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Author: Alan Shimel

  • From CEO Alan Shimel: Futurum Group Acquires Techstrong Group

    From CEO Alan Shimel: Futurum Group Acquires Techstrong Group

    I am happy and proud to announce with Daniel Newman, CEO of Futurum Group, an agreement under which Futurum has agreed to acquire Techstrong Group. The combination of these organizations will create a new, powerful force in the world of tech analysis and media that will scale great heights and do tremendous things.  

    Even though I will continue to man the helm at Techstrong, today’s announcement is a marking stone to a new era. It was a little over 10 years ago I decided to start a tech media company dedicated to DevOps, on the advice of my friends Brad Feld and Rajat Bhargava.   

    After spending almost 20 years in the world of software, infrastructure and security startups, I was done being a vendor. After leaving StillSecure, I performed consulting for several security vendors and end users and spoke at many events. But I was so sure that DevOps was going to change the landscape that I decided to try my hand as a publisher to build a “big tent” to the myriad voices in DevOps.   

    I believed DevOps was going to be the best thing to happen to security (or cyber, as it is called now) for a long time. I had already decided that if the DevOps site went well, we would follow up with a cybersecurity site using the Security Creators Network. One day, perhaps, I will write a book about the actual goings on behind all of this and how we accomplished it without raising any money and were profitable from day one.   

    These past 10 years have been possibly the best of my life. My children grew up and went away to college and beyond. My wife Bonnie and I have seen our horizons expanded beyond what we had only dared to dream. I have traversed the globe (probably several times) and seen much of what this world has to offer.   

    My greatest pleasure, though, has been growing Techstrong to what it is today. Not just the company, but the people. I have been blessed to be able to help so many people realize their dreams, grow their careers and live their lives in ways they couldn’t have before—in ways great and small, to help them be their best. This is what I am most proud of and grateful for.  

    I’ll tell you what else I am proud of and grateful for: You! Allowing us to be your source of technical information and getting to know so many of you over the years has enriched my life beyond description. No matter where I travel in the world, I know I have friends and acquaintances to make my visit even better. I could never thank you enough for that. Building our friendship has been an extraordinary experience, along with building our relationship with clients. 

    “As a longstanding client, we have collaborated with the Techstrong team to consistently create high-value and engaging research studies, webinars, and events. Alan Shimel successfully established a media organization squarely focused on the software development and security industry,” says Sacha Labourey, co-founder and chief strategy officer, CloudBees. “We are eager to experience the enhanced opportunities that the merger of Techstrong and The Futurum Group will offer CloudBees, particularly in terms of technology-focused research and access to its executive-level audience.”

    Now to the next chapter. The winds of change are blowing and have been for more than a year. I have always believed that with change comes opportunity. In even less time than I built Techstrong, Daniel and the Futurum team have built a very successful business. Over the last months and weeks, it’s become crystal clear that our businesses are complementary in so many ways.  As we said in our joint announcement, the synergies here are ballistic.  

    Media—especially tech media—and the analyst world are undergoing profound change. New technology, new consumption habits and new requirements for influence and growth are creating seismic shocks. Yesterday’s leaders are grasping for handholds to steady and support them through the turbulence. Every time these cycles play out, great successes emerge. We are on the cusp of such greatness again. Adding Techstrong to the Futurum Group’s existing business has positioned Futurum to dominate our space.  

    I am excited for this new chapter. Our mission is to build the leader in tech analysis and media, delivering next-generation results and content to market. We will need your help and support. Please join me, Daniel Newman and the rest of the team as we set sail to go where no tech analyst/media firm has gone before (cue the Star Trek theme)! 

  • Meet the DevOps Dozen² 2023 Honorees

    Meet the DevOps Dozen² 2023 Honorees

    We are proud to announce the DevOps Dozen² 2023 honorees. For the past nine years, the DevOps Dozen Awards have celebrated the most outstanding individuals and companies in the DevOps community and their remarkable contributions to the industry. These honorees have demonstrated their leadership and commitment to our community during the past year.

    Congratulations to all those nominated and to the honorees. All of your hard work and dedication are greatly appreciated.

    Without further ado, here are the DevOps Dozen² 2023 honorees:

    DevOps Dozen Community Awards

    1. Best DevOps Industry Implementation: St James’s Place DevOps Implementation

    2. Best DevOps Survey/Analysis/Research: Accelerate State of DevOps Report by DORA

    3. Best DevOps-Related Video Series (video): DevOps Exchange YouTube Channel

    4. Best DevOps-Related Audio Podcast Series: DevOps Paradox

    5. Best DevOps Book/eBook of the Year: Industrial DevOps: Build Better Systems Faster by Dr. Suzette Johnson and Robin Yeman

    6. Top DevOps Evangelist: Fatima Sarah Khalid, Developer Evangelist at GitLab

    7. Best DevOps Transformation (non-vendor): Pera People Science B.V

    8. Best DevOps Event of the Year: swampUP by JFrog

    9. Most Innovative DevOps Open Source Project: Jenkins

    10. DevOps Executive of the Year (non-vendor): Garima Bajpai, Founder of Canada DevOps Community of Practice

    11. Best DevOps Presentation of the Year: It’s Time to Rip Off the Training Wheels and Enable End-to-End Automation (BMC Software)

    12. Best devopsy.kinsta.cloud Article of the Year: DevSecOps: The Fusion of Security and DevOps for Enhanced Software Security by Muneesh Sharma, Neem Consulting Ltd.

    DevOps Dozen Tools and Services Awards

    1. Best End-to-End DevOps Tool/Service: JFrog Software Supply Chain Platform

    2. Best DevOps Repo/GitOps Tool/Service: gitStream by LinearB

    3. Best CI/CD Tool: CloudBees CI/CDRO

    4. Best Value Stream Management Tool: ValueOps by Broadcom

    5. Best Observability Solution: Grafana Cloud Free Tier

    6. Best DevSecOps Solution: GitLab

    7. Best Testing Tool/Service: Tricentis Mobile

    8. Best Kubernetes Platform/Service: Rafay Systems

    9. Best Cloud-Native Security Solution/Service: Sysdig Secure

    10. Best DevOps for Mainframe Solution: BMC AMI DevX tool suite

    11. Best DevOps for DataOps/Database Solution: Percona

    12. Best New DevOps Tool/Service Provider: New Relic Grok (now New Relic AI)

    The honorees will receive both digital badges and physical trophies celebrating their achievements.

    Winners were chosen from among the finalists with general public voting counting for 40% of the final total and our judges’ selections for 60% of the weighted total. The panel of judges went through thousands of votes to choose the winners in each category—it was not an easy task. Many thanks to our judges for making the hard calls and to everyone who has supported the DevOps Dozen² Awards by nominating candidates and voting.

    For more information, please visit the DevOps Dozen² Awards website and stay tuned for the DevOps Dozen² 2024 Awards.

  • KubeCon: DevSecOps and Generative AI

    KubeCon: DevSecOps and Generative AI

    Speaker 1: This is Techstrong TV.

    Alan Shimel: Hi, everyone. Alan Shimel back here at Chicago KubeCon, North America 2023. If you’ve watched our coverage of past KubeCons or RSA or even sometimes on Techstrong TV, you know this fellow right here, he’s my friend, David DeSanto. David, is the… Is it Chief Product Officer?

    David DeSanto: Chief Product Officer.

    Alan Shimel: Yep, at GitLab. And GitLab always has something doing, especially if it’s the 22nd of the month, right?

    David DeSanto: Correct.

    Alan Shimel: How many consecutive 22nd of the month releases are we up to now? Do you know?

    David DeSanto: Over 150. I know that.

    Alan Shimel: Over 150.

    David DeSanto: Yeah.

    Alan Shimel: But GitLab is also a big community member of CNCF, as well as a bunch of the other Linux Foundation-

    David DeSanto: Absolutely.

    Alan Shimel: Foundations as well. And David’s always a wealth of information. So David, I hope I didn’t put too much pressure on you, but welcome.

    David DeSanto: It’s fine. Thank you for having me.

    Alan Shimel: Always a pleasure. So let’s first talk a little bit about the show.

    David DeSanto: Yeah, absolutely.

    Alan Shimel: GitLab is here. What are you seeing, hearing? What are you thinking about?

    David DeSanto: Yeah, so I would say this probably is no surprise to everyone who’s watching, but this year it’s all about security and AI. And sure enough, at GitLab’s booth here, we’re booth M1, it’s also about…

    Alan Shimel: Security and AI.

    David DeSanto: Security, AI, and visibility.

    Alan Shimel: So we’ve been talking a little bit about security and AI too. Surprise. And one of the… We actually, just a quick plug. We actually have a great virtual event coming up in December on AI, and it’s sort of where does AI meet, rubber meet the road. And I want to turn that around to you, David. Look, AI has tremendous potential to help, I think, with security.

    David DeSanto: It does.

    Alan Shimel: I don’t know how much of it is real today. I think a lot of it will be real, certainly. But what’s real today? No holds barred. What’s your take?

