NDItech @ Drupal GovCon 2017

Hundreds of Drupal aficionados and implementers gathered yesterday at the NIH campus in Bethesda Maryland for Day One of Drupal GovCon. 

 

After registration and some early sessions - I kicked off the day with Untangling Your Drupal Git Workflow where I picked up a few tips for improving our own workflows - it was off to the main auditorium to hear the keynote from Pantheon’s self-described “Warrior Princess” Michelle Krejci. 

 

The keynote was a whistle stop tour of the history of DevOps (as well as the DevOps of lunch- learning about how her father’s job in the grain industry applies) and a demonstration of how DevOps methodology has permeated DrupalCons and camps in recent years. A victim of its own success, Krejci summed it up as “Everything is DevOps” and as such predicted that we'll hear less about it as DevOps has become the normal way of doing things.. 

 

After lunch (provided by the aforementioned culinary engineers), it was off to Automatic Drupal Updates using Visual Regression & Continuous Integration. We learned how to ‘make the robots do the work’ of updates and simple QA so we don't have to. 

 

Finally, we were treated to an overview of Kubernetes and how it can be used to organize our Docker containers into pods for easier management, configuration and deployment. 

 

I attended the DevOps track today, as that's my personal interest, and was lucky enough to learn a lot about automation and Continuous Integration and Delivery from some experts in the field. We're currently examining and refining our own automation workflows, so these sessions were very useful for NDITech. 

 

Today we were inspired to improve our DevOps workflows. The best thing is, there are two days left!