9 ms·

Pouring one out for the end of O’Reilly’s in-person conferences

109 points by Oculus 6y ago

chirau 6y ago
I, for one, will surely miss the O'Reilly Conferences. Very well organized and great keynote speakers. Also, you will meet a lot of interesting people in hallways, dining, social events etc. It also gives you O'Reilly Online access.
jhbadger 6y ago
This sort of thing is true for scientific conferences as well -- that half the point isn't the talks, but connecting with potential collaborators between (or instead of) talks. With numerous conferences this year that haven't been cancelled outright shifting to online, we'll have to see if any of this networking aspect can be captured.
draw_down 6y ago
I never got much out of the "hallway track", myself. For the parties and socializing, I guess I prefer the company of people that don't tend to find themselves at professional technology conferences. If the talks don't have interesting ideas or expose me to new things, it's hard for me to get value out of a conference. It's true that you can watch a talk from anywhere, but being in the same room usually gives the talk deeper and longer-term impact, I have found.
- ghaff 6y ago
  For me, a lot of the value is "hallway track," meetings, etc. But I do also find value in having some forced time to be exposed to new things. There are lots of talks online about various topics but, to be honest, I don't get around to watching a huge amount.
sybercecurity 6y ago
Same with some standard development orgs as well like the IETF. The real value is in the "hallway" meetings or pop up meetings organized over a particular topic. Especially the IETF where they even admit the email list is where official work is done and not really in-person meetings. The use of collaboration tools like github/lab, wikis and mailing lists help a bit. Maybe we need to give Second Life a second look...
wronglebowski 6y ago
I actually was planning to attend their DevOps conference this year before COVID. My employer will sponsor one conference of my choice. Any recommendations for replacements?
- jonahhorowitz 6y ago
  USENIX SRECon has been a great conference for a few years. They've postponed it right now, but I expect it will still happen.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  Hashiconf (if you're using their tooling). Incredibly informative and always well put together.
- zerkten 6y ago
  If your employer is paying, how much more runway do you have to make a decision? Given the current situation, I'd expect many companies to start cutting expenses and making excuses. If there is a virtual training class rather than an online conference, I'd make that a priority, if the funds may disappear. As for replacement conferences, I wouldn't assume that you'll have any certainty around those until those for some time.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    That's good advice. The general hope is that things start to ramp back up for fall conference season though I'm not placing any big bets on that. A few conferences are still holding to summer plans but IMO that's very iffy especially if they're not at the very tail end.
- sciurus 6y ago
  LISA. https://www.usenix.org/conferences/byname/5 https://www.usenix.org/conferences/byname/5
- DonHopkins 6y ago
  Ask for your employer to cut you a check for the cost it takes you to go to a conference, and spend it on some good headphones or earbuds, and a bidet.
driverdan 6y ago
Quite frankly I won't miss large, overpriced, junket confs like O'Reilly's. They were too expensive for most people to justify attending without corporate sponsorship. The expo halls were full of enterprise sales pitches with minimal substance. They also had sponsored keynotes which tended to be sales pitches. If you go to meet people instead of selling your product go to smaller confs put on by local organizers.
- PaulHoule 6y ago
  It's tough. I think some people get sent to conferences for the wrong reasons: the company has some money for some reason so they send them. Other people should go but they can't get the money. Many times the companies that get booths and sponsor the conference press a lot of flesh and get a lot of business cards but no sales. Sometimes you will see a conference sponsor smiling afterwards, but often they end up spending the last day doing a seminar on some product to a bunch of tired defense contractors who flew across the country to read stuff on their laptops -- if you get in free as a speaker it is probably worth the airfare to commiserate about it with the head of marketing for the sponsor afterwards in the hotel bar. A nearby city has been thinking about building a conference center, consultants are telling them that most conference centers don't make a profit. Many cities subsidize them because they hope that it will bring in more traffic to other businesses in the area. However, with conferences being as expensive as they are, I wonder how it is they don't make a profit? Who does?
  - Retric 6y ago
    It’s the same issue as sports stadiums, once local governments frequently subsidies something it stops being a competitive market with healthy profit margins.
  - bluGill 6y ago
    Don't confuse the conference center for the conferences inside. The conferences can make money (though they often don't) while the center loses money. Either because they can't book enough, or because there is enough competition that you have to lower prices. Remember that there are only so many businesses (including non-profits) in town that want to rent the place. When people are coming from out of town what difference does the town make? Thus it is hard to fill your conference center.
