devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Author: Alan Shimel

  • DevOps Chat: OPA and the CNCF, With Torin Sandall

    DevOps Chat: OPA and the CNCF, With Torin Sandall

    The Open Policy Agent (OPA) was accepted for incubation by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. In this DevOps Chat we spoke with one of the founders of the project, Torin Sandall, about OPA and why the CNCF is the right place for OPA. We also discuss the company he works for, Styra, which works with OPA.

    As usual, the streaming audio is immediately below, followed by the transcript of our conversation. Enjoy!


    Transcript

    Alan Shimel: Hey, everyone. This is Alan Shimel, MediaOps, the people behind devopsy.kinsta.cloud, Container Journal, Security Boulevard and DevOps Chat, and you’re listening to another DevOps Chat.

    I’m really happy to have as a guest for this DevOps Chat, Torin Sandall, and Torin is actually one of the co-founders of the Open Policy Agent (OPA) open source project, which recently came under the guidance management of Cloud Native Computing.

    So, let’s welcome Torin. Torin, you there?

    Torin Sandall: Hey, Alan. Yeah, great to talk to you.

    Shimel: Great to have you here, and a pleasure to have you joining us on this podcast. Torin, let’s first start off with, maybe there are people out here who don’t know what OPA is—what Open Policy Agent is, right? There’s some great, if you go to—actually, if you go to CNCF.io, there’s a blog article all about it and I’ll put it in our show notes. But for those who are following along or listening to this in their car or what have you, talk to us—what’s Open Policy Agent?

    Sandall: Yeah, that’s a great question, and it’s a good way to get started.

    So, Open Policy Agent is a domain agnostic policy engine, okay? So, it’s general purpose, meaning that you can kind of take it and use it to enforce all kinds of policies and governance regimes across a wide range of technology.

    So, for example, if you want to say that, you know, all of your containers have to be sourced from an internal image registry, you can express that kind of a policy with OPA, or the Open Policy Agent. If you want to do something like say that certain users can only see certain pieces of data served by a micro service, you can also do that with the Open Policy Agent. And if you want to restrict who can SSH into a server or run a pseudo command on a server, you can also do that with the Open Policy Agent.

    So, the idea is that we give people this engine that allows them to unify policy control across various pieces of their stack.

    Shimel: Excellent. And you know what’s interesting? I was talking to someone the other day and we were talking about, you know, how does Kubernetes fit into this whole Cloud Native thing? Because Cloud Native and the CNCF is bigger than just Kubernetes. And they gave me a really good analogy. They said, “Think of it as like, you know, a fleet of warships or, you know, a U.S. Navy fleet and maybe Kubernetes is the aircraft carrier. But there’s more to the Navy than the aircraft carrier. There’s more to a fleet than an aircraft carrier. There’s battleships and cruisers and destroyers and subs and frigates and amphibious landing ships,” and you know, I’m not a Navy expert. [Laughter] But there’s all these different elements that make up the fleet—and it’s a huge fleet.

    And so, you know, when I look at OPA, you know, Open Policy Agent—and we’re gonna talk about joining Cloud Native Computing Foundation—it’s a necessary ship in the fleet, right? That really makes it easier and more practical to use a lot of the tools that are not only in the fleet, but a lot of the commercial tools that kind of exist on the periphery as well. Fair?

    Sandall: Absolutely, yeah. The CNCF is a collection of projects that provide a lot of value within the overall ecosystem, and there are a few things that kind of bind them together, and those are kind of high level principles. So, you know, they’re all open source, they are all, you know, they’re oriented around containers. They’re oriented around very dynamic systems that you need to manage at scale.

    And so, one of the interesting things about a lot of the projects within the CNCF is that they are kind of building blocks. You can think of them as libraries or building blocks for the overall system, right? And so, you know, they integrate together, you can plug them into other systems and so on. And so, that’s how we kind of look at OPA. That’s how we think about OPA, is as a building block or as a library for enabling rich, fine grain control across a variety of parts of your environment.

    Shimel: Absolutely.

    Sandall: And, yeah, and so, policy is particularly important when you start to talk about adoption of technology within large organizations, right? As Kubernetes has matured and enterprises have really started to run with it and deploy real production workloads on top of it, they’ve recognized the need for not just simple best practice kind of security measures, but much more sophisticated and rich and fine grained rules and constraints that need to be enforced in a system in order to keep everybody safe. And so, that’s where OPA fits into Kubernetes.

    Shimel: Yeah, absolutely. You know what? I realized, and I apologize, I really didn’t do a good job of letting you introduce yourself to our audience on top of [Cross talk].

    Sandall: [Laughter] That’s okay.

    Shimel: So, Torin, I apologize. In addition to you being one of the co-founders of the project, why don’t you share a little bit about what you do in your day job and the rest of your life?

    Sandall: For sure, yeah. So, I think what’s relevant here is that I’m the co-founder of the Open Policy Agent project. I’m also a software engineer at a startup called Styra. We’re the makers of the Open Policy Agent. We founded the project about three years ago—a little over three years ago, actually, and yeah, so we’re kind of like the stewards of the project today. That said, we’re starting to see a lot more people from the community kind of come in and start contributing to Open Policy Agent and related kind of projects in the ecosystem.

    So, that’s sort of what I do. My focus is kind of on Open Policy Agent, but I’m super interested in the overall Cloud Native ecosystem and security and policy and all that kinda stuff.

    Shimel: So, you know, and I should also mention—I did a terrible job laying this one out, Torin, I apologize. We should also mention that the big news coming out—I guess it was this week, or maybe late last week—was that OPA, Open Policy Agent, has now become or come under the auspices of Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

    Sandall: That’s right, yeah. So, we actually, we joined the CNCF as a sandbox to your project last year, in 2018. OPA was added into the CNCF sandbox. So, the CNCF has multiple tiers, and right now there’s sandbox, incubation and graduated.

    And so, this year, basically, they do a review of projects, you know, every year, and they check in on how the projects are doing and how they’re growing and how their communities are evolving. And that’s just useful, right? To kind of maintain, kind of, you know, good hygiene within the ecosystem. But this time around, we felt that—everybody kinda felt that OPA was growing quite a bit and it kind of deserved to move up to the next level incubation within the CNCF.

    And so, the move from sandbox to incubation is really a reflection of the progress that we’ve made over the last year in terms of both production users as well as proof of concepts and integrations, and new external contributors joining the project.

    Shimel: Got it. And, you know, I will just mention that, you know, CNCF has really done an amazing job of shepherding these projects, from sandbox into incubation, and then from incubation into graduation. I forgot the number, if it was five or six projects they’ve graduated now.

    Sandall: Yeah, I think there’s about five graduated projects today. You know, Kubernetes is one of them, it’s kind of one of the flagship projects, and there are others. And so, yeah, so, they’re really doing a good job of curating a very important set of building blocks, like I said, that are gonna help organizations get to cloud native.

    Shimel: So, let me ask you a question—and I think this is something our audience would really enjoy. How did you, as a co-founder of the OPA project, right, what was your sort of motivation for, you know, bringing it under the CNCF?

    Sandall: So, yeah, that’s a great question. What we found was that after, you know, the project had been around for over a year, or rather over almost two years, I guess. And what we found with talking to users and potential users was that they wanted to see OPA as part of a kind of vendor neutral organization, right? So, Styra, the company that I work for, had kind of built OPA, and it’s been open source since day one, but people really like to see these kinds of projects, these kinds of core infrastructure components a little bit decoupled from, like say, any particular organization.

    Shimel: Mm-hmm.

    Sandall: And so—

    Shimel: Well, not decoupled from any particular organization. Decoupled from any one particular vendor.

    Sandall: One vendor—yeah, sorry. One vendor.

    Shimel: There’s not a single vendor.

    Sandall: Yes. And so, you know, we looked around and we looked at the CNCF and we really liked what they were doing and we figured that that was the right place for OPA to be.

    So, you know, the CNCF basically provides us with this kind of vendor-neutral home for the project, and it allows us to kinda create a rallying point around policy in the cloud native ecosystem. So, that was the main, high level motivation for joining CNCF.

    Shimel: Got it. And it makes perfect sense. I mean, I’ve gotta tell you, you know, I don’t know if you’re familiar, but recently, the CNCF launched—not the CNCF, excuse me—the Linux Foundation, right, which is kinda the parent of the CNCF, right?—

    Sandall: Right, yes. Yes.

    Shimel: —launched another foundation called the CD Foundation, Continuous Delivery.

    Sandall: Yes, yes.

    Shimel: And CloudBees, the folks at CloudBees and the Jenkins project was given under to the CD Foundation. Jenkins had Jenkins X, Netflix put in Spinnaker and Google put in—I forget its name now, with a T.

    Sandall: Tekton?

    Shimel: Tekton. They put, you know, put Tekton into the thing. And I had a good chance to interview some of the CloudBees folks with this, and I asked them the same kinda question I just asked you. You know, and it was a very similar answer, that not only do end users perhaps shy away from a single vendor supported project, but it’s very hard for a project to break out of that mold and get other vendors or talent at other vendors to contribute, because they think they’re doing it for the benefit of one of their competitors.

    So, by putting it under a neutral party like this, you know, not only is it more palatable to your end users and to the community as a whole, but it’s especially more attractive to that segment of the community that are made up of vendors. And whether you hate vendors and you think they’re all commercial slime who sold out to the man or not, the fact of the matter is, those are the people who have the resources to put into these projects and to move the needle and to keep that ball moving forward and push the rope up the hill and all of that. So, can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em, and this is a great kinda middle ground.

    Sandall: That’s a good point, and I think that, you know, what we’re starting to see are more and more security vendors getting interested in OPA or Open Policy Agent. I like to call it OPA. It’s hard to call it O-P-A when you’ve got that OPA word that you can use, but anyway—

    Shimel: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [Laughter]

    Sandall: [Laughter] But yeah, so, we’re seeing more and more security vendors get interested in OPA and, you know, that is gonna be instrumental in the long run to achieving the goal of unifying policy control across a number of different systems, right? There’s never gonna be one vendor that rules everything and there’s always gonna be an amalgamation of different technologies. And so, you know, the best that we can do, I think, is provide this building block that can be embedded all over the place and that has, like, the fundamental kind of groundwork that enables unification. So, very exciting times.

    Shimel: Absolutely. So, I’m gonna ask you now to put on your entrepreneur’s hat, right? As a co-founder of your company as well, and let’s look at it Torin from that point of view. How is this helping—and I’m not familiar with your company, so I’m gonna apologize in advance. Say the name for us, again?

    Sandall: Sorry, the name of the company is Styra.

    Shimel: How do you spell that?

    Sandall: S-T-Y-R-A.

    Shimel: Got it. So, how does this help Styra?

    Sandall: That’s a great question. So, yeah, when the founders—I’m not a founder of Styra, I’m an employee at Styra.

    Shimel: Oh, I’m sorry. Okay.

    Sandall: But anyway, when the founders of Styra started the company, one of the things that they observed was that, in order to unify enforcement of policies across a wide range of technology, there would need to be kind of like a language based approach applied to the problem domain.

    And so, that’s one of the things that the Open Policy Agent provides—it gives people this high level declarative language that they can use to codify policies. And so, that was kind of recognized as something that would be needed, and what you quickly kind of—the conclusion you quickly arrive to is that, this was in 2016, 2015, and even more so today, it’s true, but what you quickly arrive at is the realization that that kind of a technology needs to be open source, right? It’s unlikely that organizations are going to want to adopt a proprietary, closed source language. It’s just not going to happen.

    And so, right from the very beginning of the company, it was recognized that an important part of the technology was going to be open source. And so, that’s how the kind of project sort of got started.

    Shimel: Got it. Got it, got it, got it. You know, I don’t wanna put you on the spot, but a little Styra background—Styra’s venture backed or bootstrapped, or?

    Sandall: Yeah, we’re venture-backed, and we recently did a bit of a launch at the RSA Conference a few weeks ago.

    Shimel: Really?

    Sandall: And so, that was very exciting, yeah. And so, you know, you can think of Styra as a control plane for policies. So, OPA kind of acts as the data plane, right? It’s this thing that you can embed into applications, you can embed it into Kubernetes, you can put it all over the place. But, what you need is also the ability to kind of manage those OPAs that are running all over the place.

    And this is what we see within the OPA community—the people that are using OPA building it into their systems. Companies like Netflix that have built an internal security platform around OPA, what they’ve ended up doing is creating a centralized management plane for policy and for security.

    And so, that’s what we’re doing at Styra is, we’re helping people kind of think about distributed enforcement of policy and centralized management of policy.

    Shimel: Got it.

    Sandall: So, we’re focusing today on Kubernetes and you can check out the website, we’ve got a bunch of information on there, but yeah, that’s the high level.

    Shimel: Excellent stuff. As a matter of fact, just looking at the website, I didn’t realize this but Styra is Bill Mann’s company.

    Sandall: That’s correct, yeah, he’s the CEO.

    Shimel: So—just to show you how old I am. I’ve known Bill Mann a really, really long time, like, I remember the day he joined CA.

    Sandall: Bill knows a lot of folks, yeah. [Laughter]

    Shimel: Yeah, he gets around. Bill’s been around, and so have I.

    Sandall: Yeah.

    Shimel: I don’t know if that’s a good or a bad thing, you know? But hey, we’re still kickin’. So, tell Bill I said hello, he’ll get a chuckle out of it.

    Sandall: Yeah. I will do that, yeah. And we’ve got a great founding team. They are some of the folks that did Nicira, which is one of the very, you know, basically, the first SDN kind of company, right? They [Cross talk]—

    Shimel: Yep, I remember that one as well.

    Sandall: Yeah. So, we’ve got a deep background within the security and policy space, and we’re kinda taking that and really bringing it into the cloud native ecosystem.

    Shimel: Very cool. You know, I don’t wanna make this about Styra because we really wanted to concentrate on OPA and CNCF, but maybe we’ll still, maybe we’ll schedule something, a second one, and we’ll talk—we’ll dive more into Styra.

    Sandall: Yeah, that would be great.

    Shimel: You guys are gonna be at KubeCon in Madrid—or I mean, in Barcelona?

    Sandall: We are gonna be in KubeCon, yes, in Barcelona in May. There are going to be a bunch of talks about Open Policy Agent. There’s gonna be, I think there’s at least three or four sessions that are happening. There’s also a little thing called Cloud Native Rejects the weekend before. [Laughter] These are the talks—like, the BSides Talks, basically for—

    Shimel: Yes. Well, that’s how Security BSides started.

    Sandall: Yeah, exactly. And so, there’s gonna be a session there with OPA content in it. So, yeah, it’s gonna be a great event.

    Shimel: Excellent.

    Sandall: And, of course, we’re gonna have a Styra booth at the event, so.

    Shimel: So, we will have a, you know, Digital Anarchist is our video platform, and we’ll have a Digital Anarchist set there where we’ll be doing videos. So, be sure—we’ll talk offline, but we’ll get you guys in for a video. We’ll follow up more on that.

    Sandall: Perfect! Yeah, looking forward to it.

    Shimel: So, is there a timeline for graduation from incubation at CNCF, or that’s kinda open?

    Sandall: It’s open. So, you know, they do a yearly review of the project, and it’s kind of up to, you know, the community and CNCF and everybody to kind of decide when that’s right. And so—yeah, so right now, one of the main criteria for graduation is around external contribution. And so, you know, over the next year, we’ll see how external contribution around OPA evolves and if it’s in the right place, then we’ll go ahead with that.