    David DeSanto: Yeah, so maybe we’ll start with the AI part of that and then tie it into security. So I always look at new technology through the lens of my parents. They’re both much older than I am. And to them, when I showed them AI, it was magic because to them-

    Alan Shimel: It really was.

    David DeSanto: How is that happening, right? But then I also had to help ground that in reality for them to say, “Well, this is generative AI. It works by predicting the next word based off the series, right?”

    Alan Shimel: Putting one foot in front of the other, right. It’s not sentient.

    David DeSanto: When you look at it though, some people have thought it’s sentient.

    Alan Shimel: No, your parents, I go by my wife’s sister, she’s 74, and yeah, she thought there was a little person in there, but yeah.

    David DeSanto: Yeah, and actually just as a quick note, and the viewers will love this, but I introduced them to it at my sister’s wedding earlier this year. I needed to do a toast. So I had Bard generate the toast for me. And they were like, “How is this happening?” Right?

    Alan Shimel: They’re beautiful, I hear you.

    David DeSanto: But to kind of ground in reality and you realize how generative AI works, you have to then ask yourself what are the best use cases to apply it to? It’s not going to be able to tell you how many pages there are in a book, how many words are in a book. Those aren’t things that are questions it can build, right? But it can help you with tasks that can sometimes be mundane. It can help you with understanding something better. And that’s how I kind of tie it back to AI. So when GitLab started applying AI to our platform, we started in 2021 with code review because that was a huge pain point helping customers get through code review. The next area we looked at was actually security.

    Alan Shimel: Really?

    David DeSanto: And the reason why we did that is that GitLab is, in essence was a developer platform when we started, we’re an enterprise DevSecOps platform today.

    But it was about helping developers be more effective. And developers don’t start their day off by saying, “You know what? I want to write a zero day vulnerability in the application today. I want to make it super vulnerable.” Right? They want to write really good code. And so we said, “We’ve helped shift security left. How do we help now those developers understand that security they’re seeing?” And so we launched at RSA this year, explained this vulnerability where it actually explains the vulnerability, natural language using AI gives them an example of how that vulnerability is exploitable. And it gives them an example of how to resolve it. And those code snippets it shows are in the language the developer’s writing it. And so when I think about AI and security, I think about it making security truly approachable. And if you can do that, then everyone starts to win.

    Alan Shimel: So I would give you guys the Oscar for best use of AI, right? Because I think that’s where it shines. I had a very similar experience with me. So I’m not a coder.

    David DeSanto: And I claim to be one, but it’s been a decade plus since I’ve run any code.

    Alan Shimel: But you know what? Try putting a little code into your generative AI chatbot and say, “Explain this,” or, “What does this mean?” And it goes through line by line and tells you, “That’s what this is for. This is what it’s calling, this is what it’s doing.” And you can be a complete neophyte around let’s say Python or name your language, wherever you want to do it in. And it really teaches you how to code.

    David DeSanto: It does. It does.

    Alan Shimel: Line by line, syntax by syntax. So to me, that’s a great use of AI. That’s what we should be using it for. It’s not Google search. A lot of people I know, they think it’s Google. It’s not Google search.

    David DeSanto: No.

    Alan Shimel: But those kind, and it’s good for writing toasts for a best man or whatever, or an anniversary as someone in my office I know used it and his wife called him on it. But anyway, it’s really great for learning tool. Now, when we talk about AI and security, though, there’s an evil dark side to it.

    David DeSanto: There is.

    Alan Shimel: Which is how do you secure AI?

    David DeSanto: Yeah. And so I love that question. So the first time we spoke, which now is four or five years ago, the question you asked me is, “GitLab and security, explain that.” And we talked about why we’re taking that journey. And today, GitLab is recognized as a security player in the space.

    Alan Shimel: Absolutely.

    David DeSanto: And it’s one of those things that we are very proud about because we helped define what shift left actually meant. And so if you bring this back to AI, the one thing I always tell people is that, yeah, code generation can be scary. You’re not sure, is it writing good code? Is it writing functional code? But if you’re using GitLab, that code gets committed back into your CICD pipeline and the GitLab security scanners run. And now you know that vulnerability has been resolved and nothing new has been introduced. And so if you pair AI with the right things around it, it can be truly powerful. But you’re right, if you’re not doing that and you’re thinking it is the person living inside the machine, you give a little too much trust to it today. AI is not a hundred percent there yet.

    Alan Shimel: Absolutely. Well, so that’s the next segue. Don’t give up any secrets. Let’s not get in trouble. You’re a public company now, but where do you see AI going with GitLab specifically over the next, let’s say between now and RSA in May or something like that?

    David DeSanto: Yeah, great question. So fortunately, we’re a very transparent company, so I can talk about roadmap and not get in trouble, but thank you for making sure that I don’t get myself in trouble with legal.

    Alan Shimel: Or me.

    David DeSanto: So where we see AI going with GitLab is there’s really two paths that we’re exploring. The first is GitLab Duo Chat. We released it back in June, it continues to mature. We’re seeing people gravitate towards wanting to talk to chat and not necessarily click a button in the UI or engage with AI that way. And it makes sense. If you think about it, we’re humans, you and I are talking, we’re having a conversation. That’s how we’d want to engage with it. And that’s why the chatbots are so popular.

    And so what we’re looking to do is continue to take what we’ve released. We have 14 AI features today.

    Alan Shimel: Really?

    David DeSanto: Yeah. Everything from, GitLab is for the entire SDLC. So we have AI assistance in planning, coding, securing, deploying, the whole way across. And so we’re slowly moving those features into chat. An example that explained this vulnerability is a great example. So that’ll be available in chat here shortly. And the reason why we’re doing that is the natural thing is, “Well, help me resolve it. Here’s my code.” And so we want to help AI be not just a pair programmer for the developer, but be that trusted partner that can help write more secure codes. So I would say over the coming several months going into RSA, you’ll see a lot of AI and security and our Duo Chat feature coming together.

    Alan Shimel: I love it.

    David DeSanto: The other area is our-

    Alan Shimel: Wait, hold on one second.

    David DeSanto: Oh, sorry. Yeah, go ahead.

    Alan Shimel: I want to make sure Duo Chat, not everyone out here is going to know Duo Chat.

    David DeSanto: Yeah, so perfect. Yeah. So GitLab Duo is the name of our AI workflows within the GitLab platform.

    Alan Shimel: Got it.

    David DeSanto: The name is based off the fact that it’s you as a user, plus AI makes the AI dynamic duo.

    Alan Shimel: A duo. Okay.

    David DeSanto: It also helps that I’m a huge Batman fan and dynamic duo has that in it.

    Alan Shimel: All right. I love it. I love it.

    David DeSanto: I didn’t tell marketing that though.

    Alan Shimel: No, no, no.

    David DeSanto: No, no. No. Hopefully they don’t watch this. They’ll now know my secret.

    Alan Shimel: What does marketing ever? I’m only kidding. I’m only kidding. I love my marketing people.

    David DeSanto: So that’s the name of the suite of those AI workflows. And so there are things like explain this vulnerability. You’re explaining of codes for, we actually haven’t explained this code.

    Alan Shimel: I love it.

    David DeSanto: We’ll explain the code. We have our code suggestions, which is going to generate either code completion, your cursors in the file, it’s reading what’s before and after the file’s open and recommending code.

    Alan Shimel: I love that.

    David DeSanto: Or code generation where you can actually do comment decode, that’s actually the most popular for our users. As well as things in helping you do your planning, summarizing conversations, helping with CI configurations and beyond. So that’s what GitLab Duo is, and Duo Chat is part of that. And so that’s the chatbot you can launch within GitLab’s UI.

    Alan Shimel: Now, is there a way to kind of implant this into your IDE, or?

    David DeSanto: And that’s the last thing I was going to mention that we’re working on. Yeah. So the other thing-

    Alan Shimel: You didn’t pay me to say that.

    David DeSanto: I did not.

    Alan Shimel: Okay.

    David DeSanto: I did not.

    Alan Shimel: Go ahead.

    David DeSanto: It’s almost like you read our GitLab issues and read our roadmap.

    Alan Shimel: We may not coordinate our wardrobes. But we do-

    David DeSanto: We didn’t. I do wish I would’ve worn the fall shirt today.

    Alan Shimel: Next time.

    David DeSanto: We will. Next time we’ll do that.

    Alan Shimel: All right.

    David DeSanto: But anyway, we’re going to be bringing Duo Chat to the IDEs. So today we have it as an experimental feature and we’re trying it at GitLab today to make sure it works. But it’ll be available in all the IDEs that we support today, including the JetBrains Suite, Visual Studio, VS Code, Neovim, and the GitLab IDE.

    Alan Shimel: I love it. I love that. Fantastic.

    David DeSanto: But by the way, that’ll also then bring those same actions that are in the GitLab UI into chat in your IDE, so you can actually explain the vulnerability, explain the code, all those things directly where you’re working. You don’t have to leave your IDE to get that.

