.NEXT Europe Copenhagen 2019
.NEXT is the semi-annual Nutanix User Conference that has taken place in Europe and America since 2015. .NEXT 2019 Europe took place in Copenhagen, Denmark from October 11-13 and it was another sold out event that eclipsed the 2018 attendance records for prospective customers as well as our existing customers and partners.
.NEXT Magazine Issue 6 was published to coincide with the .NEXT Conference and featured an interview with Gene Kim on page 40. The interview is followed by the first public excerpt of his forthcoming book “The Unicorn Project,” sequel to the best selling book he co-authored titled “The Phoenix Project,” a fictional account of how DevOps can modernize IT at a large, traditional business.
.DEV Day at .NEXT
.DEV Day is an exclusive invite-only, full-Day event on the opening “Day zero” of .NEXT, when most attendees travel to the host city for the following morning’s opening conference keynote. .DEV Day is the successor to the Nutanix Hackathon from .NEXT D.C. in 2017 and it has an advanced technical practice focus. It is primarily intended for the community who typically cares about Nutanix platform APIs and DevOps outcomes with Nutanix. The inaugural .DEV Day took place at .NEXT 2019 Anaheim and featured Gene Kim for the guest keynote.
.DEV Day Copenhagen Recap
As a bonus to all .DEV Day attendees, there was a .DEV Happy Hour on October 7th from 5:30-7:30 p.m. at the Bella Center Gastro Pub in Copenhagen. Early arrival attendees got to mix with Nutanix employees and discuss their plans for conquering .NEXT’s exhaustive program of expert level talks, interactive partner exposition hall, and events.
The agenda for .DEV Day had an exciting line up! After a brief breakfast and introduction, the program started:
Nutanix for Developers
The “Nutanix for Developers” opening keynote featured Tarak Parekh, Principle Product Manager at Nutanix and Raghavan Kollivakkam, Engineering Director at Nutanix. They presented an overview of the Nutanix APIs, their history, and their future, it was a superset of the .NEXT EU 2019 talk Getting Started with Nutanix APIs for Orchestration and Automation and Raghavan Kollivakkam’s blog entries about APIs on Nutanix.DEV.
The Nutanix API references reside here on the .DEV web site!
Nutanix in the Real World
After a brief break, Nutanix customers and partners participated in a moderator led panel entitled “Nutanix in the Real World” where the topics of how agile practices and DevOps were applied in their organizations or for their clientelle. Their diverse technology stacks, experience gained, challenges overcome, and advice for their younger selves were equally illuminating.
Our panel included:
- Vincent Vlieghe, DevOps, DevOps Team Lead at Delen Private Bank (Belgium)
- Rubén Darío Carrera Del Castillo, DevOps Lead at Indra Company (Spain)
- Marouane Louah, Director Business Development at OmniShore Groupe Medtech (Morocco)
- Matt Saunders, Head of DevOps at Adaptivist (England)
Agile, DevOps, and Business Walk into a Bar
After lunch, the featured Keynote guest speakers Jon Kern and Dan Hardiker from Adaptavist gave a deceptively informal and amusing talk titled “Agile, DevOps, and Business Walk into a Bar.”
Dan and Jon’s conversation covered the origins and principles of the Agile Manifesto, which Jon was a co-signer in 2001, and showed the audience what it was intended to guide them towards. They provided some amusing illustrations, examples of customer approaches, and commentaries on the of misinterpretation and institutionalization of agile today. The expansion and alignment of the DevOps movement was noted and perhaps most importantly, the dynamic nature of agile as an organizational value system, not a dogmatic, rigid prescription was emphasized.
Hands-On with Nutanix
The remainder of the afternoon focused on providing access to Nutanix clusters and Hands-On Labs for participants to experiment and utilize Nutanix APIs and products, putting .DEV Day’s theory and learning into practice. After guiding attendees through access to the clusters and making their first successful API call in the API Lab, the rest of the day was dedicated to self-directed labs, which included:
- APIs: PHP
- APIs: Python Flask
- APIs: C# Windows Forms
- Calm & Linux
- Era
- Karbon (Containers)
Snacks and refreshments were provided to power the participants! The Hands-On clusters remained available during .NEXT for participants to continue their experimentation.
Conclusion
.DEV Day wrapped up with a thank you for attending, encouragement to continue the hands on labs, and then .NEXT’s “day zero” concluded.
What’s .NEXT for .DEV Day?
Follow @nutanixdevs on Twitter or the .DEV blog for events including the upcoming announcements about .DEV Day at .NEXT Chicago 2020 on June 30! Reach out to the team if you would like to be invited.