As the world embraced public cloud computing, we collectively lost track of the truism that all computing must run on physical infrastructure – and that while much of this infrastructure is in the public cloud, much remains on-premises too. This on-premises operator – tasked with running elastic, virtual infrastructure on brittle hardware in their own datacenters – has been broadly ignored, told by the industry that they don’t exist at all.

Left on their own, these operators epitomize the resourcefulness and nimbleness of DevOps, often having to invent on their own the missing software required to stitch together discombobulated physical systems, suffering at the hands of firmware upgrades gone awry and vendors pointing fingers at one another. In this talk, we’ll discuss the forgotten operator: how they have been failed by the industry, why they persist despite it – and why the problems that they have historically faced alone are more important than ever."