Mark your calendars: Devopsdays Philly returns Thursday, Oct. 1, and Friday, Oct. 2, at The Science History Institute at 315 Chestnut St. in Old City.
This is the seventh Philadelphia edition of the global, volunteer-organized Devopsdays series. The speaker lineup is posted, two hands-on workshops are locked in and the agenda leans hard into the question everyone in infrastructure is asking right now: What happens when AI agents start touching production?
If you’ve never attended, the short version is this: Devopsdays is built for anyone who ships or runs software, developers, SREs, platform and operations engineers, security folks, QA, engineering managers and the people who have to explain all of it to the business. It’s deliberately vendor-neutral, and about a third of each day is unconference time where attendees set the agenda themselves. There are still a few sponsor slots open if you want to get in front of engineers like these and have conversations.
Every year I work to keep this going for one reason. Open Spaces. There is something special about getting to pick everyone’s brain and help engineers that are stuck and just riff and share ideas. This is the core of the devopsdays community and it wouldn’t be the same without it.
What to expect at Devopsdays Philly 2026
- Morning talks in the auditorium. Single-track, 30-minute sessions from practitioners — no product pitches. The full program is live.
- Afternoon workshops. Two multi-hour, hands-on sessions: Domain-Driven Platform Engineering with Ajay Chankramath (Thursday) and Securely Deploying AI Infrastructure with Erica Windisch (Friday).
- Ignite talks. Fifteen-minute, rapid-fire sessions after lunch each day.
- Open Spaces. Both afternoons close with attendee-pitched discussion sessions — the part of the conference regulars say they get the most out of. New to the format? Here’s how it works.
- Security Automation discussion track. A standing open-space room both mornings for anyone who wants to dig into security tooling and automation with peers.
- Hiring mixer. Both days over the lunch hour bring a resume or bring a job req. Recruiters, please reach out for a free pass to the mixer.
- Snacks, soft drinks, and coffee are included with admission.
This year’s themes
Resilience and the craft of debugging
Tim Gross brings “Clinical Methods in Debugging,” applying diagnostic discipline from medicine to production incidents. Tyler Auerbeck’s “Let Me Show You How The World Ends” uses domain storytelling to plan for infrastructure disaster before it happens. And Swetha Rajshree’s “Ignite, The Deployment Worked. The Release Failed” is a reminder that green pipelines and happy users are not the same thing.
Agentic AI meets production reality
This is the dominant theme of 2026. Mehul Vani will cover “Operating Agentic AI Reliably on Kubernetes” and Yossi Eliaz is giving two sessions on sandboxing coding agents, including “Forkable Snapshots: Fast, Isolated Sandboxes for Coding Agents.” Friday’s Ignite block is essentially a set of postmortems: “Shipping the Agent Was Easy. Keeping It Honest Wasn’t” from Rahul Sharma and “We Gave the Agent Production Credentials” from Anish Puthuraya. Ranjita Rajeeva Shetty will walk through “Building an AI-Native Developer Platform” and Kateri Waltermeyer asks how you engineer AI systems that don’t converge to average. Erica Windisch’s Friday workshop, “Securely Deploying AI Infrastructure,” is the hands-on companion to all of it.
Cost and carbon, with receipts
Two talks bring actual numbers. Pravalik Medi will break down how his team cut an AWS SQL Server bill by a third and which changes actually moved the number, and Imran Halder will explain how one of the UK’s largest charities slashed cloud costs and emissions by 85%. FinOps and green ops have moved from aspiration to line item.
Platform engineering and the open-source supply chain
Christopher Tineo opens Thursday with “Free Software Isn’t Gratis,” a case for treating open source as infrastructure you’re responsible for rather than something you download. Ajay Chankramath’s Thursday workshop applies domain-driven design to platform teams. And Scott Howard asks the uncomfortable follow-up to AI-accelerated coding: “So Your Coding Is Fast, But Can the Business Keep Up?”
Join the fun
Tickets are on Eventbrite. General admission covers all sessions, breakfast, snacks and coffee across both days. Conference t-shirts are sold separately as a pre-order with limited availability on site. Refunds are available up to five days before the event.
Use this special Technical.ly code to get 30% off general admission: DODPHILLY26TECHNICALLY
Whether you’re on your first on-call rotation or you’ve been running platforms for two decades, there’s a room for you here. See you in Old City.
Attendees are also automatically entered into an in-person raffle for one of 5 copies of each of Ajay Chankramath’s books: “The Platform Engineer’s Handbook” and “Effective Platform Engineering.”