    But we’re really happy right now just with the move to incubation because it brings more visibility to the project, it lends more credibility to the project—you know, in addition to all the people that are using it in production, having it more prominently represented within the CNCF is great. So, we’re really happy with where we are today.

    Shimel: Fantastic, man. Hey, Torin, I had promised you we’ll do this in 15 minutes, and that was 25 minutes ago.

    Sandall: [Laughter]

    Shimel: So, I apologize for running over, but I thought we had a good conversation here.

    Sandall: Yeah, yeah. Thanks a lot, Alan. Yeah, I appreciate the time to talk about OPA and Styra and I look forward to—

    Shimel: Oh, it was really my pleasure. I’d like to—we’ll continue this at maybe KubeCon in May. But before we sign off—so, Styra is Styra.com, S-T-Y-R-A.com. The OPA project, right, is—

    Sandall: Yep.

    Shimel: —OpenPolicyAgent.org?

    Sandall: That’s correct, yep.

    Shimel: And, of course, you can find more information on it at the CNCF.io site, right?—

    Sandall: Absolutely, yeah, and it’s on GitHub and we also have a blog if you go to blog.OpenPolicyAgent.org, you can find out more there. So, yeah, check it out, and—yeah.

    Shimel: [Cross talk] It’s all good. Hey, Torin Sandall, co-founder of the OPA, Open Policy Agent project, which is now being incubated by Cloud Native Computing Foundation, as well as an employee at Styra—for my friend Bill Mann.

    Sandall: [Laughter]

    Shimel: So, good to have you on there. Say hello to Bill for me. Best of luck with OPA.

    Sandall: Will do.

    Shimel: And look forward to seeing you in May at KubeCon.

    Sandall: Looking forward to it. Talk to you later. Bye.

    Shimel: Alright Torin, thanks. Hey, this is Alan Shimel for devopsy.kinsta.cloud, Container Journal and Security Boulevard. You’ve just listened to another DevOps Chat.

    — Alan Shimel

  • DevOps Chat: ChefConf Update with Chef’s Nell Shamrell-Harrington

    DevOps Chat: ChefConf Update with Chef’s Nell Shamrell-Harrington

    2019 is shaping up as a “coming home” year for Chef. After recently reaffirming its commitment to an open source strategy, the company is gearing up for the best ChefConf yet. ChefConf, scheduled for May 20-23, is coming home to Seattle and many of the Chef favorites including Adam Jacobs, John Willis and more will be speaking.

    I had a chance to catch up with Nell Shamrell-Harrington, principal software development engineer and community engineering lead at Chef, who gave us a great preview of the whole event as well as her own presentation, and shared what her most anticipated sessions and activities are.

    You can still register for ChefConf, as well as get more information at: chefconf.chef.io/

    As usual, the streaming audio is immediately below, followed by the transcript of our conversation. Enjoy!

    Transcript

    Alan Shimel: Hello, everyone, this Alan Shimel, devopsy.kinsta.cloud, and you’re listening to another DevOps Chat.

    Today’s DevOps Chat is all about the upcoming Chef Conference, and I’m happy to be joined by Nell Shamrell-Harrington, Principal Engineer at Chef. Nell, welcome to DevOps Chat.

    Nell Shamrell-Harrington: Hello, Alan! Greetings from Seattle. It’s fantastic to be here.

    Shimel: Yes, it is. How’s the weather in Seattle?

    Shamrell-Harrington: Surprisingly sunny today, and it wasn’t raining when I came in, so pretty darn good for Seattle in April.

    Shimel: Absolutely. Well, look—in April, April showers. But, you know, the whole weather in Seattle thing is a bit of a fallacy. You know, they get—

    Shamrell-Harrington: What I tell people, when they ask me does it rain a lot, I said, “Yes, but it’s not, like, soaking rain. There’s a constant mist in the air that gets in to your bones and makes you cold.” So, you learn to deal with that, but yep, greetings from beautiful for today, at least, Seattle.

    Shimel: Good for—[Laughter] good for you. Alright, so now, the big news is, we are, what, about a month, maybe a month and a week, a month and 10 days out of ChefConf, right?

    Shamrell-Harrington: We are indeed. I need to write my keynote. [Laughter]

    Shimel: I would say, let’s get started, yeah—might be a good idea. And this year, after ChefConf having kinda wandered around for a few years to Chicago and Austin and I think Santa Clara I was at one and a bunch of other places, you guys are coming home to Seattle, right?

    Shamrell-Harrington: We are indeed, and we are very excited about this. We look forward to welcoming the entire Chef community to our home of Seattle.

    Shimel: Absolutely. And when we say coming home now, you know, I think it’s figuratively and literally and kinda philosophically.

    Shamrell-Harrington: Absolutely.

    Shimel: As ChefConf really represents a sort of coming home for Chef in a lot of ways, do you agree?

    Shamrell-Harrington: I agree. We made the recent announcement—which I know you covered on a previous episode—about 100 percent of our product code now being open source. And one of the reasons we did that was, Chef was created through the open source community. Chef—I mean, the open source community built every piece of the foundation that Chef stands on, so we are returning to those roots with open sourcing 100 percent of our product code and a lot of the discussion about that will be at ChefConf in our geographical home as well.

    Shimel: Yep. And, you know, I mean, the open source, reaffirmation of the open source commitment, I think, is one part of it. I think another part of it, though, Nell is—you know, look, I’ve run devopsy.kinsta.cloud now for five, six years, right? And when I first got into DevOps, you know, Chef was one of the blocks of granite, if you will, upon which the DevOps foundation or the DevOps world was kinda built.

    And over the years, you know, there’s been a lot of shiny toys that have come, as such happens in the tech space, right?

    Shamrell-Harrington: Of course.

    Shimel: And you sort of say, “Yeah, you know, that was—you know, Chef almost was old and what is it doing to stay current? Is it still relevant? And there’s Kubernetes” and all of these things. But to me, this ChefConf represents a bold, provocative, confident Chef coming, in their home court, kinda like the Hawks, right, coming out of the—

    Shamrell-Harrington: Very much so, or their home stadium, but yes.

    Shimel: – with the 12th man, and saying, “Hey, man, we’re still here, we’re still kicking, but we’re still innovating, we’re still true to our roots, and we’re still helping people with DevOps.” Fair?

    Shamrell-Harrington: Absolutely. I believe that is completely fair. We are walking this DevOps journey together, both the Chef community and Chef the company as well. And this is bringing us back into sync.

    Shimel: Cool. So, let’s dive in a little bit. You mentioned the open source commitment, and we have covered that before. Give us some—you know, and you’re gonna keynote, right?

    Shamrell-Harrington: I am, indeed. I’ll be keynoting, I’ll be first up on day two. So, make sure to be there on time.

    Shimel: Can we get a little preview without getting in trouble?

    Shamrell-Harrington: Absolutely, we can. So, I will be discussing developing software through a community. When I was starting to brainstorm this talk, I was worried that—you know, I’m a Principal Engineer. I’m very used to giving technical talks. I was worried people would respond with, “Why are you giving a cultural talk?” And I realized, open source community, it’s not cultural or technical, it’s both. And that’s really where the magic of working in open source Chef has come.

    We work on fantastic technologies, we work with fantastic technologies including Kubernetes, Terraform, and so many more, but we do it with amazing humans.

    Shimel: Yeah, absolutely. Now, Nell, you’re not allowed to mentioned your keynote, but give me what you’re looking forward to, the top three things at ChefConf this year that you might be looking forward to. And if you wanna do five, feel free.

    Shamrell-Harrington: Absolutely! Well, for ChefConf itself, I’m really looking forward to the Community Summit on Monday, May 20th. That’s when we get together, we hold a bunch of open spaces, we talk about what Chef is doing and where we as both a company and a community wanna go.

    So, there’ll be a lot of talking at the summit on Monday, and then on Thursday, we have our hack day. It’s not a competitive hackathon, it’s more people getting together in groups and building something together. So, after we talk on Monday, we’ll start building what we’ve discussed on Thursday, and I hope to see everyone there.

    Shimel: Great. So, that’s one.

    Shamrell-Harrington: Right.

    Shimel: What are some of the others?

    Shamrell-Harrington: As far as the sessions go, we have sessions from people from retail, government, banks, major cloud providers, and so much more. A few that I am particularly looking forward to are “A Habitat for Democracy.” That’s going to be by Chris Alfano of Code of America. They use Habitat to help them—they use Habitat for civic hacking, essentially. So, looking forward to hearing more from him.

    Another one is, “FIPS Doesn’t Have to Be a Four Letter Word” from Keith Walters of TapHere! FIPS is Federal Information Processing Standards. It is as boring as it sounds, but it is extraordinarily important for our government customers, especially those who work in particularly sensitive areas of the government.

    And then the third one, I mentioned how Chef, it doesn’t compete with things like Hashicorp, Terraform, or Kubernetes, it works with them. And one talk I’m particularly looking forward to is, “Terraform and Chef.” That’ll be by Seth Lippman and Andy Herm of Oracle.

    Shimel: Very cool! You know, I will say, FIPS may not be boring, but it is expensive. [Laughter]

    Shamrell-Harrington: Very.

    Shimel: In my previous life, we had to have our information assurance, as the U.S. Army calls cyber security, our information assurance solutions FIPS certified for the encryptions and stuff. And that was an ordeal, to say the least, so, I’m interested to—I’d love to listen in on that one.

    You know, you mentioned Terraform. There’s a lot of stuff coming out of the Linux Foundation recently now—

    Shamrell-Harrington: Absolutely.

    Shimel: – between Cloud Native and now this new CD Foundation that’s spun up out of Linux Foundation. It really is, you know, this whole move to Cloud Native is, in many ways, in my mind, anyway, Chef and some of the foundational work you guys did kinda laid the groundwork for the move to a Cloud Native world.

    Shamrell-Harrington: Very much. You know, the groundwork, the reason Chef was founded, the reason Cloud Native was founded is, we had this still radical idea that working with technology did not have to be as painful as it normally is.

    I remember I reached out to Gene Kim on Twitter after I read The Phoenix Project and I told him, “You know, it actually made me physically cry,” the first half at least, because it was so familiar. All that pain of dealing with both technical debt and cultural debt.

    And what we’ve said at Chef, what Linux Foundation is saying, what other Cloud Native foundations are saying is—there is a better way. It does not have to be this painful. And we’re working to make a world where it’s not as painful as it has been to run technology.

    Shimel: Amen. You know, I remember sitting with Gene Kim reading a manuscript of Phoenix Project, and you know, those characters in there are composites of real people.

    Shamrell-Harrington: Oh, yes.

    Shimel: And when you—you know, when you think back to who the real people are, I mean, it is dead on. I mean, truth is truth is truth.

    So, I’m assuming there are gonna be people in our audience who are absolutely attending ChefConf, but there are also people who have attended them in the past, but then there’s also gonna be a lot of people who have never attended a ChefConf listening in. And, you know, for those who haven’t—shame on you.

    Shamrell-Harrington: [Laughter]

    Shimel: [Laughter] But beyond that, you know, you’re missing a great time, because it’s not all sessions, ChefConf.

    Shamrell-Harrington: Very much.

    Shimel: ChefConf is very much a community, a bit of a love fest, if you will, around Chef, right? And there’s always some great social activities. Can you give us a preview, maybe?

    Shamrell-Harrington: Sure. Two of the ones I’m looking forward to, I believe it’s on Tuesday, we’ll be holding game night. We started doing those at ChefConf a few years ago, and I’ve always appreciated it. I have hearing loss, so, when I’m in a big, crowded, very loud party, I can’t have conversations with people, because I’m only getting every third or fourth word, depending on what frequency their voice is.

    But with game night, it’s quieter. People are more focused, there’s something to do. I’ve met coworkers—or people who became my coworkers a year later through game night. It’s a wonderful way to connect on a deeply personal level with other attendees and other employees of Chef.

    Shimel: And it’s fun.

    Shamrell-Harrington: It’s absolutely fun. I think we’re gonna have, something we’ve traditionally had a Chef game night has been a gamed called Artemis, which is—I’m gonna get in trouble for saying this, but it’s kind of like a Star Trek LARP without actually being Star Trek. [Laughter] But there’ll be board games as well, card games, Adam Jacob always runs a Dungeons & Dragons campaign. It’s gonna be a wonderful world of geeky fun.

    And then, on Wednesday, if kinda the traditional party is more what you enjoy, we’ll be holding the community celebration. And because we want to highlight the wonderful things Seattle has to offer, it will be catered by Tom Douglas. For all you foodies out there, you know that’s a very, very big name, both in Seattle cuisine and nationally and internationally.

    And we have two classic Seattle bands playing. The first is Mudhoney, and the second is Deep Sea Diver. They will be playing the celebration, and we are very much looking forward to hearing them and sharing that with our community.

    Shimel: So, providing a little translation in the background, right? If Tom Douglas is there, there’s a good chance there might be some killer salmon.

    Shamrell-Harrington: Absolutely.

    Shimel: He makes—I was actually privileged, he did—I forgot what event or gathering I was at. But they brought Tom in, and he showed us how to fillet a salmon.

    Shamrell-Harrington: Oh! What a wonderful experience!

    Shimel: Yeah, that was pretty cool. And then, of course, we went to one of his restaurants for dinner, and it wasn’t terrible. But beyond that, the Chef party—and that’s usually like the last night or the night before the last day kind of thing.

    Shamrell-Harrington: Yeah, it’s the night before the hack day.

    Shimel: Yep, and that’s always a great party, because by then, you know, the sessions are in, people have networked around a bit, have talked about a lot of the technology, and it’s a good time to have a good time, right?

    Shamrell-Harrington: It is, absolutely. Whenever I’m speaking at a conference, I always enjoy the conference after my talk much more than the conference before my talk.

    Shimel: Right. Well, because before, you’re all tensed, keyed up on doing that. You know, Nell, you mentioned Adam Jacob, and I’m sure some of the folks sitting out there are saying, “Well, I heard Adam’s not the CTO any more. What’s he doing there?”

    Again, I think it talks to the power of Chef. I think it talks about Chef reaffirming its roots and all of that. It’s that—yes, Adam is not the CTO any more. He’s out doing his Foundation thing. But he is going to be there, he is presenting, if I’m—

    Shamrell-Harrington: He is. He’s presenting on day two as well.

    Shimel: What other kinda—John Willis is speaking as well. John, I think, was, I wanna say, employee eight or nine at Chef back in the day.

    Shamrell-Harrington: Mm-hmm.

    Shimel: And he’s also speaking, as well as he will be there on behalf of Digital Anarchist, which is a video platform John and I partner on—

    Shamrell-Harrington: Oh, great!

    Shimel: – and we’ll be doing interviews. Yes, we’ll be doing interviews all through ChefConf, so look for the little video set, if you wanna say hello to John or check out some of the videos we’re shooting.

    What about training, though? Isn’t there training or something going on earlier?

    Shamrell-Harrington: It is, indeed. Monday, which is the day of the Community Summit, along with the Community Summit, we’re running several training sessions. So, if you wanna learn more about Chef, you wanna learn more about Chef and Kubernetes—all sorts of topics. If you wanna get hands on before the sessions begin so you get familiar with the technologies that people are going to be presenting, that’s a great way to do it.

    Shimel: Absolutely, absolutely. So, you know, Nell, interesting—look, you’re a perfect person to speak to the ChefConf crowd, right? Because it is a fairly engineering focused crowd, right?

    Shamrell-Harrington: It is. It’s historically been primarily practitioners, though that is starting to change. We’re getting what we call decision makers as well, but it is primarily an engineering crowd.

