Cuba 2017 in review

by Enrique Carbonell - 12 December, 2017

Welcome poster

Last October, 23-27 2017 we celebrated at Melia Marina Varadero the second annual event of DevOpsDays Cuba with participation of more than 120 delegates. The event was well received and of great interest to different educational institutions such as: Informatics Science University (UCI), Central University (UCLV) and others Universities from different regions of the country. In addition, the public sector was represented by professionals of companies related to Software Industry and Telecommunications services such as: DESOFT, DATYS, GEOCUBA, ETECSA, XETID, etc. As a great improvement, this year the event was well received by IT professionals of the young private sector in Cuba (TCP).


This year's event was host by the Central University and the organizer team was composed of the founding team members: Rudy Gevaert (Ghent University), Yadier Perdomo (UCI), Manuel Olivera (UCLV) y Enrique Carbonell (DATYS).

Speaker panel

All attendees were able to share and experience speakers from Cuba, United States, United Kingdom, France, and Belgium in addition to the conversations that the attendees had with the speakers during Open Spaces. The first day, we covered subjects related with “Cultural and DevOps adoptions”, the event began with extended and engaged discussions of a speaker panel model with the International Speakers. The sessions continued with an [All Day DevOps](https://www.alldaydevops.com/) Watch Party viewing live on-line transmissions of talks selected by attendees votes followed by discussions during Open Spaces.

Video of the watch party from Cuba on Facebook


Topics selection at Open spaces

Attendees at Open spaces

The other days started with Keynotes, Main Speaker Talks, followed by Ignite Talks, and interactive knowledge experience exchange discussions during Open Spaces sessions. The first presentation of the event was by US expert Randy Shoup, regarding his experience as it pertains to DevOps adoption in organizations like Google, Ebay and Stitch Fix; and Puerto Rican expert Mike Rosado closed the event with a workshop that summarized essential elements of DevOps as it relates to delivering business value to the organization, that was well received by the attendees.


Keynote by Randy Shoup

Workshop by Mike Rosado

In general, the main topics of discussion at the event were: Practices and Configuration Management Tools, Docker, Monitoring of resource and services, Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery, DevOps as cultural movement in Enterprises, Hiring DevOps professionals, Infrastructure as Code, Microservices and legacy app migration, Testing of infrastructure projects, experiences building reactive applications, Big Data solutions with DevOps approach, and other interesting topics presented during open space discussions that propitiated as Win-Win experience for all attendees.

All days of the event we had a single track session for the whole day (9:00 AM - 6:00 PM). It was gratifying to note that until late at night, several professionals exchanged experiences on other topics of interest due to time restricted reasons which is why they were unable to be present during the scheduled program, such as topics on “Data services in Microservices” by Randy Shoup or on the “Integrating roles of a Cloud Architect in companies” by Lee Fox, or on the creation of IT communities offered by Aymen El Amri.


Speakers sharing in lobby: Alina, Lee, Conor and Randy

This year we repeated the tradition of gifting the Cuban speakers with books at the end of their talks to help contribute to their professional development, also at the end of each day the attendees participated in a raffle of IT books, swags, IT certification vouchers, vouchers to VPS services, etc. We are very grateful of our sponsors and contributors to make these ideas possible: ITRevolution, Pagerduty, DevOps Institute, Clouding, AllDayDevOps, Docker Havana, UCI, and a special Thanks to our collaborators Ken Mugrage, Patrick Debois and Alex Maier.


Table with books and swags to rafle

Rafle at event

The final activity planned as Beach Party was suspended by the hotel due to bad weather conditions, but that did not stop us and we continued with enthusiasm to finish doing an after party at the Hotel Pool, celebrating the event success with Salsa music, karaoke, and dance classes. The right person to animate the after party event was Lee Fox who was the life of the party with his positive energy and contagious enthusiasm #selfieswithleeshat.


After party at the pool

Sharing dance steps at the pool. Pat showed us some break dance steps and Danielle showed us the "flow".

Our local Cuban talent were teaching salsa steps to some speakers. Alina was the best student followed by Conor.

Mike with Lee

Pat & Aymen with Lee

Danielle with Lee

We are deeply gratefully to all the sponsors, for their assistance and contribution to make this event and successful, especially to our Bronze sponsors for trust in our event ideas: DevOps Institute, Clouding and the support of DevOps.com. Also we appreciate the participation of DESOFT, because its management recognizes DevOpsDays Cuba as an important opportunity to learn and improve organizations, they were the first to contact us to and suppport the event by sending more than 30 of their IT professionals (developers, sysadmins, managers). Special thanks also to Dra. Ana María García and Lic. Libia García Rodríguez coordinators of DESOFT, to the organizer team of DevOpsDays Ghent, and to Mike Rosado who is member of DevOpsDays core team.


DESOFT IT - [#WomenInTech professionals](https://twitter.com/hashtag/WomenInTech?src=hash)

We are excited to announce next year’s DevOpsDays Cuba 2018, we will plan to increase the capacity of the event based on future Sponsorship received to make it viable for the participation of more IT professionals from different sectors.

We will invite recognized international experts from IT world (some that have currently have expressed interest in participating and waiting for next year’s announcement) once we’ve identified the topics for our next event. We will be doing some MeetUp activities and pre-event courses to promote the development of IT projects and increase the DevOps movement in our local communnities.

We’ve identified some area improvement for our next event which are:

  • Increase financial support for Cuban professionals and Speakers.
  • Get more local sponsors from Cuban enterprises.
  • Improve Internet connectivity at the event.
  • Improve communication channel to announce event and community activities

Thank you all so much for making this conference an awesome experience! See you on at our next DevOpsDays Cuba 2018 event and at the local activities!

Others related links to DevOpsDays Cuba 2017:

Official links:

Website: https://www.devopsdays.org/events/2017-cuba/
Twitter: @devopsdayscuba
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/groups/7070120
Slides: Speakerdeck
Photos: Flicker
Videos: devopsdayscuba