Old style operations put an emphasis on stability and change control. Old style architecture put an emphasis on stability and long technology roadmaps. Neither approach works today. We'll describe how the new approaches to operations and the new approaches to architecture result in systems that are performant and responsive to the ever-changing environment.

The Morning Paper is a daily blog covering fundamental research and the latest results in computer science. Over the last two years Adrian has covered over 400 papers, and in this talk he will introduce a selection of lessons learned and relevant research results that might help us tame some of the complexities involved in operating modern applications and infrastructure. From failure sketching to pivot tracing, provenance to profiling, expect a rapid-fire succession of ideas and research designed to inspire you never to settle for the status quo.

DevOps news is dominated by discussions about tools, and with good reason. It's not unusual for the amount of infrastructure-related code in a system to approach or even exceed the amount of code dedicated to the actual problem the system is solving, even in small systems. As our systems scale in size and complexity, we invest an ever increasing amount of resources into building solutions to help manage our our complex technical systems. And rightly so.

What's often overlooked, however, is the human component of our systems. All too often our approaches to tools, processes, and systems management attempt to remove humans rather than empower them.

I'll make the case that humans are not a source of entropy to be safeguarded against in our systems, but rather a fundamental source of resilience and even efficiency. We'll discuss ways that we can use this point of view to our advantage when constructing our systems to move faster without sacrificing safety. We'll look at things like tooling and the interaction with tools, team collaboration, and even organizational structure and policies.

We've had plenty of talks about building for web scale, cloud scale, and even planetary scale. Let's spend some time talking about designing for human scale.

Sure, you all know the Jedis from Star Wars! What is the first thing you have in mind? The lightsabers? Yoda? The Dark Side? But being a Jedi is far more than being a marvellous fighter.

Jedis have strengths, ideals and mindset, which could be very helpful in our daily communication. As human communication is a very complex topic, it often leads to misunderstandings. And our communication can be our ligthsaber – in good and in bad!

If we try to improve our perception to the “Jedi Style”, we would use all our senses instead of just hearing the word itself. We would start to listen with all our senses - we would have a look under the surface, which could help to ask important questions.

As knowledge is an important fact in a Jedi ́s life, every Jedi tries to improve his/ her knowledge and is responsible for it. Life long learning is the aim! If you want to improve your knowledge, you will always be interested in other people and their ideas. This is be a good basis for our communication!

All a Jedi wants is peace. Fight is not a solution, but sometimes it is inevitable. So they are prepared for both – peace and fight. Respect, tolerance and freedom of opinion are high rated in the Jedi ́s life. And they should also be high-rated in our lives. With these three basic mindsets we would improve our communication immensely and reduce situation of fight! But we should also learn to realize when it is time to fight for our ideals and our belief and for sure – how! Then your non-violent communication can be your lightsaber.

Communication also has some kind of The Dark Side, which will properly lead you to quick results, but the consequences are mostly very bad and sustainable. To resist The Dark Side of communication especially in tricky situations is an important skill in our daily business.

But the Jedis have gone through bad times, too. We will see what we can learn from their failures....

In this talk you will learn a lot about helpful skills and mindset for a good communication within the team or with people from outside for e.g. customers. You will see, why communication is so difficult and full of pitfalls and what you can do to avoid this. And you will also learn, that communication is one of the most important skills for being successful - as a team and as an individual. Last but not least you will perhaps recognize some bad habits of Dark Communication. Possible solutions will be provided, but you have to work on it on your own later.

May the Force of Communication be with you....

Our dear sponsors will have a few minutes each to tell us more about them and why they are at OperabilityIO

"Unikernels are a new technology on the micro-service landscape, that augment existing virtual machine and container deployments with compact, single-purpose appliances. There are now many different types of unikernel, ranging from those which build on existing software platforms (e.g., Rumprun unikernels) to clean-slate approaches, often in unusual programming languages (e.g., Mirage in OCaml and HaLVM in Haskell).

To date, these clean-slate unikernels have been something of a specialist's game: promising technology that requires considerable effort and expertise to actually deploy. After a brief introduction for newcomers to unikernels, Richard Mortier demonstrate the great strides that have been taken recently to integrate unikernels with existing deployments. Specifically, Richard will show various ways in which MirageOS unikernels are being deployed today to help improve the security of a traditional LAMP stack deployment on the Docker Hub. This will demonstrate that clean-slate unikernels can be used to augment and evolve existing Linux container- and VM-based deployments, one microservice at a time. We no longer need a revolution -- welcome to the evolution."

OpenSensors is the largest open data platform for internet of things, we help communities and businesses all over the world manage their sensor networks and data. In this talk we discuss some technical challenges we faced moving from a simple innovation-focused prototype to a production worth service, while at the same time re-writing every singe source-code line from scratch. We'll also touch on some of the challenges we faced with picking the correct mix of datastores.