DevOps in #CivicTech
This talk will center around how the US Government has been on a DevOps journey and where various agencies are from civilian agencies to the defense department and all the way to the White House!
My name is Ken Kato and I’m a White House Presidential Innovation Fellow or PIF since the government loves acronyms. As a PIF we’re detailed to a specific agency, in my case I’m detailed to the Department of the Navy. Previous to being a PIF, I helped launch USAF Kessel Run right here in Boston. I went through my own DevOps journey once upon a time, circa 2006 when I learned puppet as a means to open up more time for me and my team to do valuable things over hand-holding every darn switch and router. Since then I’ve continued half in ops and half in dev into cloudy things. Today I apply my experience to bettering our government as a PIF. I have a unique opportunity to speak truth to power, and just #GetShipDone. One of the things I accomplished year one was launching a cloud-native platform for the Navy and like to talk to you all about how we got there.
More about Ken Kato
Ken Kato is an entrepreneur, platform/cloud architect, change agent, and innovator; with a wide range of experience across highly regulated industries from finance, to healthcare, to defense. Most recently as a founding member of Kessel Run, Ken disrupted USAF’s technology. Working alongside industry innovators Pivotal to provide a cloud platform and help begin their cloud native journey.
Spending a career working at the bleeding edge; Ken continues to iterate on concepts with a focus lately on IoT sensor data aggregation and predictive analysis, security across software and platform lifecycle, edge computing at the extremes of information availability. Evincing a passion to keep pursuing ideas from when the ideas are theory before technology is available until they are matured as an innovation.
Technology alone can’t solve complex problems and with that in mind, Ken thinks of what the future landscape may look like. Between experience and data, Ken predicts how decisions made today will be survivable for years ahead and strives to develop a sustainable strategy for organizational growth.
Today Ken serves as a White House Presidential Innovation Fellow where he launched the cloud-native platform, Black Pearl, within the first year. Since then he has been working with many federal agencies in defense, law enforcement, healthcare, and finance to help move the needle on digital innovation.