As we approach the 15th anniversary of DevOps, we find ourselves at a crossroads. While DevOps was initially conceived to break down silos and enhance communication for stability, reliability, availability, and security, the proliferation of tools has unintentionally created new complexities and silos. What if we could embark on a paradigm shift, rather than an incremental one, based on lessons learned along the way? In this presentation, System Initiative reflected on the lessons learned throughout the DevOps journey and explored how we, as a community, can transform how we collaborate to build and maintain complex infrastructure. Whether you're a seasoned DevOps expert or just embarking on this journey, this talk will provide valuable insights into the role you can play in ushering in the "second wave of DevOps." We'll discuss the capabilities we see as necessary in a new platform and explore what's possible when we are no longer constrained by the current state of the system that we, together, have created over the last 15 years.

In this session, Michael DeHaan, who previously created Cobbler and Ansible, presented Jetporch (aka Jet), a newly released community-driven automation system. Jetporch is written in Rust and features a streamlined automation language and exceptional multithreaded performance. Jet works over SSH and requires no software installation on managed machines. Additional deployment topologies, such as SSH fanout and multi-region-capable messaging, are coming soon. Read more at https://www.jetporch.com.

WWT's Tyler Hatton reviews the Automation services and capabilities that WWT provides to customers. Tyler discusses how WWT Automation Services enables our customers, WWT's Automation capabilities and approach, and the WWT Automation Factory Approach.

The barrier to entry for Ansible is low, but is it "no code" or "low code?" Although Ansible requires some coding, the advent of validated content truly makes Ansible for networking "Easy Code!" During this session, presented by Tony Dubiel from Red Hat, we learned how Validated Content can help us automate common network use cases with simple playbooks and roles across multiple vendors. To demonstrate this capability, we walked through a use case that tackles the onboarding of multi-vendor brownfield devices into a fully automated configuration management scenario while showcasing how the validated content provides consistency and abstraction between the multiple vendor routers.

As network automation continues to gain traction, many groups face the challenge of creating an automation-friendly repository for their diverse data sets. In this session, Jordan Villarreal from NetBox Labs delved into the industry-leading open-source project, NetBox, which facilitates the correlation of network deployment information across multiple domains, thus enhancing automation and data association. We illustrated these benefits using a sample dataset from a fictional company. We explored a fully documented corporate headquarters and several satellite sites, emphasizing their IPAM, DCIM, internet circuits, virtualization environments, and the benefits of correlating this data. Additionally, we addressed the challenges faced when adopting open-source software and how contemporary companies are stepping up to support organizations in their needs.

The traditional IT operations workflow has always relied on a process and procedure cycle that ultimately requires manual intervention to restore production services and resolve an active incident. In this session, presented by Nick Thompson from WWT, we explored how the combination of Event-Driven Ansible, application telemetry, and a solid foundation of observability can be combined to deliver the ultimate in closed-loop automation to reduce incidents and after-hours troubleshooting.

In today's dynamic and interconnected digital landscape, web applications face an ever-increasing threat landscape, with injection-based attacks posing a significant risk to data integrity and user privacy. During this session, presented by Ben Novak from F5, we learned how the F5 Advanced Web Application Firewall (AWAF) and its real-time threat intelligence, combined with Red Hat Ansible and the ELK Stack, can help defend against injection-based attacks and provide a proactive and comprehensive approach to web application security, safeguarding against these threats effectively.

World Wide Technology (WWT) customers can access over 250 technology labs on demand. In this session, Corey Wanless from WWT explained how Event-Driven Ansible contributes to provisioning some of our new, on-demand labs. He demonstrated how to use AMQ streams (Apache Kafka) hosted on Red Hat OpenShift combined with Event-Drive Ansible to create a loosely coupled automation stack to provision infrastructure and applications.