Devops Down Under 2011 draws in big Cloud names

The second annual Devops Down Under conference will be held in Melbourne next month with attendees representing Australia’s largest online businesses and a few international speakers thrown in for good measure.

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Devops aims to bridge the gap between the developers who write the code and the system administrators who manage the hosted applications in the Cloud.

The inaugural event was held in Sydney last year, and judging by the level of interest this year, the event resonated well with local developers and operations staff.

This year’s keynote will be delivered by Patrick Debois, an IT professional from Belgium who first coined the term “Devops”.

Other speakers include developers and operations staff from ThoughtWorks, Puppet Labs, NineFold and learnable.com.

However, the attendee line up is equally interesting with people from GitHub, Fairfax Digital, Reece Plumbing, Google, Realestate.com.au, Lonely Planet, Wotif, Aconex, Sensis, News Digital Media, Toll Group, Seek and even the federal government’s NBN Co set to be there.

Devops Down Under organiser Lindsay Holmwood said there is a “growing, growing awareness” as to what devops is, especially in Australia “where we tend to lag behind in adoption of new technologies”.

“Last year we didn’t do so well at tailoring content for developers and operations teams, but this year we have a whole day on how to improve collaboration and gelling with one another,” Holmwood said.

Holmwood works as research and development manager at hosting company Bulletproof Networks.

The first day will be focused on business process methodologies and the second day will be more technical with a Cloud and operations focus.

Holmwood is excited to have Patrick Debois attending and says he helped coalesce a “whole bunch of disciplines within IT” to form the devops movement.

“He was visionary in that he recognised the common trends between them and how with devops we can get ourselves to a better place that where we are now,” he said.

Holmwood said the prime international example of devops in action would be Flickr, but locally Realestate.com.au is “massive” on devops and has a whole rotation system where it will take people from operations and embed them in development teams and vice versa.

Holmwood also praised local Cloud company Ninefold for its work the cloud abstraction library fog.

“It’s good to see a local company doing interesting work on an open source Cloud computing project,” he said.

Devops Down Under is online at: Devopsdownunder.org. Follow it on Twitter at: @devopsdownunder

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