Intro

This year we sponsored the DevOpsDays Zurich. It was a pleasure, and we appreciated the family atmosphere. We are also grateful to all participants who visited us and showed interest in our services and offerings. We are already looking forward to next year's event and meeting the DevOps community.

Why we sponsored DevOpsDays?

Our focus was to create an open and relaxed atmosphere where people felt comfortable to stop by for a conversation. We intentionally avoided to have a desk as a frontier between us the visitors. As a company deeply rooted in DevOps, Kubernetes, and Cloud Native technologies, our decision to sponsor DevOpsDays Zurich was driven by some key motivations:

• Introducing 4data to the DevOps community
  DevOpsDays provide an excellent platform to introduce our company and showcase what we bring to the table in term of consulting, managed service, and technical knowledge.
• Present our Services and Products
  We had the opportunity to share insights into our managed services for hosting and maintaining GitLab and JFrog instances, as well as our Kubernetes and DevOps consulting offering.
• To become a part of a great and familiar DevOps community
  The DevOpsDays community is built on collaboration and knowledge sharing, values that align perfectly with our values at 4data.
• Discussing the latest trends and technologies
  We enjoyed engaging with developers, engineers, and architects who share our passion for DevOps and Cloud Native solutions.
• Sharing our experiences and achievements
  We believe in open knowledge sharing, and DevOpsDays provides the perfect setup to discuss our success stories and lessons learned.
• Expanding our network and making new friends
  Meeting new people and forging new connections is always a highlight of these events. We were thrilled to make new contacts and explore potential collaborations.

How we achieved our first sponsoring

In the past, we attended many conferences as visitors, but this was the first time that we sponsored such an event and had our own booth. Since we did not have any marketing materials nor the necessary equipment for such an event, it was all a new territory for us. Making this happen was truly a team effort, with invaluable support from our families. Every team member contributed to ensure a professional and inviting presence at the event. Here is how we pulled it off:

• José designed and organised with the help of his family from Rusto our team clothing, giving us a unique and recognizable look at the booth
• Kris came up with the idea of branded gummy bears and M&Ms. With the help of Lucien, he designed the packaging for these treats, making them a cool and tasty giveaway
• We set up HubSpot and Lucien developed the registration form and its whinner selection application
• Tobias created an interactive diagram of our shared services platform. This allowed us to showcase how we set up our infrastructure for manged services, giving visitors an in-depth look at our expertise through open discussions.
• Lucien, with great and professional help of his sister from Ideel, designed and set up the booth

Our conclusion

Our company has been providing consulting and engineering for services, that are subject to license. In recent years, however, companies have increasingly turned to the use of open source, container platforms and the associated DevOps philosophy. We are convinced that this trend will continue to grow. However, from the conversations we had with our visitors, we could hear that many are still a long way from using these newer technologies. The reasons for this are very different and clearly show that these companies need support to be able to take this path. With our services, we enable the rapid introduction and use of these new technologies. Finally, we use DevOps/GitOps ourselves to build our internal services and feel part of the DevOps community in Switzerland.

We were delighted to be able to demonstrate our GitOps experience using the architecture of our shared services platform. All definitions are stored in two Git repositories. A corresponding pipeline builds this entire platform in AWS and configures all the tools required for this. In our opinion, Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) is the only way to achieve high-quality and stable infrastructures to meet the constantly growing requirements.

Our impressions and memories