    Alan Shimel: While we’re on this subject. A lot of people out here, look, there’s so much, there’s so much controversy around AI. Is it going to kill off humanity? Is it going to take everyone’s jobs away? Is it going… My feeling is, it’s not… Will it do some jobs? Yeah, but for the most part, it’s going to make a lot of people who do these jobs 10x more effective. How do you view it, and how does GitLab view this, in a world where chat and Duo Chat is built in and AI is built into the entire GitLab SDLC pipeline.

    David DeSanto: Yeah.

    Alan Shimel: Does it really 10x these people?

    David DeSanto: So that’s our target. And to give a little context for everyone, GitLab Ultimate, which is our top tier, includes every future GitLab has including AI. We did a survey of our customers. We had an independent company do that. They found that people using GitLab Ultimate get a 7x boost in efficiency for their organization.

    Alan Shimel: So you’re over halfway there.

    David DeSanto: Yeah. And an ROI within six months of what they paid for it. And so when we asked ourselves, “How does AI help?” We set ourselves a 10x goal. So continuing to accelerate that efficiency. And our customers using GitLab today and GitLab Duo are talking about that. They’re talking about getting through code review faster. They’re talking about resolving vulnerabilities faster. And to the first part of your comment, we don’t see AI as a replacement for your team members. We see it as helping them be more effective, removing some of the mundane tasks that can slow them down and unlocking their true potential.

    Imagine a world where your developers don’t have to worry about doing things like creating the template for the code and now they can just go in and write the actual strategic parts. And same thing across the entire software development lifecycle. I personally benefit from Duo almost on a daily basis, in that as the CPO of the company, I get pinged on our GitLab issues or GitLab Epic or whatever, and someone will say, “What are your thoughts on this?” And I’ll look at it and I go, “How long is this?” And I’ll go up and say, “PDF it.” And it’s like it’s a hundred pages, the issue’s been open eight months.

    Alan Shimel: Summarize.

    David DeSanto: Customers are coming, yeah. So I say-

    Alan Shimel: I do the same thing.

    David DeSanto: “Summarize the discussion,” right?

    Alan Shimel: We’re connected. I do the same thing.

    David DeSanto: And so that’s where I see it. That made me more efficient. I now didn’t spend two hours doing that.

    Alan Shimel: I’m doing the same exact… As CEO at Techstrong, I’m inundated. Inundated with content. “Should we publish this? Is this the right tone? Here’s the abstracts.” And a lot of times, and I don’t mean to sound callous, but I just don’t have the time to go through it all. But a summary, man, just give it to me in five bullets.

    David DeSanto: Right. And by the way, the other part of that that I use is that it could also help generate descriptions and tasks. And so-

    Alan Shimel: A bot.

    David DeSanto: Right? So I’ll just say, “I read all that. I have an action, remind me to do this. Help me create the task for it,” and so forth. But you are the great example, right? Same thing with the developer, a security person. There are other things that your brainpower should be used for and why spend the time doing those things that-

    Alan Shimel: I agree.

    David DeSanto: Truly are not moving Techstrong forward or that company’s application for it.

    Alan Shimel: We’ll come up with a, we have a theme for given event, a virtual or in-person event. We need the abstract. I can have other people write the abstract, but it doesn’t really capture my vision for it. I find just putting that into bot, into a chat, it nails it. But here’s another thing that I think is, and again, for those of you out there who don’t use generative AI yet, you should. Don’t be afraid to give it a nice long prompt or give it a lot of back. Because the more info you give it, the better it kicks back to you.

    David DeSanto: It does. It actually goes off feedback and you can like something or thumbs it down.

    Alan Shimel: That was another kind of revelation. And I think it’d probably work the same way with code.

    David DeSanto: It actually does. So the backend of GitLab Duo is monitoring for the amount of code you keep. So do you accept the recommendation? Do you not? It also measures retention. So is that code still there after you move on? And same thing with the chat. So I’ve actually had to say to it, and there’s a joke on the internet about you have to be polite back to the chatbot. I actually just recommend it because I’ve seen that documentary Terminator with Skynet. I’m just afraid-

    Alan Shimel: One day they might come for you.

    David DeSanto: You want to suck up to them now, so when they take over, they remember you.

    Alan Shimel: They’ll remember it.

    David DeSanto: But no, I’ll actually say back, “That’s interesting, but have you thought about this? And here’s why.” And then I see that it actually learns from it because we constantly fine tune models based off that feedback. Right?

    Alan Shimel: I agree.

    David DeSanto: So, absolutely. Please be kind to the chatbots. GitLab Duo will always be chat to you.

    Alan Shimel: Be kind to your chatbots. And be kind to everyone else, right?

    David DeSanto: If it is-

    Alan Shimel: Especially in this day with everything in our world going on.

    David DeSanto: If it’s anything, you should be polite. There you go.

    Alan Shimel: If you can be anything, be polite. Non-AI stuff, what’s your impressions of the show this year?

    David DeSanto: I’ve enjoyed it so far. RSA conference used to be my favorite conference to go to. I think KubeCon is now tied for first and might sometimes edge it out. And the main reason why is that here is one of the few times I feel like it reminds me of the Black Hat Conference back in the day.

    Alan Shimel: Back in the day.

    David DeSanto: You’ve got all the, it is not meant to sound negative, but the doers here, right?

    Alan Shimel: Yeah.

    David DeSanto: You’re having real conversations with developers who are trying to understand operations better, security professionals who are here trying to make sure they’re supporting developers’, operations. Same thing with operations. So you get this really good mix of people and it just reminds me of almost like a large startup, if that’s a good way to look at it.

    Alan Shimel: Yeah, no, there’s an energy that’s palpable, that I think works.

    David DeSanto: But I do want to just make sure RSA, I still love you.

    Alan Shimel: We’ll be there, May 6th-

    David DeSanto: I’ll be there as well.

    Alan Shimel: Is our DevSecOps. It’s going to be all about AI in the future of security, our event as well as the larger AI event all week. Or the larger RSA event all week. What about re:Invent? You guys are going to be at re:Invent?

    David DeSanto: We will be at re:Invent. I will personally not be there.

    Alan Shimel: No?

    David DeSanto: No. I actually, I hit the point where this is my last whole week of the year. I’ve been gone three weeks a month for this entire year. I want to stay married.

    Alan Shimel: I hear you.

    David DeSanto: I want to spend some time with my dogs. And so I’m taking December and most of January off from travel.

    Alan Shimel: Good for you.

    David DeSanto: Yeah.

    Alan Shimel: I’m getting a new dog Friday.

    David DeSanto: What kind of dog are you getting?

    Alan Shimel: I guess I could share it. So we’ve had bulldogs for about almost 30 years.

    David DeSanto: Okay.

    Alan Shimel: Our last one passed away in May. She was 14 and a half.

    David DeSanto: Actually, I think you and I talked about that.

    Alan Shimel: Yeah. So it took a little while for us to get back in the, I need a dog, but I need a dog. So it’s a new bulldog puppy. Her name is Kaia, K-A-I-A, which means sea in Hawaiian. Her father’s name is Ocean.

    David DeSanto: Oh, wow.

    Alan Shimel: And yeah, I’ll post pictures.

    David DeSanto: Okay. I think I’ve shared this to you before, but we have two rescues. They’re both Chihuahua mixes.

    Alan Shimel: Oh, yeah. Yeah.

    David DeSanto: One’s really dumb and the other one’s really smart, so [inaudible 00:18:47].

    Alan Shimel: It’s good mix. Yeah.

    David DeSanto: I will tell you, when I get home, they’re so excited to see me and they get really sad when I’m packing, so.

    Alan Shimel: There’s nothing like the love of a dog.

    David DeSanto: I completely agree.

    Alan Shimel: No doubt.

    David DeSanto: But about the conference.

    Alan Shimel: Yeah, we went off there, but go ahead.

    David DeSanto: Completely derailed us.

    Alan Shimel: Yes.

    David DeSanto: So for GitLab, a couple things. So if people are watching and they’re here, they want to see it. If not, check it out after the conference on our website. We brought our product analytics feature to market. We already have some customers adopting it and we’re demoing it. And I wanted to share it here because KubeCon’s also about visibility and you can’t close the SDLC without user feedback. And so similar to how we have observability, just about the application running in production, the value stream analytics and value stream management. This is now user feedback. So as part of GitLab CICD, we can embed telemetry into the application. So when it’s deployed, it can connect back to GitLab and start giving you data about your monthly active, daily active usage, the return rate of those users.

    Alan Shimel: This is available now?

    David DeSanto: It is available now.

    Alan Shimel: Or you’re just demoing?

    David DeSanto: No, it’s available. It is available.

    Alan Shimel: What do you call that?

    David DeSanto: Well, we love our boring names at GitLab, it’s one of our values. So it’s just called GitLab Analytics.

    Alan Shimel: GitLab Analytics. Okay.

    David DeSanto: Yeah, GitLab Product Analytics to be specific.

    Alan Shimel: All right.

