Chef at DevOpsDays Detroit

In the US Mid-West and the Southern part of Ontario, Canada, we’re lucky enough to have several DevOps events spread out from spring to fall. October hails the end of the conference season here, mainly because travel becomes dreadful once it begins to snow!

I was lucky enough to attend DevOps Days Detroit, October 12-13, at the A. Alfred Taubman Center for Design Education, College for Creative Studies. Detroit’s revival is visible and in full swing! In the shadow of Wayne State University and one of Ford’s many campuses, the area is vibrant and the city’s youth and art movement is thriving in the building.

Here you can see Bill Meyer, Solutions Architect from Chef on the first morning, and the excellent setup we enjoyed!

Chef at DevOpsDays Detroit

Day one was headlined by the always inspiring Bridget Kromhout. She eloquently provided real world examples as to how you can’t “buy DevOps”. The road to mastering DevOps in your organization is a complex one that involves cultural changes alongside tool changes, for both practitioners and management. Bridget does call out that making thoughtful decisions on tools and infrastructure can help, but it’s only part of the journey. If you have an opportunity to see her speak at other events I’d highly recommend it.

This DevOpsDays was a bit different in that the open spaces sessions were minimized. I think it suited the crowd pretty well. There was a good mix of new DevOps adopters and veterans, and having more speakers seemed to make the event more approachable for the newer DevOps practitioners.

The Chef booth had a lot of traffic and, although that is awesome, it meant I never made it to an open spaces session. Some of the hot topics this year were containers and server-less infrastructure. That led to some deep dive discussions on our newest open-source project for application automation, Habitat, and how it works. 

Overall, the event went off without a hitch! I can say it was one of the best DevOpsDays I attended this year. The organizers did an excellent job scaling the event from ~100 people last year to well over 200 this year. It’s amazing to see the DevOps community in Detroit grow and thrive.

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Andrew DuFour

Andrew is a recovering systems engineer/administrator, integrator and video game addict, from Toronto, Ontario. He’s spent the last 10 years automating things in IT in various roles across Military, Government, and private industries. He was a Success Engineer at Chef, helping Chef’s customers solve problems and move faster, safer. When not slinging code he loves a good beer, pizza and hockey.