    Shimel: You know, someone could be a practitioner and a decision maker.

    Shamrell-Harrington: Absolutely! [Laughter] Absolutely. And they make the best decision makers.

    Shimel: I guess they call that diversity, but anyway [Laughter]—in a funny kind of way. Anyway, but there’s really something for everything at Chef there. What I’m trying to get at is, I don’t want people listening to this who are saying, “Well, I’m not geeky enough for that” or, “I’m not an engineer” or, “I’m not a developer,” right? If you’re at all interested in how software is getting done, how today’s winning teams are doing it—I mean, there’s something there for you at Chef.

    If I can ask you—and we didn’t talk about this beforehand, so I don’t mean to put you on the spot—give me what you think is one session that, frankly, you don’t have to be an engineer for, and you’ll still get a lot out of it.

    Shamrell-Harrington: The one I would recommend is, “Bridging the Great Divide: Using Chef as a Spark for DevOps.” That is going to be given by Brittany Woods of CARFAX, and I believe will illustrate not just their technical transformation but their cultural transformation, because the two of them go hand in hand.

    Shimel: Absolutely. I gotta tell you, to this day still, one of my favorite ChefConf presentations was the guy from, was it Alaska Air, or Air Alaska? I always mix those—

    Shamrell-Harrington: It’s Alaska Airlines, yeah. The keynote a few years ago?

    Shimel: Yes.

    Shamrell-Harrington: I remember that, the CTO of Alaska Airlines. That was one of the best ones I’ve ever seen.

    Shimel: It was. That was a really good one. Anything else we wanna highlight?

    Shamrell-Harrington: I would say, if you deal with technology at all, whether that’s as a developer or as an engineer or something else entirely, ChefConf is the place for you. We are obviously going to be highlighting Chef solutions for how to do technology better, but that’s not the only thing we’ll be doing. If you wanna meet a lot of other people who are having the same struggles as you, solving those struggles in new and different ways, please come to ChefConf.

    Shimel: Excellent, excellent. You know what we haven’t done, though, Nell? We never told anyone where to go to get the information.

    Shamrell-Harrington: Ah! Head on over to—let me check it real quick—ChefConf.chef.io. Or, if you Google ChefConf, you should get the correct ChefConf. If you see that it’s a conference for food chefs, that’s probably not the right one, [Laughter] but check out ChefConf. It’s in Seattle at the end of May, and we would love to see you there.

    Shimel: Absolutely. And there’s still—there’s still tickets, I mean, you—

    Shamrell-Harrington: There are absolutely still tickets.

    Shimel: Cool. Hey, Nell Shamrell-Harrington, thanks for being our guest on this episode of DevOps Chat. Continued success with Chef, and looking forward to a rock and rolling ChefConf.

    Shamrell-Harrington: Thank you so much, Alan. Great to be here, and looking forward to seeing everyone at ChefConf.

    Shimel: Fantastic. We’ll talk to you soon. This is Alan Shimel for devopsy.kinsta.cloud with this update on the upcoming ChefConf conference. You can get more information at, I guess it’s ChefConf.chef.io, or just Google ChefConf.

    Until then, or until next time, you’ve just listened to another DevOps Chat.

    — Alan Shimel

  • DevOps Chat: Digital Transformation with Exadel’s Jonathan Fries

    DevOps Chat: Digital Transformation with Exadel’s Jonathan Fries

    In this DevOps Chat, Jonathan Fries, VP of Engineering and Digital Transformation at Exadel, tells us about the new Innovation Lab by Exadel—a place for organizations to accelerate their transformation. We also talk about the state of IT in general from his perch at Exadel, a company with 20 years of empowering IT.

    You can find out more about the Innovation Lab at exadel.com/innovation-lab/.

    As usual, the streaming audio is immediately below, followed by the transcript of our conversation.

    Transcript

    Alan Shimel: Hello, everyone, it’s Alan Shimel, devopsy.kinsta.cloud, and you’re listening to another DevOps Chat. This episode of DevOps Chat features Jonathan Fries of Exadel. Jonathan, welcome!

    Jonathan Fries: Hi, Alan. It’s great to be here.

    Shimel: Hey, it’s great to have you here, Jonathan, and I wanna thank you. It’s always nice to have a new company coming up on our chats here, so it’s—you know, some fresh blood for the audience. I assume most of our audience is not familiar with Exadel, so why don’t we start with that, Jonathan? Tell us a little bit about Exadel.

    Fries: Sure. So, Exadel is a global software engineering services firm. So, we help our clients write software. We have—we’re a global company, so we have offices in Eastern Europe, Belarus, Lithuania, Poland being kinda the big ones where we have our offices in Europe. And, you know, we help clients in a variety of areas. Probably our big verticals are health care, finance, transportation, media and entertainment, and high tech. And, you know, we have some really good clients in those areas. Health care, McKesson is one that people have heard of. Finance, we work with Deloitte. In the high tech world, we have HP and Google as our clients.

    So, we’re doing offshore development for a lot of it. We have teams that are either all in Europe or usually a hybrid of some people here in the U.S. and some people in Europe. We’ve got about a thousand developers in Europe, so that’s where a lot of our work gets done. We’ve been around for 20 years, and so yeah, that’s a bit about Exadel.

    Shimel: Another overnight sensation, huh?

    Fries: Pardon?

    Shimel: I said another overnight sensation.

    Fries: [Laughter] Yeah, it’s been a gradual sort of buildup of working with clients and, you know, getting to work with a lot of interesting companies and them recommending us to others.

    The name of the company actually comes from a combination of excellent and delivery. I always think that that’s an interesting fact to bring up, and I think it’s an important part about kind of who we are and where we come from and how we got that list of clients. You know, we’re all about building really great products, software products for our customers, and that’s how we’ve grown the business.

    Shimel: Sure. So, and Jonathan, you know, kidding aside about overnight sensation, that’s the right way to build the business, right? You don’t just—I mean, yeah, everybody wants to be a unicorn, but unicorns are mythical, right? [Laughter]

    Fries: [Laughter]

    Shimel: [Cross talk] the world and all of that, so good for you guys. But you know what I didn’t mention is, what exactly—and just sharing with the audience, what’s your position with Exadel?

    Fries: My title is Vice President of Engineering and Digital Transformation. So, my background is in the software development world doing software development, leading teams, eventually sort of managing engagements and things like that, and also today heading up the digital transformation practice inside of Exadel.

    So, my background comes from the technology world and software development, and that’s why I’m proud of—I’m proud of our engineering capabilities and what we’re able to do for customers.

    Shimel: Good for you, good for you. So, Jonathan, you know, digital transformation is such a buzzword today, right?

    Fries: Yep.

    Shimel: We’ve all heard it, you know, and the one thing I’ve learned is that, for many organizations, you know, digital transformation is hard, right? I’ve heard so many people say, “Well, this wasn’t as easy as it was made out to be.” And I think one of the issues is, is that, if you can’t define something, how can you achieve something? Right?

    Fries: Yeah.

    Shimel: And so, it starts with, “Well, what exactly does digital transformation mean?” And so, I’ll throw it back at you—what does digital transformation mean to you?

    Fries: So, digital transformation for us is about helping our clients with the—you know, the doing and the engineering work of doing digital transformation. So, it’s about software development—you know, in particular it’s cloud development today—QA automation, and DevOps. I mean, those are really the big three areas of expertise within the company that we’ve really brought together under the digital transformation sort of heading as well as our agile methodology expertise, and so, bringing kind of those four things together. And they completely make sense together, because, you know, DevOps is really kind of the technology reflection of agile methodology and agile methodology is kind of the methodology reflection of the DevOps technology mindset. And QA automation is so tightly wound into DevOps and really the way that we’re delivering software and the way that our DevOps solutions work are very much married a lot today to cloud development.

    And so, we’re bringing all of those things together, which are all things that Exadel had lots of expertise in, but figuring out how to make sure that we were weaving those strands together, if you will, in a really sort of explicit way and building up some solutions for clients. Not just, “Hey, we’re really good at those things, and we have people who can be really good at those things for you,” but we can bring all of our best practices together and some technology solutions together.

    So, that’s what it is for us. It’s very much, you know, we’re a software development, software engineering firm, so we really—you know, we’re not sort of going after the cultural transformation part of that, or the, you know, the change management. I mean, we certainly have experience with those things, but for us, it’s really about the development side of it and our expertise in helping clients take on hard projects and succeed.

    Shimel: Absolutely, absolutely. Let’s talk a little bit about something new that Exadel recently delivered, and that’s the Innovation Lab. Talk to us—what exactly is the Innovation Lab?

    Fries: Yeah, the Innovation Lab is, it’s a new offering that we’re bringing to the market that combines some things that we already have into one thing. So, you know, we’ve all heard about the importance of innovation and even innovation labs. You know, some companies have them or are creating them. Exadel’s Innovation Lab is sort of more of a virtual innovation lab as opposed to, say, a physical place that we help someone create.

    So, we already have something called Appery, which is a cross-platform, low code development environment for creating cross-platform mobile apps as well as, like, a low code backend that runs behind that. So, that’s a way to build software very quickly to create real, working software.

    We already have a lot of expertise in agile development, as I mentioned before. And so, that’s also part of what we do. We have really great resources, all of those developers that we have, you know, in Europe and some here. And we have some packaged solutions that are a part of those practices.

    So, we’re bringing those all together to help our clients innovate. So, you know, what we wanna do is help our clients who are looking for a way to move faster, experiment, try something, get some features in front of customers or business stakeholders more quickly, and the Innovation Lab is our sort of packaged solution for doing that.

    So we can, we bring all of those things together—low code development, agile, on-demand resources when there might be something. Since a lot of what people what to experiment today are things like artificial intelligence and blockchain and how can we make those things work for us, so that’s—you know, often, we might have to bring in, you know, we might have to bring in an expert to help out with that as well.

    So, it’s really, it’s all of those things to help our customers and new customers innovate more quickly.

    Shimel: Got it. So, you know, and to me, when I look at it, Jonathan, you know, we talk about digital transformation, and what I said before about how, if you can’t define it, how can you be successful, and even once you define it, it’s an experiment in a lot of ways, right? It’s kinda that classic DevOps where you deliver, you learn, you get feedback loops, you iterate, you reiterate, and you keep reiterating.

    And an innovation lab is kinda the perfect place to kinda have that sort of learning that propels, that helps you define and then succeed in your digital transformation, right?

    Fries: Yep.

    Shimel: You know, you don’t wanna practice, I guess, on live TV or stuff like that. But you need—you need these labs to push the envelope and find out what works for you and what doesn’t work for you.

    Fries: Yeah. I very much view it, you know, as an extension of the product owner, you know, life cycle from scrum. You know, there’s the regular sort of software development life cycle within scrum where you’re doing your sprints and you’re delivering software.

    Shimel: Mm-hmm.

    Fries: But a big part of what the product owner should be doing is developing the product backlog which includes, you know, testable hypotheses. That’s kinda the way that the scrum community talks about it.

    And so, the Innovation Lab is a way for product owners to test some hypotheses that they might not be able to test, you know, if they already have a product. Like, you may not wanna do all the work to develop it and test the hypotheses over here, or that hypothesis over here. You may wanna use something like the Innovation Lab where we can use some of the tools at our disposal to create something that you can deliver and test out one of those—you know, test a hypothesis kind of on its own, if you will—but with working software. Which, you know, as we know is also a big part of agile and DevOps. You know, wireframes and requirements are great and they have a place, but they’re not the best way to show people what you’re doing or get feedback, and this really allows us to help clients do that and do it more quickly.

    Shimel: Got it. I agree 100 percent. Interesting—great idea. Moving off Innovation Lab, there’s other stuff going on at Exadel. You wanna share with our audience a little bit?

    Fries: Sure, yeah. We just launched the practice areas. As I mentioned, I’m the head of the Digital Transformation practice, and we also have a Digital Marketing Technology practice and a Products and Platforms practice that, much like digital transformation, the other two are also things that, you know, in places where we already have a fair amount of expertise and were kind of collecting all of that together in one place.

    So, for Digital Marketing Technology, we have some pretty significant clients for whom we’ve done work with Adobe Experience Manager to build global, localized, large scale websites. And since we had really done that several times, the Digital Marketing Technology practice is all about packaging that solution and delivering that to other clients for kind of building those large scale worldwide type of websites with Adobe.

    Products and Platforms is—you know, given that we’ve developed Appery, which really is, you know, it’s not just an application, it’s a whole platform for building other applications, and we’ve done that both for ourselves with Appery as well with several of our other clients like GHX where we’re creating a lot more than just an application, it’s this whole ecosystem. And so, that Products and Platforms practice sort of brings together the best of our knowledge base about developing those really sophisticated, large scale platforms.

    And Digital Transformation, of course, which is mine, is all about DevOps, cloud tech, QA automation, and agile. We have a solution that we’re putting together within the Digital Transformation practice that is a cross-cloud Kubernetes implementation that’s all done with Terraform and we’re actually getting ready to use that with the first customer now. We’ve kinda been just doing our internal dev on it, but we’ve shown it to some people and they’re pretty interested in that. The first customer will probably just use it on Azure, but it’s got some really sophisticated—you know, deploying Kubernetes with Terraform, autoscaling, a lot of really cool tech for containerized application development. So, I’m pretty excited about that.

    Shimel: So am I. I mean, it’s an exciting time to be alive in IT. I mean, from a developer point of view, from an ops point of view, there are so many options and so—you know, such power at your fingertips.

    Fries: Yeah.

    Shimel: It really is, you know, it’s a golden age to be into this kinda stuff.

    Fries: Yeah, I agree. I mean, I just—I think it’s an amazing time and, you know, I think there’s so much opportunity. There’s so much opportunity out there in what you can do and so forth and then how easy it is now to, you know, to bring computing solutions online for stuff, you know, and it’s what can be done.

    It’s awesome, and I know that, you know, it’s a lot of change and it can be hard on people sometimes, but I’m definitely an optimist and an “all ships will rise” type of guy, so, you know, I see all those opportunities out there and it’s like—you know, yeah, there’s an awful lot exciting going on.

    Shimel: Well, you know, Jonathan, I think in our business, either we can be optimists, or we can be cynics.

    Fries: Yeah.

    Shimel: I got into it yesterday, some guy, I don’t even remember his name, but he tweeted, “Oh, those DevOps people selling snake oil! There’s no such thing!” I think they reach a certain age where they just feel like there’s nothing new under the sun, and therefore, they’re just gonna bad mouth, right, whatever new comes along, and—hey man, you know, there’s a place for them on Earth, too, I guess.

    Fries: Yeah, and I mean, I think there’s always, I think, a real reason to be concerned about automation and the changes that that brings to not just our industry, but all of society. I mean, you can look around and see how much automation is impacting everything and, you know, as somebody with—you know, I have kids who are grade school aged kids, and it’s like, the world’s gonna look a lot different 20 years from now, so here’s what you need to spend your time thinking about and learning. Because, you know, if you really wanna do this kinda job, it’s not gonna be there 20 years from now.

    Shimel: And I have kids in high school and college and I’m telling them the same thing, man. It’s a crazy world. But you know something? To me, you know, we talk about being optimist, pessimist—Jonathan, the flip side of digital transformation is disruption.

    Fries: Yeah.

    Shimel: Right? And so, you get to the haves and the have nots. You have the empowered people who embrace transformation and are accelerating their business, and you have the laggards who don’t, and they may very well have to die off, right?

    Fries: Yeah.

