HashiConf: exploring the newest improvements

This year our CloudOps team attended the HashiCorp Conference in Amsterdam for the very first time. They had the opportunity to meet with and learn from HashiCorp employees and get updates directly from the kitchen on the newest improvements in their product portfolio. Here is their experience:

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1. What was your reason for going to this year’s event?

HashiCorp is the company organising the conference. We use a lot of their products daily combined with the power of Amazon Web Services (AWS). It was fruitful to be among the first to find out the newest features and improvements to their portfolio. We were thrilled to see the new releases and highlights of their DevOps tools which they provide to the open source society.

2. What were your expectations?

We expected a huge amount of people to show up. Additionally, we were eager to learn a lot from experts who are happy to guide and answer questions or concerns. It was very exciting to hear new announcements and talk with employees about their roadmap, partnership program and etc.

3. What was your overall impression of the event?

The event was extremely well organised, very nice location and the lectures were more than well structured and valuable for the short time given.

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4. What lectures did you find most interesting?

The presentation of the new features of Terraform 0.12 (infrastructure as code automation tool) and the newly released capabilities of Consul (a service networking solution) were quite impressive. We were also enthusiastic to learn from real use cases they presented and we enjoyed the lectures regarding networking automation and orchestration, too.

5. What did you find most interesting outside of the lectures?

The organisation was outstanding! Not many conferences are so impressive - no big queues for food and drinks, people are happy to answer every question you have and we had everything so easily explained that we didn’t wander searching for anything. Also, Amsterdam’s scenery is picturesque and quite nice for walks with the small canals, people on bikes and flowers everywhere.

6. What topic would you choose if you were a lecturer at the event?

“Best practices in Terraform for users who cannot find such in Stackoverflow.”

7. What will you remember and take for yourself from the
entire experience?

We came back from the trip with the feeling we are participating in a big tech community where the people have the same problems and face the same issues as us. It also reminded us that we are dealing with complex tools and how important it is to stay up to date and never forget to inform and improve yourself in this fast evolving tech environment as the DevOps one we are in. It was definitely an awesome week full of productivity and team bonding

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