Speaking

Nov 16, 2021 Human Skills: How to Delegate with Marco Coulter – Podcast – DevOps Institute

Oct 8, 2020 The Humans of DevOps Podcast Series

“[EP59] Human Skills: How to Delegate with Marco Coulter”

Marco discusses the human skill of delegation – what it is, why is delegating important, how to delegate, tips and more.

Oct 5-7, 2021 DevOps Enterprise Summit – Virtual – US

Sep 30, 2021 Conf42: Site Reliability Engineering 2021

May 17, 2021 Inside Quantum Technology New York Online

“Integrated Approaches to Quantum Safe Technology”

Four industry experts join me as I will moderate this panel discussion around making technology to be quantum safe.

“Markets and Product Evolution for Post-Quantum Cryptography”

Three industry experts meet on our virtual stage to share knowledge and experience on the future of post-quantum cryptography.

Apr 29, 2021 Conf42: Cloud Native 2021

“Get ready to spend more on Cloud Native than you expect and be happy about it.”

It seems common sense. Today, you pay for a server with a full stack. Tomorrow, you run just a microservice without that overhead. You will reduce your cost, right? Sorry, Jevon says you are likely to end up spending more, and that you will probably be glad you did! By stepping through IT’s history of sprawl and consolidation cycles and weaving ‘Jevon’s Paradox’ into the lessons learnt, this session prepares you for the surprise serverless microservices appearing in your cloud invoices. Learn what to prepare for and which will not work in the microservice ecology.

Feb 25, 2021 SKILup Days – Cloud Native and Serverless

“Get ready to spend more on serverless than you expect, and be happy about it.”

It seems common sense. Today, you pay for a server with a full stack. Tomorrow, you run just a microservice without that overhead. You will reduce your cost, right? Sorry, Jevon says you are likely to end up spending more, and that you will probably be glad you did! By stepping through IT’s history of sprawl and consolidation cycles and weaving ‘Jevon’s Paradox’ into the lessons learnt, this session prepares you for the surprise serverless microservices appearing in your cloud invoices. Learn what to prepare for and which will not work in the microservice ecology.

Dec 15, 2020 DevOps Institute SKILup Chapter USA

“A Brief Wild Ride Around Quantum Computing”

A mathematician, a data scientist, a computer scientist and a physicist walk into a room sounds like the start of a joke. It is actually the average quantum computing (QC) meetup. Gartner warned executives to consider hiring PHD’s even though many will not use QC for possibly a decade. QC is already helping classical computing with improved algorithms, so we should be aware of what QC is and where it can be useful today.

Dec 7, 2020 SREcon20 Americas

“Avoiding Goodhart’s law – Use SLO’s as Tools not Cudgels”

The concepts of SLI, SLO and Error Budget are there to balance risk (rates of change) and reward (business contentment). Using such metrics as red lines to punish teams, or force acceptance of risk by the business is missing the point. Experiences from SLA’s in service contracts inform a conversation identifying that SLI, SLO and Error Budgets are better as a basis for conversations about the stress an application can withstand. This must include the business stress, as well as the infrastructure stress. This session takes Goodhart’s law from economic policy as a frame for reconsidering SLI’s and SLO’s. Leave this session inspired to approach your SLO negotiations in the best possible way.
Click Here for Slides

Nov 4, 2020 QCon Plus

“AIOps – the next frontier of observability”

You are responsible for the application you code, and after DevOps, you are responsible for keeping it running in production as well. You will need to augment yourself to succeed, and that is where AIOps comes in. Sometimes it is hard to bridge from the IT hype to what something can actually do for you. This session will discuss the stepping stones to implementing AIOps, and you will learn about the four fundamentals of AIOps: ingestion; correlation; detection and automation.

Oct 20, 2020 Cloud Foundry Summit Europe unConference

“A Brief, Wild Ride Around Quantum Computing”

A mathematician, a data scientist, a computer scientist and a physicist walk into a room sounds like the start of a joke. It is actually the average quantum computing (QC) meetup. Gartner warned executives to consider hiring PHD’s even though many will not use QC for possibly a decade. QC is already helping classical computing with improved algorithms, so we should be aware of what QC is and where it can be useful today.

