Guide to DevOps Enterprise Summit 2017

Editor's note

November 2017 will mark the fourth year of the DevOps Enterprise Summit in San Francisco. Aimed at bringing large and complex organizations working with DevOps together with industry pundits and practitioners, the conference's theme this year is "Deep dive into DevOps."

For perspective, last year's conference had over 100 speakers and over 1,300 attendees who could choose from 75 different DevOps-related sessions. This year's conference sold out well before it began.

The DevOps Enterprise Summit (DOES) has six tracks for attendees to choose from: Architecture, Business Buy-In, Experience Report, Ops & Next Generation Leadership, Security & Compliance and Technology for Technology Leaders. Since the conference is focused on how large organizations have implemented DevOps -- and the challenges involved -- many of the tracks feature speakers talking firsthand about DevOps successes and failures. At DOES17, a wide range of industries are represented from government to banking, retail, insurance, healthcare, food services and entertainment.

The schedule reflects the challenges DevOps presents to large organizations around the world. From scaling to automation, DevOps requires sweeping cultural changes, as well as new tool sets. Collaboration, always a goal, is a necessity with DevOps, and finding ways to bring developers and operations people together -- not to mention security experts and the business side -- remains an enormous and ongoing challenge. Automation also remains a key but thorny challenge to organizations, whether it's in testing, deployment or production. Finally, new technologies, including AI and machine learning, continue to offer new possible solutions, but many bring challenges with them.