Agile management has become necessary to survive, but is it enough to thrive? Many organizations have embraced Agile management on the assumption that if they upgrade existing products and services through cost reductions, time savings or quality enhancements for existing customers (i.e. operational Agility), they will realize financial gains. Owing to increased competitive pressures, this assumption often proves incorrect and consequently top management support for Agile often flags. It turns out that major financial gains are more likely to come from Strategic Agility, i.e. generating innovations that create entirely new products and markets, and that turn non-customers into customers. Strategic Agility is the next frontier of Agile management. The profit margins are bigger, and the value to society is often larger. Steve will show what’s involved in achieving Strategic Agility, including a playbook for systematically generating market-creating innovations and the necessary shift in culture that is required.

Agile methods and DevOps approaches can bring enormous benefits to an organization by increasing flexibility, reducing time-to-value, all while increasing quality. However, these are not methods you simply "adopt". They require a substantial transformation of a company's values, beliefs, and processes. For example, DevOps is about removing impediments from the flow in the software delivery to the business. Likewise, agile requires changing the way the company budgets and funds projects.

This session reflects on the experience of truly transforming IT inside a large organization as opposed to simply adopting DevOps.

Twitter has rapidly evolved in how we do Machine Learning over the last few years. We rapidly evolved from making incremental improvements to our existing Logistic Regression models to a wave of new Deep Learning architectures. At the same time, we were faced with the challenge of uneven distribution of ML expertise across the company. This is the story of the Cortex team that enabled this machine learning transformation across the entire company by making a set of careful strategic investments.

Infrastructure as Code is a radically different way of working for many infrastructure teams, and for application teams.

Users are used to raising tickets, sending emails, or coming around to the desks of infrastructure people to ask for things to be done. Infrastructure people are used to carrying out work by following checklists and running scripts. Managers are used to having detailed designs and project plans for major work, and change request forms and change review boards to handle smaller tasks.

Infrastructure as Code is very different. Infrastructure is defined in files in source control. Change management pipelines - like application deployment pipelines - propagate changes, automatically integrating and testing changes before they are pushed into production. The end result of this is that it's possible to have much more rigorous control and assurance of infrastructure implementation and changes, with much less planning and ceremony.

This talk aims to describe the moving parts of a typical organisation using Infrastructure as Code. Moving beyond the general patterns, to looking at exactly how changes are implemented and rolled out.

Diffy is a tool used at Twitter to automatically catch regressions in our backend services before they are deployed to production.

Diffy is open source and has been adopted into modern continuos deploy workflows by the larger community.

This talk will cover the fundamental concepts behind Diffy and how its automation helps achieve peace of mind for service owners, devops, and QA folks.

Building complex apps are hard and so is adopting sustainable CI/CD practices - we'll show you how easy it is to develop complex container-native apps using Red Hat technologies and deliver them continuously.

As part of this 'live' hands-on workshop, you'll get to witness the entire journey of developing, building and finally deploying a complex Java application into a staging and production environment, continuously, on OpenShift 3 using OpenShift.io. You'll learn how to bring analytics to the developer right into her container-based workspace powered by Eclipse Che, for making intelligent decisions on choice of third-party dependencies.

As we uncover how to do Continuous Delivery efficiently using OpenShift.io, we will also showcase how we are building OpenShift.io using efficient CI/CD practices in a fully transparent and open-source way.

Most organizations today have adopted IT infrastructure automation tools and dynamic infrastructure platforms such as private or public clouds. However, the technology alone isn't enough to help IT respond quickly and reliably to changing opportunities and challenges. At worst they can lead to a "Sorcerer's Apprentice" situation, where the ability to rapidly spin up new infrastructure leads to a sprawl of poorly maintained systems.

Infrastructure as Code is an approach to managing infrastructure that leverages software engineering practices. Companies like Netflix, Facebook, and Etsy have pioneered a new generation of principles and practices for IT change management. IT teams who have adopted these ideas find that they can not only make changes far more frequently than they could with old ways of working, but they can actually increase the reliability, security and quality of their IT services.

The presentation will demonstrate why SAFe is the most widely adopted agile scaling framework by global international companies and gaining traction in India. SAFe’s practices have evolved from Agile practices and methods, Lean product development, systems thinking, and observation of successful enterprises.