    David DeSanto: But yeah, we started using it earlier this year for our handbook and we’re able to learn about how our users use the handbook, our employees and team members. And so I’m excited how make this available because other people want to understand how their apps are being used. Long term, we’ll be able to pull in things like retention rate, user adoption journey metrics. But today it’s just those raw metrics like the active usage, return rate, the graphs of how the usage is going. But we’re very excited to be demoing it here. It’s really cool.

    Alan Shimel: Absolutely. Very cool. GitLab user analytics.

    David DeSanto: Yep.

    Alan Shimel: David, it’s always a pleasure, my friend.

    David DeSanto: Love our chats.

    Alan Shimel: You know what? I spoke to you. We’re going to do another chat with David before you leave for two months with the dogs.

    David DeSanto: Yeah. I will be working, for everyone. I’m not taking time, I’m just staying home. I’ll be-

    Alan Shimel: Okay. You’re just not on the road.

    David DeSanto: Yeah, I’ll be working from home that entire time.

    Alan Shimel: I was going to say that’s a lot of vacation time.

    David DeSanto: No, no, no. I did have my first big vacation since the pandemic though.

    Alan Shimel: Really?

    David DeSanto: Yeah, we went to Bar Harbor for two weeks and hiked Acadia National Park.

    Alan Shimel: Oh, that’s beautiful.

    David DeSanto: Yeah.

    Alan Shimel: And when was this?

    David DeSanto: End of August. Last two weeks of August.

    Alan Shimel: Oh, so it’s still nice there.

    David DeSanto: It was very beautiful, but-

    Alan Shimel: Not really peak color season there yet. But beautiful time, summer.

    David DeSanto: But we’ll definitely can connect because I’m working. I’m just not on the road.

    Alan Shimel: But we’re going to have you on Techstrong TV because you guys have more news.

    David DeSanto: We do.

    Alan Shimel: That we can’t talk about yet.

    David DeSanto: Yeah, that’s a good teaser. Everyone tune in.

    Alan Shimel: That was my, that’s what we call it.

    David DeSanto: For the big news. It’s the hook.

    Alan Shimel: That’s what we call it in the industry. My hook.

    David DeSanto: Going back to our marketing friends. That’s the hook.

    Alan Shimel: All right. Hey, we better take a break here. We’re getting a little loony. We’ll be back. We’re live in Chicago at KubeCon with our friends at GitLab. We’ll be right back.

  • KubeCon 2023: Elevating Observability

    KubeCon 2023: Elevating Observability

    Speaker 1: This is Techstrong TV.

    Alan Shimel: Hey everyone. We’re live back here at KubeCon. I hope you’ve been enjoying our coverage today, Mitchell Ashley, our CTO and a GM of Techstrong Research. And I have been kind of splitting the duties. Just we’re that booked with people. I don’t know, there’s over 10,000 people here. I’m going to guess there’s 12 to 15,000 people.

    Alex Burkhardt: Yeah, there’s a lot of people.

    Alan Shimel: … At the event. Maybe more I’ll know more. I’ll find out tonight. But anyway, let me introduce you to our next guest. His name is Alex Burkart. Alex is with Observe Inc. Alex, welcome to Techstrong TV. Thanks for being here with us at KubeCon.

    Alex Burkhardt: Yeah, thanks Alan. I appreciate you guys taking some time to talk to me today.

    Alan Shimel: Absolutely. So let’s start with this. Let’s start with Alex.

    Alex Burkhardt: Yeah.

    Alan Shimel: What do you do at Observe?

    Alex Burkhardt: Yeah, so at Observe I run our technical customer facing team. We call it field engineering. And we work with customers from the first interaction when they’re in the sales cycle to figure out if observes a great solution for them, all the way to success and renewal and helping them realize value from their investment in our partnership.

    Alan Shimel: Okay. I mean, so you’re at that role, but let’s tell a little bit about more your personal journey.

    Alex Burkhardt: Oh yeah. So I started as a computer scientist actually in the Navy.

    Alan Shimel: Really?

    Alex Burkhardt: Yeah. I went to the Naval Academy, got a computer science degree, and they said, that’s great, go drive some ships.

    Alan Shimel: Such is life in the Navy, what do you expect?

    Alex Burkhardt: And then my journey brought me to Silicon Valley after I did some cybersecurity work for the Navy. And what I love more importantly than anything else is helping people find a way to use technology to solve a problem that makes their life better.

    Alan Shimel: Excellent. Now, when did you come to Observe?

    Alex Burkhardt: I’ve been at Observe for more than three years now. Yeah, I was employee 28. I think if my numbers are right, pre customers, in fact.

    Alan Shimel: Really early.

    Alex Burkhardt: I think when I started, we signed our first customer.

    Alan Shimel: Good for, good for you. Good for them. So we don’t have to assume, I know for a fact there are people out here who don’t know, Observe from, have never observed Observe. Tell them. How would you describe what Observe is and does to our audience?

    Alex Burkhardt: That’s a great question, Alan. So at Observe, what we realized is observability is a data problem. So we started by building a data company. What we wanted to figure out is can we bring a solution to market that allows customers to send any data they’d like to correlate it and interact with it in a way that allows them to get more value out of it more quickly. And what we’ve done is we’ve brought a solution to market that unifies the observability tooling into one platform that allows you to send logs, metrics, traces, and any other type of data structure or unstructured that you’d like to keep in your observable universe into one tool, one data store.

    Alan Shimel: Love it. And before we jump into news and stuff, for people who want to just say, hey, I’d like to just see what their website is, what’s the URL?

    Alex Burkhardt: Yeah, our website is www.observeinc.com.

    Alan Shimel: So it’s observeinc.com.

    Alex Burkhardt: Observeinc.com. We are Observe Inc technically. So observeinc.com.

    Alan Shimel: Makes sense to me. All right, we’ve got all that out of the way, Alex, let’s jump in. Now, you guys recently announced some new product feature releases. Why don’t we jump in right there and see what’s that about?

    Alex Burkhardt: Our last release was called Hubble, and Hubble is significant for a couple of reasons. One, naming after the Telescope, one of the things that we want to do is help people elevate their observability. And that came in two specific forms.

    Alan Shimel: I get it. I just got to ask, is the next release called Web?

    Alex Burkhardt: We have considered other satellites, and in fact, we had Erica on our launch. She was actually a NASA scientist.

    Alan Shimel: Very cool. All right.

    Alex Burkhardt: One of the things that we know is very important to our customers is if we bring a solution to market and it’s very, very powerful, is it easy to use and are we taking advantage of the latest and greatest technology that’s emerging in the market? On the ease of use side, one of the things that this Hubble launch and we did, we call it a launch included, was the recognition that when we introduced our logs in our metrics and our tracing explorer, we’ve seen an enormous increase in users engaging in the platform. And we supercharge that by adding one additional layer, which is how we leverage GPT or AI in our platform. And that happens in four specific locations. We have a chat bot that allows you to get guidance on how to use the tool, will actually allow the AI to write any of our query language for you if you’d like to do that. We call that copilot.

    We also have two cool functionalities in terms of making your data more actionable. You can click on a field and observe and ask Ollie or Ollie GPT specifically to explain what an error means and it will actually return an answer that helps you stop having to copy and paste into Google and do outside investigations. The last thing that’s most interesting is we leverage GPT to allow users to separate out their data and do those hard parsing and Reg X challenges that no one likes writing Reg Xs and anyone that has written them knows that regx101.com is their friend, and we wanted to kind of bring that into the product and make that easy for customers to use.

    Alan Shimel: Very cool. Very cool. Now this was released not here at the show, it was released earlier in the month.

    Alex Burkhardt: October 4th.

    Alan Shimel: What’s been the feedback?

    Alex Burkhardt: Well, we’ve more than doubled our monthly active users since we’ve released that.

    Alan Shimel: Really?

    Alex Burkhardt: Yeah.

    Alan Shimel: Since October 4th?

    Alex Burkhardt: Technically since late September. But yes.

    Alan Shimel: Wow.

    Alex Burkhardt: It’s really simple. We listen to our customers and we really care about what they say and how they experience ourselves on our platform. And when we say we’re focusing on ease of use, we mean it.

    Alan Shimel: So the entrepreneur in me just has to ask you.

    Alex Burkhardt: Okay.

    Alan Shimel: What were you waiting for?

    Alex Burkhardt: It’s very easy to make very quick, bad decisions. It’s a lot harder to take a data-driven approach to how to build a product better. And when we approach any problem at Observe, and it’s built into our culture as we first of all figure out this is an important problem, how can I measure the impact I can make on this problem? And that’s how we measured usability. Now for AI, we kind of knew that it was going to be something special and it could help. We’re still figuring out exactly how to measure the impact there, but every decision we make at Observe is grounded in what’s best for our customers and how do we help make the market better.

    Alan Shimel: So how much of this phenomenal growth in such a short period of time do you think is just attributed to riding the AI wave, if you will?