jonahhorowitz 6y ago
I've been going to large conferences since I started my career 20 years ago. When I was a junior engineer I found the sessions very informative, but as I developed more experience, I always got the most value hanging out in the hallway after sessions or the hotel bar at the end of the day. I've tried "going to" a few virtual conferences and they're basically useless. Losing these physical spaces to gather and discuss will be a huge blow to learning and collaboration.
- duxup 6y ago
  As a bit of a n00b (working in a small shop without a lot of exposure to other processes and etc) going to meetups I find those are super handy conversations / the most valuable. Even stuff like "I was trying to solve this problem but I saw this really popular pattern and folks seemed to like it but damn it looks like it would just blow up if you ever did X." And someone tells me "yeah that blew up for me and here is how". So helpful! I want a conference where folks get into small groups and everyone goes around and says: Here is what I'm doing, challenges we faced, how we overcame them, lessons learned. Even basic day to day stuff that someone talks about can be handy. The minuta and stuff sometimes is the key it seems. And sometimes just sharing similar stories / problems that don't have solutions for me inspires a lot of confidence and that can lead to real results.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    That's often how unconference formats work for at least part of the day. Unconferences seem to have fallen a bit out of fashion although AFAIK DevOps Days typically combine some curated main stage talks with smaller unconference facilitated discussions. I haven't been to one for a while though.
    - rutthenut 6y ago
      I've been to the last couple of London DevOpsDays and find the presentations often interesting, but the ad hoc sessions in the afternoon can be some of the best parts.
hinkley 6y ago
When I worked on the Mosaic project, I went into my boss's office one day and his shelves had sprouted about 6 shelf-feet of O'Reilly books. Somehow Terry convinced some O'Reilly rep that since we were helping them sell so many books that maybe they should give us some free books. Turns out that the entire catalog was 6 feet at that particular moment. So he had every. single. O'Reilly book in print. I was not entirely gracious in my jealousy. A couple times a year I am reminded of the comedians and speakers I heard as a child talking about old things ending all the time, and it's been happening more and more to me. The worst is still the "Guess who died game", but that's so far about losing people I grew up with. As you can tell by the above, I kind of grew up with O'Reilly, and I hope this isn't the end of an era.
ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
I certainly agree about the "Hallway track." Nowadays, you can get more from a session by reviewing the video, than from being there in person. However, making relationships, and maintaining them, is really important. This goes double for today's distributed teams; where people may seldom get a chance to meet. Never been to an O'Reilly conference, but have attended many others. Nowadays, most conferences are too damn big and polished for me. My favorite conference of all time, was MacHack, in the late 1980s. Really scruffy, scrappy, and energizing.
ansible 6y ago
This is somewhat off-topic, but has anyone else been disappointed by O'Reilly's website these days? I was disappointed to learn about them discontinuing the sale of individual ebooks, but sort of rolled with it by just buying them from another vendor. Now it seems I can only sign up for online learning. What is that? Yes, I can start a free trial, but wouldn't it be nice to know what I might want to spend $500 USD per year on? What does O'Reilly actually have these days? I'd prefer to save my free trial for when I'm moderately sure I'll want to stick with the service. If I don't even have an index of what's being offered, that really turns me away.
- unethical_ban 6y ago
  They don't sell ebooks anymore?
  - ansible 6y ago
    Not individual ebooks directly from O'Reilly. I used to do that. But they've pushed the Safari initiative, and gone wholly on the subscription route.
    - ilamont 6y ago
      They also forced some publishers off the platform, even if they participated in Safari.
      - lovehashbrowns 6y ago
        Do you know which publishers they pushed off the platform?
        ilamont 6y ago
        My company, for one. The letter I received was a form letter which leads me to believe others were impacted, too: We periodically review our partnerships and titles made available through our online learning platform, to ensure appropriate diversification, topic coverage, and audience fit. The learning platform customer base is rapidly evolving and growing, which means the learning resources we offer our customers must as well. I'm writing today to let you know that while we have greatly appreciated your ongoing partnership with O’Reilly we have made the decision to not renew the contract for the distribution of XXXX content in the O’Reilly learning platform effective XXXX.
saystupidthings 6y ago
I thought this was going to be an auto parts conference.
alaxsxaq 6y ago
I've been going to OSCON on and off since the entire conference took place in the downtown Portland Marriott and it was a really good conference, until they moved it to Austin. From there, attendance seemed to decline yearly and the content was getting very watered down. At the 25th anniversary event back in Portland, it was startling clear that either O'Reilly was becoming disinterested in this event or there was a revenue problem. I guess a bit of both.