    Shimel: I think that’s the choice that we—you know, that it’s nice to talk about this golden age, but that’s also the choice out there is, you can get with it or fall by the wayside. It’s compete or die. And, you know, that may be harsh to some, but that, I think, is the way it is.

    Fries: Yeah. It’s kind of been true for, you know, for a while, honestly. Industrialization automated some things, and like I said, I think, at the end of the day, the new businesses that will be created by digital transformation, the businesses that will be completely transformed by digital transformation will create, you know, even more opportunity, and as long as you are looking at it through the lens of those things, even though automation can be—you know, it can be scary.

    I mean, like I said, I came from—I was a developer and worked in IT and things like that, and you know, there was lots of things even 20 years ago, where it’s like, “Oh, these things are gonna change everything and jobs will go away” and it’s like—you know, that’s—

    Shimel: [Cross talk] Doesn’t happen, doesn’t happen. Anyway, Jonathan—

    Fries: No, it happens.

    Shimel: – when we started, I told you, the 15 minutes goes really quick, man. [Laughter]

    Fries: Yeah.

    Shimel: And we’re way over already. I apologize, but I didn’t wanna stop you, you were on a roll, and I thought it was a good conversation. So, but we’re gonna need to pull the plug on this episode of DevOps Chat. Jonathan Fries from Exadel, thanks for being our guest today.

    Fries: Absolutely, Alan. It was great. Thanks for having me.

    Shimel: Alright! This is Alan Shimel, devopsy.kinsta.cloud, and you just listened to another DevOps Chat.

    — Alan Shimel

  • DevOps Institute Brandjacking: When Imitation is Not the Sincerest Form of Flattery

    DevOps Institute Brandjacking: When Imitation is Not the Sincerest Form of Flattery

    “There can be only one”    ~ Duncan McCloud, Highlander

    They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Often it is absolutely true. But stealing, ripping off and/or trying to trade on the name of others crosses the line between right and wrong, legal and illegal. As a co-founder of the true, one and only DevOps Institute, I was appalled to see the efforts of another company, whose name I won’t even dignify in this article, trying to launch “the DevOps Institute.”

    If you told me that this company perhaps did not know that there was already a DevOps Institute (it’s not like we hide it), I would say OK, maybe it was an honest mistake. But no. In this case, the company in question actually reached out to DevOps Institute—us—and had several conversations/interactions regarding becoming a registered education partner of the DOI. What the company reps were actually doing was fishing for information as they sought to launch their own version of DevOps Institute. So this is certainly not a case of an innocent mistake; rather, it’s a deliberate attempt to misappropriate the name, assets and hard work of another. Where I come from, the streets of NYC, we call it stealing.

    You have to ask yourself: Knowing what we know of the situation, why would these people commit such an unethical, illegal act? I can only come up with a few reasons:

    1. They are seeking to deceive and confuse the public by literally trading on DevOps Institute’s—our—good name to make a quick buck.
    2. They are part of those in the world who do not respect intellectual property, seeking to sell out the back door anything they get their hands on from the front door.
    3. They are unscrupulous thieves who are incapable of building a business by themselves.

    No matter whether one or all of the above, none of the reasons are very good.

    In generally acceptable business practices worldwide, there are more than several acceptable ways for companies to imitate the business strategy and models of others. More power to them—after all, competition makes us all up our game.

    In the DevOps education training and education space, there is certainly no shortage of competitors. Just do a Google search of DevOps Institute and look at the companies buying that ad word or otherwise using SEO to get listed. Lots of competitors, for sure. Remember, this isn’t even a generic “DevOps training” search, but actually searching for DevOps Institute.

    Taking another’s name crosses the acceptable boundary. So now we have to lawyer up to protect our rights and property. No one likes to throw good money at lawyers to go after bad actors. But protecting one’s brand, reputation and IP is that important.

    For those of you familiar with the DevOps Institute, you know that the team has worked hard for more than four years now to lead the way in curating content for bringing DevOps training, education and certification to the market. It hasn’t always been smooth sailing. When DevOps Institute launched, we faced strong headwinds from those who thought a training/certification program around DevOps was wrong. We listened, we learned, we set up the feedback loops and we iterated (like good DevOps should). We have won over many of our critics; they saw the good work we were doing.

    More than that, they saw DevOps Institute try to be stewards of and active participants in the DevOps community. We are not in this for the fast buck or the quick hustle. The executive team has plowed our revenue back into the company and community, expanding the association’s offerings and reaching out to DevOps communities throughout the world. Today, DevOps Institute has ambassadors in Europe, South America, AsiaPac and of course here in North America. We go wherever DevOps goes.

    Recently DevOps Institute has tried to build a greater DevOps community based on the Humans of DevOps and our SKILS framework (Skills, Knowledge Ideas and Learning). We have worked with the leading names in the DevOps industry to do research and help bring greater understanding of DevOps. We have sponsored and spoken at many of the DevOps events you have attended. In fact, I am satisfied to rest on our laurels.

    If you are not familiar with the real DevOps Institute (and that is at https://devopsinstitute.com, btw) check it out for yourself. We have nearly 200 partners around the world who deliver training for our certifications. We have a healthy global community and active engagement with industry thought leaders. We obviously are doing something right.

    Finally, I wanted to speak to my entrepreneur friends in the audience: Those of you know who know me, know that this isn’t my first rodeo. I have founded and helped several venture-backed startups through IPO and exit. I have had my share of wins and my share of losses. I am not one to whine or back down from some good competition, but this kind of shadiness has no place in the business world.

    We put a good chunk of our own blood, sweat and tears into our businesses, and for someone to swoop in and steal the fruits of our labor is just plain wrong. Brandjacking is stealing. I started this article off with the quote from “Highlander.” So if you see me walking around with a severed head or sword in my hand, remember: There can be only one.

    — Alan Shimel

  • Insight IGNITE: DevOps, Cloud and Cyber From Iceland With Love

    Insight IGNITE: DevOps, Cloud and Cyber From Iceland With Love

    I had the pleasure recently of attending my first Insight IGNITE event, which was held at the ION Adventure Hotel in enchanting Iceland. It was also my first trip to Iceland. These two new experiences combined to deliver an excellent learning and networking experience, resulting in me realizing more than several new insights (pun intended) around DevOps, cloud and cybersecurity, as well as mindfulness and contentment.

    The agenda for this particular IGNITE event featured some great examples and discussion around DevOps, cloud migration and infrastructure and cybersecurity, among several others. All three of these were right in my wheelhouse, so I really enjoyed the presentations and discussions. I couldn’t type fast enough to keep up with all of the insights I was soaking in. Of course, I was also trying to contribute to the conversations, which are held in a very open, communal manner under Chatham House Rules.

    You may not be familiar with the Insight IGNITE Innovation Roundtable Series. They are the brainchild of Insight Partners’ Emmet B. Keeffe III. Emmet is beyond passionate about digital transformation (among several other passions including Formula One racing, world peace and now mindfulness/contentment). Utilizing his vast network (and it is vast), Emmet founded Insight IGNITE, an innovation program that delivers Innovation Briefings, the Innovation Roundtable Series and Growth Advisory Board opportunities to global IT leaders. I know that sounds like marketing speak, but let me explain.

    Basically, Emmet holds about one of these events a month at some of the most fascinating venues on earth. Each one has ~50 people. There is a mix of C-level executives from some of the 200+ Insight Partners portfolio companies, along with executives past and present from large global enterprises, sprinkled in with a mixture of technology experts and subject matter experts (I guess that is what got my ticket punched). The agenda is an exhilarating mixture of roundtable discussions and presentations on subjects touching on Digital Transformation, along with exciting activities that allow attendees to experience the local venue.

    The events are open to Global 2000 executives and other business and technology experts who think they could both benefit from this type of experience as well as have something to offer.  You can reach out to Emmet’s team if you are interested in attending one of these events.  Most attendees have to cover their own airfare/hotel. While not cheap, it is well worth the money, and the IGNITE team, who are extraordinary, do an amazing job of keeping it fresh, fun and challenging.

    The real special sauce of the IGNITE Roundtable Series, though, is the passion, caring and love that they receive from Emmet’s team. It is infectious and spreads to the attendees as well. I have attended hundreds of conferences over the years and don’t remember one where I made as many connections, had as many great side conversations and really felt part of a group. I am sure many of the people I met at this event I will be in touch with and doing business with in the months and years ahead.

    I met Emmet about three or four years ago in London (where he lives with his family now) and was invited to a previous event or two but was unable to make it. Since then, it seems Insight Partners is investing in so many of the companies that we work with here at MediaOps in DevOps, containers and cybersecurity—including Tricentis, JFrog, Aqua Security, Firemon and others. If you can’t beat ’em join ’em, as they say, so I decided to take Emmet up on his kind invite and check it out.

    The IGNITE event in Iceland had several great presentations about disrupting your own company product by spinning up the disruptor internally. We heard from “a queen of transformation” who has led transformations at several large multinational and government agencies. Another presentation focused on how an energy company keeps transforming as it stays ahead in today’s ever-shifting market and sets the bar for what the energy company of tomorrow looks like. In addition, there were some great panel discussions on the current state of DevOps and Agile, another on the state of cloud migrations, hybrid cloud and next-generation infrastructure. Also on the agenda was a great discussion regarding what is happening in cybersecurity and how critical it has become as part of any transformation. All of these were great, but what made them better was the great discussions they sparked among the attendees.

    That was not the full roundtable agenda, though. We also had a private briefing with the first lady of Iceland, discussions on some new fintech companies and technologies, AI/ML and more.

    But perhaps some of my favorite presentation and discussions were on a new passion of Emmet’s called the Contentment Foundation. This is a breakthrough effort to bring a new take on making education better for the world of today and tomorrow. Led by Dr. Daniel Cordaro, it recognizes that children are truly our future. How can we make them more content and mindful, better equipped to handle the world of tomorrow and the challenges they will face? The Contentment Foundation has developed a curriculum that is available to just about any school in the world. If you know a school that you think could benefit from this, I encourage you to reach out to them.

    All work and no play would make for a boring event, though. My trip to Iceland at the Insight IGNITE Roundtable was far from boring. We visited the famous Perlan Planetarium (which, unfortunately, was as close as I got to seeing the Northern Lights on this trip); ate in a Viking-themed restaurant; and rode ATF vehicles through the rugged, lava rock-strewn, stream-filled Icelandic countryside. We explored a lava tube cave and more. Unfortunately, the weather didn’t cooperate, so we had to cancel snowmobiling, whale watching and dinner on an island off the Iceland coast. I stopped off before heading to the airport to explore a bit in the capital of Reykjavík, which is a great little city with great cafés, shopping and sights.

    Even the social activities provided some great bonding and networking opportunities. It is rare for me that I not only make business acquaintances, but also form friendships at events like this. To me, this was yet another unique feature of the IGNITE Roundtable: People were there genuinely to share their experiences and discuss the burning topics at hand.

    All in all, one of the best events I have attended in a long time. I highly recommend attending at least one of these IGNITE Roundtables, if this sounds like something you may be interested in. As for me, I am already looking at what is the next one I will be able to attend. Once I have had a chance to digest and percolate on some of the insights I experienced, I will share a follow-up article to share them with you.

    Thanks, Emmet and IGNITE team, for a great experience.

    — Alan Shimel

  • DevOps Chat: Future of the ‘Accelerate: State of DevOps’ Report with Nicole Forsgren

    DevOps Chat: Future of the ‘Accelerate: State of DevOps’ Report with Nicole Forsgren

    “Accelerate – The State of DevOps Report” by Dr. Nicole Forsgren and the folks at DORA (now part of Google) is far and away the most widely cited research in the DevOps field. Dr. Nicole and her team have brought scientific rigor to the survey over these past six years and the results show it.

    Here is your chance to shape the future of the DevOps market by taking 25 minutes of your time and take this year’s state of DevOps survey. These reports are only as good as the info they gather.

    So. have a listen to our conversation and then please go take the survey!

    As usual, the streaming audio is immediately below, followed by the transcript of our conversation.


    Transcript

    Alan Shimel: Hey, everyone. This is Alan Shimel, devopsy.kinsta.cloud, and you’re listening to another DevOps Chat. I’m really happy to be joined by one of my good friends in the DevOps industry today, Dr. Nicole Forsgren, founder of DORA, DevOps Research and Assessment and also now with Google, right, who acquired DORA. Dr. Nicole.

    Nicole Forsgren: Yes. Thank you so much. I’m so excited to be here.

    Shimel: I’m excited to have you here. So, you know, I know what – your title at DORA was very easy, CEO and cofounder, but share with us your title at Google now with the audience.

    Forsgren: Yes. So now – it’s actually pretty similar to what I was doing at DORA. So now I am doing research and strategy with Google Cloud and I’m still leading all of the dope, fun, amazing DORA work, so DORA is still continuing. We’re still doing all of this exciting external industry amazing work that’s DORA. And actually, that’s what we get to talk about today, right?

    Shimel: Absolutely. So, you know, March 14th was five years we’re publishing devopsy.kinsta.cloud, and over that time, you know, a lot of water under the bridge, but there are certain foundations that the DevOps community – and I don’t mean just practitioners, I mean the vendors, I mean the evangelists, the leaders, the followers, the laggards, the early adopters – there are just certain foundations that we’ve built this on and one of them is the State of DevOps Survey that you’ve been doing now I’m gonna guess it’s six or seven years, right?

    Forsgren: This is – yeah, this is year six.

    Shimel: Yes, six years, and –

    Forsgren: It’s a kid. [Laughs]

    Shimel: It still is, but you know what?

    Forsgren: It’s a small child now. [Laughs]

    Shimel: Let me see if I remember because I don’t have notes in front of me, Nicole, but over the six years you’ve collected was it 25,000 or 27,000 responses, something like that?

    Forsgren: Yeah, yeah, we’re right in there.

    Shimel: Yep. And what’s great is over these six years you’ve disseminated so much of the information, and that information and those results of the survey really form the basis for so much of the Dev – of what we think we know anyway about DevOps and Agile and Lean and all of these things that, you know, come together. So much of what the whole thing is premised on comes from the results of this survey, so congratulations on that and thank you.

    Forsgren: Thank you. Oh, yes of course. I love it because it helps us understand what we do that’s important and impactful, and it backs up so much that, frankly, some of us know and have done for a decade now, right? So I started so much of this back – you know, I’ve chatted about this, right? – back in my dissertation work about a decade ago, and even so much of what I did as an engineer and as a sysadmin, even before that, but as we know as good little scientists and good little experimenters, right, we need more than just intuition. We need data.

    We need to know what’s working and what’s working consistently in part so that we can keep doing it and sometimes so that we can convince people, whether it’s convincing ourselves, whether it’s convincing leaders, whether it’s convincing our teams so that we can say this is what we’re gonna do and this is what we’re gonna keep doing. And so, yeah, sometimes people will read the book Accelerate, you know, that I wrote with Jez and Gene, or they’ll read the State of DevOps reports and they’ll say, “Oh, well yeah, I knew that.” Well that’s great because so often that’s where we get our hypotheses from, right? We’ll reach out to the community, we’ll go to conferences, we’ll speak with engineers, we’ll check Twitter, we’ll read our emails, we’ll speak with so many people in the community and we’ll say, “What are you hearing, what are you seeing, what do you think is working, what’s not working?”

    And we’ll look at the things that are like consistently working or maybe there’s mixed signal and we’ll say, “Okay, these are the hypothesis we want to test,” because that’s – like that’s how you do science, right? You form a hypothesis and then you go to test it.

