Velocity is right around the corner and we couldn’t be more excited! We’ll be in Santa Clara June 22-23, so be sure to stop by Booth 401 to meet the PagerDuty team and check out a demo. You can pick up some PagerDuty swag and play with a giant Lite-Brite while you’re at it! If you’re interested in meeting with us for a more in-depth chat, we’re also scheduling meetings on-site — sign up for meeting here.

Sessions Not to Miss

There’s no shortage of great content and there are plenty of inspiring sessions at Velocity. While you’re building out your own schedule, be sure to take a look at our recommendation list of sessions not miss.

The PagerDuty team has a few sessions at Velocity as well, be sure to stop by and check them out:
Lessons from the dark side: DevOps and product management
David Shackelford, Product Manager
11:20am–12:00pm Thursday, 06/23
Location: Ballroom GH
Product management is not often part of the DevOps conversation, but collaboration between product, development, and operations is critical to shipping great software. David Shackelford explains why performance and reliability are just part of shipping customer value, how managing complex systems applies to product management, and opportunities for both practices to learn from each other.

Debugging distributed systems
Donny Nadolny, Developer
3:40pm–4:20pm Thursday, 06/23
Location: Mission City Ballroom B1-3
Despite our best efforts, our systems fail. Sometimes it’s our fault—code that we wrote, bugs that we caused. But sometimes the fault is with systems that we have no direct control over. Distributed systems are hard. They are complicated, hard to understand, and very challenging to manage. But they are critical to modern software, and when they have problems, we need to fix them.

ZooKeeper is a very useful distributed system that is often used as a building block for other distributed systems like Kafka and Spark. It is used by PagerDuty for many critical systems, and for five months it failed a lot. Donny Nadolny looks at what it takes to debug a problem in a distributed system like ZooKeeper, walking attendees through the process of finding and fixing one cause of many of these failures. Donny explains how to use various tools to stress test the network, some intricate details of how ZooKeeper works, and possibly more than you will want to know about TCP, including an example of machines having a different view of the state of a TCP stream.

If you are interested in distributed systems and how they can fail, this session is for you.

Why DevOps is more than just automation
David Hayes, Product Manager
10:25am–10:30am Thursday, 06/23
Location: Mission City Ballroom
DevOps brings proven benefits—continuous deployment models, reduced organizational friction, and tighter feedback loops—by automating the deployment pipeline. But DevOps is also about building a culture that unifies a team to be empathy-driven and customer-focused, willing to take risks, and ultimately build a better product. David Hayes explores the benefits DevOps brings beyond automation, explaining the importance of shared operational responsibility on organizational culture, why reliability means both systems and people, and how aggregating alerts helps to maintain situational awareness.

We look forward to seeing you at Velocity Santa Clara! Be sure to follow the conversation on Twitter @PagerDuty.
Get more information on PagerDuty at Velocity.