Growing up, I wore a lot of hand-me-downs. I thought I looked great – all three of my older siblings were cool. It didn’t matter how many times I tripped on my brother’s torn jnco jeans or how long my sister, six years older than me, laughed when I got my head stuck in the armhole of her WWF t-shirts. I wanted what they had because they were so influential in my life – even if I was never comfortable and nothing ever fit.

What happens then when we apply DevOps strategies innovated at companies like Amazon and Starbucks to our mid-size applications? Do they really fit?

In this talk, we’ll discuss how to approach DevOps at an average company – how much should we automate? If we can’t afford to stress test everything, how do we choose which pieces to test? Should our dev’s work on development tools to expedite their process in the future or spend time on the features we need to ship? Do we need to trace everything? When do we turn to DevOps tools like Chef and Puppet? How can we avoid getting our heads stuck in the armhole of a shirt that doesn’t fit? We’ll investigate how to answer these questions, and how to make the most out of others’ success while we learn how to be happy being average.