For me, the local DevOps Days is a must-go event – the tickets are extremely affordable and it is a great way to connect to the local community beyond the much smaller circle of people who attend monthly DevOps events. As with all DevOps days, tools and technologies are deemphasized; people and processes take precedence (in that order). This year’s venue, Evergreen Brickworks, is a great conference space with plenty of room and lots of fresh air, and I wish more Toronto events took advantage of it. ... Read more

AtlSecCon is a mid-size conference held annually in Halifax, Nova Scotia. It has the usual security conference assortment of free time activities (a CTF competition, a lockpick lab, an Internet of Things lab, and a very photogenic lab from St John’s Ambulance therapy dogs program.) A five-track talk schedule means there’s something interesting for everybody, and using a proper conference center means the vendor area is not as crowded and hot as that of conferences that run in hotels. ... Read more

One of the three SREcons worldwide, this was a long and intense conference with a three-day multitrack format and a correspondingly voluminous collection of notes. The crowd felt different from North American one: a lot more “large company” folks (heavy presence from Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and others), a lot more smokers than there would be on this side of the pond, and somewhat more conservative technology choices (the last point is similar to what I felt at DevOpsDays TLV last year as well). ... Read more

This is the first attempt by DataDog to produce a branded conference, and they did not manage to avoid some of the rough edges that usually accompany first-time events. However, the organizers’ response to various crises was commendable: they scheduled additional workshops when the existing ones proved to be significantly undersized, promised to refund some of the people who could not enter because of overcapacity, took contact information to follow up with some attendees, and in general hustled to recover in an admirable fashion. ... Read more

I wrote this report for internal consumption shortly after the conference. As Monitorama 2018 approaches, I thought these notes could be useful for a wider audience to revisit the common themes and interesting questions from the previous year and to see what has been done to address them. ... Read more

This was my second ShmooCon. It was just as fun as the first time, and this time I did various other activities (solving a few of Raytheon’s CTFs, practicing lockpicking, looking at all the codes in the conference program) in between interesting talks. For more details about the conference itself, see the last year’s report. ... Read more

This is a quick survey of available tools to monitor a cloud-based (AWS or multi-cloud) infrastructure network. My conclusions and recommendations are at the bottom. ... Read more

The Tel-Aviv instance of DevOps Days was interesting to me for two reasons. The first one is there’s a ton of innovation happening in Israel, so there’s a chance of hearing new things; yet Israel is far enough from Silicon Valley that its thinking and opinions are distinct from the San Francisco area monoculture. ... Read more

ShmooCon is a security conference held yearly in Washington, DC. With around 2000 participants, it has an audience large enough to fill 3 tracks and provide a range of extra-curricular activities, yet it is much less crazy than events like DefCon (which is ten times the size). ... Read more

As usual, Linux needs a bit of under-the-hood wrenching to get things working. HP is actually doing Linux support commendably compared to its peers (see hplip). However, in this case a bit of extra grease was needed. ... Read more