Unicorns, horses, and donkeys, oh my

- DevOps is a fast growing and evolving discipline. Gartner predicted that by 2016, DevOps will evolve to a mainstream strategy employed by 25% of the Global 2000. - [Earnest] To describe this adoption curve, Michael Cote popularized the notion of three groups that DevOps can apply to: the unicorns, horses and donkeys. - [James] That's right, we said unicorns, that's the first group. They are those elusive magical creatures who all work for startups and early adopter trendsetters, and they can hire top talent at will. - [Earnest] The second is the horses, that's the enterprise IT folks with large budgets, large teams and large-scale problems. - [James] The third, that's the donkeys. It's the IT every man, it's the real person with real problems that forms the vast bulk of technologists suffering from problems that DevOps can help solve. Usually they're found in small teams with budgetary constraints. - In our unique DevOps journey, we've learned the most by finding peers of our same general livestock class in our local area that are trying to do similar things in their organizations. - Yeah, and these people are always willing to share. DevOps practitioners believe that meeting people in person and sharing their knowledge, whether they be successes or failures, that's going to help everybody in the community. - That's right. One of the best places for meeting like-minded folks is conferences. There are three conferences that I highly recommend. DevOpsDays, Velocity and DevOps Enterprise Summit. - All right, let's start talking about DevOpsDays. - DevOpsDays is definitely the best option to get started. You probably remember that DevOps was first coined by Patrick Dubois at the very first DevOpsDays in Ghent. You could say it's really like the birthplace of DevOps. I love it, I love DevOpsDays, it's a really unique conference, unlike any that you've ever had before. - In the morning, there are structured talks, and in the afternoon is an unconference with open spaces. The agenda for the open spaces is set on the spot by the attendees, and it naturally gathers practitioners around problems that they're looking to solve. - You know, Earnest and I, we've been running the DevOpsDays Austin Conference for the last five years. - If you all are up for visiting Austin, come say howdy at DevOpDays. - Yeah, we hope all you all can make it. - [Earnest] You might be thinking that's great, but I don't live in Austin or a major tech hub like Silicon Valley. Well that's okay, DevOpsDays' events happen in dozens of cities across the world from Boise to Bangalore. There's bound to be one near you, and if not, it's actually pretty easy to start one. - One bonus of DevOpsDays is that's relatively low cost compared to other tech conferences. Most events cost less than 200 bucks a ticket. DevOpDays is heavy on donkeys with whatever horses and unicorns happen to be in the local area. - All right, that brings us to Velocity. That's another of my favorite conferences. While DevOps as a term was born at DevOpsDays, it has its roots at Velocity. This is where John Allspaw and Paul Hammond gave their seminal talk, Dev and Ops at Flickr. This was back in 2009. - Velocity's an O'Reilly conference, so it's higher cost and it has four events in a year, two in the U.S., one in the EU and one in Asia. Some of the best talks happen at Velocity and they always get some of the best speakers. And we've both made great friends and contacts at Velocity conferences. - [James] Yeah, we really have, it's great. Velocity tends more towards unicorns and horses. - The last major event I want to call out is the DevOps Enterprise Summit also known as DOES. It arose from the need for DevOps to cross the chasm into the enterprise. - [James] Almost all the talks at DOES are from enterprise practitioners and for enterprise practitioners, with companies ranging from the big financials to airlines, to retail, to defense. - [Earnest] It's horse heaven. - [James] Oh no, we didn't mention your favorite conference, did we? - [Earnest] There are a lot of conferences out there. There's technology-specific events like ChefConf or AWS Reinvent. - [James] Or there's events like Monitorama, Surge, Scale, Structure, they all focus on certain aspects of DevOps. - [Earnest] And other conferences now have a DevOps track like RSA and GlassCon in the security space. - There are DevOps and other related meetups in many cities. - In Austin, James and I, host or are involved in Cloud Austin, Austin DevOps, Docker Austin, the Agile Austin DevOps SIG and other user groups that are DevOps friendly. There are DevOps people everywhere, and we encourage you to seek them out and make a friend. One of the best things about the DevOps community is how helpful and friendly everyone is. - Yeah, don't be afraid to ask for help or explanations. You know, DevOps is a bootstrap movement. We all consider helping new folks trying to learn as part of our professional responsibilities. That closes our conference overview. - And our animal references. - Join us for the next video, covering the top 10 books to read in the DevOps space.