There a plenty of DevOps meetups in Austin (amongst them the Agile Austin DevOps SIG), but ever since I worked with other fellow TFS users in town in leading the local TFS Users Group, later renamed to Austin ALM User group, there was always the question on whether it should actually be a DevOps group.
The initial resistance came from the misconception that DevOps was just the end part where software meets production. All the way we talked about merging our efforts with the .NET user group.
So, after a hiatus Austin finally has had since September this year the Microsoft DevOps User Group (MDOUG), spearheaded by Jeff Palermo from Clear Measure, with my-self and others as co-organizers.
Here is the group mission:
This group is for software professionals working on the Microsoft platform who wish to explore, implement, and learn DevOps. This group embraces cloud and as such will bring in the best presenters for each topic while live streaming all content. Additionally, this meetup serves as the hub location, providing an example of other MDOUG live-stream locations in major cities around the U.S. This group recognizes the technical practices included in the DevOps Handbook by Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Bebois, and John Willis. We encourage members to read this book. From a technology perspective, we seek to implement these practices on Visual Studio-based software, leveraging VSTS, and running on Azure or on Windows servers anywhere.
This is a worthy successor to the original Austin ALM/TFS User group, and I recommend all to become a member. Amongst other presenters we have had Brian Harry himself speak to the group, follow by Damian Brady, both from Microsoft. And now I am recommending that we have Arun Chandrasekhar on DevOps with Azure and OSS.
See you there!