    Alex Burkhardt: That increase in active user growth actually wasn’t tied to the AI release. It was more to the ease of use functionality that we brought. And I think that’s important for any product, but more specifically, one as powerful as ours. When you’re solving big data problems, people get exposed to big data. And one of the things we thought very deeply about is how do we take the experience that a user has to have to get to the outcome they want and narrow that down and give them an obvious path to go through so that they don’t have to deal with all of the problems if they just want to come in and check their logs and see what’s not working. Sometimes it’s the simplest question of, hey, is it easy to do this in the tool? And when we decided ourselves that it wasn’t easy enough, then we started making some really serious changes and that was backed by every single one of our customers agreeing with us back in the active user growth.

    Alan Shimel: Sure. That’s fine. That’s phenomenal, man. Alex, I can’t look for those out here. This is impressive. Let’s talk a little bit about KubeCon here now. I mean, it’s only day one of the expo floor open and everything. What are you hearing from the crowd, from the attendees?

    Alex Burkhardt: Yeah, that’s a great question. This is my second KubeCon. I was new to it last year when we were in Detroit, and I really love this conference, Alan.

    Alan Shimel: Yeah, it’s great. It’s a great community.

    Alex Burkhardt: It’s a great community. It’s a great conference. And frankly, when people come up to our booth and want to talk to us, they want to talk about what we do. There’s not a lot of tire kickers. Everyone that’s here seems to be operators, people that are experienced and steepen the problem. And I love whenever someone comes up and talks to us. I think the other thing I’ve seen in this particular venue specifically, the room is packed. It’s crowded, so crowded that I think that we’re going to have to have a bigger footprint next year.

    Alan Shimel: Observers or the whole?

    Alex Burkhardt: Both.

    Alan Shimel: Yeah. Well, the problem is there’s a pretty big convention center. I mean, short of breaking into sort of a two different exhibit halls, which RSA used to do that. Now it’s one big continuous one. It’s hard. The other thing I will tell you, so we do the North American and the European. So in Amsterdam in the spring, they actually said, look, I think it was 12,000 was the number. At 12,000 they stopped selling tickets. They did a waiting list and a lot of people didn’t get to the show. They were on the waiting list. As anti-business as that sounds, I wouldn’t be surprised if they did something similar.

    Alex Burkhardt: Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, the quality of conversations and the quality of attendee keep the quality super high. And you asked about some of the conversations we’re having when people come by. It’s a variety of things and a couple of themes that I see. I’m curious if other people that have come on the show have said the same, but people continue to talk to us about saving money. They want to do more with less.

    Alan Shimel: That’s the big thing today.

    Alex Burkhardt: [inaudible 00:09:23].

    And I think they also want to figure out, do we need all of the tools? Is there a way we can both get some hard dollar savings and some soft dollar savings. By compressing some tooling and aligning teams we’re also seeing a lot of push and the DevOps teams are getting more involved in security conversations as well. Which I guess-

    Alan Shimel: No, no, that there’s no doubt.

    Alex Burkhardt: As a former security practitioner, if you had asked me five years ago if I thought these two markets would converge, I would not have said yes. Now I think it’s inevitable.

    Alan Shimel: I think it’s already happened, right? So there’s a lot of convergence going on. There’s security with DevOps into what we call DevSecOps. But there’s also, there was a time, and I’ve been going to these conferences now before Covid, so I don’t know, four or five years. There was a time where cloud native was very developer-centric, not as much centric, but it was very distinct from DevOps. There was DevOps and there was cloud native and then there was security. So you look at a company like ours, right? We have devopsy.kinsta.cloud, cloud native now, security boulevard.

    And I always knew there was an inherent overlap between them, but we’ve seen much more than an overlap now. We’ve seen a conversion around this with security being a primary concern of people. And you don’t do cloud native today without doing DevOps.

    Alex Burkhardt: Agreed.

    Alan Shimel: And everything getting pushed out today, especially Greenfield, not Brownfield stuff. It’s predominantly probably 85% or better cloud native.

    Alex Burkhardt: Yeah, I think that’s another thing I’ve seen too as well. Many, many customers are adopting the cloud native terminology, setting goals in those languages and words.

    Alan Shimel: Now, multi-threaded, no doubt. Container based, the whole cloud native thing. And now what I think we’re starting to see and we see, look, you’re naming your company’s Observe. It’s not just the architecture and development being cloud native, but the cloud native aspect of the operations of ops. Forget dev, forget dev ops, ops.

    Alex Burkhardt: It even touches revenue. So one of the things that we see very often is do the nature of how our platform can process data. We take technical telemetry from a customer’s application. We also take business data. Sometimes customers ask us, how can you Observe, help us give our customers a better experience? Well, one of the ways is we can tell you when a particular customer is hurting, when a customer has a challenge or help you reframe all these very deep technical jargon and things that are happening into the context of how does this impact the customer’s experience? How am I able to get proactive? Is what I’m doing in my infrastructure plan having a net positive impact on my customers, on my users?

    And those are questions that previously companies I don’t think they thought they could answer. And when they start working with us, they start seeing a path to that. And I love that. We have some customers even completely away from the DevOps side, that send us shipping data just because they want to know, can I make a support dashboard for my low level support employees so that they can be more efficient with their time and our data? It’s such a cool convergence. I agree with you. I love that word convergence.

    Alan Shimel: It really is. Let’s talk a little bit about observability though too. So over the last two years, so there was a KubeCon in LA during around Covid time that was a little dicey. Then there was the one in Europe, then got canceled. Then there was Detroit, then Amsterdam here. We’ve really seen the observability market just explode, right?

    Alex Burkhardt: Yeah.

    Alan Shimel: Prometheus. What’s the other, I’m drawing a blank. The other big observability open source. OpenTelemetry.

    Alex Burkhardt: OpenTelemetry. Yes. Everyone-

    Alan Shimel: I think of the second and third biggest projects of the gazillion projects in CNCF now. Right?

    Alex Burkhardt: That’s such a good point. I remember when OpenTelemetry was OpenTracing and it was still kind of a fractured project. If you asked us three years ago if we thought that open telemetry would be the way, we weren’t super sure a year into that. So two years ago we were like, yeah, this is the direction. It’s solid.

    Alan Shimel: No doubt about it. You look and you can’t see this at home guys because all you’re seeing is here, but there’s a-

    Alex Burkhardt: All our beautiful faces.

    Alan Shimel: … Big floor out there, but so much of it is based now on this. Really good stuff, really good stuff.

    Alex Burkhardt: I think the other thing, observability as a vernacular is kind of emerging even at the higher level in the business. By definition observability is, can I tell something about a system by looking at its outputs? And one of the things as we’re moving closer to cloud native is more and more systems have outputs and that kind of builds on that data problem I mentioned and why we were founded. So I look forward to seeing how this problem space changes in the next year.

    Alan Shimel: Oh, I think we’re just, look, when you start, you guys are already doing it with gen AI and stuff. You start adding gen AI to this stuff, we start putting more focus on it. We’re in for an interesting times. What’s the Irish proverb? May you live in interesting times.

    Alex Burkhardt: Yes.

    Alan Shimel: Definitely interesting times. Anyway, Alex, thanks for joining us here live at KubeCon. This is Observe Inc. So let me again observeinc.com. Check it out. Hey, they’re doing amazing things. This new release, something that gets twice as many new visitors right? In a couple of weeks, a month. It’s got to doing something right.

    Alex Burkhardt: Yeah.

    Alan Shimel: All right, we’re going to take a break. We’re live at KubeCon in Chicago. I think we have one or two more videos before we wrap for today. We’ll be right back.

  • KubeCon 2023: Telemetry and Data Management

    KubeCon 2023: Telemetry and Data Management

    Speaker 1: This is Techstrong TV.

    Alan Shimel: Hey everyone. We’re back here at KubeCon and it’s bustling, man. It’s a crazy big floor with a lot of people walking around, so we hope you like this. This is a little different than we usually do. Usually people can’t see the background because the cameras face this way, but we usually have sort of the typical background that you see at some of these other booths. But we wanted to give people kind of a flavor that we’re alive here.

    Tucker Callaway: We’re in the middle of it.

    Alan Shimel: We’re in the middle of it. So kind of like if you ever watch Sunday night football, they always have that. So that’s what we were shooting for. But anyway, let me introduce you to Tucker Callaway. Tucker is the CEO of a company called Mezmo. Now, some of you may have heard of, I think it was Log DNA.

    Tucker Callaway: Before. Yep.

    Alan Shimel: And they pivoted. Was it about four years ago?

    Tucker Callaway: About two years ago now.

    Alan Shimel: Two years ago.

    Tucker Callaway: I’ve been here for four, but big change was two years ago, renamed.

    Alan Shimel: Renamed to be Mezmo and a slightly different mission, let’s call it. And then I had a chance to catch up with Tucker at RSA last, I guess it was last April.

    Tucker Callaway: April. Yeah.

    Alan Shimel: This year it’s May. So I think it was around then last year. And for those of you who want to catch that interview, it’s actually available on Techstrong TV. If you look up RSA 2023, it’s there. But so Tucker, before we get into that, let’s back up. Mezmo. Not everyone out here. Look, not everyone out here knew Log DNA either, so don’t worry about it.