- ghaff 6y ago
  While the trigger was obvious, the way this came down makes one suspect that the in-person events were, if not on the chopping block, at least somewhat precarious. Remember also that it's not just OSCON; O'Reilly had a big slate of events. (That a lot of people mostly equate OSCON with the O'Reilly events business is likely a symptom of the overall problem. This isn't a commentary on the quality of their events generally--which I've found to be pretty solid--but it does say something about the mindshare they have beyond OSCON.) And, if I'm being honest, OSCON has gone from being almost a must go if you were in certain open source circles to something still mostly worth going to if you could find the time and budget. OSCON out-survived a lot of shows that were about open source overall but it's frankly a bit hard to be an event about open source in a general way when open source touches almost everything. In any case, in spite of the special place a lot of people have for OSCON, it probably wasn't sustainable as a standalone event without the rest of the event slate.
jedberg 6y ago
This is a huge blow to our industry I think. I've attended a lot of conferences, large and small, and the hallway track is almost always the most useful part. I've had some of my most important collaborations start with meeting someone in the hall. I've met some of my best friends in conference hallways. I have an entire group of friends who I only ever see at conferences, because we live all over the world. I once got questioned entering Canada as to why I was going and I said, "to visit friends". They asked me how I could have so many friends in Canada if I've lived in California all my life. I told them, "I met them all at conferences!". And it's true. Every person I know in Canada I met at a conference (other than a few family members). And almost all of them have helped me professionally at one time or another as well as being good friends. I'm going to miss those O'Reilly hall tracks. :(
itqwertz 6y ago
Most conferences can be summed up in a group of blog posts. I don’t need to listen to a Diversity Evangelist tell me how to code.
frost_knight 6y ago
This past February I had the honor of giving my first ever keynote presentation. The conference was sponsored by my employer. That said, aside from mentioning that I worked for said employer, I never mentioned it again nor did I try to sell anyone anything. I had some of the best most awesome conversations during the coffee and lunch breaks. I can only hope that I gave a fraction of insight during my keynote that I received during the hallway talks.
wenc 6y ago
Developers conferences can be useful if you get to talk to the right people. I was given a pass to Microsoft Build one year because we were looking to build stuff on Azure but weren't sure which services were mature and which were not. I talked to almost every single PM who had a booth there (and at MS, PMs are also developers). I learned that if you push MS PMs hard enough and ask the right questions, most will drop the marketing facade and give you the insider's view. (after all, developers -- by personality trait -- generally hate two-faced marketing talk and would genuinely rather talk about the tech) This unfiltered insider's view is decidedly quite different from Microsoft's enterprise marketing's messaging. Attending Microsoft Build and talking to PMs helped us avoid investing our efforts in Azure services that turned out to be dead-ends. (many of Azure's GA stuff are feature complete but not truly production-ready) Short of running POCs, there exist few other low-effort means of procuring this intelligence other than by talking to (honest) Azure consultants at Meetups who have to deal with this stuff in daily production. My conclusion from the conference (corroborated with my own dev experience) was that the parts of Azure that were built on pre-existing Microsoft technology (like VMs and SQL Servers) were generally solid and could be relied upon. Whereas many new-fangled PaaS/SaaS cloud-only offerings tend not to be as battle-tested and would often fail on corner cases, so one would be prudent to think twice about putting mission-critical workloads on them. Also, one learns that despite the glossy marketing material, some Azure offerings turned to not have had any dev activity on them due to low uptake. There are still maturity issues in Azure today, and my gut feel is that most enterprises that do run on Azure mostly use their IaaS (VMs, SQL) offerings -- these are the most mature -- rather than their PaaS and SaaS offerings. The common refrain from marketing folks is that cloud development is a moving target, and what was true a week ago might not be true now (a trivially true statement but of no practical use).
donretag 6y ago
Good riddance. They would purchase great conferences, like Hadoop World which costed only $200 to attend, and turn them into $1500 affairs. Wish there were more very tech focused conferences in the US like Devoxx in Europe. No filler. No hidden sales pitches.
- ghaff 6y ago
  LISA, SCALE, Supercomputing, Gluecon, local DevOps Days, etc. The thing is that cheap conferences depend on either a company running it for sales purposes (and mostly not then for big events) or volunteers providing cheap labor--both of which limit the options. Volunteers mostly get tired of running conferences when there are large commercial interests involved--as happened with Hadoop.