This presentation will introduce the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe version 4.5), including its core values, principles, and practices, along with a roadmap for implementation. The presentation will explain the roles that are needed to successfully deliver value at scale. SAFe provides guidance and training for scaling Agile development across the portfolio, large solution, program, and team levels. The presentation will describe the most critical elements needed to realize the Framework’s benefits.

Amazon Alexa, the cloud based voice service that powers Amazon Echo, provides access to thousands of skills that enable customers to voice control their world, whether it’s listening to music, controlling their smart home devices, listening to the news, or even ordering a pizza. This talk will provide an Introduction to the Alexa Skills Kit - how it works and a deep dive of the tech behind it. The talk will also cover basic concepts like intents, utterances, and slots while touching upon the principles of designing for voice interfaces.

We often think of software architecture as one of those things we just have to do right at the begging of a project, often using fancy tools.

In this talk, James offers an alternative. What decisions would we make differently if we had the ability to rapidly evolve our architecture? The tools and techniques we now have available allow a new type of architectural decision making possible; from Software Defined Networking, IaaS and Continuous Delivery to Real Options and Architecture Decision Records. James will cover pre-requisites that allow us to make small bets on architecture and explore the strange world of evolutionary design that this technique makes possible.

The tech industry thrives on the new, with leaders telling us to "move fast and break things." But what about writing software with the expectation of a lifespan longer than the average Javascript framework?

Kris has been working in the tech industry for over 20 years, and she's seen many projects and products come and go. One of her own projects is now in its second decade of life online, and she'll share with you the lessons she's learned from it. You'll learn about several key decisions that can set your project up for longterm success, and what trade-offs you can choose to make when speed is of the essence.

Real-time analysis through cloud-based solutions is expected in every domain, including life sciences. However, keeping runtime to real-time and constant can be challenging for problems that vary in their complexity such as genome engineering. Here, the whole genome needs to be analyzed for every potential modification spot, hence the computational complexity of finding the optima spot can vary by orders of magnitude. Using AWS Lambda we break down this task into smaller sub-tasks that can be solved in parallel by instantaneously recruiting additional Lambda functions as the complexity increases. The resulting web-tool, GT-Scan2 was featured on the prestigious AWS Jeff Barr blog as it brings together novel scientific insights and unprecedented cloud-compute capacity. This same idea has been used for building CryptoBreeder.

In this presentation, we will discuss the general template for serverless web-application and discuss bespoke solutions for overcoming technical limitations server-less imposes.

Moving IT infrastructure to AWS services creates a model of shared responsibility between the customer and AWS. This shared model can help relieve customer’s operational burden as AWS operates, manages and controls the components from the host operating system and virtualization layer down to the physical security of the facilities in which the service operates.

How can you create a frictionless on-boarding environment when each of the product must implement specific requirements based on the 1) type of products is offered and 2) country in which their products are sold.

How do you create a secure cloud management layer between Application teams infrastructure as to ensure security in the cloud while balancing the developer productivity and enabling continuous integration? Take the operations team on a journey of automation and how the organization looks like after hiring engineers to develop those capabilities following SRE model.

For each layer, the control objectives are defined. For each control objective, the necessary responsibilities & process controls are defined, including company policies and procedures to be followed i.e:

• Control Objective: IT third party can demonstrate the effectiveness of their operating model and control environment.
• Process Control: The CSP owner will annually review the effectiveness of the AWS operating model and control environment.

Drawing on his experience advising clients on platform adoption, James Lewis explores the benefits that platforms can bring, the organizational limitations that make platform adoption attractive, how we currently overcome these limitations, and the paradigm shift in thinking needed to get the most out of them.

Many large enterprises are under pressure to transform their IT architecture and organization, as their business is attacked by “digital disruptors”. IT architects can play a key role in such a transformation because they combine the technical, communication, and organizational skill to apply IT for the benefit of the business. Their job is not an easy one, though: they must maneuver in an organization where IT is often still seen as a cost center, where operations means “run” as opposed to “change”, and where middle-management has become cozy neither understanding the business strategy nor the underlying technology.

