Conferences are an inefficient way to learn a specific skill and an excellent way to discover what the rest of the industry is struggling with this year. The ones below are the events I either attend or watch closely, grouped by focus area.

Large vendor conferences

These are the flagship events run by the major cloud and software vendors. Content is partly marketing, but the architectural talks and customer case studies are genuinely useful.

  • AWS re:Invent - the annual AWS conference in Las Vegas, with hundreds of technical sessions and major service announcements
  • AWS Summit series - free regional one-day events held in most major cities worldwide
  • Microsoft Build - Azure, .NET, and the developer tools ecosystem
  • Google Cloud Next - GCP’s annual conference, strong on data and AI content
  • HashiConf - the HashiCorp community event for Terraform, Vault, Consul, and Nomad

DevOps-specific events

Focused on the culture, practice, and tooling of DevOps rather than a specific vendor stack.

Kubernetes, containers, and cloud-native

  • KubeCon + CloudNativeCon - the flagship CNCF event, runs in Europe, North America, and China each year
  • DockerCon - Docker’s annual event, now focused on developer experience and supply chain
  • Container Days - European conference covering Kubernetes and the wider container ecosystem

Platform Engineering and SRE

  • PlatformCon - dedicated to the emerging discipline of platform engineering, held online each year
  • SREcon - USENIX’s SRE conference series, with EMEA, Americas, and Asia-Pacific editions
  • Observability Day - co-located with KubeCon, focused on tracing, metrics, and logs

How to get value when you can’t attend

Most of these conferences publish session recordings on YouTube within weeks of the event. The CNCF YouTube channel and AWS Events YouTube channel are the two most useful archives. Scanning the session list and watching three or four relevant talks is often more valuable than sitting through a full conference schedule.