{"id":288863,"date":"2026-09-18T11:24:08","date_gmt":"2026-09-18T11:24:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/288863\/"},"modified":"2026-09-18T11:24:08","modified_gmt":"2026-09-18T11:24:08","slug":"devopsdays-philly-2026-explores-ai-agents-in-production","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/288863\/","title":{"rendered":"Devopsdays Philly 2026 explores AI agents in production"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is a guest post by Damion Waltermeyer<\/a>, product security engineer and co-organizer of Devopsdays Philly 2026. Technical.ly is a media partner.<\/p>\n

Mark your calendars: Devopsdays Philly<\/a> returns Thursday, Oct. 1, and Friday, Oct. 2, at The Science History Institute<\/a> at 315 Chestnut St. in Old City.<\/p>\n

This is the seventh Philadelphia edition of the global, volunteer-organized Devopsdays series. The speaker lineup<\/a> 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?<\/p>\n

If you\u2019ve 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Every year I work to keep this going for one reason. Open Spaces. There is something special about getting to pick everyone\u2019s brain and help engineers that are stuck and just riff and share ideas. This is the core of the devopsdays community and it wouldn\u2019t be the same without it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

What to expect at Devopsdays Philly 2026<\/p>\n

Morning talks in the auditorium. Single-track, 30-minute sessions from practitioners \u2014 no product pitches. The full program<\/a> is live.<\/p>\n

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).<\/p>\n

Ignite talks. Fifteen-minute, rapid-fire sessions after lunch each day.<\/p>\n

Open Spaces. Both afternoons close with attendee-pitched discussion sessions \u2014 the part of the conference regulars say they get the most out of. New to the format? Here\u2019s how it works<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Security Automation discussion track. A standing open-space room both mornings for anyone who wants to dig into security tooling and automation with peers.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Snacks, soft drinks, and coffee are included with admission.<\/p>\n

This year\u2019s themes<\/p>\n

Resilience and the craft of debugging<\/p>\n

Tim Gross brings \u201cClinical Methods in Debugging,\u201d applying diagnostic discipline from medicine to production incidents. Tyler Auerbeck\u2019s \u201cLet Me Show You How The World Ends\u201d uses domain storytelling to plan for infrastructure disaster before it happens. And Swetha Rajshree\u2019s \u201cIgnite, The Deployment Worked. The Release Failed\u201d is a reminder that green pipelines and happy users are not the same thing.<\/p>\n

Agentic AI meets production reality<\/p>\n

This is the dominant theme of 2026. Mehul Vani will cover \u201cOperating Agentic AI Reliably on Kubernetes\u201d and Yossi Eliaz is giving two sessions on sandboxing coding agents, including \u201cForkable Snapshots: Fast, Isolated Sandboxes for Coding Agents.\u201d Friday\u2019s Ignite block is essentially a set of postmortems: \u201cShipping the Agent Was Easy. Keeping It Honest Wasn\u2019t\u201d from Rahul Sharma and \u201cWe Gave the Agent Production Credentials\u201d from Anish Puthuraya. Ranjita Rajeeva Shetty will walk through \u201cBuilding an AI-Native Developer Platform\u201d and Kateri Waltermeyer asks how you engineer AI systems that don\u2019t converge to average. Erica Windisch\u2019s Friday workshop, \u201cSecurely Deploying AI Infrastructure,\u201d is the hands-on companion to all of it.<\/p>\n

Cost and carbon, with receipts<\/p>\n

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\u2019s largest charities slashed cloud costs and emissions by 85%. FinOps and green ops have moved from aspiration to line item.<\/p>\n

Platform engineering and the open-source supply chain<\/p>\n

Christopher Tineo opens Thursday with \u201cFree Software Isn\u2019t Gratis,\u201d a case for treating open source as infrastructure you\u2019re responsible for rather than something you download. Ajay Chankramath\u2019s Thursday workshop applies domain-driven design to platform teams. And Scott Howard asks the uncomfortable follow-up to AI-accelerated coding: \u201cSo Your Coding Is Fast, But Can the Business Keep Up?\u201d<\/p>\n

Join the fun<\/p>\n

Tickets are on Eventbrite<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

Use this special Technical.ly code to get 30% off general admission: DODPHILLY26TECHNICALLY<\/p>\n

Whether you\u2019re on your first on-call rotation or you\u2019ve been running platforms for two decades, there\u2019s a room for you here. See you in Old City.<\/p>\n

Attendees are also automatically entered into an in-person raffle for one of 5 copies of each of Ajay Chankramath\u2019s books: \u201cThe Platform Engineer\u2019s Handbook<\/a>\u201d and \u201cEffective Platform Engineering<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This is a guest post by Damion Waltermeyer, product security engineer and co-organizer of Devopsdays Philly 2026. Technical.ly…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":288864,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[2962,1756,1757,69,71,70],"class_list":["post-288863","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-philadelphia","tag-cybersecurity","tag-events","tag-guest-posts","tag-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia-headlines","tag-philadelphia-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288863","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=288863"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288863\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/288864"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=288863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=288863"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=288863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}