Oct 15, 2020 SKILup AIOps & MLOps

“AIOps Stepping Stones”

DevOps took us from SysAdmins to DeployAdmins to improve availability but came with a tidal wave of tools and environments, leaving detecting anomalies and finding root cause a task for the overcrowded war-room of siloed experts. Developers need to understand infrastructure, and operations needs to understand the SDLC. The good news is AIOps can help! Let’s look at what AIOps can realistically do for us, identify criteria for where to automate and lay out the stepping stones for achieving AIOps nirvana (the state of mind, not the band).

Oct 13, 2020 DevNet Create Virtual

“AIOps is how we will survive DevOps”

DevOps began as a way to deliver availability and survive agile methodologies. Along the way to CI/CD, it has become an overwhelming set of tools cobbled together to deploy code. Simultaneously, applications moved to mobile and IoT devices and from simple application servers to front end, backend, cloud, and microservices. The monitor stage of DevOps has exceeded the human capability for comprehension.
We are missing things and that leads to outages. We need to augment ourselves with ML & automation.
During this session, I want you to think about your last war-room incident and consider whether you are reactive or proactive. By augmenting ourselves through AIOps, we move towards the nirvana of being preemptive.
Click Here for Slides

“Slowdown is the New Outage (SITNO)”

While outage-driven news headlines can cause stock prices to plummet short term, the performance-driven reputation loss is a slow burn for longer-term customer loss. This session compares slowdowns vs outages and the resulting need for insight mores than observability. By understanding these difference, you’ll be ready to drive agile applications, gain funding for lowering technical debt, and focus on customer retention.
Click Here for Slides

Oct 8, 2020 Cloud Native Summit featuring Kubernetes, Fall 2020

“Having New Eyes“

We ignore those little flashy lights on the front of the WiFi router – until things fail. Suddenly they are THE critical feature, sitting on the outside showing us how the router is functioning. Observability gives us ‘flashy lights’ for our production applications, answering the questions we did not predict. It is impractical to keep every trace, metric, and log. Instead, let’s look at how AI/ML technology helps us see production code with new eyes. This session will discuss the definition of observability and how to achieve it.
“Discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes” Marcel Proust.

Oct 8, 2020 Chaos Conference

“Certainty Among the Chaos”

Chaos engineering tests your application resiliency by thoughtfully injecting failure and starving resources. Complete failure is obvious, but how do you detect the warning signs of pre-failure stress? This session takes the capabilities of chaos engineering beyond resiliency to support capacity optimization. You already need to monitor performance to see when your code is bending before it breaks. Why not glean more insight from the data so you can prioritize efforts and respond rapidly?

Sep 23, 2020 DevOps Live

“AIOps Is How We Will Survive DevOps”

DevOps began as a way to deliver availability and survive agile methodologies. Along the way to CI/CD, it has become an overwhelming set of tools cobbled together to deploy code. Simultaneously, applications moved to mobile and IoT devices and from simple application servers to front end, backend, cloud, and microservices. The monitor stage of DevOps has exceeded the human capability for comprehension.
We are missing things and that leads to outages. We need to augment ourselves with ML & automation.
During this session, I want you to think about your last war-room incident and consider whether you are reactive or proactive. By augmenting ourselves through AIOps, we move towards the nirvana of being preemptive.

Click Here for Slides

Aug 20, 2020 SKILup Days: Observability

“Having New Eyes – The power of Application Observability”

We ignore those little flashy lights on the front of the WiFi router – until things fail. Suddenly they are THE critical feature, sitting on the outside showing us how the router is functioning. Observability gives us ‘flashy lights’ for our production applications, answering the questions we did not predict. It is impractical to keep every trace, metric and log. Instead, let’s look at how AI/ML technology helps us see production code with new eyes. This session will discuss the definition of observability and how to achieve it.
“Discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes” Marcel Proust.