    Tucker Callaway: Fair enough. Yeah.

    Alan Shimel: Let’s start there. Let’s talk about the mission.

    Tucker Callaway: Yeah, so the mission of Mezmo is essentially to help people with their telemetry data. So we’ve found that there’s really kind of three main problems in the telemetry data space. There’s too much of telemetry data. It’s not in the right format. It’s not in the right location. So that was kind of one of our founding kind of principles of solving.

    Alan Shimel: Yeah, I think that.

    Tucker Callaway: Solving the problem.

    Alan Shimel: Those were three rock solid.

    Tucker Callaway: Hard to debate.

    Alan Shimel: Hard to debate. That’s the good way of putting that. And also, quite frankly, all three problems are like they compound each other.

    Tucker Callaway: They do.

    Alan Shimel: So it’s like you have too much data. That’s a big problem, but we have too much data that we don’t know how to categorize, so that exponentially makes that problem worse. So these are-

    Tucker Callaway: Compounding problems. No question about it.

    Alan Shimel: No doubt about it. So when we were at RSA, you felt like you were kind of on the cusp of a realization, right? You were going to help customers. Why don’t you? Well, you tell the story better than me.

    Tucker Callaway: So as we were talking about earlier, we had just launched this new product capability, the telemetry pipeline at RSA. We’ve got a lot of great customers and great experience since then. When we think about the core value of what it provides, it helps people with cost, it helps people get better insights and helps people enforce compliance. What we were surprised by though in the last couple months, is how little people actually understand of their data.

    In fact, we’ve put a lot of time and effort as an industry into getting control of our applications and getting control of our infrastructure, but we haven’t really gotten control of our telemetry data yet, and that’s like the big opportunity that we see. But with that, in order to get that value I described, people didn’t need to understand their data better. And so that was a big revelation for us.

    And we just launched our data profiling capability that helps people categorize and understand baseline, to do the schema management for their data, which is a really strong foundation for data ops principles applied to telemetry data. Then the next thing we found after we solved that problem was now that people understood their data and they were able to optimize it because they understood it. They also realized that the context and telemetry data changes rapidly. So for example, you don’t want to store all this data because you don’t need it until you need it, and then you really need it.

    Alan Shimel: I’ll take a little, they do want to store the data because people are data hoarders.

    Tucker Callaway: The data hoarder. Yeah.

    Alan Shimel: It’s when they get hit with the bill for storing all that data, they say, “Wait a second, I don’t need all this data. Not at that price.”

    Tucker Callaway: Something has to give somewhere.

    Alan Shimel: Exactly.

    Tucker Callaway: And so what we realized though was if you take the bookend of this value, we think of as understand, optimize and respond, we talked about understand and optimize the response stage was a really important one for us. So when new context comes in, the pipeline can change its behavior and change its optimizations to account for the current flow of data and the current needs. So if you’re sampling down to 20% and you see an event, you see performance, you can rehydrate, reprocess, dynamically change the responsiveness of the pipeline and get all the data to the right location for the right people, which helps address the cost problem, but also gives you the full visibility that you need.

    Alan Shimel: If one was going to do a business school case study on this, someone who’s not from this industry would say, “Hey, just the fact that you discovered that most of these organizations don’t even know how much data or what data they have would be enough to build a company around.”

    Tucker Callaway: Yeah, I’d like to think so.

    Alan Shimel: No, it’s logical. It makes sense, but it’s not, it’s the threshold. Because I think you’d hit the nail on the head here, Tucker, which is once they recognize that, now there’s a whole new vista of realization for them of, “Holy mackerel, I got all this data, now I want to start understanding it. Wow. I’m seeing stuff I never thought I’d see. Maybe I intuitively thought I had, but I got the goods now.”

    Tucker Callaway: We like to think of that as being mesmerizing, right?

    Alan Shimel: Okay, I love it. Mesmerized by Mezmo.

    Tucker Callaway: I couldn’t not take the shot, but that was just-

    Alan Shimel: Yeah, that was your shot.

    Tucker Callaway: That’s the derivative of the name.

    Alan Shimel: I feel used. I feel used.

    Tucker Callaway: I got back into it a little bit.

    Alan Shimel: So now you’re mesmerized and now like, “Oh my God, what can I do with this?” And that really becomes the business. And I guess that’s now where you are.

    Tucker Callaway: The next step for us is clearly that. Yeah, and I think there’s two plays on that, too. There’s a, “What do I do with it? Help me, tell me what to do. Give me the best practices that from all of your customers, what should I do?” And so we’ll be coming out probably later in the spring with something that actually allows you to simulate how that data might look when optimization’s applied to it so you can start to make those decisions more effectively.

    But then the second phase of that, too, is that also won’t be sufficient for certain organizations that want to look at their data as a strategic advantage. And they’re going to be looking for ways to take actions and drive more insights out of that data. And so the way we see that, we see that through recipes. We’ll give you the standard offerings, but then you have the ability to go in and edit as code and go do the things you need to do to go drive more value out of that data. If you’re ready for advanced yoga moves in the data space.

    Alan Shimel: Got it, got it, got it. My background is security.

    Tucker Callaway: Yep.

    Alan Shimel: Started a security company in 2001, and it was right when we were moving from IDS to IPS. So intrusion detection to intrusion prevention. Same thing with vulnerability management. We were moving from just finding vulnerabilities to patching, remediating, not always patching, remediating. Seemed like who wouldn’t want that? No brainer, right? Just don’t tell me I’m getting attacked. Block the thing. By the time you tell me, the attack went through. Don’t just tell me you found a vulnerability, make sure I’m not getting exploited. But a funny thing that I learned in that was a lot of people say, “Go slow here. I can’t afford, because sometimes the vulnerability or the attack or the data that you want me to act on can affect something that I consider more valuable.”

    Tucker Callaway: Yeah, fair enough.

    Alan Shimel: And I like to go slow when it comes to letting a program or an application or a product, just do things. Just give me my menu and I’ll decide what I want to do. Now, of course, that was before the world of AI and ML and a lot of the automations. And quite frankly, the speed of business was probably a little slower then. Do you see a way station where people are going to want that? Just give me best practices and I’ll decide when, how, and where I want to implement it. Or do we move right to, “Hey man, make it happen for me.”

    Tucker Callaway: I think there’s a way station, when we think about the data management, telemetry, data management in general, the word that’s the most important to us is trust, right? So it is one thing to optimize the data, but you have to trust that data is constantly being optimized and handled in the right way for all those varying needs you described.

    So I do see that the first step is a suggestion with a human in the loop. You want to hit that button still to say “go”, and then as you build trust in that data and you know that the algorithms are working, then you’ll let that go. Probably with some backstops on the side, I’m going to let it go, but I’m [inaudible 00:09:52] just in case. And then you’ll start to optimize it more and more. And I think naturally, almost like a realtime data platform, operating system will start to evolve.

    Alan Shimel: So really the key there is trust.

    Tucker Callaway: Key is trust.

    Alan Shimel: To build trust in the next. So as the CEO, how do you build that trust?

    Tucker Callaway: Well, trust is always a tough.

    Alan Shimel: I’m interested, you tell me.

    Tucker Callaway: Yeah. I think like anything else in life, you deliver trust through consistent delivery. And so that’s where I think that human in the loop step is important. It has to be sustaining. It can’t be a moment in time, it can’t be the very first implementation. It’s something that you earn over time where people can count on you or could count on the data or count on the ways that you treat data to get you to the outcome that you want to go through. So it’s really only through the delivery of outcomes to the customer that they will trust the systems and all those things.

    Alan Shimel: Makes sense?

    Tucker Callaway: Yeah.

    Alan Shimel: All right. Got to do a little housekeeping.

    Tucker Callaway: Okay, let’s do it.

    Alan Shimel: People who want to know more about Mezmo.

    Tucker Callaway: Come to the website. We’ve got an offer out there to profile anyone’s data for free right now.

    Alan Shimel: Do you really?

    Tucker Callaway: Yeah. Come to mezmo.com or stop by our booth.

    Alan Shimel: M-E-Z-M-O.com.

    Tucker Callaway: M-E-Z-M-O.com

    Alan Shimel: Out there in TV land or if you hear a coupon.

    Tucker Callaway: Come by the booth. I forget the number, but it’s over there.

    Alan Shimel: You know what, if you look on the, I don’t have it. If you look on the back of your ID thing, you could actually look stuff up like that.

    Tucker Callaway: Yeah, it’s back there. If you connected to the wifi here at KubeCon, it’s Mezmo Data.

    Alan Shimel: I’ve noticed that.

    Tucker Callaway: Is the wifi.

    Alan Shimel: I was like, “Wow, what a cool thing.” Yeah.

    Tucker Callaway: You have see us. Come see us. Profile your data will give you insight and understanding into that and talk to you about the next steps.

    Alan Shimel: All right, check it out at Mezmo. Tucker, thanks.

    Tucker Callaway: Thanks for having me.

    Alan Shimel: Actually, we’ll see you. Are you going to be at AWS?

