Build Systems that Drive Business
30–31 Oct 2018: Training
31 Oct–2 Nov 2018: Tutorials & Conference
London, UK

About Velocity

Why attend | Experience Velocity | Who should attend | What people are saying | Program chairs

O'Reilly Velocity Conference

Modern systems pose a number of thorny challenges: they are inherently complex, spanning multiple technologies, groups, and sometimes different organizations altogether. Most poignantly, they fail in the most unexpected and spectacular ways. The O'Reilly Velocity Conference is the best place on the planet for web ops and systems engineering professionals like you to learn from your peers, exchange ideas with experts, and share best practices and lessons learned for handling modern systems and applications.

O'Reilly Velocity Conference O'Reilly Velocity Conference

Why attend

Build Secure, Resilient Systems
The O'Reilly Velocity Conference provides you with real-world best practices for building, deploying, and running complex, distributed applications and systems.

Quality Time with Experts
Take advantage of this rare opportunity to meet face-to-face with a cadre of industry leaders who are taking systems performance and operations to the next level. Bring your entire team to share ideas and get your toughest questions answered by the experts.

Four Days Devoted to Web Operations, DevOps, and Systems Engineering
Velocity packs a wealth of big ideas, know-how, and connections into four concentrated days. You'll be able to apply what you've learned immediately and you'll be well prepared for what lies ahead.

Experience Velocity

O'Reilly Velocity Conference
  • Inspirational keynote presentations that bring clarity to complex issues and new perspectives on the state of the art
  • Immersive training courses and tutorials addressing critical topics and technologies
  • Two days of technical sessions covering both practical and emerging issues
  • An Exhibit Hall featuring dozens of the latest tools and products
  • Fun evening events, Topic Tables at lunch, and plenty of networking opportunities

Who should attend

O'Reilly Velocity Conference
  • Systems and site reliability engineers
  • Systems architects
  • Application developers
  • DevOps practitioners
  • Researchers and academics
  • Teams engaged in operations, infrastructure, and cloud ecosystems
  • CTOs and CIOs seeking to streamline operations
  • Performance engineers

What people are saying about Velocity

The Velocity Conference is an excellent opportunity to learn about devops and new technologies being used today. Whether you are a rookie or a veteran in the devops world, you will meet some like-minded people who are all striving to solve complex problems in complex environments. I highly recommend attending the Velocity Conference."
—Jeremy Ramage, Shaw Communications Inc.
As a first-time attendee, I was really impressed by the variety of subject areas, technologies, and vendors. Whether you are in development, operations, product, or management, you will not only leave with more knowledge and exposure—you will leave inspired."
—Chris Halbert, Senior Web Engineer, Dominion Enterprises
This is a great conference to attend for any web app developer. Loved the quality of the content, the variety of topics, and awesome presenters. I will try to bring my whole team next year."
—Tom Hughes-Croucher, Yahoo! Developer Network Blog
I can say without hyperbole that this was the best conference I've attended. The presentations were from people doing real large-scale web development and included a fair amount of real data and some of their solutions to hard problems."
—robcee
I have attended Velocity for over six years now and still find the content to be incredibly valid to my daily work. In many ways, it prepares me for items and features we haven't even discovered yet."
—Don Shanks, Marchex
Velocity is the conference where people talk about how to get things done in the real world—if you want to know how the best in the world handle their operations, Velocity is the place to learn."
—Adam Jacob, Opscode

Program chairs

Nikki McDonald

Nikki McDonald

Nikki McDonald is a content director at O'Reilly Media where she writes, edits, and develops content to help engineers and developers collaborate more effectively and create and deploy complex distributed systems. She also co-chairs O'Reilly's Velocity conference, which is held annually in San Jose, New York, and London. Nikki started out as a features editor at MacUser magazine back when people were still dialing up to the Internet with AOL. She now works with the industry's leading practitioners to develop books, online courses, and video training for engineers, product managers, and developers. Nikki lives in Ann Arbor, MI.

Ines Sombra

Ines Sombra

Ines Sombra is a distributed systems engineer at Fastly, where she spends her time helping the Web go faster. Ines holds an MS in computology with an emphasis on cheesy '80s rock ballads. She has a fondness for steak, fernet, and a pug named Gordo. In a previous life, Ines was a data engineer.

James Turnbull

James Turnbull

James Turnbull is a CTO in residence at Microsoft. A longtime member of the open source community, James is the author of 11 technical books about open source software. Previously, he was CTO at Empatico and Kickstarter, VPE of Venmo, and an adviser at Docker. James likes food, wine, books, photography, and cats. He is not overly keen on long walks on the beach or holding hands.

Committee Members

Matt GrayMatt Gray (Fastly) is a Site Reliability Engineer at Fastly, based in London. Prior to Fastly he built HTTP APIs and did system administration. Outside of computer shepherding he's interested in OSes, network protocols and functional programming languages, and is a contributor to the MirageOS project.

Lorenzo SainoLorenzo Saino (Fastly) is a software engineer at Fastly, where he works on network systems and load balancing problems. Prior to that, he was a PhD student at University College London. His thesis investigated design issues in networked caching systems and he was awarded the 2016 Fabrizio Lombardi prize for his research. In addition to serving on Velocity program committee, he is a reviewer for IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications ACM Computing Surveys and IEEE Communications Magazine.

Jennifer PetoffJennifer Petoff (Google) is a Senior Program Manager for Google’s Site Reliability Engineering team based in Dublin, Ireland. She is one of the co-editors of "Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems". Jennifer has managed large global projects across wide-ranging domains including scientific research, engineering, human resources, and advertising operations. Jennifer joined Google after spending eight years in the chemical industry. She holds a PhD in Chemistry from Stanford University and a BS in Chemistry and a BA in Psychology from the University of Rochester.