This workshop illustrates how software or IT architects can play an active role in driving the digital transformation of a large enterprise. To do so, they need to extend their horizon beyond dealing with technology to navigate organizational politics, get management attention, work with external vendors, and pick the right battles. The examples and anecdotes originate from the presenter’s experience as Chief Architect in a large financial services organization that is undergoing a massive IT transformation.

WHAT WILL I LEARN

This workshop covers the different aspects a chief architect has to tackle as part of a digital transformation including:

• The role and qualities of an enterprise or IT architect
• How architecture influences digital transformation
• How to communicate to a variety of stakeholders to instigate change
• Understanding organizational structures and systems
• Putting it all together to achieve innovation and transformation

Architects in the enterprise are often regarded as ivory tower residents who bestow their utopian plans upon project teams in the form of colorful diagrams that bear little to no resemblance to reality. The most suspicious in this group are often the "Enterprise Architects" who are perceived as being furthest from actual technical problems.

However, large-scale IT operation and transformation require transparency across hundreds or thousands of applications running on all sorts of middleware in data centers around the globe. The very enterprise architects are likely the only ones who stand a chance to bring transparency into such an environment and who can direct IT investments in the hundreds of millions of Euros towards modernization and run-cost reduction. This sounds a lot more exciting and valuable than drawing pictures!

This session takes a serious but light-hearted look at the role of enterprise architects in modern IT organizations.

An unstoppable revolution is now underway in our society, affecting almost everyone. The revolution is very simple. Today, organizations are connecting everyone and everything, everywhere, all the time. Knowledge is being shared on the fly. What has become possible is now increasingly necessary. Continuous innovation is the performance requirement for the 21^st Century organization, with instant, intimate, frictionless value at scale. To accomplish this, firms must embrace an Agile mindset and implement the three laws of Agile management: the Law of the Customer, the Law of the Small Team and the Law of the Network. Leaders must also recognize that the revolution is about “being Agile,” not just "doing Agile" or “implementing Agile processes.” In the Agile world of continuous innovation, diligent employees who simply follows orders can’t get the job done. Instead, firms must inspire innovation through an initiative, commitment, smarts, and passion. Agile is about creating workplaces that enable human beings to contribute their full talents to something worthwhile and meaningful—creating value for other human beings.

Organizations can improve their Agile scaling efforts by focusing on 5 common challenges: the way teams are chartered, how people come together to form teams, how their values and working agreements are protected, how they are helped to remove impediments, and how they learn to improve what they deliver based on feedback. These common challenges can derail and distract the efforts of the organization to reap the benefits of agile, empirical product delivery. This presentation discusses these challenges and strategies organizations can use to overcome them.

Monitoring devices/servers/application is essential in network management. However, current monitoring systems are unable to recover their internal faulty entities forcing the network administrator to manually fix the occasionally broken monitoring solution. Network engineers are spending high level of non-value efforts on repetitive tasks like disk space cleanup, process restart, etc.hundreds of email alerts generated per day from various monitoring systems and only 10% of them are true or valid alerts which need network engineer’s attention 24/7.

To address the above problem we have implemented a solution that automates incident management on Alerts received from various network monitoring tools. The major features of the tool include the following.

• Automatically open tickets within ITSM tools like Service now, Remedy etc in response to system alerts generated from various monitoring systems such as Solarwinds, Nagios, SCOM etc via email, SNMP, CMD or web services.
• Bot opens a ticket post making checks for any planned outages, existing tickets if any or if the alerts are real/bogus.
• It executes automated workflow or troubleshoots or even remediates the problem for predefined repetitive issues (ex: checks and clean the disk space on servers).
• The solution also automates updating the incident status with all relevant information, keeping all data for future investigation and closes the tickets in ITSM tools like service now.

The benefits realized by the above solutions includes

• Reduced monitoring efforts in identifying the false alerts
• Auto-healing solutions on repeat issues for faster issues resolution
• Increases efficiency in infrastructure support.

The presentation will also talk about of our POV of how this transformation story of network self-healing can address IT issues that can get resolved immediately and quickly without anyone having to get involved. We focus on improving the existing solution to address two main areas

1) Gain Real-time insights to identify the issues faster so we can fix them fast

2) Proactive problem solving by leveraging Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning technologies to learn and resolve them based on the patterns incurred in the past.