 DevOps, DevOps is what brings us together today. DevOps, that blessed arrangement, that dweem within a dweem. You know, DevOps is the greatest thing in the world except for maybe a nice MLT, unless tomato sandwich where the mutton is nice and lean and the tomato is ripe. I'm here today to tell you ten of the things that you can learn about DevOps by watching The Princess Bride. If you haven't seen it or haven't seen it recently, I'm sorry there's references to it. You have homework now, I promise it's more fun than Aaron's homework. This movie actually teaches us the most essential of the core DevOps lessons, that we need to work together with people of different skill sets and backgrounds to achieve our goals. At the movie's climax, they need physics strength, indigo swordsmanship, and Westley's brain to storm the castle. And even though they have different goals and motivations for storming the castle, they're able to meet all of their separate goals by collaborating and working together. We also learn, though, that people aren't always enough. We do often need tools and technologies to assist us. But just like them, it's important to know precisely what you need. Westley does not bemoan, not having a Kubernetes. I mean a catapult to storm the castle. They want a cloak and they want a wheelbarrow, so that instead of trying to attack the castle, they can scare the guards away and then just sneak in. We can also learn from their mistakes, though. After using physics for his strength, both Westley and indigo ditch him so that they can go accomplish their own goals separately. However, they both forget to do one important thing, which is plan their escape. And physics just goes and he handles that for them. Never actually thinking about it, he finds four white horses. And he does this using the one thing that everybody in the movie underestimates him for, which is his brain. When you underestimate your colleagues, you take away their ability to pick up your slack and to fill in spaces where you weren't able to think about something. Our organizations pay us to solve difficult problems. They pay us for that reason. No vendor, no tool is going to take away all of the toil or all of the challenges from running your applications at scale. That's just how it works. Indigo lives his life reacting to the incident of his father being murdered. When he meets someone, he asks them if they have six fingers on their right hand. He is asking his system questions to determine what kind of actions he needs to take, which maps to observability. It's an oversimplification, but this movie does teach us this in numerous occasions. This is a different set of questions than what you want to ask if you're trying to determine which glass has Iocane powder in it and you're going to die if you drink it. We also learn that systems can lie to us. Here, Indigo is falling over and saying, I feel fine, right? After, physics says you don't look so good, right? Our systems lie to us. When Indigo and Wesley first meet, they spend some time chatting and becoming friends before Indigo tells Wesley that he has to kill him. It's his job, after all. And this kind of maps to what we talk about in DevOps with having cattle instead of pets for servers. It goes further than that, though. To do our jobs well, we do need to be able to discard the work that ourselves and our colleagues have done previously. We absolutely need to respect it just as Wesley and Indigo respect each other, but we can't cling to that. After those two slides, though, I do want to point out you shouldn't kill someone with our skills. Please don't. And the movie shows us to be ethical, too. Both Phezic and Indigo say that what they think that they're doing with Visini is wrong. They think that he is the only person that will give them a job, so they go along with it. But by the end of the movie, they're working against the man who hired Visini. They're rescuing someone. They're stopping a war. And, I mean, Indigo even gets a cushy gig as a pirate captain, right? Don't do something unethical because someone's paying you. Indigo here is telling Visini that he's going to duel Wesley left-handed, which is his offhand. Minutes later, Phezic, instead of throwing a rock at Wesley's head, decides to wrestle him. When we don't give people structure for how they want to flex their skills or how they want to do things on the job, they're going to do it the way they wanted to anyways, which is a great way for you to wind up with tools that you don't know about yoloed into production. Give people structure to flex their skills. And finally, before he dies, Visini teaches us of the great blunders. Your organization is not going to succeed if you get into a land war in Asia. But he also teaches us that only slightly less well-known is never go against a Sicilian when death is on the line. Ah-ha-ha-ha! Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha!