PREVAIL 2021

A Virtual Event held October 19-20, 2021

Resilience is a more vital topic than ever as the challenges presented by COVID-19 have pushed many organizations beyond normal concerns around DevOps, cloud adoption or Agile methodologies. Cloud-based services are in high demand and expected to be fast, always on and secure.

We are proud to announce PREVAIL 2021. PREVAIL is a yearly follow-the-sun virtual event devoted to IT resilience, performance, security, quality testing and SRE.
PREVAIL is an IBM technical conference hosted by technical people for a technical audience. Prevail is a space for technical people to speak openly about technical topics. Speakers are welcome from within IBM and IBM Business Partners, from Academia and also from other organizations including IBM’s competitors. All speakers should leave their badge at the door and present a talk that covers technical aspects of a technology, method or service that is important to them and is relevant to one of the PREVAIL tracks.
Keynote Speakers
While the conference timetable is still being planned (and by submitting a session via the link below you can affect the timetable) we are delighted to confirm the following Keynote Speakers for the conference.

Tiago Costa Tiago is a Cloud Architect and Advisor at Microsoft and a recognized International speaker and MVP for Microsoft Azure. Building reliable systems on Azure is a shared responsibility between Microsoft and the customer. Microsoft manages the datacenters, and customers using architectural best practices need to make sure their solution requirements are meet. Azure fits simple reliability to mission-critical complex requirements. In this session we will discuss how to use the Azure Well-Architected Framework to build highly reliable and resilient applications.
Edward Lee Edward is Professor of the Graduate School in EECS at UC Berkeley. He is the lead author of the open-source software system Ptolemy II, author of textbooks on embedded systems and digital communications, and has recently been writing books on philosophical and social implications of technology. Uncontrolled and unintended nondeterminism has been a persistent problem for concurrent, parallel, and distributed software. In this talk, he will examine what we mean by “determinism” in engineering, science, and in philosophy. Whether a model is deterministic or not depends on how one defines the inputs and behavior of the model.
Rashik Parmar Rashik is an IBM Fellow, the leader of IBM’s European technical community and previously President of the IBM Academy of Technology. As IT and computing is critical to almost all aspects of daily life, IT engineers play a vital role in ensuring responsible use. Responsible.computing() is a framework that defines the overall aspects of the responsibility and helps individuals learn how best to be the professionals we need.
Nataraj Nagaratnam Nataraj is an IBM Fellow and the CTO for IBM Cloud Security. Zero trust is an emerging approach to security which is particularly useful in the current threat environment. This talk will cover the basics of zero trust, and how it is being used in IBM.
Zak Berrie Zak covers Red Hat’s Storage, Application Development, and Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning portfolios. Traditional perimeter-based network security does not work in this new world of containers and hybrid cloud. Security teams must rethink their approach to security in this new world with automation and DevSecOps, where security is built-in, continuously addressed, and continuously monitored across the entire application lifecycle, infrastructure lifecycle, and supply chain. We look forward to hearing about some prescriptive steps you can take to tackle security successfully in this new environment. Kyle Brown and Roland Barcia Kyle is an IBM Fellow and the CTO for the CIO; and Roland is an IBM Fellow and CTO of Cloud & Data Platform Adoption. They will explain how GitOps is a practical implementation of a broad set of principles that define how you need to think about building and operating your applications. We look forward to hearing about Two halves of the same coin: Why functional and nonfunctional requirements can’t be separated.

Replays of the excellent keynotes, breakout sessions, panels, workshops and posters from subject matter experts delivered on last year’s conference are still available. Check out replays of last year’s sessions here.

PREVAIL is a cooperation of the
IBM Academy of Technology,
the IBM Performance and Availability Community,
Turbonomics, Instana, Red Hat and Kyndryl.