On 22nd of September, Spotlight visited the first ever conference for DevOps on Windows, WinOps.
There were interesting talks about different takes on DevOps philosophies (automation through to culture) with an emphasis on CALMS:
- C – Culture
- A – Automation
- L – Lean
- M – Measurement
- S – Sharing
There was a call for a show of hands, ‘how many of you would run your applications on Linux if you could?’. At least 90% went up I believe, which shows the extent of vendor lock-in that exists in the Microsoft ecosystem.

Just-Eat once again gave fantastic insights in how they’re practising continuous delivery (chortle) with very short-lived AWS EC2 instances, developer/product accountability in a windows and .net environment.
Discussions on monitoring life cycles, experts on automation tools ( Chef / Puppet and Ansible on the same panel) as well a release patterns and anti-patterns were covered by experts.
Networking with other WinOps types invariable led to discussions on Powershell, limitations they had come across and overcome (or not) but overall the event was well received.
There was also an element of validation that Spotlight’s mix of build and release technologies were highly typical of a mature setup and that ‘all in one’ tools are not yet mainstream or desirable.
I look forward to their next event.