Aug 6, 2020 DevOps.com SRE Webinar

“How SLOs Enable Fast, Reliable Application Delivery”

(Co-presented with Dyllen Owens of Blameless.)

As enterprises adopt DevOps at scale, there is increasing tension between product, operations, and the business to manage competing incentives around release velocity and risk.
In this webinar, you’ll learn how adopting a collaborative approach to implementing service level objectives (SLOs) gives software teams and leaders a shared language to focus engineering efforts and optimize the customer experience.
In light of recent trends such as rapidly accelerating digital transformation, SLO adoption is increasing, yet the journey is fraught with pitfalls. With an integrated solution from AppDynamics and Blameless, organizations can protect key customer journeys by leveraging real-time monitoring data to design, measure, and truly operationalize SLOs. We’ll dive into a case study and demo on optimizing production readiness, and share actionable best practices you can implement today.

Jul 16, 2020 SKILup Days: Continuous Delivery Ecosystem

“Will it Never End? – Preparing For and Exploiting CD”

If your team stands in your virtual doorway and asks ‘will it never end?’ – you are doing Continuous Delivery wrong. We get asked to implement the shiny new CD practice, but will it actually improve things? Automatically building inefficient code just gives you automated inefficiency. Calming release anxiety needs visibility before, during and after the move to CD. After sharing an experience of how CD can unravel, let’s talk about connecting the dots correctly and actually exploiting the power of CD.

May 5, 2020 OpsMatters – Webinar

“Slowdown is the New Outage“

While outage-driven news headlines can cause stock prices to plummet short term, the performance-driven reputation loss is a slow burn for longer-term customer loss. This session compares slowdowns vs outages and the resulting need for insight more than observability. By understanding these difference, you’ll be ready to drive agile applications, gain funding for lowering technical debt, and focus on customer retention.

Apr 21, 2020 Failover Conf 2020

Slowdown is the New Outage (SITNO)

While outage-driven news headlines can cause stock prices to plummet short term, the performance-driven reputation loss is a slow burn for longer-term customer loss. This session compares slowdowns vs outages and the resulting need for insight more than observability. By understanding these difference, you’ll be ready to drive agile applications, gain funding for lowering technical debt, and focus on customer retention.

Apr 28, 2020 Shifting\Left Webinar

Hitting fast-forward on digital transformation

Today, applications are the business. But how have application experiences and IT teams been impacted by the current climate? What new demands face teams tasked with managing and optimizing this new digital world?
AppDynamics Technical Evangelist, Marco Coulter, answers those questions, as well as help you chart a clear path forward in a rapidly changing IT landscape.
You’ll learn more about:

  • The evolution of IT as new and more demands are placed on digital experiences (hint: it’s not just about transformation)
  • The tools and team dynamics IT should be leveraging to thrive in today’s landscape
  • The three key action items for making sense of this new “normal”.

Jan 31, 2020 Cisco Live EU – Barcelona, Spain

Prove It’s NOT the Network – DEVNET-1237

In today’s world, your applications are your business. For networking and infrastructure teams, keeping up with the application landscape in the multi-cloud world is more challenging than ever before. This session provides an overview of how AppDynamics can help you:

  • Detect and remediate issues before they impact customers;
  • Understand how network policies and infrastructure configurations impact the applications running on them;
  • Ensure application availability and performance across public, private and hybrid cloud environments.

Rightsize Your Infrastructure with AppDynamics and CWOM – DEVNET-1607

User expectations have never been higher. Yet application and infrastructure complexity is exploding, making it increasingly difficult to determine how workload placement and capacity impact the customer experience–and the bottom line. By integrating AppDynamics and Cisco Workload Optimization Manager (CWOM), IT teams can now intelligently correlate application metrics to the underlying infrastructure capacity and make real-time infrastructure resourcing decisions to scale resources up and down to match today’s most elastic environments. In this session, you’ll learn how AppDynamics and CWOM can help you:

  • Balance application health and infrastructure utilization
  • Provide continuous infrastructure optimization for performance and spend
  • Automate workload sizing to guarantee the optimal customer experience

Learn how you can ensure a world-class customer experience while rightsizing your infrastructure.