    Tucker Callaway: Yeah, we’ll be there. Yeah, I’ll be there. Yeah.

    Alan Shimel: We’ll be doing videos, not on the show floor. It’ll be a little quieter in a private suite. And then of course you’ll be at RSA.

    Tucker Callaway: We’ll be at RSA.

    Alan Shimel: We’ll be there as well.

    Tucker Callaway: We might not be on the show floor at AWS just because of-

    Alan Shimel: It’s a little crazy there isn’t it? A little pricey.

    Tucker Callaway: Yeah.

    Alan Shimel: Yeah, I hear you. That’s why we’ll be at the wind in the studio.

    Tucker Callaway: I’ll see you there.

    Alan Shimel: Come on up. I’ll have coffee.

    Tucker Callaway: Sounds good.

    Alan Shimel: But RSA will be at broadcast alley and we’ll be doing our DevSecOps thing on Monday. And the usual kind of RSA craziness.

    Tucker Callaway: Looking forward to it.

    Alan Shimel: Absolutely.

    Tucker Callaway: Okay.

    Alan Shimel: Check out Mezmo.com.

    Tucker Callaway: Thanks everybody.

    Alan Shimel: Tucker Callaway here on Tech Drunk TV. We’re going to take a break. I guess it’s almost lunchtime here, but it’s still busy.

    Tucker Callaway: Near enough.

    Alan Shimel: Stay tuned. We’re here all day. We’ll be back. Bye-Bye.

  • KubeCon 2023: Dell, DevOps and DevRel

    KubeCon 2023: Dell, DevOps and DevRel

     

    Speaker 1: This is Techstrong TV.

    Alan Shimel: Hi everyone. Hey, we’re back here live in Chicago, KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, day two, continuing our coverage, we’ve got some great people lined up to bring you today. We started just now with Dan Garfield from Argo and Codefresh, and my next guest is my friend Brad Meltzer…

    Brad Maltz: Maltz.

    Alan Shimel: I screwed this up… He’s my friend, and why do I think Meltzer?

    Brad Maltz: I don’t know, it’s a good New York name.

    Alan Shimel: No, I knew a Richard Meltzer.

    Brad Maltz: There you go.

    Alan Shimel: I’ll tell you a great story about him off camera, he was a tech entrepreneur, a miserable failure of a tech entrepreneur.

    Brad Maltz: Okay.

    Alan Shimel: His wife though, invented the things, you know how you’ve got holes in Crocs?

    Brad Maltz: Yes.

    Alan Shimel: His wife invented the things that go into those holes. He closed down his venture backed startup, his wife sold those to Crocs, and they’ve lived happily ever after.

    Brad Maltz: And I hope he’s watching this.

    Alan Shimel: Richard Meltzer. He’s from Boulder, Colorado. Hey man, how are you, Meltzer?

    Anyway, that took me down a rabbits nest. Brad is with us… Actually shout out, right? Dell Technologies is sponsoring our broadcast this year from KubeCon again, as they did in Amsterdam last year, and a large part of it is due to Brad, Brad is a director…

    Brad Maltz: Senior director of-

    Alan Shimel: Senior director.

    Brad Maltz: Of the DevOps portfolio and DevRel.

    Alan Shimel: There you said it. Now a lot of you may be asking at home, wow, I didn’t know Dell was involved in DevOps and DevRel, or in CNCF.

    Brad Maltz: Yep.

    Alan Shimel: I got a Dell, right? I got a Dell box-

    Brad Maltz: You’ve got your laptop.

    Alan Shimel: I got the Dell server and stuff like that, but there’s more to today’s Dell than the boxes. So Brad, I don’t want to embarrass you, but I’m going to put you on the spot here.

    Brad Maltz: Go for it.

    Alan Shimel: Talk to us about, I want everyone at home to understand what your group does and how involved you are, not just in CNCF, but in the DevOps community, the DevRel community.

    Brad Maltz: Yeah, so basically over the past year and a half, we’ve been making sure to kind of expand our community outreach, specifically around the DevOps stuff. When I took over the role in product management to help kind of build out further our container strategy, our infrastructure as code strategy, we didn’t realize that we needed a DevRel-like function to help kind of expand our community outreach, our advocacy back into Dell.

    And the reason for that is, what a lot of people don’t know is, I mean, we play across the entire ecosystem of CNCF, right?

    Alan Shimel: Absolutely.

    Brad Maltz: We bring Containers and Kubernetes solutions to market, we play in the AIML space, the security spaces. We’re enabling ecosystems around us with our technology.

    So because of that, having DevRel was extremely important. We spun up podcasts, we have what we call our DevOps Dispatch, which we’re actually recording here at CNCF, and you can get that on YouTube and Spreaker. We have developer.dell.com which we relaunched last year, and now it’s kind of taken off, hands-on labs and blogs and a whole bunch of stuff on there. So for us, the evangelism’s important, but the advocacy for our end users is more important back into Dell.

    Alan Shimel: Got it. So we talked about the… I don’t want to use the word infrastructure, but the infrastructure of how you’re reaching out.

    Brad Maltz: Infrastructure matters.

    Alan Shimel: Absolutely. But I want people at home to understand that behind that infrastructure though is real solutions.

    Brad Maltz: Exactly.

    Alan Shimel: Right? Because part of the whole Dell Technologies thing, it’s solutions. It’s not just a PR marketing kind of… Though we see it here on the show floor, and the podcast and all these things. Let’s talk about the solutions you guys bring.

    Brad Maltz: Yeah, so I mean, a great example is, and this show is actually a big one for us, we just recently have launched our APEX Cloud platforms, and we did one with Azure Stack, we just did one with Red Hat with OpenShift, and that’s actually one of the big things here.

    And what you’re going to see more and more of from us is the ability to take our compute, with our storage, our networking, integration with our ecosystem partners, but give you more of that easy button experience, give you more of the turnkey experience, or even the DIY. We’re always been good at the DIY.

    Alan Shimel: Yeah, that was DNA…

    Brad Maltz: But right now, can we get you more of those easy buttons, right? And that’s exactly where something like ACP for Red Hat here, is if you just want to be able to get OpenShift up and running from the factory as quickly as possible with the least amount of hands as possible, you’re looking at things like our solutions like ACP. And the trick is when you look at solutions, are they just white papers, [inaudible 00:04:57], which are really invaluable to certain people?

    Or is it a factory delivered end-to-end platform experience that delivers that Cloud-like experience and developer experience, on top of the infrastructure, plus plus.

    Alan Shimel: Guys, let’s not minimize that, that makes life a lot easier. I mean, I think back to the first DockerCon… It wasn’t the first, but it was the first one in Austin, because before that DockerCon was in Seattle, this is going back a while. And I saw Kubernetes there, I think it was maybe 0.8 was the release, it wasn’t-

    Brad Maltz: It was early.

    Alan Shimel: It was early. I came home, because at the time, we hadn’t launched Cloud Native Now, and before that it was Container Journal, we hadn’t launched it yet, we were still coming up with the names, and we were toying around with names with Docker in it, which would’ve been a mistake… Well on multiple levels.

    But I came home and told the team, I said, “Look, everybody at DockerCon is talking about this thing called Kubernetes, but it’s never going to catch on. It’s so God damn hard, I don’t know how anyone would use it.”

    Brad Maltz: Why do you think you didn’t bet on that?

    Alan Shimel: Well, this is why I still work and I’m not retired, Brad.

    Brad Maltz: Okay.

    Alan Shimel: Yeah… Another brilliant insight from Alan Shimel… So now with that being said, I’ll stand by my original point, Kubernetes is still hard.

    Brad Maltz: Yes,

    Alan Shimel: It is. I don’t care, I’ll work till I die, I guess, but it’s hard.

    Brad Maltz: Kubernetes is hard, and I think… So Kubernetes hit a maturity point, right? So definitely it won.

    Alan Shimel: No doubt.

    Brad Maltz: And everybody needs it. It’s leading the Cloud Native application kind of abstraction battle, so it’s there, but that doesn’t mean you don’t need to be a jack of all trades to be able to understand all the nuances in the abstraction. And you basically have to be able to operate everything under the covers of Kubernetes to make Kubernetes work properly.

    Alan Shimel: Absolutely.

    Brad Maltz: So what is the real long-term easy button? That’s I think an open question right now for Kubernetes. Opportunity.

    Alan Shimel: Absolutely, I don’t want to get [inaudible 00:07:10], maybe the easy button is something other than Kubernetes?

    Brad Maltz: That is always a potential.

    Alan Shimel: Yeah. But let’s get back to our point here though, so now you get Red Hat OpenShift, right?

    Red Hat OpenShift is probably, I guess the most, certainly in the top two Kubernetes platforms, if you will, if you’re using Kubernetes. And it’s still a little hard, right? I mean, you could go download it from Red Hat-

    Brad Maltz: You can get it running, but you’ve still got to have some knowledge behind it to do the basics.

    Alan Shimel: But this is where the easy button comes in.

    Brad Maltz: Yes.

