The 7th edition of The Italian DevOps Conference IDI2019 is over. During Friday, March 8th, in the beatiful Bologna 370+ people gathered together to attend the main Italian event on DevOps, automation tools, testing and much more.

One theme dominated the conference: Microservices and how can we adopt it (but also, should we?).

Let the numbers talk

• There were 370+ people
• 320 tickets (Sold Out! Again!)
• 33 speakers
• 4 tracks
• 28 talks

Well, let me say that this conference delivers multiple insights at a quick pace.

There were about 50% of talks given in Italian, but, following the huge success of the previous editions, we continue to feature keynotes and talks in English to extend our audience and to create a bridge between the Italian and the international DevOps communities.

Workshops

The Italian DevOps Conference is a 2 days event. The day before the conference (7th of March 2019) is the Workshops day. This year 4 workshops were presented, on Docker, Kubernetes, AWS and Ansible. Going from 0 to designing a containerized infrastructure using automatic configuration tools has never been easier.

Topics and talks

Topics included DevOps, Continuous Delivery, Cloud, Microservices, Automation, Testing, Big Data, Containers, Data Center Operating Systems, Software Operability, IT operating models and how to plan and organize IT Operations.

There were many interesting talks but I remember vividly the keynote presentation by Giuseppe Lavagetto who gave its perspective on the adoption of Microservices at the Wikimedia Foundation. He condensed the lessons learned at Wikimedia during the transition from a monolithic architecture to a microservice-oriented infrastrucure. I also appreciated the presentation given by Andrea Tosatto who spoke about "Scaling Ansible". He showed how he reduced the execution time of a playbook from 60 minutes to 6 minutes by applying some small, but powerful, hacks.

My 6 key takeaways from #IDI2019

1. DevOps is more a cultural shift than a set of ever-evolving technologies.
2. Microservices, containers, etc.. can help you or trap you. A (not so) minimal knowledge of how things work under the hood is always required.
3. Infrastructure-as-Code tools (e.g. Ansible, Terraform) can be very beneficial to your company, whether you are migrating to microservices or not.
4. Kubernetes is everywhere.
5. Serverless applications still need to be monitored (just like any other thing on this planet).
6. Conferences like this are a great place to ramp up your knowledge and get inspired, whether you are an experienced DevOps superhero or new to the topic.

We look forward to see you next year!

#IDI2020 will take place, as usual, in Bologna at the beginning of March. Tickets are already available!