    Shimel: So you just said the magic word – science – because, you know, it’s interesting, there’s something – depending who you believe, there’s 400 to 700, 800 vendors in the DevOps space, and I’m gonna bet half of them, maybe more than half, do some sort of – excuse language – but some sort of half-ass survey, right? Where they’ll put out a survey on SurveyMonkey and they ask questions, they get answers, and I am constantly bombarded by PR agencies who say, “You know, our survey found 42 percent of people did this, 36 percent of people did that, blah, blah, blah, blah.” There’s no real science behind these surveys, right? The questions are done in – it’s like political surveys, right?

    Forsgren: Right. Yeah.

    Shimel: They tell what the answers are – they – what answers they want, and they –

    Forsgren: Because they want to support their own product.

    Shimel: Of course.

    Forsgren: They want to support an agenda, and I understand why. I mean I get it.

    Shimel: You know, they’re _____ their own socks, as we say, [laughs] but–

    Forsgren: Yeah.

    Shimel: – I think one of the things, you know, why you’re sitting here at Google right now, right, and why you’ve have the success you’ve had is that there’s some academic – what’s the word I’m looking for?

    Forsgren: Rigor.

    Shimel: Rigor. That’s the word I’m looking for. There’s some academic rigor to this survey and I think that is a big reason for its success. I mean, Nicole, I’m going all over the world and people will throw out, you know, stuff to me, and I say, “Where did you get that number?” They say, “Oh, the State of DevOps Report 2018, 2017,” you know, and I’m like, “Oh, okay. Pretty cool.” You know, so it’s a amazing thing. But of course –

    Forsgren: Well, and I think it’s because we don’t have anything to sell.

    Shimel: Exactly.

    Forsgren: Or let me say the thing I have to sell is better outcomes, and I am happy to be convinced at any time with data and with results. If my–

    Shimel: And that’s science.

    Forsgren: That’s science. If I get my mind changed – and there have been a couple times when my mind is changed and I am reconvinced of another position because we want better outcomes. This work is born of my experience in the early 2000’s. I entered technology in ’98, ’99, 2000 in – and I’ve said this before – in the dot.com bust, and it’s interesting because people are like, “But the dot.com bust didn’t happen, right, the world didn’t end, you know, the Y2K bug didn’t end the world,” but what did happen is some systems failed, some companies failed, so what happened?

    Companies fail, people lost their jobs, families were torn apart. We’re seeing some of that trickle down again, so if we can improve outcomes, if we can make companies more successful, deliver value better, if we can make work better, if we can decrease burnout, if we can make work/life balance better, if we can make pushing code easier so we’re not doing seven-day forced marches – ’cause I did that for two years.

    Shimel: Right.

    Forsgren: If we can make work better we all win.

    Shimel: Absolutely.

    Forsgren: Everything gets better.

    Shimel: Well, and not only those folks who were slinging code and stuff, the world wins because, you know, I was just – right before I got on this podcast with you I was doing a video with another guest and, you know, we were talking about Charlemagne scribes. I don’t know if you know anything about this, right?

    Forsgren: Yes. Well, let’s catch everyone up.

    Shimel: He was illiterate, Charlemagne, so he counted on his scribes to tell him – well, the Bible was kind of the only book they had, but he counted on his scribes to get him the intelligence, to make him smart, to show him the way, to let other people know what he was doing and all of these things. Today, technologists, developers, and DevOps folks and stuff like this, those of us in the tech world, we’re sort of Charlemagne’s scribes, right? It’s almost within our hands to make the world a better place. And I don’t want to overemphasis it,  but it’s true.

    Forsgren: But if we can make things more accessible for more people and more places across broader populations –

    Shimel: Yeah. No, even just something –

    [Crosstalk]

    Forsgren: – it really changes the conversation.

    Shimel: – as simple as the black hole picture last week, right? I’m sure you looked at it.

    Forsgren: Of course.

    Shimel: I mean what a great story this is, right? I’m not even gonna get into the idiots who were giving this young woman a hard time, that she really wasn’t the driving force, but what a great – I mean to be able to sit at our desk and peer into what a black hole looks like, the inside of – you know, that’s what it all comes down to, but we can’t do those algorithms, we can’t do that data without the science, right? Science feeds science. But anyway, Nicole, a lot of people have asked me, you know, with DORA now acquired by Google, are they doing the survey? Is it gonna be the same? What is the story? Tell our audience.

    Forsgren: Yes. Yes. Okay, so the survey’s still happening and it’s happening now.

    Shimel: Okay.

    Forsgren: So for anyone who hasn’t taken the survey it’s open right now. It’s about 25 minutes, and right, everyone’s like, “Girl, 25 minutes,” but it’s because it’s that academically rigorous research. So what are we studying?

    Shimel: But haven’t they always been about 20, 25 minutes?

    Forsgren: It’s always been about 20, 25.

    Shimel: Yeah.

    Forsgren: And I’ll still love everyone who does it. I’ll come, like, hang out with you and, like, selfie with you and give you a hug or give you like an elbow bump, whatever you want to do.

    Shimel: Well, we might be talking thousands and tens of thousands of people, Nicole. You know, _____.

    Forsgren: That’s fine, we’ll hang, we’ll hang.

    Shimel: Let’s talk about the survey, though. First of all, is there like an easy URL we can talk to people? I’m gonna put the written URL in our show notes, but do you have an easy-to-remember URL that people can _____?

    Forsgren: Yes, yes. So it’s bit.ly/2019-ASODR, A-S-O-D-R, ’cause – for accelerate State of DevOps Report.

    Shimel: Accelerate State of DevOps Report, ASODR.

    Forsgren: That’s – so bit.ly/2019-ASODR.

    Shimel: So bit –

    Forsgren: nd anyone who’s in tech – well, anyone can go take it, but I would love to hear from our devs, our test, or ops.

    Shimel: Security people.

    Forsgren: Yeah, yeah.

    Shimel: Don’t forget our security DevSecOps people.

    Forsgren: Oh sure, Infosec, absolutely.

    Shimel: So, Nicole –

    Forsgren: And we’re digging into cool stuff this year.

    Shimel: That’s what I wanted to ask you. What’s different this year?

    Forsgren: We say it every year. I know. I get excited every year. But we’re really digging into cool stuff. So I reached out to some extra experts this year, so automated testing and testing in a slightly different way, right, because testing’s changing. The way we think about testing is changing. We’re also looking at how to build effective deployment pipelines a little bit differently. Disaster recovery practices, right?

    Shimel: Yeah.

    Forsgren: As our systems get more distributed and more complex, disaster recovery is super important. Things like our technical environment; what does that look like, right? So, so many things. I can’t say all of it. Productivity.

    Shimel: So let me – give me a timeframe. Timeframes, Nicole.

    Forsgren: Okay. So the survey’s open until May 3rd.

    Shimel: We got –

    Forsgren: And I know everyone’s like, “I got plenty of time.” You got – I mean kind of.

    Shimel: No, go do it now.

    Forsgren: A couple weeks. Do it now. And then the survey comes out in August, like mid-August.

    Shimel: Oh.

    Forsgren: And I know everyone’s like, “That takes a minute,” but it takes a minute to do science. It’s a lot of stats and then writing and then I gotta make it pretty because –

    Shimel: Was that always the time? I seem to remember it coming out around DES in US, around like October.

    Forsgren: So it always takes about six months. It used to come out June-ish and then –

    Shimel: Oh, maybe it was DES London.

    Forsgren: Yeah, it was DES London, and then last year we shifted a little bit to fall because I just think it took me a minute to pull together research, design it –

    Shimel: Oh, it takes time.

    Forsgren: _____ in December, because what I – here’s the thing: I love to hear all of the feedback from the whole fall conference schedule. It gives me a better chance to really get great signal from what everyone’s hearing and what everyone’s saying.

    Shimel: Yep.

    Forsgren: And then I start pulling together all of my research design in January and February and then we launch in March, so it takes about six months to pull together a really, really good research study.

    Shimel: Look, all this is good by me. I was expecting October for DES, so I just – you know, I just picked up two months.

    Forsgren: Yeah, yeah.

    Shimel: So it’s good by me. Alright. And now Google, of course, is obviously sponsoring it again this year, Google Cloud, with your –

    Forsgren: They are – yep. So we’re partnering with them this year like we did last year.

    Shimel: Yep.

    Forsgren: And then we have lots – we have got a handful of other sponsors just like we do all the time, right?

    Shimel: That’s what’s changed in this regard.

    Forsgren: Because this is such a great industry report, right?

    Shimel: Yeah.

    Forsgren: And so we’ve got a handful of wonderful – and it’s still under wraps – but we have amazing, wonderful industry partners and sponsors.

    Shimel: Oh, good.

    Forsgren: Like we always have, right? So it’s still the DORA Report, it’s still – you know, we still have the DORA team behind it, and I’m super excited to share the results with everybody in August.

    Shimel: So we’re excited to read about it. So let me – I don’t know if you can say this or not, but will we see a second Accelerate book?

    Forsgren: [Gasps] Probably. Well, because the first book was based on four years of research.

    Shimel: Right.

    Forsgren: And then we had a 2018 study come out that had some incredible findings like cloud, right? Everyone’s like, “Okay, cloud, but does cloud matter?” And some people are like, “Okay –” science, right? Here’s a great example of science. Some people are like, “Of  course cloud matters. Cloud makes a huge difference.” And then there’s some groups that are like, “We made these huge investments in cloud, but I’m not seeing the benefits of cloud.” So here’s what we found: Cloud matters but only if you do it right.

    Shimel: Yeah.

    Forsgren: Some people are like, “What do you mean do it right?” If you follow the five essential characteristics of cloud computing as defined by NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, we see that you’re 23 times more likely to be an elite performer. See? Stuff like that is super important because that’s really what helps you tease out the differences.

    Shimel: I wish I would’ve had this in my – you know, Nicole, I was in Iceland last week at a conference – a small one, 50 – more of a roundtable, 50 people, all high execs at large enterprises, and we – and there was someone giving a presentation there about, you know, advantages, disadvantages, cloud, hybrid cloud, et cetera, and man, I could’ve used some of these metrics there because –

    Forsgren: But see that’s what helps you tease out yes it makes a difference but only if you’re actually doing it right. You can’t skip steps. You have to execute. And then you can go back to an exec team who says things like, “We made investments, it doesn’t work.” Okay, but did you execute all the way? Did you execute fully? Are you so early in your transition that you’re just not seeing the benefits yet but they will come; don’t give up.

    Shimel: Well, this is – I have to say I’m arguing with people with DevOps who tell me their DevOps failed or whatever.

    Forsgren: Oh, absolutely.

    Shimel: DevOps only fails when you stop doing DevOps and –

    Forsgren: We see the same thing with CI/CD, right? We’ll see teams do a continuous integration initiative and then they’ll redefine it so narrowly to make sure that they hit their target, but then what happens is if you go reevaluate – I think that’s the benefit of the research, is because we have to do it rigorously we end up identifying _____ exactly what it means to do CI. You have to hit four things, which gives you an evaluative criteria. So then you can go back and you can say, “We’re doing CI but I’m not seeing benefits.” Okay, go back to the book. We outline it for you. Are you doing all these four things? And you could say, “Oh, we’ll we’re only doing two.” Okay, that’s why you’re not seeing the benefit.

    Shimel: [Inaudible comment]

    Forsgren: You have to have all four.

    Shimel: But Nicole, this is an excellent reason why people need to buy the book. It makes a big difference.

    Forsgren: Yes, and this is also an excellent reason, by the way, please take the survey because –

    Shimel: Yes.

    Forsgren: – what helps me understand which things are predictive of performance, which things are not, and then you can turn back around. The report is free. It’s free to download. Anyone can go back through and you can see, okay, absolutely these are the things we should continue doing, these are the things that are not helpful and not beneficial. So, by the way, I super – like I love and appreciate anyone who helps contribute to all of this research, but we do pay it forward. We absolutely contribute to the community.

    Shimel: Absolutely do, and I think our entire industry should pay it forward by participating. Nicole, as I mentioned to you before we started, this is only a 15, 20-minute interview. We’re close to the half hour, but –

    Forsgren: [Laughs] Sorry. Thanks, everyone. I love this community.

    Shimel: Absolutely. But let us end with this then. Please go take this survey. It’ll take 20, 25 minutes, and the URL to go take it is bit.ly, which is, of course, B-I-T dot L-Y, slash 2019 slash A for accelerate –

    Forsgren: Dash, ASODR. Yep.

    Shimel: ASODR.

    Forsgren: Sorry, bit.ly/2019-ASODR.

    Shimel: ASODR, spell that for us.

    Forsgren: A-S-O-D-R.

    Shimel: ‘Cause, you know, I had – I’m from New York. We have a tough time with R’s at the end of words.

    Forsgren: I know.

    Shimel: Like brother, sister, and all that. I can’t help it.

    Anyway, Dr. Nicole Forsgren, thanks so much for being our guest. Guys, gals, listening; go take the survey. Nicole, hopefully – I guess I’ll see you in London next perhaps and –

    Forsgren: Yes, yes, for sure.

    Shimel: Unless maybe at KubeCon in Barcelona is very nice, but I don’t know if you’ll be there. If not, DES London.

    Forsgren: Absolutely.

    Shimel: Alright. Dr. Nicole Forsgren, CEO and founder of DORA, big-time person at Google Cloud as well, and the – kind of the life and breath of the State of DevOps Survey. Thanks for being our guest on this DevOps Chat.

    Forsgren: Thanks so much.

    Shimel: Alright. This is Alan Shimel and you’ve just listened to another DevOps Chat.

    — Alan Shimel

  • DevOps Chat: Performance Testing with SmartBear’s Keshav Vasudevan

    DevOps Chat: Performance Testing with SmartBear’s Keshav Vasudevan

    In this DevOps Chat we speak with Keshav Vasudevan, product manager for performance testing at SmartBear. Keshav talks about the move to “end-to-end DevOps,” the importance of shifting left with testing and the latest state-of-the-art in performance and load testing with SmartBear.

    As usual, the streaming audio is immediately below, followed by the transcript of our conversation. Enjoy!

    Transcript

    Alan Shimel: Hey, everyone, it’s Alan Shimel, devopsy.kinsta.cloud. You’re listening to another DevOps Chat. Joining me in this DevOps Chat is Keshav Vasudevan – and I’m sure I mispronounced that; we’ll let him correct it. Keshav is with SmartBear and he’s our guest in this DevOps Chat. Keshav, welcome.

    Keshav Vasudevan: Hey, thanks, Alan. So happy to be here and, yeah, I will correct it – it’s actually Keshav Vasudevan, so that’s how you say my last name. And I’m – I currently work at the –

    Shimel: Vasudevan, okay.

    Vasudevan: Yeah. I work –

    Shimel: I’m glad you _____ –

    Vasudevan: Uh-huh?

    Shimel: Well, give us your – okay, so – and we’ll call you Keshav for the rest of the podcast today. But, Keshav, you’re with SmartBear, but why don’t you give our audience a little background? What’s your own personal journey here?

    Vasudevan: Oh, of course. I mean, personally, I’m coming from an engineering background. Yeah, I love all things code. I love building applications and, in my spare time, I just love building mobile apps and Web-based apps as just hobby projects, which is why it felt like a natural fit to be at SmartBear Software. I’m incredibly passionate about quality as a whole and I understand and know the importance of having consistent quality to ensure the best optimal end-user experience.

    So, at SmartBear, currently, I’m the product manager for performance testing and specifically in the LoadNinja application. And I help communicate the value of shift-left testing in the Agile- and DevOps-based ecosystems that typically we’re seeing the world shift towards. And, of course, I’m responsible for the product management and execution of our innovative, new, revolutionary platform in the performance-testing space, essentially allowing people to do real browser-based load testing at scale, which is unprecedented so far.