Getting the Skill Mix Right for the 20’s – DEVLIT-4025

With 69% of enterprises describing the skill drought as being soft skills, rather than technology skills, are you ready to survive against disrupters? Drawing on experiences with large and midsize enterprises, Marco Coulter tabulates the skills needed to survive the coming decade while innovating at scale. What you need now, what you will need next, and a process for transforming your existing team to that new level.

Does Quantum Entanglement Mean No More Networks? – DEVLIT-4009

Security teams are watching the progress of quantum computing carefully as quantum supremacy could disrupt all concepts of safe encryption. Should network experts be watching quantum entanglement as a threat to today’s networking? This session will look at some of the features needing circumvention for quantum networks to exist.

Deciding What to Automate in AIOps – DEVLIT-4015

We automate for three benefits: to improve responsiveness, remove drudgery, and deliver consistent results. But automation has consequences, too. As you automate you’re potentially creating technical debt. That’s why it’s important to assess what you need (and don’t need) to automate. I’ve developed five criteria that I use to help decide what to automate in IT environments.

Slowdown is the New Outage (SINTO) – DEVLIT-4005

While outage-driven news headlines can cause stock prices to plummet short term, the performance-driven reputation loss is a slow burn for longer-term customer loss. This session compares slowdowns vs outages and the resulting need for insight mores than observability. By understanding these difference, you’ll be ready to drive agile applications, gain funding for lowering technical debt, and focus on customer retention.

Oct 22, 2019 DevOpsDays – Philadelphia PA

“AIOps is how we will survive DevOps“

Guessing alert threshold settings, coping with event storms, and scanning logs for root cause analysis at 2am is inefficient and soul-crushing. This session uses Marco’s experiences to give a reality-check on AI/ML, list what DevOps missed out on, and why he sees AIOps as the natural next step.

“A Brief, Wild Ride Around Quantum Computing“

A mathematician, a data scientist, a computer scientist and a physicist walk into a room sounds like the start of a joke. It is actually the average quantum computing (QC) meetup. Gartner warned executives to consider hiring PHD’s even though many will not use QC for possibly a decade. QC is already helping classical computing with improved algorithms, so we should be aware of what QC is and where it can be useful today.

Jun 20, 2019 IT Gathers – Boston MA

“Monitoring Applications At Scale In The Cloud”

(Co-presented with Casper Pierterse, Dimension Data)
Cloud expanded options and triggered the Jevon’s paradox. This goes into the ‘thundering herd’ issue that comes with server less computing and an approach to solve the cloud jigsaw puzzle.
Key points of discussion: The Complicated Cloud Conundrum; APM to the Rescue; Don’t Take My Word For It.

Jun 9, 2019 Cisco Live 2019, San Diego

AIOPs – the Life Preserver for ITOps – PSOGEN-1014

Let’s face it – coping with network event storms, guessing warning threshold settings for infrastructure, and using command line skills for 2am root cause analysis is inefficient and soul-crushing. Multi-cloud and hyperconverged infrastructures generate too many metrics for humans to comprehend, and ITOps needs augmentation from AI/ML just to survive. Enterprises are urgently seeking AIOps to automate infrastructure drudgery. This session gives use cases and describe Cisco’s vision for AppDynamics as the Central Nervous System for the enterprise.
“AIOPs: The Life Preserver for ITOps – PSOGEN-1014” (SLIDES)
If you have a Cisco Live! login, you can watch the video.

What Network Architects Need to Know About the Evolving Software Lifecycle (SDLC) – PSOGEN-1013

As our applications transform to cloud-native-first architectures, policy replaces configuration files to define infrastructure at all layers; networking, compute, storage, and of course application. Developers now have almost unlimited choices in how to solve their architecture, agility and scale challenges using the software defined infrastructure that powers our cloud-native world. Prescriptive topologies for networks are too rigid to support the needed agile iterations of today’s application. The software development lifecycle (SDLC) evolved to support multiple iterations for innovation and has some lessons for all of us. This session describes SDLC evolutions to help network and infrastructure experts as they strive to connect business value to applications to infrastructure while constructing the networks of the future.
“What Network Architects Need to Know About the Evolving Software Lifecycle (SDLC) – PSOGEN-1013” (SLIDES)
If you have a Cisco Live! login, you can watch the video.

