DevOps Days DC: Are We There, Yet?

It's hard to contain my excitement or stop wishing away the hours until my flight tomorrow, as I prepare for DevOpsDays DC this week.

After all the discussions from my trip to Interop, I've got my convention go-bag ready . The venue is awesome. The schedule looks stellar. And we were even able to throw some free tickets your way so we could be sure SolarWinds was represented in the audience (looking at you, Peter!).

Whenever we venture out to a DevOps Days get together, the conversation among the team is, "What stories do we want to tell?". The truth is, each of us has our own personal stories that we gravitate to. I like to talk about the THWACK community and how the time has come for monitoring to become its own specialty within IT like storage, networking, or infosec. Connie has a great time discussing ways our monitoring tools can be leveraged for DevOps purposes. And, of course, Patrick spends his DevOps Days spreading the gospel truth about SWIS, SWQL, and the Orion SDK.

However, this week, the story is going to be NPM 12. It really couldn't be about anything else, when you think about it.

It's the story I want to tell because it fills a gap that I think will resonate with the DevOps community: As you strive to create ever more scalable systems that can be deployed quickly and efficiently - which almost by definition includes cloud and hybrid-cloud deployments - how can you be sure that everything in-between the you (and the user) and the system is operating as expected?

When everything was on-prem that question was, if not easy to ascertain, at least simple to define. A known quantity of systems all under the company's control had to be monitored and managed.

But how do we manage it now, when so much relies on systems that sit just past the ISP demarc?

As you know, NPM 12 and NetPath address exactly that question. And hopefully the attendees at DevOps Days DC will appreciate both the question and the answer we're providing.

For now, I'm biding my time, packing my bags, and looking wistfully at the door wondering if time will keep dragging along until I can get on the road and start telling my story.