At salesforce.com, we’re always looking for ways to improve. Delivering value to our customers is something we take very seriously. To that end, we’ve been holding regular internal DevOps mini-conferences similar in style to the DevOpsDays events. Recently, we held our fourth DevOps conference.
We began by taking a look back at all of the things we’ve been able to accomplish in the last year and a half, and also talked about some of the challenges we see ahead. Then it was time for the Ignite talks – a format that lends itself to the fast exchange of ideas in an entertaining way.
On the first day of the conference, our Ignite talks were:
- DevOps According to Me: Bala Subramanian, Data.com
- OS Patching Fun: Paul Fitzpatrick
- Puppet – Self Service: Alan Vaghti
- Resiliency: Keith Stobie
After our Ignite speakers gave us lots to think about, we broke up into open space breakout session to discuss things like culture, continuous delivery and virtualization.
Day two began with Ian Varley sharing his thoughts on service ownership and what this looks like at salesforce.com with such a large application and codebase. He was followed by a panel of Salesforce executive leadership including Parker Harris, Benji Jasik, Scott Hansma, Paul Constantinides, and Christine Chau who shared their perspectives on the topic with the crowd. The panel turned out to be the driving force behind our discussions the rest of the day.
We again followed with Ignite talks, with a new set of topics:
- Service Engineering 101: Marvin Lam
- Service Ownership for QE : Ryan Guest
- Continuous Deployment: Pardot’s Approach: Jan Ulrich, Pardot
- Integration across Businesses: Jeanine Walters
Our breakout sessions covered topics like monitoring and tools, and more discussion on service ownership and continuous delivery.
As engineers, we feel very fortunate to be given this opportunity to take time away from our regular jobs to be able to get together and discuss things that we feel we can do even better. We look forward to sharing our progress with all of you in the community. See you at Dreamforce ’14!
What do you feel are the drivers that transform a DevOps culture?