Every year, a fresh slate of conferences helps those working in DevOps keep pace with rapidly evolving tools, platforms, and practices. Whether you are an individual contributor looking for hands-on workshops or a senior leader seeking strategic insight, there is a conference tailored to your needs. The challenge is choosing wisely given tight travel budgets and limited time away from work.
The following guide covers major DevOps-focused conferences, originally compiled for 2017. While specific dates and venues change each year, the conferences themselves remain relevant fixtures in the DevOps calendar. Use this as a framework for evaluating which events align with your role, toolchain, and learning goals.
DevOpsDays
DevOpsDays is a globally distributed series of community-driven events designed for DevOps practitioners to share lessons learned, war stories, and best practices. Events are held throughout the year in cities around the world, making it one of the most accessible conference series regardless of your location.
A standout feature of DevOpsDays is its format: mornings typically feature short, focused presentations, while afternoons open into self-organized Open Spaces discussions driven by attendees. This format encourages genuine conversation rather than passive consumption of vendor-driven content. Past events have attracted hundreds of attendees per city, with a noted emphasis on diversity and inclusion among speakers.
Check devopsdays.org for current event listings in your region.
DockerCon
DockerCon is the flagship annual conference for the Docker ecosystem, drawing developers, operations engineers, DevOps practitioners, system administrators, and executives. The event centers on Docker’s open-source containerization platform and the broader container ecosystem, covering topics such as container orchestration, security, networking, and developer workflows.
The conference typically features high-energy keynotes with live demos, deep-dive technical sessions, and a large expo hall. With thousands of attendees expected at each edition, it provides substantial networking opportunities across a wide range of industries and company sizes.
Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference
Gartner’s infrastructure and operations conference targets IT professionals responsible for cloud operations, IT operations management, and IT service support. The event is notable for its analyst-driven content, with Gartner researchers presenting research findings and actionable guidance rather than vendor pitches.
Typical conference tracks span cloud and virtualization strategy, DevOps and Agile adoption, IT operations optimization, leadership and organizational change, and emerging technology trends. The event is particularly valuable for IT managers and directors who need to build a business case for technology investments or navigate organizational change.
Interop ITX
Interop ITX positions itself as an independent conference for IT and technology leaders, with a deliberate focus on vendor-neutral content. A vendor-neutral business hall allows attendees to see how different components of the current technology landscape fit together without the distortion of individual vendor marketing.
The event typically offers more than 100 panel and speaker-led sessions covering networking, security, cloud infrastructure, and DevOps practices. For IT generalists who need broad, practical coverage rather than deep specialization in a single tool or platform, Interop ITX is a strong option.
ChefConf
ChefConf is the primary annual gathering for users and contributors to the Chef infrastructure automation platform. The event combines practical workshops, technical presentations, and community discussions for professionals working on continuous delivery, configuration management, and infrastructure-as-code.
Past editions have featured keynotes from enterprise practitioners at organizations such as Alaska Airlines, Google, and Liberty Mutual, offering real-world context for how large organizations implement Chef at scale. Workshops cover both introductory and advanced topics, including compliance automation, cookbook development, and cloud integrations.
Monitorama
Monitorama is a single-track, open-source conference and hackathon dedicated to monitoring, observability, and operational visibility. Its single-track format means all attendees share the same sessions, fostering a stronger sense of community and making hallway conversations more productive.
The conference covers monitoring both as a technical discipline and a cultural practice. Sessions frequently address metrics collection, alerting design, log management, distributed tracing, and the human factors involved in on-call operations. It attracts practitioners from companies across the spectrum of scale, and speakers often share candid post-mortems and hard-won operational lessons.
DevOps Enterprise Summit
The DevOps Enterprise Summit (DOES) is specifically designed for leaders and practitioners at large, complex organizations navigating the cultural and technical transformation to DevOps. Unlike conferences that skew toward individual contributors, DOES draws a significant proportion of managers, directors, VPs, and C-suite attendees.
The conference is organized by IT Revolution, founded by Gene Kim (co-author of The Phoenix Project and The DevOps Handbook). Sessions focus on real transformation case studies from enterprise organizations, with speakers drawn from companies such as Disney, Unilever, SAP, and other large enterprises. The event runs in both North America and Europe each year.
O’Reilly Velocity Conference
The O’Reilly Velocity Conference targets application developers, performance engineers, system architects, and web operations professionals. Its focus spans cloud infrastructure, distributed systems, site reliability engineering, performance optimization, automation, and security.