109 points by Oculus 6y ago

I, for one, will surely miss the O'Reilly Conferences. Very well organized and great keynote speakers. Also, you will meet a lot of interesting people in hallways, dining, social events etc. It also gives you O'Reilly Online access.

jhbadger 6y ago

This sort of thing is true for scientific conferences as well -- that half the point isn't the talks, but connecting with potential collaborators between (or instead of) talks. With numerous conferences this year that haven't been cancelled outright shifting to online, we'll have to see if any of this networking aspect can be captured.

draw_down 6y ago

I never got much out of the "hallway track", myself. For the parties and socializing, I guess I prefer the company of people that don't tend to find themselves at professional technology conferences. If the talks don't have interesting ideas or expose me to new things, it's hard for me to get value out of a conference. It's true that you can watch a talk from anywhere, but being in the same room usually gives the talk deeper and longer-term impact, I have found.

ghaff 6y ago
For me, a lot of the value is "hallway track," meetings, etc. But I do also find value in having some forced time to be exposed to new things. There are lots of talks online about various topics but, to be honest, I don't get around to watching a huge amount.

sybercecurity 6y ago

Same with some standard development orgs as well like the IETF. The real value is in the "hallway" meetings or pop up meetings organized over a particular topic. Especially the IETF where they even admit the email list is where official work is done and not really in-person meetings. The use of collaboration tools like github/lab, wikis and mailing lists help a bit. Maybe we need to give Second Life a second look...

wronglebowski 6y ago

I actually was planning to attend their DevOps conference this year before COVID. My employer will sponsor one conference of my choice. Any recommendations for replacements?

jonahhorowitz 6y ago
USENIX SRECon has been a great conference for a few years. They've postponed it right now, but I expect it will still happen.
toomuchtodo 6y ago
Hashiconf (if you're using their tooling). Incredibly informative and always well put together.
zerkten 6y ago
If your employer is paying, how much more runway do you have to make a decision? Given the current situation, I'd expect many companies to start cutting expenses and making excuses. If there is a virtual training class rather than an online conference, I'd make that a priority, if the funds may disappear. As for replacement conferences, I wouldn't assume that you'll have any certainty around those until those for some time.
- ghaff 6y ago
  That's good advice. The general hope is that things start to ramp back up for fall conference season though I'm not placing any big bets on that. A few conferences are still holding to summer plans but IMO that's very iffy especially if they're not at the very tail end.
sciurus 6y ago
LISA. https://www.usenix.org/conferences/byname/5 https://www.usenix.org/conferences/byname/5
DonHopkins 6y ago
Ask for your employer to cut you a check for the cost it takes you to go to a conference, and spend it on some good headphones or earbuds, and a bidet.

driverdan 6y ago

Quite frankly I won't miss large, overpriced, junket confs like O'Reilly's. They were too expensive for most people to justify attending without corporate sponsorship. The expo halls were full of enterprise sales pitches with minimal substance. They also had sponsored keynotes which tended to be sales pitches. If you go to meet people instead of selling your product go to smaller confs put on by local organizers.

PaulHoule 6y ago
It's tough. I think some people get sent to conferences for the wrong reasons: the company has some money for some reason so they send them. Other people should go but they can't get the money. Many times the companies that get booths and sponsor the conference press a lot of flesh and get a lot of business cards but no sales. Sometimes you will see a conference sponsor smiling afterwards, but often they end up spending the last day doing a seminar on some product to a bunch of tired defense contractors who flew across the country to read stuff on their laptops -- if you get in free as a speaker it is probably worth the airfare to commiserate about it with the head of marketing for the sponsor afterwards in the hotel bar. A nearby city has been thinking about building a conference center, consultants are telling them that most conference centers don't make a profit. Many cities subsidize them because they hope that it will bring in more traffic to other businesses in the area. However, with conferences being as expensive as they are, I wonder how it is they don't make a profit? Who does?
- Retric 6y ago
  It’s the same issue as sports stadiums, once local governments frequently subsidies something it stops being a competitive market with healthy profit margins.
- bluGill 6y ago
  Don't confuse the conference center for the conferences inside. The conferences can make money (though they often don't) while the center loses money. Either because they can't book enough, or because there is enough competition that you have to lower prices. Remember that there are only so many businesses (including non-profits) in town that want to rent the place. When people are coming from out of town what difference does the town make? Thus it is hard to fill your conference center.

