Dev’ing all the Ops at PuppetConf 2016: a full review

PuppetConf is a yearly conference for Puppet DevOps automation software. This year’s conference was held in San Diego, CA. As one of the largest DevOps automation conferences in the United States, PuppetConf is a big event.  With over 80 sessions, 100 speakers, and 1,500 attendees the conference was a great source of DevOps automation information.

This year, the conference was a split into several different phases. The first two days (October 17 and 18) were mainly focused on Puppet training courses. Wednesday (October 19) focused more training along with the Puppet Contributor Summit. The Puppet Contributor Summit provided information, product sneak peaks, and community interaction for Puppet users and contributors. The final two days (October 20 and 21) were focused on educational sessions presented by both Puppet employees and industry experts.

The sessions were split into eight different topic tracks:

While there were plenty of sessions dealing specifically with Puppet itself, there were still a great number of opportunities to learn more about practical DevOps in general.

Here are some of my personal highlights from the conference:

Things I learned

Final thoughts and information for next year

PuppetConf 2016 was a great experience, even for someone like myself who mainly operates on the development side of things.

Having a better working knowledge of one of the main DevOps automation platforms along with a deeper understanding of the developer operations processes enables software developers to make better decisions about the code they write. It’s all too easy to forget that the things we create have to be run in the real world and things aren’t always as neat and tidy as they can be in your local dev environment.

Rumor has it that next year’s PuppetConf will be in San Francisco, bringing things back to the Bay Area.  If it is anywhere close to PuppetConf 2016 then it will definitely be a must attend event in 2017.