Dean WilsonDean Wilson (GOV.UK) is a Lead Site Reliability Engineer at Government Digital Service where he spends his time helping to build and promote digital Government. He was originally a software developer but has spent the last decade performing large scale operations at a number of well-known companies including Net-a-Porter and Mozilla. Dean occasionally blogs at https://www.unixdaemon.net, provides technical publication and architecture reviews and can often be found in the quiet back corner at London technical events.

RI Pienaar ()RI Pienaar (Independent) is an independent consultant specializing in the DevOps space. Creator of MCollective and several other Puppet space tools. Active in Startups, Government and Fortune 500 companies with a wealth of experience in automation, administration and architecting large scale systems.

Mathias MeyerMathias Meyer (Indie) is the former CEO and Co-founder at Travis CI. He used to be an engineer and is now focusing on the intersection of distributed systems, teams, company culture, resilience engineering, and building healthy businesses.

Nicole ForsgrenNicole Forsgren (DORA) is the CEO and chief scientist at DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA). Nicole is an IT impacts expert who is best known for her work with tech professionals and as the lead investigator on the largest DevOps studies to date. She is a consultant, expert, and researcher in knowledge management, IT adoption and impacts, and DevOps. In a previous life, she was a professor, sysadmin, and hardware performance analyst. Nicole has been awarded public and private research grants (funders include NASA and the NSF), and her work has been featured in various media outlets, peer-reviewed journals, and conferences. She holds a PhD in management information systems and a master's degree in accounting.

Lex NevaLex Neva (Fastly) is a site reliability engineer at Fastly. Lex originally trained in computer science, but he found that he most enjoyed applying his software engineering skills to operations. Previously, he kept large services running at Linden Lab's Second Life, DeviantArt.com, and Heroku. A veteran of many large incidents, Lex has strong opinions on incident response, retrospectives, on-call sustainability, and good development and release processes.

Guy PodjarnyGuy Podjarny (CEO at Snyk) is a cofounder and CEO at Snyk.io, where he focuses on securing open source code. He was previously CTO at Akamai and founder of Blaze.io. He also worked on the first web app firewall and security code analyzer. Guy is a frequent conference speaker, the author of Responsive & Fast, High Performance Images, and the upcoming Securing Third Party Code, and the creator of Mobitest. He also writes on "Guypo.com":http://guypo.com/ and Medium.

Bridget KromhoutBridget Kromhout (Microsoft) is a principal cloud developer advocate at Microsoft. Her CS degree emphasis was in theory, but she now deals with the concrete (if the cloud can be considered tangible). After 15 years as an operations engineer, Bridget traded being on call for being on a plane. A frequent speaker and program committee member for tech conferences, she leads the devopsdays organization globally and the DevOps community at home in Minneapolis. She podcasts with Arrested DevOps, blogs at Bridgetkromhout.com, and is active in a Twitterverse near you.

Michael Hausenblas (Red Hat)Michael Hausenblas (Red Hat) is a developer advocate for Go, OpenShift, and Kubernetes at Red Hat, where he helps app ops engineers build and operate distributed services. Michael shares his experience with distributed systems and large-scale data processing through demos, blog posts, and public speaking engagements and contributes to open source software such as OpenShift and Kubernetes. Previously, Michael was a developer advocate at Mesosphere, chief data engineer at MapR Technologies, and a research fellow at the National University of Ireland, Galway, where he researched large-scale data integration and the internet of things and gained experience in advocacy and standardization (World Wide Web Consortium, IETF). In his free time, Michael contributes to open source software (mainly using Go), blogs, and hangs out on Twitter too much.

Kerim SatirliKerim Satirli (Method) is part of a team of engineers and helps the company by stewarding the adoption and expansion of DevOps techniques and practices. In the past, Kerim built web applications for advertising companies, worked on a content management system that was used by the top museums of the Netherlands and helped make music and video more accessible for a number of start-ups.

Tameika ReedTameika Reed (Women In Linux) founded Women In Linux out of frustration that there were no other women or women of color represented at the workplace or tech events. Tameika is a self-taught Linux administrator who has spent countless hours helping others get started in Linux. In conjunction with the NAACP, she provides families with basic computer training and life skills. Tameika is also a consultant to the Education Foundation on how to introduce Linux and other tech careers to Florida students.

Andrea MagnorskyAndrea Magnorsky (Goodlord) has current technical interests in F#, Scala and other programming languages, games and philosophy of computing. She really enjoys finding different ways to write code, sometimes for performance, other times for succinctness, sometimes, just because you can, there is no better way to learn than trying. When she is not working she tends to play with Racket or other languages or cats. Conferences and meetups are a great way to learn more, so she tries to help when she can to make them happen. She speaks at local and international conferences like CodeMesh, Progressive.Net, ProF#, Lambda Days and many more.

Liz Rice AquaLiz Rice Aqua (Security) is the technology evangelist at container security specialists Aqua Security. Previously, she cofounded container startup Microscaling Systems, which built a real-time scaling engine and the popular image inspector MicroBadger. Liz has a wealth of software development, team, and product management experience from her years spent working on network protocols and distributed systems and in digital technology sectors such as VOD, music, and VoIP. When not building startups and writing code, Liz loves riding bikes in places with better weather than her native London.

Alvaro VidelaAlvaro Videla (FaunaDB) was a senior software engineer at Apple. He was a core developer for RabbitMQ. He also worked in Shanghai helping build one of Germany’s biggest dating websites. Alvaro is the coauthor of RabbitMQ in Action (Manning) and is a frequent "open source contributor":https://github.com/videlalvaro. Outside of work, he likes traveling with his wife, listening to and playing music, and reading books.

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