TIAD offers the time, the tools & space to understand Automation and all the theory & practice around it. Thanks to inspiring speakers, live demos and interactive workshops, we give you the chance to LIVE the Automation your own way. Dedicated to IT professionals, TIAD is an inclusive event mixing developers & ops engineers, freelances & students, large companies & startups. Today we choose to present you one of these inspiring speakers, Liz Rice.

Liz Rice, co-founder of Microscaling Systems, has a wealth of software development & management experience in technology sectors including VOD, music, VoIP and the charity sector. When not building startups and writing code, she loves riding bikes in places with better weather than her native London.

Why did you choose to join TIAD ?

I was put in touch by a friend whose opinion I respect, and won over by the idea of a focused conference that won’t just be rehashing some of the broad themes we often hear. It’s great that it’s aiming to inspire people not just to learn but to take action! Plus, I was a student in Paris a long time ago and it’s lovely to have the opportunity to come back and engage with the tech community here.

What will be the topic of your speak in TIAD ?

I’ll be talking about containers and container images, and encouraging people to use metadata to help manage them. Containers are such a hot topic in DevOps, and they bring loads of benefits, but as an industry we’re only just getting to grips with how to manage them. I’ll highlight a few pitfalls and crazy situations that I’ve seen, and then it’ll be all action. I’m hoping that attendees will get their laptops out and add some useful metadata to their own container images during the workshop.

For this workshop you will need a free Docker ID. During this workshop you will :

• Build your own container image and understand how the content layers are built up from your Dockerfile
• Explore Dockerfile labels and other metadata contained within a container image
• Learn how metadata is inherited from a base image, and experiment with ways it can be mis-used – or reveal potentially unexpected information about the container images you’re using
• See how metadata can be automated through Makefiles and other build systems

What do you think IT automation brought us ? what did it change ?

I’m all for anything that frees people up from mechanistic, repetitive tasks and allows them to be more creative. When I think of automation I’m immediately thinking about continuous integration and continuous deployment, which allow us to cheaply and quickly roll out and / or experiment with code changes. In the containerised world this also brings us a new challenge in managing all the images we build as a result.

How do you see the devops evolution ?

In the old days of Dev and Ops, there could be a difficult layer of communication and dependency between the two groups. I think we’re seeing automation remove some of these inefficiencies, and we’ll see orchestration automating more and more of the placement of services so that the role of Ops becomes more about managing the underlying infrastructure efficiently and securely (whether that’s on premise or in the cloud). We’ll need better tools for communicating ‘Developer Intent’ so that we can revisit dependencies in months or years to come. As a very basic example, a Developer shouldn’t need to care whether a web service needs to be made available on port 80 – they just care that the web service they build is made available to consumers of that service.

What are the next challenges in IT ?

Security will always be huge! But I’d love to see our industry leading society towards a future where we (as consumers as well as professionals) don’t need to remember so many passwords and PIN codes.

Automation, Big Data, Cloud, DevOps, De-automation… join us at TIAD 2016 !