    Shimel: Very cool. So, Keshav, you’re right in the heart of it of what SmartBear’s about, but SmartBear is a company – you know, when we look at the DevOps space, the move is obviously towards “bigger is better.” We have all these companies who are trying to do end-to-end DevOps and complete-life-cycle DevOps. SmartBear is a company that, for as long as I’m familiar with them, have had multiple products and plays – you know, I’m not saying you’re end-to-end DevOps or that’s what you aspire to be at SmartBear, but SmartBear is definitely a company where you aren’t singular product, singularly product-focused on any one area. SmartBear – you know, there was a lot of testing products, but there was a lot of other products too.

    And, recently – well, historically, each of those products almost had their own identity, as they should, but the SmartBear moniker was almost secondary to the individual products. And, recently, we’ve seen that change, right? Where SmartBear has made a broader effort to bring all of these disparate products into a cohesive type of vision of going to market under “SmartBear.” You wanna elaborate on that a little bit? Or, better yet, give our audience kind of the breadth of all the different solutions SmartBear can help with.

    Vasudevan: You bring up a great point, Alan. So SmartBear’s been around for almost ten years now. And, since our inception in 2009, we’ve grown into a global company, which testers and developers and architects and designers have come to trust with their overall software-development needs. Our initial focus, when we first started, was around software collaboration and testing, but, eventually, of course, as the company grew and as we added more talented people to the company and also as we grew in user base, we realized that we could actually solve much more broader functional use cases.

    And so, since our inception, we right now have 11 global offices. We are a big advocate of open-source platforms and tools, and so a combination of our open-source tools, which is SoapUI, which is one of the most popular API-based testing tools, and Swagger, which includes, of course, the Swagger UI, the Editor, the Codegen, and the commercial SwaggerHub, are all part of our ecosystem. And so, in total, we have over  6.5 million users and over 22,000 customers of our commercial platforms. And, since we’ve started, we have over 500 employees. So that is history of SmartBear and where we are in its current state, but you’re absolutely right. We have a breadth of different products, that each essentially cater to different aspects of the overall software development life cycle.

    And so, if you look at the overall life cycle, we have tools that cater to solving and solving use cases and problems and seeing the design phase of the software journey, the actual development and testing and collaboration aspect, cross-functional and performance testing. We’d integrated a bunch of our partners in the deployment phase, with AWS, for example, or Kubernetes. And, finally, in the actual post-production and post-deployment, we actually have monitoring tools as well. So we essentially play in the entire software development life cycle, and we cater to different audiences and our tools overall cater to different use cases in those journeys.

    Now we’ve gotten a lot of good feedback for each of these products, but we also recognize, at the end of the day, that, today’s day and age, Agile and DevOps is the way products – or software-development teams are moving towards. This is primarily, again, because software development has evolved in order to meet the growing demands of consumers. And consumers right now, today’s consumers of software applications, are looking two important things. The first is they want features, right? The switching cost to go from one application to the next is going lower and lower, so, if I, as a consumer, am not getting the best features on a regular basis or new updates or enhancements on a regular basis, I might get frustrated and I might just move to another vendor. And the second thing is we have started to expect a lot of good quality in all the things that we’re consuming because, again, as we’re digital consumers, we know that, every day, we spend over 11 hours in front of our computer and looking through different applications. So we have come to expect a certain standard of quality.

    And all of this ideal of fast development and incorporating testing and quality into every aspect of this journey is achieved with the ideal of incorporating Agile and DevOps into your workflow. And so we know that, to go across all of these different functions in a seamless and automated fashion, you have to essentially integrate all of the different tools that we have that cater to all of these individual use cases, in a seamless fashion as well. And so – oh, one other thing that we pride ourselves on is we, from a product level, we have a seamless integration across all of these different verticals, right?

    So, for example, we have the ability in the performance-testing space to essentially integrate with Jenkins, with LoadNinja, that essentially now allows you to automate your load testing with real browsers at scale, meaning with 10 virtual users or 10,000 users. You can be rest assured that is the most accurate representation of load. All of this can be integrated and automated using Jenkins with a simple plug-in. Right? And this also then integrates with other tools. For example, we have an integration with our design tool, which is SwaggerHub, with our API-testing tool, which is SoapUI. So then you can essentially easily design your API, architect it easily, design the API, make sure it solves the end-user use cases, and then push it to the tester and developer to actually test out each of these functionalities. So we wanna make sure that this process, this ideal of DevOps, is actually achieved in execution with the seamless integration.

    Now one level higher is the actual story and the marketing and the branding around it. And we’re proud to say that SmartBear recently unveiled its new brand that gives our customers and prospects and users a more cohesive understanding of how each of these tools fit together, feel proud of the fact that they’re now part of the SmartBear ecosystem, and allow them to, essentially, seamlessly move from one tool to the next because of maintaining the branding and user experience across each of these tools. And that was a huge undertaking that we did and we just unveiled it last year at our user conference, Connect. And we’ve gotten lot of, lot of, lot of good feedback about our new brand, our logo, and everything else around that. So it’s a long–winded way of saying, “Yes, you’re absolutely right. And we’re making sure that that we are achieving that as well.”

    Shimel: Absolutely. And you know what? I have one of the shirts with the new logo they sent me too, so thanks for that. But, you know, the interesting takeaway here – I hear from so many and I recently received an e-mail from a fellow in the field who said, “Where do you see – we need to be moving to platforms. We need platforms to build on. And how do you build a platform? And where do you see the need for a platform?” And then you look at, as you’ve just laid out here, SmartBear and you take these tools and individual solutions, point-solutions that you guys had put together over the years, and showing how integration among them, as well as integrating with best-of-breed kinda tools out there, like a Jenkins and some of – and we were blessed in DevOps to have a lot of open-source solutions as well, but integrating with a lot of these open-source. I mean, this is how you stitch together a platform. This is how you get “one plus one equals three.” Right?

    Vasudevan: Yes, exactly. Absolutely.

    Shimel: Yep. So, Keshav, we’ve waste – we didn’t waste but we’ve spoken an awful lot about kind of background on SmartBear. I really wanted to spend our time talking about what’s new and what’s going on with you and your team there, so why don’t we dig down and peel the onion back a couple layers on that? What do you have – imagine you may – you know, you alluded to it earlier but let’s dig in: what’s happening?

    Vasudevan: Absolutely. So one of the things, as I mentioned in my introduction, as something which we as a company are really passionate about, is ensuring quality. Right? And, over the last 15 to 30 years, over the last – well, let’s say over the last 15 years, we as users – and when I say “users,” anyone – me, you, our friend; it’s essentially consumers of applications – have started to expect a certain level of quality. And this is how software development has evolved, in order to meet this demand.

    And, as we have touched upon, this is why Agile has evolved, which is essentially moving fast, allowing developers and engineers to build features in a much more faster way and deploy them seamlessly so that the end users get them in the quickest way possible. Right? And we’re always listening to the end-user feedback and updating the platform. Then there’s DevOps, right? Which is, again, trying to follow the same ideal and essentially having a much more collaborative approach towards testing, operations, and development together.

    Now let’s go dissect quality, the testing aspect of it. Right? So Agile, to allow for Agile- and DevOps-based testing, functional testing tools have done a great job of keeping up with the times. Right? For example, we have two tools like that, which is SoapUI and TestComplete. And they’ve done a phenomenal job in terms of allowing people to quickly come in and create their test scripts, make sure it all works, make sure to write the test cases really quickly because they have features to do that, and then, again, automate the entire process, using maybe a REST API or, of course, using an existing CI/CD tool.

    Performance testing, though, which is a huge – which is a big business KPI in today’s day and age, right, is something that people are still, to this day, scared to do. We talk to product teams and engineering teams on a daily basis, who tell us how important they know performance testing is. For example, we know that, if consumers take more than – if it takes more then 3 seconds for a certain e-commerce page to load, for a customer, they’ll leave. They’ll just go to another platform. The switching costs are getting lower and lower and people are getting more impatient, so, if it’s gonna take a while to do a certain transaction, people will leave. And that is a huge business loss at scale for your company, for your platform, and as an organization as a whole.

    So product and engineering teams, Agile teams, want to do performance testing. However, performance testing, to this day, has not evolved to keep up with the growing needs of Agile and DevOps-based workflows. To this day, it takes such a long time, for me as a performance tester, to create a test script. I have to essentially learn – and, if I was a developer or functional tester wanting to do performance testing, I have to forget about it. I have to hire a consultant because my learning curve is gonna be so steep. I have to allocate a lot of time in my day-to-day operation in order to create a simple test script. This is because, over the last 30 years of performance testing, the technological process has not evolved at all. To this day, if you’re creating a performance test script, you have to record all the transactions between the browser and the server. You’re doing this under the protocol level. That is typically how you actually create a performance test script.

    Now, as you know, the responses and the requests between server and client will have certain dynamic characteristics, like session IDs, cookies, and so on. So, in order to play this back across 1 user or 10,000 users to do the performance testing, you will have to do this programming and dynamic correlation. This process takes anywhere between several hours to a few days to even become successful, for the most basic transactions. Now imagine doing this for the complex applications that we have today, some of the AJAX applications which are very client-rich, in terms of actions and allowing users to do multiple things. The effort that is involved to do this multiplies threefold. Right?

    And so this is why performance testing is still, to this day, seen as something which no one wants to touch. They’ll hire a consultant; they’ll have a centralized function to do this. Then there’s, of course, the actual process of emulating and creating the load itself because, to this day, we still use emulators to generate the load, which is not necessarily representative of the end-user experience.

    So this is something we saw over the last one year and we decided to do something about it, which is what – you know, our engineers came together. We said, “We are passionate about this. We face this issue ourselves. Let’s do something about it.” And so, essentially, we productized a new approach to doing load testing, essentially allowing users or testers or developers or functional testers – anyone who’s passionate about performance testing, anyone who’s behind an application, be it a marketer, a product manager, a functional tester, or a performance tester – to essentially come in, record, and instantly play back the transactions that they record in the test script, without doing any programming or dynamic correlation whatsoever. Right?

    And, from here, of course, you can – and take the script that you have and spin up tens of thousands of real browsers to go ahead and do the load test, based on these transactions. Right? This is a – I don’t use the word lightly here, but a revolutionary approach to actually doing performance testing because this is unprecedented, to essentially create browser-based test scripts without doing any sort of protocol-based recording, which allows you then to create test scripts out of the box. And then simulate tens of thousands of real browsers to run these scripts on them. So, as a user, as a tester, you’re, one, going to save over 50 to 70 percent of your time, doing the actual load testing, because the scripting process has become so much more easier. And you’re gonna get results that are coming straight from the browser, so you can be rest assured that this is the most accurate and realistic representation of the performances that your application will be showing for end users. And this is what LoadNinja is, as a product.

    And, over the last five months, since we launched in October, end of October, during our user conference, we’ve seen tremendous traction in the market. We’ve seen so many customers come to us, sign up for annuals and partner with us, to essentially allow them to do load testing. And it’s just phenomenal, as a product manager, and it’s like seeing the vision come to fruition and actually seeing the people who are behind products – product managers, functional testers, all of them – coming and saying, “Hey, we can now do performance testing by ourselves, without necessarily having to get a certification with an expensive tool. Without having to spend so much more money and dollars trying to get a consultant.” They can do this all by themselves and that’s the most gratifying thing I ever heard. So, yeah. So there’s a lot happening, but the LoadNinja’s primarily something that we’re super proud of, as a company. It was built in house by us. The revolutionary technology to do this it’s something which performance testing has never seen to this day.

    Shimel: You know, listening to you, all I can think of is back to my own days as a entrepreneur and developing security solutions, and we’d have to go get performance testing done. We were selling to DOD – it was large, large networks – and this is pre-DevOps, obviously, and pre-automation and pre-continuous. And, my god, the budget for the performance testing was bigger than the budget for the development team. It was nuts. I mean, it was – so, when I hear now about how this stuff is being done in the cloud and “automated” and “scalable” and the price points, it’s just crazy.

    Vasudevan: It is. It is. We’ve come a long way. And, to this day, there’s still – performance testing is seen as a monolithic and centralized function, right? And so, to this day, what you saw years ago, many of the factors are still there. So, yeah. So you’re absolutely right and it’s good to see the cloud coming in, but as a performance-testing industry and tool vendors, we can do a lot more to push the boundaries and keep up with the growing demands of engineering and quality as a whole.

    Shimel: Yep. Got it. Got it. You know, Keshav, I told you when we started things get out of control. We were supposed to go 15; we’re at 20 minutes.

    Vasudevan: [Chuckles]

    Shimel: We’ll have to continue our SmartBear discussion on another DevOps Chat, at another date. We’ll have you back on soon. But why don’t we put an end for it right here? But, before we do, people listening, they like what they heard; they’re interested. Where can they go get more information?

    Vasudevan: Oh, absolutely. So the best place to go is loadninja.com, so L-O-A-D-N-I-N-J-A-dot-com. And you should have all the required information to become successful and get started. One of the things we pride ourselves, as a product and engineering team, is our turnaround for new features and enhancements. We deploy almost every week and, again, using the – many of the learnings, we learned from your website, Alan, in the DevOps world, to essentially continuously integrate and deploy every now and then, every week, in order to get the features and enhancements that users require. So go to loadninja.com; you’ll have all the required information to become successful.

    Shimel: Fantastic. Thank you very much for being a guest on this DevOps Chat. And I am serious – we’ll have to have you back on here – but, for now, I think we’re gonna pull the plug on this episode. Thanks, everyone, for listening. This is Alan Shimel for devopsy.kinsta.cloud, Security Boulevard, Container Journal, Digital Anarchist. You’ve just listened to another DevOps Chat. Have a great day, everyone.

    — Alan Shimel

  • DevOps Market Consolidation Gets Real: CloudBees Acquires Electric Cloud

    DevOps Market Consolidation Gets Real: CloudBees Acquires Electric Cloud

    You may have already seen the news today: CloudBees has acquired Electric Cloud in a move that marks a true market consolidation in the DevOps space. I had a chance to speak with CloudBees CEO Sacha Labourey to discuss the acquisition. We discuss the motivation for the deal, what the combined entity may look like going forward and more. The video of our conversation is at the bottom of this article.

    In my mind, this acquisition represents true consolidation of the DevOps tool vendors market. My reasons for this are as follows:

    1. Until now, many of the acquisitions in the DevOps space have been by large, established public companies such as CA, HP or IBM. Typically, these kinds of deals are not as much consolidation as they are large companies using M&A activity in place of R&D. CloudBees is not a large vendor—this isn’t R&D dressed in an acquisition.
    2. Electric Cloud is not your typical venture-backed startup that is looking for exit opportunities. The company has been around for many years. It has a large base of enterprise customers and an enterprise-tested product.
    3. With the recent changes in the DevOps vendor market involving CA (now Broadcom), HP(E) now Micro Focus and IBM preoccupied with Red Hat, there is a vacuum for enterprise leadership. The combination of these two vendors of scale is really a consolidation move.

    Best of luck going forward and congratulations to our friends at CloudBees and Electric Cloud. It will be interesting to see what repercussions this deal brings to the rest of the DevOps market.

    For more details on the acquisition, check out Mike Vizard’s article in devopsy.kinsta.cloud today. In the meantime, enjoy the video and conversation with Sacha. Also, let us know what you think about the acquisition—and other M&A activity in the DevOps space—in the comments section below.

