DevOps, The Next Five Years

From Deming to Domination, DevOps has become all things to all people. It's the new must have entry for your resume, it's the black magic that will save your business from irrelevance and obscurity, it's the snake oil that is sold by vendors looking for the new cloud, it's a community of smart people who care about making a difference. Or, is it just a buzzword that people are hiding all the biggest challenges in their business behind?

In this talk we’ll have a brief review of the last five years with insightful (and occasionally humorous) milestones on the journey to its present state. We’ll then cast our horizon to the next five years and assess what events like this might look like in 2019 as well as suggesting:

• What will enterprises do to DevOps? What will the community do for them?
• Where does DevOps stop and innovative leadership start? What happens when we’ve automated all of the things?
• What disruptive new tecnologies will be challenging DevOps to evolve and adapt?
• What will the definition of DevOps be? Because we have to keep discussing this!
• How does a community manage it's vendors? How do you balance their commercial goals with the opportunity they present to put DevOps on an even bigger platform?
• What will the 2019 State of DevOps Report tell us? What have we succeeded at? Where can we do better?
• What are the biggest challenges facing the community in the next few years?

DevOps is the number one opportunity for IT to re-connect itself with the business it supports and I am passionate about making that work. Join me in debating what the future looks like for DevOps and whether it will continue to be the thing that originally attracted you to it in the first place?

Chris Jackson is the CTO for Rackspace's emerging DevOps practice. He has over a decade of IT experience in technical support, solution design, account management and web application development. In his current role, Chris is responsible for the technology and service strategy built around the new DevOps Automation service, as well as working with customers to understand how their needs map to a increasingly complex marketplace of services. He has built and championed the creation of a DevOps advisory service and is contributing to a global group responsible for understanding the evolution of managed services in an increasingly automated world.

Chris launched his Rackspace career eight years ago as a data center technician after spending a year with Motorola as a system administrator. He earned a bachelor's degree in computer science and e-business from Loughborough University in the UK, where he graduated with honors. Chris and his wife, Sally, live in Berkshire, with their young son, George. When he's not in meetings, Chris can be found spending time with his family and catching up on sports.