Velocity is particularly well-regarded for its technically rigorous content and its role in popularizing concepts like Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and web performance best practices. The conference has historically been co-located with other O’Reilly events, broadening the range of available sessions for attendees who want to cross disciplines.
Jenkins World (now cdCon / CloudBees DevOps World)
Jenkins World was established as the premier annual conference for the Jenkins open-source automation server community. Jenkins, a Java-based continuous integration and continuous delivery server, is one of the most widely deployed CI/CD tools in the industry, and the conference reflects that breadth with sessions covering pipelines, plugins, security, scalability, and integrations.
The event grew from a few hundred attendees at its first edition in 2011 to thousands of participants globally. Sessions routinely include keynotes from Jenkins founder Kohsuke Kawaguchi, deep-dive technical workshops, an Ask the Experts area, and a community hub. Note that the conference has evolved and rebranded in subsequent years; check the current CloudBees and Jenkins community channels for the latest event name and dates.
Microsoft Ignite
Microsoft Ignite is Microsoft’s flagship annual conference for enterprise IT professionals. It covers the full breadth of Microsoft’s product and service portfolio, including Azure cloud infrastructure, Microsoft 365, security, big data, AI, and developer tools.
For DevOps engineers working within Microsoft-centric environments, Ignite offers dedicated tracks on Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, cloud-native development, and infrastructure automation. With hundreds of sessions and interactive labs, it is one of the largest enterprise IT conferences globally. A virtual attendance option has been available in recent years, significantly expanding accessibility.
PuppetConf
PuppetConf is the annual community and user conference for the Puppet infrastructure automation platform. It combines breakout sessions, networking events, training courses, and a Puppet Contributor Summit into a multi-day program.
Sessions cover a wide range of experience levels, from introductory Puppet usage to advanced topics such as compliance automation, security hardening, cloud provisioning, and continuous delivery pipelines. The Contributor Summit is specifically designed for open-source contributors and community members working on Puppet modules and related projects. Pre-conference training days offer hands-on deep dives with Puppet Enterprise and its components.
IT/Dev Connections
IT/Dev Connections is a practitioner-focused conference known for its emphasis on technical depth over marketing gloss. Past editions have organized content into tracks covering data platforms and business intelligence, enterprise management and security, cloud and data center infrastructure, and development and DevOps.
Attendees have consistently praised the event’s manageable size, which makes it easier to hold substantive conversations with speakers and other attendees without the anonymity that can accompany larger events. It suits engineers and architects looking for actionable, hands-on content from peer practitioners.
LISA (Large Installation System Administration Conference)
LISA, organized by USENIX, is one of the longest-running conferences for system administrators and operations engineers. It brings together professionals who build, maintain, and evolve large-scale interconnected systems, with a focus on culture, engineering discipline, and architectural thinking as much as on specific tools.
The conference is notable for its academic rigor alongside practical content. Sessions often address topics such as reliability engineering, automation, security operations, and organizational change in IT. The famous Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions allow informal, self-organized gatherings on niche topics that formal conference tracks rarely cover. LISA is particularly well-suited for senior engineers and system architects interested in the broader craft of operations.
How to Choose the Right Conference
With a growing number of DevOps-related events available each year, prioritizing which ones to attend requires a clear-eyed assessment of your current role, learning objectives, and toolchain. Consider the following criteria:
- Role alignment: Individual contributors typically get more value from tool-specific conferences (ChefConf, PuppetConf, Jenkins World), while leaders benefit more from enterprise-focused events like DevOps Enterprise Summit or Gartner’s operations summit.
- Toolchain relevance: If your organization runs a particular platform heavily, its dedicated conference offers access to the deepest expertise and community.
- Community vs. vendor content: Open-source community conferences (DevOpsDays, Monitorama, LISA) tend to offer candid, practitioner-driven content. Vendor-backed events may provide excellent technical depth but filter content through a commercial lens.
- Format: Multi-track conferences maximize session variety; single-track events like Monitorama maximize community cohesion. Consider which you find more productive.
- Budget: Registration costs, travel, and accommodation vary enormously. Regional DevOpsDays events are typically the most accessible; large enterprise summits can be significantly more expensive.
Regardless of which events you choose, the returns extend beyond the sessions themselves. The conversations during breaks, the hallway track, and the connections you make with peers who face similar challenges are often the most enduring value of in-person attendance.
Note: Conference dates, venues, and formats change annually. Always verify current schedules directly with event organizers before making travel arrangements.