    — Alan Shimel

  • DevOps Chat: Aqua Security Talks Funding, Security in a Cloud-Native World

    DevOps Chat: Aqua Security Talks Funding, Security in a Cloud-Native World

    Aqua Security, one of the leaders in container and cloud-native security, recently announced it has raised $62 million in a “C” round of investment, led by Insight Partners.

    In this DevOps Chat, we speak with Rani Osnat and Andy Feit of Aqua Security about how this validates the cloud-native security field that Aqua has helped develop.

    The video of our conversation is immediately below, followed by the transcript of our conversation. An audio version is also available on Soundcloud.

    [videopress 1pfe0tRG]

    Transcript

    Alan Shimel: Hello, everyone. It’s Alan Shimel, devopsy.kinsta.cloud, Container Journal, Security Boulevard for MediaOps and I’m really happy to be joined by my friends from Aqua Security. Charge of product marketing, we’ve got Rani Osnat, and, in charge of go-to-market, Andy –

    Andy Feit: Go-to-market, that’s right, Alan.

    Shimel: – none other than Andy Feit. Both of these guys are familiar to our audience or you’re both familiar to the audience – you’ve been on – but, guys, first of all, congratulations, mazel tov, whatever you wanna say. Big news today with Aqua. You guys raised a Series C, I believe it is, for $62 million.

    Feit: Yeah, thank you, Alan.

    Rani Osnat: Thank you, Alan.

    Shimel: Congratulations. So let’s talk about what this means, guys. So, first of all, it looks like this round was led by Insight Ventures, correct?

    Feit: Yep.

    Shimel: And I don’t know if we know; who is the Insight partner kinda leading the charge on this?

    Osnat: It’s Jeff Horing, was the _____ –

    Shimel: So I know Jeff and he’s one of the senior people there. Will Jeff be joining the board of directors?

    Feit: Yeah, so Insight will have a board seat.

    Shimel: Okay. Will it be Jeff, though, or you don’t know at this point?

    [Crosstalk]

    Osnat: Yeah, we’re not sure that it’s gonna be Jeff.

    Feit: We’re not positive, yeah.

    Shimel: Okay. I don’t mean to ask any trick questions, so don’t worry. So, Andy and Rani, you know, what I thought was interesting in reading the release was, yes, Insight did lead this round for $62 million, but a couple of things to note. Number one, your existing ventures, Lightspeed, Microsoft or M12, M7, whatever they call it –

    Osnat: M12, _____.

    Shimel: – Shlomo Kramer. You know, your existing venture investors all participated in this, correct?

    Osnat: Correct. Yeah.

    Shimel: And that says something, right? People believe in it enough to keep writing more dollars into it. Kudos to the Aqua team ’cause that does mean something.

    Osnat: Yeah, and it has been like that in all previous rounds as well, so we’ve always had the existing investors continue to participate. And I think, from their perspective, obviously, this is – they’ve taken – especially the early investors, like Shlomo Kramer and then TLV Partners, have taken a risk, investing in a very early-stage startup with an uncertain market. And now a lot of that risk is gone – you know, you can never know, but it’s a much more solid proposition than we had _____ _____ ago –

    Shimel: Well, it certainly less risky than a raw startup, but, you know –

    Osnat: It’s less risky, and so they deserve it.

    Shimel: – from an investment point of view, when they – it’s almost doubling down, when they continue to participate. Right? That’s saying, “I believe in this enough that I don’t wanna be watered down in my stake in the company, and so I’m gonna invest my pro rata or per-capita share so that my stake in the company remains constant, not decreased or watered down as they raise more money.” So it is very significant.

    The other thing I just wanted to mention is, hey, this brings the total raised, I think, to $100 million, maybe a little over $100 million.

    Feit: Just don’t round down, yeah.

    Shimel: I was doing the math on my fingers; I ran out of the toes, but I knew it was close. But the obvious question then becomes “So does this move Aqua into a unicorn, where you have a valuation of a million-plus?”

    Feit: Yeah, we’re not really sharing the details on the post-money valuation here. One of the nice things about being a privately-held company: you don’t have to share all those details. But, obviously, the number’s more than $100 million and we’re excited about bringing in a new investor that’s actually more than just bringing money to us. And I think what’s great about Insight is how involved they are, how well they know the space, the introductions they can make to partners as well as end-user customers. And this is really – they are a late-stage investor that knows what it takes to make a company successful.

    Shimel: No doubt about it. As we were talking off camera before, I have a relationship with Insight for a number of years now and, look, I’ve seen them invest in many companies that I’m very familiar with – some of them, I’ve worked with. Companies like FireMon and JFrog and Tricentis, Aquanow, and others. So, I mean, their record kinda speaks for itself. And I will tell you, more than just writing a check, I’ve seen firsthand, right, what they’ve done. I mean, frankly, we’ve talked about working with them here at MediaOps, in doing something for their whole portfolio, right? And great company. You couldn’t pick a better partner, in my opinion.

    Feit: We definitely feel that way and it’s impressive how well they know the space. Through the due diligence process and even –

    Shimel: No doubt about it.

    Feit: – here at the meeting, they’re digging in. And the fact that they spoke with our customers, they met with our team, they looked at our product, they went through it – it’s a testament to how far we’ve come and we’re excited about that.

    Shimel: Great. So let me pivot now. So, again, congratulations on the raise. That’s a significant amount of money. It means you guys can do some great things. In reading over or perusing the release, though, I saw some other kinda subtle changes in messaging, and that is I knew Aqua or many of us may know Aqua as a container security company. And now I see the messaging changing to more a cloud-native security company. Let’s talk about that. What does that mean, Rani?

    Osnat: Yeah, I think, when we started out, the market was different, in terms of adoption and also in terms of the technology landscape. A lot of the technologies that are now maturing were really experimental at the time – and we’re not talking about a long time ago; it’s three and a half years ago – but things like serverless, for example, that are catching on. They’re not as big as containers yet, but, if you believe some of what the proponents say, they will be bigger.

    And, in general, I think there’s a trend to look at this cloud-native space, for lack of a better term, as something that is supporting the next generation of application development, application deployment, and runtime environments, where cloud-native doesn’t – it’s not equivalent to cloud, right? I mean, you could run things in the cloud that are not cloud-native and you could run cloud-native applications on-prem as well. But the whole notion is that you support this very Agile, microservices environment that is portable, interoperable, and you can update it very frequently. It’s very resilient – you can update different pieces without impacting other pieces.

    And the benefits to enterprises that adopt these technologies are huge, and so that’s why it’s catching on. And we’re at that stage where we see not just the breadth of adoption across the industry, in terms of the number of companies that are actually using it, but also how deep it goes and how wide the adoption is within a given company. So we’re still at an early stage, but we see how a lot of enterprises like banks and insurance companies, not the tech industry itself, are looking at these technologies as strategic to their objectives – digital transformation, customer centricity, all those things.

    Shimel: You know, I was telling someone in the office here this morning, “We live in such interesting times if you’re a tech person.” Right? I think bank to my first Web hosting company in 1995 and what it meant to rack up a server.

    Osnat: Right.

    Shimel: Right? Set up a server for someone. My ops people walked around with tool belts, with pliers and screwdrivers, right, ’cause you had to literally screw in the server into the rack. It’s a different world; it’s an amazing world. Here’s another just something I wanna throw out at you: when we talk about things like serverless and we talk about what Kubernetes brings to the picture, it almost – there’s a place for everyone here. It’s not just the cloud, like we’ve seen with AWS or Azure or Google or Alibaba or – you know, the data center is back.

    Osnat: Right. Yeah, I –

    Shimel: Right? And there’s now _____ serverless stuff, right?

    Osnat: Yeah.

    Shimel: And it’s still native.

    Osnat: Yeah, absolutely, and we think if you really kinda distill it, from a technology standpoint, to one thing, we’re talking about a complete abstraction of the application layer from the underlying infrastructure. Right? So that’s –

    Shimel: That’s it right there. Mm-hmm.

    Osnat: – moving into a serverless world, but “serverless” not in a narrow sense of serverless functions that we have today but “serverless” in the wider meaning of the word, where you really don’t have to manage any servers. And any technology that aligns with that concept is legitimately cloud-native and we need to support those technologies.

    And, even today, there are many choices, right? You can do everything from running containers on VMs to running containers on bare metal to using container-as-a-service type solutions or serverless containers, like Fargate and ACI, and, of course, serverless functions. And there will be a lot of things in between that. We’re already seeing some technologies that are still very early-stage, like micro-VMs or hybrid container VMs, and this will all have a place because, ultimately, organizations will choose the technology that serves them in the most optimal way, without necessarily being married to one particular technology.

    Feit: And I would just add, Alan, I think the common theme between these technologies is the dynamic nature of the infrastructure and the ability to spin up, whether you’re spinning up a VM or requesting a microservice run for 70 milliseconds on a function. It’s happening over the course of the day, over the course of an hour, over the course of minutes. That network is changing and your security infrastructure needs to understand that. And the old-school models of securing these platforms didn’t work before and it’s only getting harder with things like microservices and moving to serverless architectures.

    Shimel: No, I agree. I think Rani hit it, actually, right on the head. We’re just seeing this abstraction where that whole infrastructure is so liquid, right, and so dynamic that you almost – you need to secure it, obviously, but the mission of securing the application, irregardless, wherever it’s _____, of the infrastructure, is a mission in and of itself as well.

    Feit: Which means you need to understand how _____ _____ _____.

    Shimel: And you still have to play nice.

    Feit: Yep. Yeah, you need to understand the application part of it, go with it wherever it’s running, and that’s really the magic of what Aqua does.

    Osnat: Right.

    Shimel: Yeah. Well, and I think that that is the magic, right, and that is the mission. Go with it wherever it’s running. Let me turn back. So, you know, some fresh fuel in the tank. What does the $62 million mean? Let’s talk about it just in terms of go-to-market with you, Andy, but, Rani, let’s talk what does it also mean in terms of product? In this new – I mean, one could say that – saying, “Hey, we’re gonna secure cloud-native. Gives us a bigger surface to play on, a bigger playground to play in.” Go-to-market’s a challenge, right? Both? Let’s hear.

    Osnat: Right. Yeah, I mean, so we’ve been – one of our key advantages in this market has been platform support and being able to support different clouds, orchestrators, operating systems, and modalities of cloud-native, right? And, as we see things right now, the market is not – it’s been consolidating around Kubernetes as the orchestration platform, but, at the same time, there are many different flavors and there are different dependencies, on where you’re running, et cetera, that have to be addressed.

    So we already are supporting a very large matrix of different technologies and combinations of those technologies. And, as the market continues to hold, we’ll need to continue to track that, so not just support them but actually provide deeper security controls at each level and at each step of the way because we’re not only a container security solution, as you pointed out earlier, but we actually provide this support for various types of cloud-native technologies, various pieces of the stack, and also the full life cycle. So, starting from their early stages of development and CI/CD, going all the way to production environments. And this requires investments in R&D.

    Additionally, we also have been investing in open-source tools, specifically around Kubernetes, and we will continue to do that and not only expand the capabilities of those tools that we’ve already put out there in the market but also add new tools. And we do that as part of our philosophy of educating the market, getting out tools that anyone can use, and then, when they get to large production environments, they’ll probably come to us for a commercial solution, with all the benefits of commercial interoperability and support and all that. So that’s – part of the money goes there, obviously.

    Feit: And part of the money definitely goes out to build the infrastructure, whether we’re talking sales globally. We’re working with some of the largest customers – companies in the world today and they have a global presence, but, as we go to market and look at growing the business, we have a proven model at this point. I mean, that’s what happens when you get to this late-stage investment. They’re looking for “Do you have customers? Could you do more of them if you had resources in various countries? Could you scale out more by solving more of their problems across divisions and departments in those enterprises and up-sell and cross-sell?”

    And then the support infrastructure. One of the things that has really differentiated Aqua, when we win our business – and we’re in a competitive marketplace, but one of the things that really drives us is our ability to be on site with a customer, to support them through their deployment, to be truly invested in their success and integrating with their CI/CD pipelines, integrating with their secrets management, integrating with their SIEM tools. Our solution is not standalone; it’s not a double-click install of a SAS solution. This is part of your entire application development life cycle and it requires resources, so we’ll be – there’ll be people, as part of those organizations, that help ensure the customer deployment is successful.

    Shimel: You know, I think Aqua is kinda taking the lead on this cloud-native security. Of course, we all at KubeCon in Seattle a few months ago. There’s another one coming up in Barcelona in – was it May? The end of May, I think.

    Feit: May 20th. Believe it, it’s on our schedule.

    Shimel: Yeah, no, us too. I think I fly out the 18th. We’ll talk about it. But, you know, I mean, we saw at KubeCon in Seattle this buzz, this palpable excitement – it reminded me of AWS Reinvent five years ago, right? Before the – when the cool kids still there. Where do you think we go? Are we at – I guess, are we at the top of the hype cycle here? Do you think it’s just starting? Where’re we going here?

    Feit: It’s still early, I think. [Laughs]

    Osnat: It’s not even close to the top. I mean, so KubeCon in Barcelona is gonna be – they’re expecting 10,000 attendees.

    Shimel: Wow.

    Osnat: Yes.

    Shimel: I didn’t realize it’s that big.

    Osnat: In Europe, _____ _____ _____ –

    Shimel: Yeah, that’s great to hear.

    Osnat: – _____ people coming from all over, et cetera. These European events are typically less well-attended than the US equivalents, so the last KubeCon in Seattle, I think, was 8,500, which was about double what Austin was the year before, and now they’re doubling Europe. So that’s, obviously, a very promising sign. But not only that, we see a lot of companies that are new to this space, new to Kubernetes, new to containers, new to serverless. And, sometimes, we get leads on our website – people who’ll purchase – and you can tell they’ve already done their homework, so these are not clueless people who are just kicking the tires, that are trying to learn the basics. They’ve already done that and now they’re actually looking for a solution because they know that they’re going to production, with their environment, in – whatever – six months, three months, nine months.

    And so that’s a level of maturity in the market that we didn’t see until recently. And also just the number – I mean, the sheer number of companies that are getting involved is huge and CNCF membership, including end-user organizations, is growing. So all of these are indicators to where it’s going. And I think Andy also wants to say something about our presence at KubeCon.

    Feit: Yeah, two things. I would also – before we talk about KubeCon, I think the other indicator is that most of the application workloads that are out there today are still very much in the data center. A lot of them are still monolithic applications; they haven’t all migrated to the cloud or, if they have, maybe they were done with a lift-and-shift. So I think we’re talking about a market that is poised for significantly more growth and we see a lot of different indicators of that. One example is our customers who deployed, say, a pilot project or a handful of applications one or two years ago are now asking us for enterprise-wide licenses and scaling this out to be “This is our cloud-native platform. We’re gonna do everything on this.”

    But, at KubeCon this year, in Barcelona, as we did in Seattle, where we did a pre-day event called “KubeSec Enterprise Summit,” we will be doing the same thing in Barcelona. You can register on the CNCF site. When you register for KubeCon, you can sign up for KubeSec Enterprise Summit, which is really an event built just for large-scale enterprise customers rolling out into Kubernetes in production. We’ll have customer speakers; we’ll have an analyst speaker; we’ll have panels. It was a terrific event, very positively reviewed in Seattle, and we’re repeating that now in Barcelona on the 20th of May.

    Shimel: That’s great news. You know, and one thing – look, I’m guilty of it; I think you guys are guilty of it too – we call it “KubeCon.” It’s “cloud-native con” too. Right?

