WinOps at Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Our latest WinOps meetup was held at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, in their brand new offices and as part of a big welcome party to the new buildings. The evening was a huge success and we can’t wait to return to HPE for future WinOps events.
HPE have pledged that their offices will act as the ‘home’ venue for WinOps in 2016, and it’s great that we have a place to meet regularly. Of course, we still love meeting in different companies and seeing the internal workings of the big players on the scene, so we’ll still be hosting alternate events at other offices, just as we did with JustEat last year.
This month’s meetup was built around DevOps culture and integrating culture into business. We had two excellent speakers, Arne Luhrs, a senior system architect from HP Enterprise, and Andy Burgin, senior DevOps engineer at Sky Betting and Gaming.
Arne’s talk focused around how to scale DevOps cultures into an established enterprise level business. He gave us some valuable insights into how HPE have overcome some of the challenges that they faced, and how DevOps can still work in larger companies.
Andy meanwhile gave us an interesting history of DevOps, and then traced its story through to the story of his own department, and how they integrated DevOps into their company — and what worked and what didn’t.
These speakers were well received, particularly as the audience on the evening were almost entirely from enterprise backgrounds. In his welcome talk, DevOpsGuys’ Stephen Thair asked who was from a startup. Of the 80 who attended, only 3 raised their hands. The other 77 indicated to us that they were from the sorts of companies that face these scalability issues with integrating DevOps into their environments. We had some big hitters attending, with guys from Chef and Puppet both in the crowd.
The attendees were also a mixture of IT managers, directors and engineers. The engineers typically came from a Windows sys admin background, and were looking to explore Windows DevOps and WinOps in more detail. Gareth Rushgrove made a similar observation of the last WinOps meetup in his newsletter DevOps Weekly, saying, “The interest part was how much of the audience was new to everything Devops — it’s worth remembering that if you’re thinking about writing or talking about something and not sure what to cover. We still need lots ore good introductory material out there.”
The event really was a success. The speakers were incredibly interesting, the attendees were all great fun, and the sense that this was a community that was growing and was going to make waves in 2016 was overwhelming. We love organising WinOps with DevOpsGuys, and we cannot wait to announce the date of WinOps Conference in 2016.
To stay up to date, follow WinOps on Twitter and make sure you’re a member of the meetup group. This way you’ll get the latest news about the conference and future meetups.
And finally, a massive thank you to Hewlett Packard Enterprise for their hospitality!
If you missed the meetup, the two presentations can be found here.
Hannah Foxwell from Pendrica wrote a review of our first WinOps Conference, take a look here.
