As AI Reshapes Tech Work, Pasadena Conference Will Mark 15 Years of DevOps Community

For 16 years, software engineers and IT professionals from across Southern California have come to the Pasadena Convention Center to talk shop, swap ‘war stories’ and figure out how to build technology together. This year, the conversation has a new twist at its center: artificial intelligence.

DevOpsDayLA, the region’s volunteer-run conference on the practice of DevOps — the collaboration between software developers and IT operations teams — holds its 15th event Friday, March 6, from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. at the Convention Center, 300 E Green St. The theme this year is “DevOps in an AI World,” a reflection of the rapid changes AI has introduced to the way software teams work.

The one-day conference is co-located with SCaLE 23x, the 23rd annual Southern California Linux Expo, which runs March 5-8 at the same venue. SCaLE has been described by the FreeBSD Foundation as North America’s largest community-run open-source and free software conference. DevOpsDayLA has been part of SCaLE since 2011, according to the event’s organizers.

DevOpsDayLA began as Southern California’s first DevOps meetup on July 14, 2010, shortly after the global DevOpsDays movement launched with its inaugural conference in Ghent, Belgium, in 2009. The 2026 event marks the conference’s 15th gathering in 16 years — organizers skipped 2021 because of COVID-19.

The conference’s call for proposals sought talks from practitioners working in SoCal’s entertainment, gaming, aerospace, retail, healthcare and manufacturing industries, according to the event website. Organizers said in their call for speakers that they were looking for stories about “how you and your organizations are adapting your mindsets, processes, and team dynamics in this rapidly evolving landscape.”

The event format includes in-person attendance and a livestream option. Talks are videorecorded and made freely available online afterward, according to the DevOpsDays global website.

Registration for DevOpsDayLA is handled through SCaLE. A full SCaLE pass, which includes access to all sessions and the exhibit hall, costs $90. An expo-only pass costs $20 and provides access to the exhibit hall on Friday afternoon, Saturday and Sunday. Registration is available at register.socallinuxexpo.org/reg23.

SCaLE 23x features more than 20 tracks of content over four days, including three days focused on open-source AI, according to the PyTorch Foundation’s event listing. Co-located events alongside DevOpsDayLA include Cloud Native Days LA, AstriCon, the Open Source Career Day, PlanetNix and SunSecCon, according to a Meetup.com listing for the conference.

Gold sponsors for DevOpsDayLA 2026 include IBM, Red Hat, Pulumi, Teleport and Thales, among others, according to the event website. The conference’s organizers describe it as “by the SoCal DevOps community, for the SoCal DevOps community,” and say it is volunteer-organized with a focus on practitioner-to-practitioner learning rather than vendor presentations.

Volunteer and speaker inquiries can be directed to losangeles@devopsdays.org. More information is available at devopsdays.org/events/2026-los-angeles.

Sixteen years in, the tools have changed, the workflows have changed, and now the machines are starting to do some of the work. The engineers still come to Pasadena to figure it out together.