jonahhorowitz 6y ago

I've been going to large conferences since I started my career 20 years ago. When I was a junior engineer I found the sessions very informative, but as I developed more experience, I always got the most value hanging out in the hallway after sessions or the hotel bar at the end of the day. I've tried "going to" a few virtual conferences and they're basically useless. Losing these physical spaces to gather and discuss will be a huge blow to learning and collaboration.

duxup 6y ago
As a bit of a n00b (working in a small shop without a lot of exposure to other processes and etc) going to meetups I find those are super handy conversations / the most valuable. Even stuff like "I was trying to solve this problem but I saw this really popular pattern and folks seemed to like it but damn it looks like it would just blow up if you ever did X." And someone tells me "yeah that blew up for me and here is how". So helpful! I want a conference where folks get into small groups and everyone goes around and says: Here is what I'm doing, challenges we faced, how we overcame them, lessons learned. Even basic day to day stuff that someone talks about can be handy. The minuta and stuff sometimes is the key it seems. And sometimes just sharing similar stories / problems that don't have solutions for me inspires a lot of confidence and that can lead to real results.
- ghaff 6y ago
  That's often how unconference formats work for at least part of the day. Unconferences seem to have fallen a bit out of fashion although AFAIK DevOps Days typically combine some curated main stage talks with smaller unconference facilitated discussions. I haven't been to one for a while though.
  - rutthenut 6y ago
    I've been to the last couple of London DevOpsDays and find the presentations often interesting, but the ad hoc sessions in the afternoon can be some of the best parts.

hinkley 6y ago

When I worked on the Mosaic project, I went into my boss's office one day and his shelves had sprouted about 6 shelf-feet of O'Reilly books. Somehow Terry convinced some O'Reilly rep that since we were helping them sell so many books that maybe they should give us some free books. Turns out that the entire catalog was 6 feet at that particular moment. So he had every. single. O'Reilly book in print. I was not entirely gracious in my jealousy. A couple times a year I am reminded of the comedians and speakers I heard as a child talking about old things ending all the time, and it's been happening more and more to me. The worst is still the "Guess who died game", but that's so far about losing people I grew up with. As you can tell by the above, I kind of grew up with O'Reilly, and I hope this isn't the end of an era.

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago

I certainly agree about the "Hallway track." Nowadays, you can get more from a session by reviewing the video, than from being there in person. However, making relationships, and maintaining them, is really important. This goes double for today's distributed teams; where people may seldom get a chance to meet. Never been to an O'Reilly conference, but have attended many others. Nowadays, most conferences are too damn big and polished for me. My favorite conference of all time, was MacHack, in the late 1980s. Really scruffy, scrappy, and energizing.

ansible 6y ago

This is somewhat off-topic, but has anyone else been disappointed by O'Reilly's website these days? I was disappointed to learn about them discontinuing the sale of individual ebooks, but sort of rolled with it by just buying them from another vendor. Now it seems I can only sign up for online learning. What is that? Yes, I can start a free trial, but wouldn't it be nice to know what I might want to spend $500 USD per year on? What does O'Reilly actually have these days? I'd prefer to save my free trial for when I'm moderately sure I'll want to stick with the service. If I don't even have an index of what's being offered, that really turns me away.

unethical_ban 6y ago
They don't sell ebooks anymore?
- ansible 6y ago
  Not individual ebooks directly from O'Reilly. I used to do that. But they've pushed the Safari initiative, and gone wholly on the subscription route.
  - ilamont 6y ago
    They also forced some publishers off the platform, even if they participated in Safari.
    - lovehashbrowns 6y ago
      Do you know which publishers they pushed off the platform?
      - ilamont 6y ago
        My company, for one. The letter I received was a form letter which leads me to believe others were impacted, too: We periodically review our partnerships and titles made available through our online learning platform, to ensure appropriate diversification, topic coverage, and audience fit. The learning platform customer base is rapidly evolving and growing, which means the learning resources we offer our customers must as well. I'm writing today to let you know that while we have greatly appreciated your ongoing partnership with O’Reilly we have made the decision to not renew the contract for the distribution of XXXX content in the O’Reilly learning platform effective XXXX.

saystupidthings 6y ago

I thought this was going to be an auto parts conference.

alaxsxaq 6y ago

I've been going to OSCON on and off since the entire conference took place in the downtown Portland Marriott and it was a really good conference, until they moved it to Austin. From there, attendance seemed to decline yearly and the content was getting very watered down. At the 25th anniversary event back in Portland, it was startling clear that either O'Reilly was becoming disinterested in this event or there was a revenue problem. I guess a bit of both.

