At Salesforce.com we have a kaizen spirit that demands that we periodically set aside time to facilitate collaboration between widely disparate parts of the organization. One way we do this is with our internal DevOps conferences. Today’s start of our Spring conference was no exception.
The day began with (yummy) breakfast and kicked off with a panel of CTOs moderated by Reena Matthew. The theme of the panel was resiliency and the discussion covered such topics as how resiliency had been designed into the service and how that has evolved over time as we’ve grown to billions of transactions. We talked about how things are expected to change over time with more growth, where we thought we could improve, and what is planned for the future. We had great audience participation who asked questions about many different parts of the infrastructure and were so engaged that our poor moderator only got through her first two questions!
The next part of the conference was the ignite talks. Our fast paced presentations focused on topics like metrics, monitoring, and resiliency. We even had our first remote ignite presenter! Hopefully the remote presentations will go a little more smoothly for tomorrow’s ignite talks.
The final part of day 1 of the conference was the ever popular unconference breakout sessions. We took suggestions from the audience and split into discussions on a number of topics. Here are some examples from today:
- Delivering a database-centric service
- Resiliency, complexity, and anti-fragile systems
- Environment validation
- DevOps behaviors
- Deployment tools
- Service ownership
Each discussion group setup a videoconference so that we could have our discussions with people from around the world. The only requirement for each group was that they write up a summary of their discussion and post it on Salesforce Chatter so that the discussion could continue long after the conference ends.
Personally, I was really excited to see so many new faces! We had representation from many different parts of the organization and participation from many folks who hadn’t attended either of the previous two DevOps conferences. It was exciting to see the passion all the attendees had for solving problems and the incredible dedication everyone had to make salesforce.com better for themselves, their peers, and our customers!
Looking forward to a great day 2 tomorrow.