DevOpsDays Atlanta April 19-20
Held at Georgia Aquarium, with Beluga whales in attendance
DevOpsDays Atlanta finally happened at Georgia Aquarium, after multiple delays and false starts. Location was surreal – attendees had the best views of the aquarium. And the Beluga whales were as enthralled by us, as we were by them over the 2 days.
There were quite a few booths (21 by my count) but in-person audience attendance was on the lighter side. Cox Automotive and JFrog were the two Platinum Sponsors; there were 19 Gold Sponsors, including Capital One, VMWare, PagerDuty and a slew of still-private tech companies.
Interestingly, there were many observability companies at the event. Newer players like ERASoftware, Caralogix, and Instana (part of IBM) were marketing their latest technologies with loads of swag. And incumbents – Dynatrace and AppDynamics – held fort.
Clearly, observability is hot – who says pull forward of demand? I am looking forward to Datadog’s earnings on May 5, 2022. And Elastic’s as well, likely in early June 2022.
I chatted with a number of company representatives over 2 days, but the one that I was most interested in was JFrog. Back in September 2020, its IPO was part of the tech mania – first day pop was 60+% above offering price. Current share price, however, has not been spared by ongoing market meltdowns. Nevertheless, FY 2021 results were strong, and JFrog representatives expressed confidence in their product roadmap, customer stickiness, superior security, platform expansion and expansion motion. JFrog is hiring a ton of people here in its Atlanta office as well. I will write more about JFrog when Q1 2022 results are released.
Finally, I took pictures of the job postings there – tech hiring continues unabated, unlike what market news might suggest.
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