With the onset of conference season I have been running a bit ragged. But something I noticed at the recent IBM Think 2018 Conference really needs to be called to attention: DevOps was still a prominent theme at IBM Think. But instead of having a dedicated DevOps theater or DevOps section of the show floor, DevOps was integrated into everything—all the various flavors of cloud (hybrid, Cloud Private, public), development, apps, even cognitive and AI … all were integrated with DevOps. I, for one, think this is as it should be.

It is a sign of DevOps maturity, I think, that instead of DevOps being called out as some special beast—a unicorn, even—it is more just the way things get done. I had a chance to talk to many different people on the show floor, attend several track sessions (which were also done on the show floor—much better than having to go into separate rooms) and, as usual, interviewed more than a few people for our DevOpsTV YouTube channel. While all of them were excited by various announcements and exhibits, it seemed as though DevOps was part of all of them.

DevOps integrated everywhere

Two great examples of this are my interview with DevOps Playbook author Sanjeev Sharma:

and my interview with Mark Howell and James McLeod of Lloyds

Another really interesting discussion was how DevOps plays into IBM’s Cloud Private offering. Cloud Private is a Kubernetes-based architecture. We spoke with Andy Gower, product marketing manager for Cloud Private. As you would expect with a Kubernetes-based offering, DevOps is right in the middle of things.

This was the theme time and time again at IBM Think 2018. DevOps was not concentrated in any one area; it was everywhere. Even in the quantum computing area, which I will admit was cool as can be.

Mainframes also were all about DevOps. This is not new for the IBM Enterprise Systems team. They have really led the way with DevOps and mainframes.

This was the first year for IBM Think 2018. It represents the merging of several different IBM conferences into one large one. I enjoyed the format and look forward to future IBM Think events.

Also a note on keynotes: The tone for IBM Think was set by IBM CEO Ginny Rometty. It was plain that IBM as a whole is focused on some key technologies and initiatives. Among these were cognitive and AI, cloud and disruptive technologies on the near horizon such as quantum computing.

There was a lot going on at IBM Think 2018, check out the YouTube channel to get more of our coverage.

— Alan Shimel