As the new Techstrong Group team member, I wasn’t familiar with the DevOps Dozen awards. The basics: It’s a cool program that recognizes excellence across a number of categories in the DevOps world. The winners will be announced during our Predict 23 conference on January 12. I have to tell you that the submission process was interesting.
It’s not surprising that many of the submissions came in on the last day. Some within the last hour of the last day. But what was surprising were some of the excuses we got when companies inevitably asked for extensions.
No one actually used the “dog ate our submission” excuse—mostly because, well, it’s an online submission process so, unless the dog swallowed a computer, that’s not really a thing anymore. It seemed that honesty prevailed this year. We got a bunch of folks that said they were working on a major launch; others said they’d been consumed with getting ready for KubeCon and asked for a little more time.
We were somewhat sympathetic since we also were getting ready for KubeCon and totally understand the all-hands-on-deck push required to get ready for a major event. We also encountered some issues with our payment processor which prevented the completion of some submissions. We’ve fixed the issue and we’ve learned from that experience, so it won’t be a problem next year.
In terms of the categories, unsurprisingly the top three that attracted the most submissions were “Best DevSecOps Solution,” “Best End-to-End DevOps Tool and Service” and “Best New DevOps Tool/Service Provider”. Given the move to integrate security into the DevOps environment and the move to integrate the variety of DevOps tools onto a platform, the popularity of those two categories was expected.
The next wave of categories included “Best Observability Solution,” “Best Cloud-Native Security Solution/Service” and “Best CI/CD Tool” to round out the top six. Again, less strategic and more tactical in this second group.
If you are looking to go where the crowds aren’t, the least-crowded three categories in terms of submissions were “Best DevOps-Related Video Series (Video),” “Best DevOps Transformation (non-vendor)” and “Best DevOps Presentation of the Year.” Maybe those aren’t the sexiest, most buzzworthy categories, but the competition is minimal.
So what did we learn from this year’s submission process? Try not to wait until the last minute and that the most competitive categories are those that deal with hot issues. Keep an eye out for the beginning of public voting, and we’ll see you at the awards ceremony during Predict 23!