap-up of the application management possibilities within AWS including a live demo of the integration between AWS OpsWorks and Amazon ECS.
4. Another keynote: Flexibility, how to make data science in banking work by Bart Buter. This was about how to enable data scientists with an agile working environment in the field of Big Data analysis.
5. Microservices and DevOps Journey at Wix.com by Aviran Mordo. This talk was very entertaining! Aviran talked about their journey from a monolithic to a microservice architecture ... about what to do when, and even more important, about what not to do at the beginning. As the company has to deal with the clash of their company name in German, he also showed their funny German commercial.
6. Completely Without Any Server? Yes, with AWS Lambda and API Gateway! (in German) by Andreas Mohrhard. AWS Lambda lets you run code without the need to explicitly set up an execution environment - Andreas presented a nice use case for this.
7. Wake me up before you Go-Go: Lightweight, Fast and Maintainable Web Services in Go (in German) by Philipp Tarasiewicz. A nice intro into the key concepts of Go and how to easily implement a web service.
8. Panel session: Building happier engineering teams with John Willis, Erkan Yanar, Peter Roßbach and Sebastian Meyen. To summarize it in short words: DevOps people want freedom, respect and challenges; they hate limitations, boring work and a blaming culture.
9. Three Open Space sessions completed this first conference day.

The second conference day was shorter:

1. Eight Things that make Continuous Delivery go Nuts by Eduards Sizovs - filled with war stories about how organizations kill CD, DevOps and a good team spirit by their processes and business decisions - very entertaining.
2. High Throughput Logging with Kafka and Spark by Alexandru Dabija and Viktor Kubinec. They showed a kind of opinionated logging solution based on Kafka and Spark motivated by Elasticsearch not fulfilling their requirements.
3. Reliable and Flexible Build Resources with Mesos, Docker and CoreOS (in German) by Georg Öttl - a good presentation of how they used Docker containers as Jenkins slaves.
4. Keynote: Tools, Culture, and Aesthetics: The Art of DevOps by J. Paul Reed - the title says it all and perfectly chimes in with the discussion about the DevOps mindset and culture. 
5. rkt: the container runtime by Iago Lopez Galeiras. A nice presentation of the core concepts and the architecture behind rkt, which takes a different road to application containers compared to Docker.

I skipped the final panel session.
My personal summary:

• Docker seems to be everywhere. But we should be cautious and not just follow a hype - ask yourself: Does Docker help in my current use case? Do I understand the implications?
• If you want to learn a new programming language, learn Go.
• Culture and people are more important than technology - see CAMS.