[Archive] Atlassian Summit 2017 Blog

This post describes some of the best parts of the European Atlassian Summit 2017, which took place in beautiful, sunny Spain which offered not only a great chance to catch up on everything Atlassian, but also a chance to see the beaches, taste the food and experience the nightlife of Barcelona.

I was attending the Summit and Partner Day events, but there was also AtlasCamp taking place at the same time as the Partner Day if you had a ticket which included this - meaning the following events were available:

• Atlassian Summit
• Atlassian Summit Expo
• AtlasCamp Developer Conference
• Atlassian Partner Day
• Networking Events

The above planned events were of course in addition to meeting people ad-hoc at the hotel and in the city center - which were just as interesting as the event itself.

Here is an overview of what events I attended during the conference:

1. Summit Europe 2017 Keynote with Scott Farquhar, Bryan J. Rollins and Jurgen Spangl (Atlassian)
2. Enterprise Ready - What's New in Data Center with Keshav Puttaswamy (Atlassian)
3. Configuration as Code in Bamboo with Przemek Bruski (Atlassian)
4. Software Delivery at Warp Speed: Five Essential Techniques with Domnick Eger (Splunk)
5. Automation Awesomeness: Scaling JIRA Service Desk with Vincent Wong
6. Modern Operations at Scale within Viasat – How to Structure Teams and Build Automated Toolsets with Chris Crocco (Viasat) and Marty Jackson (xMatters)
7. Be Prepared for Growth (Confluence) with Jean-Christophe Mielnik (Thales)
8. The Four Principles of Atlassian Performance Tuning with Dan Hardiker (Adaptavist)
9. Ryanair's DevOps Journey with Alan Coates (RyanAir)

Some of the highlights for me where as follows:

• (1) "Summit Europe 2017 Keynote"

• This was the first presentation to take place at the Conference and started with stage dancers wearing very futuristic and bright outfits with LEDs covering them which was a very energetic and colourful way to kick off the conference!

• The Co-Founder and Co-CEO Scott Farquhar also joined in and entered onto the stage wearing one of the outfits too which was quite an entrance.

• They discussed the most recent additions to the Atlassian family - such as Trello, which was introduced by Michael Pryor, the CEO of the company before it's acquisition who I had the pleasure of meeting later on in the event to discuss the application.

• The new Atlassian Design Guidelines (ADG3) were introduced, which first hit Confluence Cloud and later JIRA Cloud.

• The new Atlassian Community and Atlassian Developer Community were announced - a replacement for Atlassian Answers.

• (4) "Software Delivery at Warp Speed"

• This talk discussed modern components of a DevOps stack - including how Splunk use the Docker, Kubernetes (Kube) and AWS tools in addition to JIRA, Bitbucket, SonarQube and Ansible to streamline their development lifecycle.

• (6) "Modern Operations at Scale within Viasat"

• As a transformation specialist, this talk was one of the most interesting ones, as it involved formalising the Business Process involved with supporting a global satellite network and connecting all the collaboration tools that ViaSat used together to simplify support and management - while also reducing the impact that errors have on engineers. This showed that in the DevOps world, there is less of a need for a 24x7 Network Operations Center (NOC) which is costly to implement.

• The main point of the talk was that you can draw on the strengths of each tool in your toolbelt and by using xMatters to 'glue' them together, you can make them act/behave as a single solution designed to help you with the job at hand.

• Picture this situation: "It's 3am and you have been alerted to an incident with a satellite"

• Your phone (through the xMatters app) presents you with the Incident information and 2 options - "I'm on it" or "Open a War Room"

• This simple approach hides the complexity of either assigning the JIRA issue to you, or opening a HipChat Room, inviting your teammates and linking it back to the JIRA issue - something that anyone would appreciate at 3am.

• Taking the concept further means that you can have a 'closed loop' which uses several tools to give a complete solution.

• I had the pleasure of chatting to Chris (ViaSat) and Marty Jackson (xMatters) over a few drinks after the conference had finished and learnt a lot about how xMatters can be used to bring some more cohesion across the stack - something I have used since the conference.

Software Delivery at Warp Speed

Modern Operations at Scale