Devopsdays 2020: importance of devops in the new world - Michael Ducy¶

Tags: devopsdays

(One of my summaries of a talk at the 2020 online devopsdays Amsterdam conference).

(Note: he woke up at 3:00 in the night to give the talk as he’s from the USA).

Corona… social distancing, less travel, canceled conferences, communities shattered when we need them most.

The rise of cloud and mobile has changed the world. Your mobile phone has access to everything. There’s the “rise of the connected consumer”: businesses have changed a lot, too. Digital transformation. DevOps enables it.

DevOps is a lot of things. But mostly it is empathy. So community is important (and sadly mostly lacking at the moment). Digital transformation is about other things: capitalism (not necessarily intended negatively), consumption, individuality.

Individuality? In the corona response you see a mostly individualistic approach in the USA and much more community approaches in countries where they have it more or less under control.

So: what does digital transformation do to serve the people? What kind of world do we want to build? What is our focus? What does digital transformation do to serve the underpriviliged and the poor? It is the kind of thing you see when you need to get an unemployment benefit system from 100 “customers” per day to 180.000 per day…

Looking at the real world with a technical eye, our society is a legacy system that needs upgrades desparately. At least in the USA (where he’s from) parts of the system are 400 years old, back when there was still slavery.

What we need to focus on is to better the lot of those in our society that have the least. A rising tide lifts all boats. And at least in the USA, more and more money is being poured into security as opposed to welfare: that’s not the best way. we must destroy our, sometimes very old, systems of (racial) oppression.