Adventures of an ACE Director on DevOpsDays in Tokyo
As an ACE Director knowledge sharing is uttermost important, because the community expects us to stay ahead on technology and identify the latest trends.
One of the ways of how to do that, is speak in public on technical conferences. Ofcourse, you can write a blog or article, which can be very useful too, however speak at conference gives you the extra interaction from the attendees and inspiration out of your session, and the sessions of other speakers. This year I was very pleased to hear I was invited to speak at the DevopsDays in Tokyo. Now, the event DevOpsDays itself is a flag where several cities and organizers around the world organize such an event around DevOps. If you look at https://devopsdays.org/ you can see the participating cities, for the rest local they are all independent.
Usually I attend Oracle Usergroup events, but so now and then I also try to look outside the Oracle community, such as these, or open source communities. I find it very important to also tell the story outside the Oracle community. I experience a lot misconceptions about Oracle, so every possibilty where I can speak about Oracle I will grab it it with both my hands.
Tokyo is a very crowded city, however very exciting and ofcourse the food is delicious too!
A challenge: the language
Unfortunately I don’t speak Japanese, the same as some other international speakers. But this was very well arranged; every English spoken session was translated live. To accomplish a good translation during the session, all international speakers were interviewed by the interpreter, about the content in the presentation, so that they would not get surprises. And also, we had to speak slower and with longer pauses in order to give the interpreter the time to translate the sentences. It was a hybrid conferences, so also some attendees remote.
Another challenge: Oracle technology on DevOpsDays…?
Certainly: YES!. My session handled about Infrastructure as Code in the Oracle Cloud.
I attended some other sessions, which were all very much cloud focussed on AWS and Google. In one session someone came up with a slide with database…. and to my big surpise: no Oracle database was mentioned on it! Come on! Even Microsoft SQL Server was mentioned, but the no 1 Database technology vendor not mentioned?
Lucky it was time for me to do my session. I had a full room with mixed Japanese and non Japanese, and talked about the following topics:
DevOps Challenges
Infrastructure as Code and CloudNative
CNCF Landscape
Terraform
Jenkins
Integration
The challenges handled about the struggles of adoption of the DevOps way of working and how organizations could address those, such as creating how to collaborate, how to deal with new processes in the organization etc.
The 2nd topic handled about the traditional IaC tools and how the shift to CloudNative could be made. Around the technology, I emphasized a little bit arount the CNCF and how tools such as Terraform and Jenkins, and Oracle as a member took their place in it.
In the second part I kind of more deepdived into the different technologies, first separate, and at the end the integration of the 2.
Now one of my main drivers was: Jenkins is a tool which is already highly adopted amongst developers and testers as a CI CD tool. Moving to the Cloud should not have the need to change that. Many hours and time are invested to setup CI CD with Jenkins and additional tools, so why not use it for Cloud infrastructure provisioning too.
As an example I used A Jenkins pipeline to build an Oracle Kubernetes Engine on OCI, as you can see below:
Hospitality of the organization
Not to forget to mention the hospitality during these days. For the international speaker Alex was our host, and he took us all every day to the most neat places to have dinner. A big thank you to him too!