ghaff 6y ago
While the trigger was obvious, the way this came down makes one suspect that the in-person events were, if not on the chopping block, at least somewhat precarious. Remember also that it's not just OSCON; O'Reilly had a big slate of events. (That a lot of people mostly equate OSCON with the O'Reilly events business is likely a symptom of the overall problem. This isn't a commentary on the quality of their events generally--which I've found to be pretty solid--but it does say something about the mindshare they have beyond OSCON.) And, if I'm being honest, OSCON has gone from being almost a must go if you were in certain open source circles to something still mostly worth going to if you could find the time and budget. OSCON out-survived a lot of shows that were about open source overall but it's frankly a bit hard to be an event about open source in a general way when open source touches almost everything. In any case, in spite of the special place a lot of people have for OSCON, it probably wasn't sustainable as a standalone event without the rest of the event slate.

jedberg 6y ago

This is a huge blow to our industry I think. I've attended a lot of conferences, large and small, and the hallway track is almost always the most useful part. I've had some of my most important collaborations start with meeting someone in the hall. I've met some of my best friends in conference hallways. I have an entire group of friends who I only ever see at conferences, because we live all over the world. I once got questioned entering Canada as to why I was going and I said, "to visit friends". They asked me how I could have so many friends in Canada if I've lived in California all my life. I told them, "I met them all at conferences!". And it's true. Every person I know in Canada I met at a conference (other than a few family members). And almost all of them have helped me professionally at one time or another as well as being good friends. I'm going to miss those O'Reilly hall tracks. :(

itqwertz 6y ago

Most conferences can be summed up in a group of blog posts. I don’t need to listen to a Diversity Evangelist tell me how to code.

frost_knight 6y ago

This past February I had the honor of giving my first ever keynote presentation. The conference was sponsored by my employer. That said, aside from mentioning that I worked for said employer, I never mentioned it again nor did I try to sell anyone anything. I had some of the best most awesome conversations during the coffee and lunch breaks. I can only hope that I gave a fraction of insight during my keynote that I received during the hallway talks.

wenc 6y ago

Developers conferences can be useful if you get to talk to the right people. I was given a pass to Microsoft Build one year because we were looking to build stuff on Azure but weren't sure which services were mature and which were not. I talked to almost every single PM who had a booth there (and at MS, PMs are also developers). I learned that if you push MS PMs hard enough and ask the right questions, most will drop the marketing facade and give you the insider's view. (after all, developers -- by personality trait -- generally hate two-faced marketing talk and would genuinely rather talk about the tech) This unfiltered insider's view is decidedly quite different from Microsoft's enterprise marketing's messaging. Attending Microsoft Build and talking to PMs helped us avoid investing our efforts in Azure services that turned out to be dead-ends. (many of Azure's GA stuff are feature complete but not truly production-ready) Short of running POCs, there exist few other low-effort means of procuring this intelligence other than by talking to (honest) Azure consultants at Meetups who have to deal with this stuff in daily production. My conclusion from the conference (corroborated with my own dev experience) was that the parts of Azure that were built on pre-existing Microsoft technology (like VMs and SQL Servers) were generally solid and could be relied upon. Whereas many new-fangled PaaS/SaaS cloud-only offerings tend not to be as battle-tested and would often fail on corner cases, so one would be prudent to think twice about putting mission-critical workloads on them. Also, one learns that despite the glossy marketing material, some Azure offerings turned to not have had any dev activity on them due to low uptake. There are still maturity issues in Azure today, and my gut feel is that most enterprises that do run on Azure mostly use their IaaS (VMs, SQL) offerings -- these are the most mature -- rather than their PaaS and SaaS offerings. The common refrain from marketing folks is that cloud development is a moving target, and what was true a week ago might not be true now (a trivially true statement but of no practical use).

donretag 6y ago

Good riddance. They would purchase great conferences, like Hadoop World which costed only $200 to attend, and turn them into $1500 affairs. Wish there were more very tech focused conferences in the US like Devoxx in Europe. No filler. No hidden sales pitches.

ghaff 6y ago
LISA, SCALE, Supercomputing, Gluecon, local DevOps Days, etc. The thing is that cheap conferences depend on either a company running it for sales purposes (and mostly not then for big events) or volunteers providing cheap labor--both of which limit the options. Volunteers mostly get tired of running conferences when there are large commercial interests involved--as happened with Hadoop.