The last few years I've been lucky enough to head up the hands-on labs, meaning working with the selection team, the planning team, the labs development teams, the presenters, and finally the support teams on site. It's grown every year an last year was no less than 57 labs run for our attendees, with 6 of the top 10 voted sessions being hands-on labs. The top 3 of 4 for entire event where also hands-on labs sessions, so we're proud of our labs presenters!
As you can imagine, that is a lot of work that has caused my participation in other areas (like presenting sessions myself) to decrease noticeably across that time span. This year I've been able to scale back my participation in hands-on labs to just the selection planning, with another team assuming the development and delivery management phases.
Let's look at what this means for my participation in sharing open technology and ideas this year?
Freeing up my time means assisting friends and colleague with presenting their ideas, such as the following selection of talks and workshops:
5 Questions Everyone Ignores with Microservices
The daily hype is all around you. Microservices are a necessary step along the path to integration for a digitally successful future for your organization. The choices you’ve got to make don’t preclude the daily work of developing amazing applications. From containers, cloud, multicloud, and beyond, microservices are the core infrastructure ensuring your organization's flexibility in the digital world. Funny enough, when discussing the development impact while transitioning to microservices, there are five questions that keep popping up in one form or another. These questions are the same regardless of organizational size and effect strategy discussions late in the process as organizations move towards microservice architectures. This session cover questions that everyone should ask about microservices. They're based on real life experiences in customer organizations around the world who are in the process of conquering microservices for existing development and for delivering modern applications. Join us for an hour of power, where real life developer experiences are used to highlight the lessons we're all learning as we transition our integration infrastructure into modern day microservices. (with Roel Hodzelmans)A beginners guide to using and contributing to the open Solution Exchange
Are you a solution builder and designer who wants to share your work in the spirit of open collaboration? Are you active with rules, decisions, event processing, or process automation and pull together solutions in these areas with Red Hat technologies? Then this is the session for you! With the open Solution Exchange you have a place to contribute solutions, big or small, for others to use. If you’re just interested in speeding up your current project you can browse and leverage existing solution pieces that are available in the open Solution Exchange.Learn more about this space designed to find, share, and collaborate on open source solutions. Soon you’ll find, learn, download, and test solutions that are ready to deploy in your existing projects. From small workflows to complex processes and applications. From on-premise solutions, to containers ready to run on OpenShift. The open Solution Exchange is your new one stop for leveraging the true power of sharing. Join us for an hour of power to learn how to become an expert user of the open Solution Exchange. (with Louis Cortez)
Concept to Reality: An Advanced Agile Integration Blueprint
Are you all in on the concept of agile integration or just getting your toe in the water? Are you an expert or just getting started with concepts like integration, microservices, message integration, process integration, APIs, and all the things that make your customers experience the best it can be? This session has something for all levels as it walks attendees through the architecture concepts with whiteboard diagrams, easy to grasp images, with a bottom up approach to connecting the dots for the concepts of an integration architecture. Once the groundwork has been laid, the second half of this session take a look at an integration architecture blueprint based on three successful customer integration solutions. Presenting the results of researching these successful solution architectures provides attendees with a clear blueprint for matching to their own architectures, or to help solidify their plans for architecting successful integration solutions. (with Christina Lin)Solving Retail Challenges Through Integration
Digital disruption is causing a fundamental change in the Retail industry, forcing many retail businesses to reinvent themselves in the face of modern commerce. For example, customer buying decisions happen faster, channels to sell lack flexibility, traditional retail shopping experiences require adaptation, just to name a few. How do you keep up with one of the most dynamic and fast moving industries, let alone lead the pack? Join us for this session as Iain shares his insights into industry challenges and outlines how improved integration helps confront these issues. At the end of this session, you will leave with a better understanding of how modern, open source focused retail solutions such as Headless Commerce and integrated Point of Sale systems can deliver true advantage to retailers. Are you ready to embrace open source and take the lead? (with Iain Boyle)DevOps Heroes - Adding Automation Integration to your Toolbox
DevOps is more than the process of automating your CI/CD pipelines to generate code and deployment artifacts for production. It’s also about organizational change and integration of many subtle processes that help you deliver applications seamlessly from development to production through your operations. Let’s unlock the power of process integration with a hands-on workshop using your own devices (laptops). We’ll take you through the integration of an organizational process as part of your DevOps strategy. Step-by-step you’ll build a domain model, creating an automated process, integrating user approval tasks and more using modern open source process automation tooling. Bring your laptop as this is a hands-on experience that takes you from nothing to a fully working DevOps supporting automation integration project. No experience in automation integration is required. Let’s add a new tool to your development toolbox and get you jump started on automation integration that’s supporting your organizations DevOps activities. Note: The workshop materials is free and available online, attendees can use and enjoy after the event. (with Karina Varela)Agile Integration, because agile developers can’t wait for the IT department
In digital business, nothing happens until something is integrated. The success (or failure) of a new service or application depends on its ability to communicate with other services, across an infrastructure, in scalable secure ways. That is the challenge of integration. While that’s a simple concept, there’s a lot of complexity in trying to work with different languages, APIs and protocols, different data formats, and different data requirements. The way that these integrations are designed and included in new applications can create new value and innovations for businesses. Historically, IT departments employed specialized tools and specialized developers to address integration, but that strategy serves as a bottleneck for fast moving innovation. This talk builds on the basics of the agile integration story providing; an overview of integration, storage, and other technologies compromising Red Hat’s integration solutions. We’ll discuss how to identify enterprise challenges and potential capabilities and solutions for those challenges. Finally, we’ll provide attendees with an overview of real customer examples and architectural blueprints based on their solutions. (with David Codelli)Commit to Excellence - Best Practices for Container Development
Time to market and providing first class services to customers is more important now than ever before and with the rate of innovation in IT, organizations need to be able to respond to customers needs in days rather than months. The growing complexity of container runtimes leaves developers and their fun behind unfortunately. But it does not have to be that way. This session shows you how to bring the fun back into development when using containers. Code Ready Containers is tooling designed to get you started locally on your very own machine and experiencing the joy of an easy to use container platform. Push your code and enjoy the ease of integrated tooling that builds, tests, and kicks off rolling deployments directly from your favorite IDE. Eric and Markus share their best practises and get you started from the ground up with Code Ready Containers. Join us and start finding your joy with cloud native development right there on your very own local machine. (with Markus Eisele)Designing Architectures Like a Boss
Quickly and easily build architectural diagrams for your work that will impress your mother, your friends, and you customers! This workshop helps developers, architects, and consultants learn how to use a streamlined architecture diagramming tool focused on open source architectures. These architectures will help you illustrate how the open source solutions are implemented. Architecture diagrams you create are suitable for use in customer and prospect presentations, press articles, blog posts, website content, customer documentation and training and other influential materials. Your expertise and customer experience could drive architecture diagrams that not only change public opinion of your work, but also how you enable your colleagues in your organization. Be prepared to bring your own successful project implementations to life with beautifully illustrated diagrams after taking this workshop! (with Ishu Verma)Now it's fingers crossed and waiting on any acceptance letters!