    Feit: Absolutely. We do tend to – for those of us who’ve been in the market –

    Osnat: It’s like for a while.

    Feit: Yeah.

    Shimel: No, no, I do it. I’m guilty as charged, but I think there’s gonna come a day where cloud-native maybe is bigger than Kube itself, right?

    Osnat: Yeah. Well, I think it already is, in a sense, right? I mean, Kubernetes is just – it’s a bit like a fleet. You have a – Kubernetes is the aircraft carrier and then you have everything that surrounds it, the frigates and the destroyers and the minesweepers and all of that.

    Shimel: _____ and the battleships. Absolutely.

    Osnat: I think that you can tell I play – I used to play _____ –

    Shimel: I can tell that. Right.

    Feit: And the other thing that I think it comes down to, it’s just harder to say “cloud-native con.”

    Osnat: That’s true.

    Feit: It’s got too many Cs and Ns and _____ –

    Shimel: “KubeCon” does roll. You’re right.

    Osnat: Why don’t we call it “KubeCon cloud-native con”? Not “cloud-native con” or “KubeCon.”

    Shimel: Absolutely. Hey, guys, I know you’re coming to us from Madrid today. You’re at an Aqua team meeting, and so I appreciate you carving out some time, but I wanna be respectful as well. I know you only had 25, 30 minutes, so. First of all – or last of all, congratulations.

    Osnat: Thank you.

    Shimel: You and the whole Aqua team. I tend to think of you two as Aqua, but I know there’s more people behind it.

    Osnat: I mean, _____ _____ people behind this wall. I don’t _____.

    [Laughter]

    Shimel: Yeah. But congratulations to both of you. Congratulations to the whole Aqua team. It’s gonna be interesting to see how it plays out. As I said earlier, we live in interesting times in tech, so I will see you both in KubeCon in Madrid? I mean, in Barcelona.

    Feit: In Barcelona. And if –

    Shimel: In Barcelona. We’re doing videos there for Digital Anarchist, so we’ll have you in and we’ll talk some more.

    Feit: I will be at DockerCon before that if you’re going to San Francisco, so _____ –

    Shimel: I’m not at DockerCon. I have to go to Iceland. But –

    [Crosstalk]

    Feit: All right. Great talking to you again, Alan.

    Shimel: There’s only so many conferences that I can do, but we try. But we’ll talk more. But, for now, Rani and Andy, congratulations. Continued success with Aqua and we’ll talk to you later.

    Feit: Thanks, Alan. Buh-bye, Alan.

    Shimel: All right, guys. This is Alan Shimel for devopsy.kinsta.cloud, Container Journal, and Security Boulevard, with our friends from Aqua Security on their recently-announced $62 million raise of round C. Till next time, bye bye.

    Osnat: Bye.

    Feit: Bye.

    — Alan Shimel

  • DevOps Chat: F5’s NGINX Acquisition, with F5’s Lori MacVittie

    DevOps Chat: F5’s NGINX Acquisition, with F5’s Lori MacVittie

    F5 Networks has acquired NGINX, the leading open source web server player. The move clearly puts F5 in the DevOps space, as well as the open source market.

    In this DevOps Chat, we speak with Lori MacVittie of F5 along with Sidney Rabsatt of NGINX. Some great insights into why this acquisition makes sense for both parties.

    As usual, the streaming audio is immediately below, followed by the transcript of our conversation.

    Transcript

    Alan Shimel: Hey everyone, it’s Alan Shimel, devopsy.kinsta.cloud, DevOps Chat, and you’re listening to another chat. Today’s chat features two folks from an acquisition announced yesterday. In case you haven’t heard, F5 Networks has acquired NGINX. We’re going to hear more about it from two folks. Number one is our friend, Lori MacVittie from F5 Networks. Lori, welcome. Glad to have you here.

    Lori MacVittie: Thanks, happy to be here.

    Shimel: Fantastic. Joining Lori and I is Sidney Rabsatt. Sidney is VP of product at NGINX. Correct, Sidney?

    Sidney Rabsatt: That’s right, and I’m happy to be here too.

    Shimel: Well, everyone’s happy to be here. That’s not a bad thing. Are you happy to be here at the DevOps Chat or are we happy to be here talking about F5’s acquisition of NGINX? Let’s hope it’s both. Lori, give us a little background here. When I saw the deal yesterday. I said, “Wow, that’s a big deal.” I’m not sure – it’s certainly an expansion, up the stack, if you will, for F5.

    MacVittie: Up the stack, deeper into the app. It’s all about application delivery. One of the – Sidney mentioned earlier when we were chatting, building on NGINX’s vision, which as I read it, is flawless application delivery. That’s certainly something that F5 has always aspired to achieve as well, but there’s just pieces in the application stack that we don’t play in, or haven’t played in until yesterday with the acquisition. NGINX is the leading webserver. They’ve got an app server. They do some app delivery. They’re very prevalent in many, many places. So we’re very excited to have them on board to see how we can bridge the gap between those two worlds.

    Shimel: Absolutely. What about the perspective of NGINX? Money is always nice. Don’t get me wrong. What’s the attraction to F5 here?

    Rabsatt: I think there’s at least two sides of it. Working with the folks on this early on, we got to get a sense of the culture of the organization. It felt very compatible. The people we met were great. We had a great time talking, hanging out, sharing ideas. There’s some real optimism about what can be done together. The thing that really gets folks excited, especially on my side of the house, on the NGINX side of the house is the opportunity to do even more faster. We’re a startup. It’s grown to a good size. The set of resources that we have, but looking at F5 and talking to those folks, understanding that they have a shared vision. They see the world very similarly and bringing more resources to bear to execute on the vision that we’re always working towards. It’s something that’s very exciting for us.

    Shimel: I can’t disagree with you. I think we’re in violent agreement on it. It is a great opportunity. I guess the next question is how do we integrate, Lori or Sidney, how do we integrate the NGINX webserver, appserver, and the rest of the toolset into the F5 family? Or do we not?

    Rabsatt: Do you mind if I take a stab at it?

    MacVittie: Go ahead, Sidney, please.

    Rabsatt: Sure. Look, I think on the surface of things it might seem as if there’s a ton of integration that needs to happen, and a lot of overlap needs to be addressed, but quite frankly, I’ve been pleased to see how much complementary capabilities we actually have. Oftentimes, in the marketplace, folks will actually deploy both solutions side by side. It’s because we do slightly different things, both super important to folks. When we think about integration, there’s opportunity for F5 customers to be able to leverage NGINX solutions in places where they couldn’t necessarily before. That should be a net benefit to them.

    There’s the ability for folks that leverage NGINX solutions to take advantage of things that F5 does, that we don’t particularly do. I think that’s going to be another win for them as well. The integration is really focused on making sure we have the right extensions to the product line identified so we can really give customers the things they need to succeed in delivering those end to end applications, and yes, of course, we’re going to be looking to bring the best of both sets of technologies together in the places where it makes sense, but we’ve been pleased to see it’s not as many overlapping things as we might have found in some situations. We’re very optimistic about the path forward here.

    Shimel: So crystallize for me, where do you see things that overlap versus things that play well together? Can you give us some specifics?

    Rabsatt: Sure. Things that play well together fall into the category of “Hey, can I bring better scrutiny, better analytics, to the types of solutions that I might already have with NGINX?” On the NGINX side, I’m sorry – on the F5 side, “Hey, can I leverage solutions to give me a little bit more freedom and flexibility to build my apps wherever or however I might choose to?” So I think there’s some goodness there that folks will definitely get access to.

    On the integration side, you’ll find most of it is just around making sure that the products work seamlessly together. So to the extent of I have multiple devices in my environment. How do I have a single solution that gives me the ability to manage it the way that I need to? We still need to go through the work of understanding exactly how the different buyers are going to need to interact with the different solutions that we use going forward, but all that work is in progress and again, the overlap tends to be the little stuff. Oh, do you draw a report? Oh yeah, we draw a report. Do you guys do that too? Sure. So how do we bring the best of those technologies together? It’s that kind of thing.

    Shimel: Got it. Lori, interested to hear, you heard Sidney here. What do you add to that? What are your feelings on it?

    MacVittie: I think he encompassed everything well. We already – you already see both of us in F5 and NGINX together in a lot of environments. From our perspective, I think we’re looking at – one, continuing to invest and amplify the NGINX vision and what they’re trying to execute on, but also where can we add security? Security is a big deal that has to extend from end to end. Right now, that’s a very disjoint process sometimes. That’s why we keep telling security to shift let. I think this is an opportunity that we’re going to be looking for to be able to do those kinds of things and shift that security even lefter with NGINX.

    Shimel: Absolutely. It’s funny when you think about security being a driving force behind this acquisition. With NGINX being a webserver, that’s been an area and app server, that’s been an area where security has been required and important forever, even going back to IIS in the day, Internet Information Server and stuff. Here’s an area though I was thinking about. So many people in the public cloud use NGINX as their webserver of choice, whether we’re talking about Amazon or even Microsoft Google or any of them. Lori, does F5 maybe view this acquisition as a way to expand your footprint in public cloud? If so, how?

    MacVittie:  I don’t think we looked at exactly how that’s going to play out, and what we’re going to do with that. The webserver is something different from the proxy technology that most of our products are built on. So there’s some differences there in how that works. We’re still looking at roadmaps and trying to figure that out. For right now, we’re just going to keep going ahead with both sets of road maps and moving forward. As we continue to explore what we can do together, we’ll figure out where it makes sense.

    Shimel: Sidney, same – flip side of that coin – of that question to you around public cloud. Do you see an angle where F5 helps there?

    Rabsatt: Yeah, I think F5 already had strong relationships with quite a few of the cloud vendors as do we, and we expect that – we ultimately want to give folks a choice. This all boils down to organizations are trying to build the applications that make sense for them. They want to be able to leverage the best tools and capabilities that help them deliver those applications while giving them the freedom to build the application they want. So whether that is on one cloud, on multicloud, across clouds, and on prem locations, they need that flexibility to do what makes sense for them. A big part of what we’re trying to accomplish here is making sure that F5’s large customer base has the capabilities that NGINX large user base has, which is again, that freedom of flexibility. That means that whether it’s on Amazon Google, Microsoft, any cloud, or any on prem solution, they get to deliver their applications with the security, controls, the visibility that they desire.

    Shimel: Excellent. I’m just – in hybrid situation, what about – one of the hottest topics certainly in technology today is the whole Kubernetes container thing. I know both F5 and NGINX had Kubernetes-related solutions and playing in that market. What, if any, does this acquisition, what if anything does this acquisition bring to that? Either one?

    Rabsatt: I would say it should be a net benefit. NGINX, there was a recent report I saw. It’s in the public domain. NGINX is the most commonly used ingress controller for Kubernetes environments today. If you think about what Kubernetes means for organizations that are building these modern applications, it’s giving them an environment that allows them to build typically microservices-based applications. So getting those applications exposed to the outside world requires the first thing, the foundational element, the hierarchy of need. It’s getting traffic in and out of that Kubernetes environment. How do you do that? Through the ingress capability.

    Our ingress controller is pretty much the number one solution out there for doing that today. That’s the first place people have to start before they get into some of the more complex or exotic things they’d like to be able to do. So our customers, our users are already benefitting from that. It’s allowing them to do what they need to do when it comes to adopting or testing Kubernetes for their own uses.

    Shimel: Sure. Lori, even independent of NGINX, what effect is this whole move to Kubernetes and container-ized environment having on F5’s business?

    MacVittie: Wow. On the business? Don’t really know. No. There is – we see a lot of customers asking. One, they want guidance on how to do this at scale and safely. A lot of our customers are very concerned about security, about performance. How do they bridge those two worlds, coming out of Kubernetes and trying to get into an environment where there’s a lot more traditional apps and infrastructure still supported? It’s trying to bridge those two worlds.

    Our customers are looking at it and they’re bringing it in and they’re adopting it, but they’re also having challenges with the deployment side where NetOps traditionally sit that they don’t have the skills to do the automation. They have problems with integration of the toolsets to build those pipelines. So one of the things that this kind of an acquisition does is bridge that gap. Hopefully we’ll see better integration and easier in and out, both actually in the flow of traffic, but also just between the teams in the businesses, so we think this will help address some of the pains at the people level in organizations by having this end to end delivery chain with both F5 and NGINX.

    Shimel: Sure. Sidney, maybe you would know. What are the plans with some sort of common interface or more integration between the two lines?

    Rabsatt: I’d say it’s still very early on. We have some good ideas, but we’re not really in a position to preview too much. I will say there’s going to be a focus on again, making sure we’re bringing the best of both solutions together. Again, not nearly as much overlap as you might have expected, or we – I should say as we might have expected. Yeah, what we’re looking at is really the opportunity to bring more features to the things we already have, more so than trying to get rid of things. We’re looking forward to getting this innovation stuff underway. We’ve had some very early conversations, but over the next days and weeks, we’re going to be digging into it very deeply.

    Shimel: Makes sense. Lori, so this was as we said right from the outset, what we’re turning to is a move up the application stack. What – is F5 done with that? Will we see more F5 potential either via the acquisition or holistically – organically moving up this stack here in the application world?

    MacVittie: I can’t obviously comment on any kind of [laughter] –

    Shimel: Can’t tell _____ acquisition is. I get that one.

    MacVittie: That’s right. With any company, that’s always a possibility. We have been transforming ourselves in the past year really moving forward with a lot more innovation in terms of exploring things and looking at – we’ve got Aspen mesh going, which is service mesh trying to bring some sanity to Kubernetes inside for scaling. Cloud services, we’ve made a lot of our services as a service. You just hook them up. We’ve been moving deeper into the application stack for a while. This is just going to accelerate that transformation from ADC to application services company.

    Shimel: Understood. Understood. Well, guys it really is exciting. One of the things I sit here at devopsy.kinsta.cloud and Security Boulevard and we go to all of the conferences and we cover all the news, and you hear so much “What’s bleeding edge, bleeding edge, bleeding edge?” We tend to forget, or we overlook what are the nuts and bolts, the bread and butter that keeps the internet and these applications going? It is things like the NGINX web server that is the dominant web server in the world today. It is things like the F5 lineup of software and of _____ actually that have been delivering the internet to the public since 2002 or whatever it is. Lori, you probably know, but so it’s good to see innovation continuing to happen. It’s good to see new combinations taking place.

    I’m excited to see what comes out of – Sidney, as you said, it’s very early on. It’s a day after the acquisition was announced. Maybe we could check back in six months and see how things are progressing along these lines. In the meantime though, just the usual questions. Everyone from NGINX is staying on? There’s not going to be layoffs as part of the consolidations and stuff, or again too early to tell?

    Rabsatt: I mean what we know is F5 is interested in our organization and not just products. They’ve made it very clear they want the vast majority of folks to stay and we expect that to continue to be the case. We look forward to what the future holds together.

    Shimel: Yep, understood. Look, I wish you a lot of success, both you guys individually, as well as F5 and NGINX. It’s an exciting combination. Congratulations to both organizations and Lori, I think congratulations on especially to F5 for really making a real great addition to the family there.

    MacVittie: Thank you. I know there’s a lot of us. We’re just really excited about this and about the future and what we can do together.

    Shimel: Cool, cool, cool. All right, congratulations, guys. We’re going to call it a rap on this edition of DevOps Chat. Lori MacVittie for F5 networks. Sidney Rabsatt for NGINX, soon to be F5 Networks. Thanks for being our guest today on DevOps Chat. Thank you everyone for listening. You’ve just listened to another chat. Bye bye.

     

    — Alan Shimel