This year I hosted the Global DevOps Bootcamp 2019 for London, and the theme of the event was You Build It, You Run It! - so it’s time for a postmortem!
It was a wrap-up of several months of preparation, not only from myself but also from the central organisation team. The effort they put in was really remarkable, and I don’t think we would have gone anywhere without their support. What they did was really outstanding, not only from a technology standpoint but also on the operations side - I never saw anything being that smooth from top to bottom.
The event itself went really well: six teams were extremely engaged with the challenges and they spent the whole day in the awesome Microsoft Reactor:
The whole premise of the workshop was about maintaining a production website (Parts Unlimited!) up and running so that sales could keep coming in - that was a brilliant way of keeping people on their toes, with each team using a different approach to maintain it up as much as possible. The clear takeaway here was about acting with pro-activity: many of the problems introduced during the challenges could have been prevented by implementing pro-active strategies like monitoring, alerting or other pre-emptive actions in general.
The most recurring feedback was to get the challenges available as either documentation or samples after the event, something that I believe it is going to happen down the line.
In terms of what did not go well, unfortunately it’s all about the drop rate and the no-shows. I managed to send back pretty much of the no-longer-needed lunchboxes so I could minimise waste, but as of today I still cannot get my head around how it is possible being unable to cancel the participation to a free event as soon as you are aware of another commitment (and despite reminders!). It doesn’t take much after all, and it hurts future possibilities of organising similar events. One of the attendees told me that his friends gave up on rocking up on the day because of the sold-out capacity, which we were nowhere near on the day.
Regardless, I loved hosting the event and I am surely looking forward to hosting next year’s as well at the London Microsoft DevOps Meetup!