The theme for our 2019 event is a little different and we have changed the talk formats, please read this carefully.

Theme

The theme is Pragmatic DevOps. We want to hear your stories of how you succeeded or failed along your journey. Help us learn through your experiences. Preference will be shown to DevOps practitioners talking about their stories, their problems, and their approaches. The best kind of talk says “as an X, I had the problem Y, and here’s how I addressed it, and here’s the results both good and bad.”

The kind of people who come out to DevOpsDays work for a living. They want to know the down and dirty details, whether it’s about your attempt to migrate to kubernetes that was scuttled by poor microservice hygeine, or about the cool techniques you used to get people’s acceptance and understanding implementing kanban, or about how you had lots of monitoring but still never saw the problems and came up with a different approach to enhance your observability. Because that’s what you really want to know before you do it yourself.

Topics can cover anything of interest to the DevOps crowd, including but not limited to:

• Modern Infrastructure Approaches - infrastructure as code, cloud, and so on
• Modern Development Approaches - coding in reliability, security, scalability
• Containers, Kubernetes, Service Meshes
• SRE, Self Service, and Automation
• Continuous Delivery
• Monitoring and Observability
• Security + DevOps
• Serverless
• Microservices
• Other Technical Sins Against Humanity
• Culture and Personal Experiences
• Lean/Agile and other Crazy Process Trix

Talks we won’t accept:

• We will not accept talks submitted on behalf of someone else. We’ve found if the practitioner doesn’t submit it, they are very unlikely to actually show up. In previous years we’ve been astroturfed by well-meaning marketing folks or executive assistants who pitch topics that, if they’re accepted, they honestly try to find someone to deliver, but they generally fall through. If you fill out this CFP, you should be a practitioner with a story you’re itching to share!
• While individual engineers etc. that work for product companies are welcome to submit talk proposals, we do not accept sales pitches/vendor talks, including from our event sponsors. We do not have a sponsored talk track (except for what Platinum sponsors schedule in their dedicated suite) and do not explicitly or implicitly sell talk slots.
• We’d prefer to limit talks that have been presented at other conferences. We want to promote a diversity of voices and experiences, and generally the talks that are traveling the “DevOps talk circuit” can be easily viewed online by those interested. Do submit these if they strongly match our theme, but please understand if we err on the side of allowing in new voices.

Format

The three types of talk format are:

• Regular. This is a 35 minute talk. We are looking for talks by those that can share pragmatic steps or advice as well as discuss their own journey. One of the two content tracks will be Regular talks.
• Conversation (new). This is a 20 minute presentation in the morning AND an open space you host on the topic that same afternoon. This abridged format takes the Q&A and in depth technical demo portions of a talk that are problematic in a large crowd to the open space and furthers the conversation with highly engaged attendees. We hope you will try this out! The second content track will be Conversations, and we can fit 2x as many of these in as we can fit Regular talks.
• Lightning Talk. This is a 20-slide, auto-advancing, 5 minute talk. Tons of fun and a huge audience favorite. We squeeze in as many of these as we can!

The Conversation format is new, and based on attendee feedback that deep technical demos go poorly in large groups where many of the audience prefer not to follow the details and those that do find it difficult. We wanted to try a format where you can do the talk part, and then those who really want to ask a lot of questions and/or see you hit that command line can self-select and get together with you to do that!

If you are accepted for a Regular or Conversation talk, you will be given free entry to the conference.