Greetings to you, dear reader!

I’m Liene, one of the DevOps Talks organizers. If you are following our reviews regularly – I must ask you to lower your expectations as I am definitely not such a great poet as Murathan.

This time our speaker was Edgars Biezaitis – DevOps specialist, currently working at Arvato Systems Latvia. He is an experienced public speaker and was so kind to share with us his tips and tricks on How to Reduce Meeting and Public Speaking Anxiety. He talked about how to set yourself up for success, make it fun, and my favourite takeaway – to keep in mind that sometimes a duck is just a duck, and presentation is just a presentation.
After an amazing presentation (where we did not note any public speaking anxiety), Edgars answered questions on what to do when you don’t have an answer to a question and shared his biggest public speaking disaster. To hear what it was – check out the presentation’s video:

Moving on to the second part – the discussions. In short – the discussion facilitator invites participants to come up with topics they would like to discuss. Then everyone can vote on which ones should we talk about. Check out the beautifully written explanation on how it works in our previous review.

Here are the topics we were discussing:

Why are companies moving away from AWS?

For some(I mean myself) it was a surprise that this is a thing, while others had some guesses:

• It is not reliable – there have been multiple issues with the availability of the services;
• Amazon in basis is a retailer  – so you are a retailer yourself, you are building your infra on competitors site;
• Some solutions are cheaper elsewhere like bandwidth costs in Oracle
• There are some rumours that a European cloud provider is coming into the market
• AWS is not for everyone – it depends on what you want to build

And an interesting thought came up in the chat – “Choosing a cloud provider is like choosing to whom you will be hostage”, or something of the like was said by Mark Smalley.

Everyone can deploy to production. How to fix it?

Here the discussion also raised a question – is that a problem? Here are a couple of thoughts:

• If testing practices are in place and provide safety, developers deploying to production is not a problem, depends on the team
• Approvals and maintenance windows can help to avoid issues
• Implement practices, processes, and conditions – how and when you deploy to production. Then talk about them a lot. And make the deployment process highly documented, in addition.
• Consider these 3 things: speed (to production), risk (can the system be down), and the maturity of the team (trust in people who have this access). Where are you in this triangle?

Best CI/CD tool

I believe this was not the first time this was a discussion topic. Participants shared their thoughts:

• There is no such thing as a CI/CD tool anymore
• CircleCI, but depends on what you need from the tool
• GitHub; Jenkins is a go-to if you use some hardcore corporate tools. Many build their own custom plugins for Jenkins, but not much for others.
• GitLab

As the discussion part proceeded, more topics were discussed:

• How do you make the feedback loop shorter?
• To bash or not to bash?
• Good conferences this year
  

If this sounds interesting and fun for you – join us for the next DevOps Talk event!

We have our next event on the 22nd of April. Whether you have topics in your mind you would like to share and discuss or you want to hear about interesting discussions from others, we have an open place for you. Come and join us!

We are looking for new speakers! Do you have a topic/case you would like to present and tell about? You can contact us through the Techies of Baltics LinkedIn page or Slack channel to be our next presenter!