Prove It’s NOT the Network – DEVNET-1237

DevNet-1237 Cisco Live 2019 CLUS19 Marco Speaking – Version 2

In today’s world, your applications are your business. For networking and infrastructure teams, keeping up with the application landscape in the multi-cloud world is more challenging than ever before. This session provides an overview of how AppDynamics can help you:

  • Detect and remediate issues before they impact customers;
  • Understand how network policies and infrastructure configurations impact the applications running on them;
  • Ensure application availability and performance across public, private and hybrid cloud environments.

“Prove It’s NOT the Network: An Introduction to AppDynamics – DEVNET-1237” (SLIDES)
If you have a Cisco Live! login, you can watch the video.

Jun 6, 2019 IT Gathers – Atlanta GA

“Monitoring Applications At Scale In The Cloud”

(Co-presented with Casper Pierterse, Dimension Data)
Cloud expanded options and triggered the Jevon’s paradox. This goes into the ‘thundering herd’ issue that comes with server less computing and an approach to solve the cloud jigsaw puzzle. Key points of discussion:

  • The Complicated Cloud Conundrum;
  • APM to the Rescue;
  • Don’t Take My Word For It.

Apr 25, 2019 TechGig.com Webinar

“AIOps as the Co-Pilot to DevOps”

(Co-presented with Ravi Lachhman)
Survive the fog of system development! Developers’ lives have gotten more complex in the last decade. There is too much to learn and understand now, and you need a co-pilot. Let AIOps be that co-pilot. Key points of discussion:

  • Levelset for Machine Learning (ML) today;
  • Flying planes vs DevOps;
  • Defining AIOps;
  • AI/ML making DevOps survivable;
  • A guide for assessing where to automate.

Apr 4, 2019 DevOps.com Webinar

“AIOps: Your DevOps Co-Pilot”

(Co-presented with Ravi Lachhman.)

Feb 5, 2019 Premier Group, New York

20190205 Premier Group Photo 2“AIOps – How We Will Survive DevOps”

DevOps sees development embrace the world of operations. Marco Coulter’s own move from operations to leading development teams across four countries brought a realization. Guessing threshold settings, coping with event storms, and using command line skills for root cause analysis at 2am was inefficient and soul-crushing.

Jan 21, 2019 OOP, Munich

OOP 2019 Marco Presenting“AIOps and DevOps as Perfect Partners”

This session uses my experiences (and a quick overview of machine learning) to frame why leading enterprises are urgently seeking AIOps to automate drudgery and allow DevOps to evolve ’T’-shaped skills.

Dec 18, 2018 Cloud Unfiltered Podcast

EV Team at Lunch“Harnessing the Power of Application Performance Management, with AppDynamics“

Today we speak with Kyle Tyacke, Ravi Lachhman, and Marco Coulter of the AppDynamics team. They explain why APM tools are important, and why AppD is uniquely equipped to help you identify problems within your applications and resolve them quickly.

Nov 25, 2018 AWS re:Invent, Las Vegas

AWS reinvent 2018 - Marco Presenting 2“DevOps & AI: Cue the Robot Underlords“

DevOps will never be the same. This session breaks out why AI will work even better for DevOps than for cat photo recognition, and shares the strategy for preparing development and operations for machine learning and predictive models.

Nov 12, 2018 DXWorldEXPO, New York

(c) 2018 Steven Menges“Getting the Skills Right for Competitive Digital Transformation“

Drawing on experiences with large and midsize enterprises, Marco Coulter tabulates the skills needed to survive DX while innovating at scale, with a focus on the ‘lingua franca’ or common language between business and technology needed for today’s digitally savvy or agile enterprise.