This article is based on a post originally sourced from techgenix.com, published in April 2018. Conference dates, speakers, and product announcements reflect information available at time of writing.
If you work in DevOps, conferences are more than networking events. They are where vendors announce major features, where practitioners share hard-won lessons, and where the broader direction of the industry becomes visible. For 2018, several major events stand out as essential viewing — whether you attend in person or follow remotely. Below is a breakdown of the top DevOps conferences of 2018 and what practitioners can expect from each.
Why DevOps Conferences Matter
DevOps conferences serve multiple purposes simultaneously. For vendors, they are the biggest product launch window of the year — a chance to put new features in front of influential early adopters before general availability. For practitioners, they offer:
- Hands-on workshops with emerging tools and platforms
- Case studies from teams operating at scale
- Direct access to engineers and product managers
- A consolidated view of where the ecosystem is heading
With so many events on the calendar, being selective is important. The conferences listed below represent a cross-section of the most consequential gatherings in the DevOps and cloud-native space for 2018.
Red Hat Summit
Date: May 8–10, 2018
Location: San Francisco, CA
Red Hat made significant waves heading into 2018 with its acquisition of CoreOS. CoreOS had established itself as a frontrunner in container-focused Linux distributions and was one of the leading contributors to the Kubernetes project. The acquisition positioned Red Hat to deepen its investment in Kubernetes at a time when the orchestration platform was rapidly becoming the default standard for container workloads.
The central story at Red Hat Summit 2018 is expected to be OpenShift. Red Hat had previously announced a strategic pivot for OpenShift, shifting its focus from OpenStack to Kubernetes. With the CoreOS acquisition now complete, attendees can expect announcements around the integration of CoreOS’s Tectonic platform into OpenShift — a move that would consolidate Red Hat’s position as the leading enterprise Kubernetes vendor.
Key themes to watch:
- OpenShift and Tectonic integration roadmap
- Red Hat’s enterprise Kubernetes strategy
- Hybrid cloud and on-premises deployment patterns
DockerCon
Date: June 11–12, 2018
Location: San Francisco, CA
Docker enters 2018 at an inflection point. The company appointed Steve Singh as CEO as part of a broader push toward enterprise customers. At the same time, founder Solomon Hykes announced his departure — a move that prompted questions about Docker’s strategic direction and whether the company had drifted from its community roots.
The rise of Kubernetes as the dominant container orchestration layer has complicated Docker’s commercial positioning. While Docker’s core container runtime technology remains widely used, its commercial products — including Docker Enterprise Edition — have faced stiffer competition. DockerCon 2018 is expected to be heavily focused on the enterprise market, with an emphasis on production success stories and guided workshops demonstrating Docker’s role in end-to-end cloud-native workflows.
Key themes to watch:
- Docker’s enterprise strategy and commercial product roadmap
- Kubernetes integration and coexistence with Docker Swarm
- Hands-on workshops covering containerized application delivery
- How new leadership shapes Docker’s community messaging
Google Cloud Next
Date: July 24–26, 2018
Location: San Francisco, CA
Google Cloud occupies a distinctive position in the cloud market. While it trails AWS and Microsoft Azure in overall market share, its stewardship of Kubernetes and the maturity of Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) give it strong credibility in the cloud-native space. Google Cloud has been securing high-profile enterprise customers, and Cloud Next 2018 is expected to feature customer case studies from organizations migrating workloads to GCP.
One area of interest is Stackdriver, Google’s operations suite, which has been evolving toward deeper application performance management (APM) capabilities. The platform is positioned as a developer-centric observability tool with tighter integration into Google Cloud resources. Practitioners working on distributed systems will want to pay attention to how Google frames its observability story.
Key themes to watch:
- GKE and managed Kubernetes announcements
- Stackdriver APM and observability tooling
- Customer migration stories and multi-cloud strategies
- New Google Cloud services and developer tooling
Jenkins World
Date: September 16–19, 2018
Location: San Francisco, CA
Jenkins remains one of the most widely deployed CI/CD tools in the industry, and Jenkins World is the primary gathering for the community around it. CloudBees, the commercial entity behind Jenkins, has been expanding its vision beyond traditional CI pipelines. Ahead of Jenkins World 2018, CloudBees announced an integration with Red Hat OpenShift, positioning Jenkins as the DevOps pipeline engine for both modern containerized applications and legacy workloads running on OpenShift.
CloudBees has articulated ambitions to serve as the management layer across multiple cloud providers — providing a consistent pipeline and operations experience regardless of whether workloads run on AWS, GCP, Azure, or on-premises infrastructure. Jenkins’s long history of plugin-based integrations makes this a credible story, and Jenkins World 2018 is expected to reinforce the platform-agnostic positioning.
Key themes to watch:
- Jenkins X and cloud-native CI/CD pipelines
- CloudBees enterprise platform updates
- Multi-cloud pipeline management
- OpenShift and Kubernetes integration patterns
How to Choose Which Conferences to Attend
With multiple major events concentrated in San Francisco across the same year, travel and time budgets become a real constraint. Here are a few practical criteria for prioritizing:
- Tool alignment: If your team is heavily invested in a specific platform — OpenShift, Docker, GCP, Jenkins — prioritize the conference most directly tied to that ecosystem.
- Career stage: Earlier-career practitioners often get more value from hands-on workshops. Senior engineers and architects may prioritize keynote announcements and hallway conversations with product teams.
- Organizational goals: If your team is evaluating a platform migration or major tooling change in 2018, attending the relevant vendor conference before committing is valuable due diligence.
- Remote attendance: Most of these conferences publish session recordings. If budget is limited, watching recorded sessions is a viable alternative to in-person attendance for knowledge acquisition — though you lose the networking component.
Conclusion
The 2018 DevOps conference calendar reflects a maturing industry consolidating around Kubernetes, cloud-native delivery pipelines, and enterprise-grade tooling. Red Hat Summit, DockerCon, Google Cloud Next, and Jenkins World each offer a distinct lens on where the ecosystem is headed. Attending even one of these events with clear goals — specific sessions, specific people to speak with, specific questions to answer — will pay dividends in both knowledge and professional connections.