It has become a real tradition: at the beginning of September, another edition of devopsdays took place here in Belgium. You could safely call this conference the high mass of the DevOps community and, by extension, the entire IT optimization community. Devopsdays is essentially one big, annual learning moment, and that goes for us at BRYXX too.
It was no coincidence that devopsdays 2024 took place in Antwerp, where the idea for the conference was conceived 15 years ago. This special anniversary edition attracted 300–400 participants, spread over two days, who got stuck into the presentations and interactive Open Space meetings.
Technology is not central
It’s obvious why BRYXX takes part in devopsdays every year. For starters, we love meeting like-minded people from all over the world, smart people who are working in the same area and struggling with the same issues. The conference allows us to exchange practical tips and ideas, and we always gain valuable new insights from other users, whether it’s an SME with just a few IT people or a multinational with hundreds, or even thousands, of developers. Everyone comes together to find the best solutions.
Where devopsdays differs from other IT conferences is that the technology itself is never the starting point, not even in the conference program. And that’s as it should be, because DevOps is first and foremost about our organizations and their cultures, not about some tool or other, no matter how necessary or useful it might be.
ROI calculator for DevOps investments
That’s why devopsdays remains a conference for top-notch managers, although paradoxically you’ll hardly encounter any C-level profiles there. It seems we haven’t yet succeeded in communicating DevOps ideas to that level of the organization. This also explains why we’ve been essentially hammering the same nail for 15 years in keynote after keynote, including 2024. We’re still trying to get the word out that DevOps isn’t merely a technological concept, even though it is still too often marketed that way.
Perhaps C-level management isn’t always aware of the return that a DevOps investment can yield. And the fact that this return isn’t so easy to quantify undoubtedly also plays a role. However, we’re hopeful that this will change soon. At the conference, we learned about a scientific method that allows you to reliably calculate the ROI of a DevOps transformation based on a number of standard questions. That’s the kind of information you can take to your CxO and convince them of your DevOps story.
From “paved roads” to “pirate metrics”
What makes devopsdays so valuable for us is that we get to spend so much time with other experts. For example, we learned from a platform manager at SAP that not every problem needs a technical solution. If you, as a DevOps developer, have so many tools to choose from that you can’t see the wood for the trees, it might be better to first document the processes that you have to go through. The SAP manager described them as “paved roads” — comparable to what used to be known as SOPs (standard operating procedures).
At devopsdays, you sometimes even get to pick the brain of one of the renowned international speakers. This year we got to chat with Manuel Pais, who wrote a brilliant book called Team Topologies with his co-author Matthew Skelton. We mainly explored the importance of KPIs with him.
And, perhaps not entirely coincidentally, KPIs were also the theme that one of the other speakers at the event addressed. In his keynote, he focused on the “pirate metrics framework.” Under the name AARRR, this framework offers five alternative metrics: acquisition, activation, retention, referral, and revenue. These can help you determine whether or not your Internal Developer Platform is succeeding — another important step forward on the path to IT optimization and DevOps transformation.