    Alan Shimel: And also, I want to make clear, when we talk about this easy button, a lot of people say, look, why do I get it from Dell? I don’t want hardware, I’m hosting it in the cloud.

    Brad Maltz: But are you? That’s the question. So when people talk about-

    Alan Shimel: I wouldn’t have asked you if it was the… Okay…

    Brad Maltz: With cloud, it’s always, yeah, you have the super easy button in the public cloud, they’ve done an amazing job there. But you get to deal with things like egress fees, you got to deal with things like costs for ongoing costs for a lot of services behind that. And at some point people start to become cost conscious, so that’s one angle that you deal with.

    The second angle, in this new AI world that we’re now officially in as of 2023, you do start to wonder where’s your data living? Where do you want your data to live? And you’ve got the governance compliance side of it. Not security as much, but it’s more the ownership governance. And we’re seeing a lot of people say, you know what, with all those GPUs, there’s a cost and a governance angle to hosting it in my data center, in a Colo, Cloud adjacent and Cloud aware.

    Alan Shimel: Yep.

    Brad Maltz: So that’s where I see things like ACP for Red Hat 100% making sense.

    Alan Shimel: I agree with you 100%. I think there’s another angle here though, and that is this: Unless you’re really in it, and you may not realize this, but Kubernetes on bare metal, Kubernetes in a data center, not in the public cloud, has always been a big component of the Kubernetes footprint.

    Brad Maltz: Yes.

    Alan Shimel: Everybody just assumed, puts the words Cloud Native and Kubernetes Cloud Native, that it’s all in the big three clouds, right?

    Brad Maltz: Yep.

    Alan Shimel: Well, even beyond Oracle, IBM and the rest, but there’s always been a Kubernetes on-prem.

    Brad Maltz: There always has been, and there always will be.

    Alan Shimel: It’ll continue, it will be-

    Brad Maltz: I think it’s going to grow.

    Alan Shimel: Right, well, I think for the reasons you’ve outlined, right? People are worried about control, they are worried about compliance, they are worried about how’s AI play in all this and cost containment and FinOps and everything else.

    So I think that again is an insight that if you’re not really wired into the Kubernetes community, you don’t-

    Brad Maltz: You don’t think about it.

    Alan Shimel: Recognize… Yeah, excellent. Let’s talk about the show a little bit, so you guys are podcasting here live as you said, but what about conversations? I don’t know, I heard today there’s maybe eight, maybe up to eight to 10,000 people or something like that.

    Brad Maltz: Feels like that, yep.

    Alan Shimel: Conversations with people; what are you hearing? What are you seeing?

    Brad Maltz: A lot of the conversations right now are actually… So I’ve had a lot of AI discussions, which-

    Alan Shimel: So do we.

    Brad Maltz: I mean I expected it, but they’re kind of interesting because they’re not just about how do I build AI things, it’s how do I use AI operationally?

    And I think that’s the nuance that I’m seeing CNCF, maybe in the forward-looking view of the world, is how do we apply AI in the operational side of things like Kubernetes and security and all of that. That’s been a handful of, not a large percentage of conversations. There’s always… Actually the easy button thing, honestly, that’s probably been one of the biggest things.

    People are just, they don’t have enough skills out there, and actually one of the other things is Platform engineering. So one of the things you can see on my shirt, right? We have this-

    Alan Shimel: I saw it, I saw it when you came in.

    Brad Maltz: This is our logo that we have here, at Amsterdam, we kind of have this DevOps operating model yin yang where Dev and Ops have to play well together, cats and dogs have to come and be nice.

    Well enter Platform engineering, and these folks building the platforms that are like products inside of the end user environment, they need to adopt and embrace the DevOps operating model in their world. Platform engineering has been one of the buzzwords, I think it has been a big conversation for us here as well.

    Alan Shimel: Absolutely. Hey, just a quick plug for Techstrong, if you don’t mind, on the topic of operationalizing AI.

    We actually, I mentioned to you off camera, we did this hackathon about two months ago at our office with some of the founders of the DevOps movement, around operationalizing AI. And we recorded it-

    Brad Maltz: Oh, that’s awesome.

    Alan Shimel: We recorded all the sessions and we’ve just about got done editing now to make it manageable, and it’ll be out on Techstrong TV, I think in the next week or so. So if operationalizing AI is something you are into, go check that out. Edited, created totally by our Techstrong video team and starring some really cool people, so-

    Brad Maltz: That’s awesome.

    Alan Shimel: Looking to hear that about it. All right, enough of my own plugs. Brad, what else have you got for us?

    Brad Maltz: I mean, right now I think it’s just an exciting time to be in CNCF, in the community, in the industry, right?

    I mean, what’s interesting, I had seen, funnily enough a meme, that popped up in one of my social media threads, it talked about over 2000 years, the acceleration was like: The horse and buggy to the horse and buggy and everything was very flat, and all of a sudden the last 100, 150 years… Right now it feels like this year, and the past of one or two years, technology is accelerating at such a fast rate that we as an industry, can we keep up with it skills wise and people wise and career-wise?

    I feel like going into the next few years, we’re definitely going to have this skills challenge, and I think that’s one thing that I’m going to be focusing on a lot is how do we enable the industry, as technology just keeps evolving around us? I think that’s a big thing personally for me.

    Alan Shimel: So I will tell you, I’m a little older than you, a little… I don’t disagree with you except I think it’s even bigger than… It’s not just about this industry.

    Brad Maltz: Yep.

    Alan Shimel: I think the kinds of changes we’re seeing now is almost akin to when the internet first went public, right? So this is how I divide things, there are technology innovations that have a profound impact on the technology industry. I’ll give you a perfect example, the cloud. The cloud changed a lot of how we do tech, right?

    I mean, your grandma may say, “Where’s your pictures, grandma?”

    And she says, “They’re in the cloud…”

    Whether they were in the cloud or in the server [inaudible 00:14:33] or whatever, it didn’t make a difference to grandma, but it made a difference to us in this industry, we had to know about cloud security and deployments and everything that goes along with cloud and it kind of rocked our world.

    Then there are technology innovations that rock civilization: the internet rocked civilization, think about life before the internet. It’s a very different-

    Brad Maltz: Cell phones.

    Alan Shimel: Cell phones rocked civilization. So there are things that transcend technology markets, and I think we’re in one of those layers right now where things like AI and quite frankly, look, quantum is going to be real-

    Brad Maltz: At some point, it’s just going to magically happen to everybody.

    Alan Shimel: Boom. I read an article last week the very first time they broke RSA 256.

    Brad Maltz: Yeah, I saw that.

    Alan Shimel: With quantum. That’s crazy stuff, if you’re not up on it out there. But I feel like all of these things are converging to create another civilization changing and it couldn’t come at a better time because God knows we need it.

    Brad Maltz: We do. I’m with you, AI is going to be the next… It’s not even going to be, it is the next thing. And one last note on that for me, when we talk about in product management and Dell Technologies land, like our end users are people? Not anymore… The end users of our technology might actually be the AI, so we have to figure out what is the personality of an AI in the future? There’s a lot of things to think about.

    Alan Shimel: What is the AI wanting and looking for?

    Brad Maltz: That’s it.

    Alan Shimel: Nuts. All right. Hey Brad, you know what we didn’t mention? Hey, people who want to go visit the website, what’s the url?

    Brad Maltz: Obviously at dell.com, we have developer.dell.com now, so please focus on developer.dell.com. Go there, you can get all the latest events, newsletters sign up, hands-on labs, you name it. And you can reach out to me on LinkedIn, and if you have any questions, we’ll help you out.

    Alan Shimel: Fantastic. All right, we are live here in Chicago. We’re going to be back with our next guest in a second in KubeCon. Go check out developer.dell.com, and many thanks to Dell Technologies for sponsoring us here at KubeCon. We’ll be back in a minute.

  • KubeCon 2023: CTO.ai’s Developer Control Plane

    KubeCon 2023: CTO.ai’s Developer Control Plane

    Speaker 1: This is Techstrong TV.

    Alan Shimel: Hey, everyone, we’re back. We’re here in Chicago at KubeKon. We’re wrapping up our day two coverage, our last guest for day two. We’ll be back tomorrow, though. But let me introduce you to Kyle Campbell, right?

    Kyle Campbell: That’s right.

    Alan Shimel: Kyle is the founder of cto.ai and we’re going to find out about cto.ai and a little bit about what they’re doing here at KubeKon. But before we do that, Kyle, first of all, welcome.

    Kyle Campbell: Thank you.

    Alan Shimel: Second of all, let’s hear a little bit about Kyle.

    Kyle Campbell: Yeah, thanks.

    Alan Shimel: Tell us your kind of journey.

    Kyle Campbell: Yeah, well, first of all, great to meet you in person. I’ve talked in the past. Yeah, so my journey, I’ve told this story before, a little unconventional. I grew up in Nova Scotia in Canada, a small town. Been on the internet since the age of eight and just had no interest in the formal past. So I’ve been building software from the early days of the .com boom. I may not look at it, but I got some of the scar tissue. But I was self-taught software engineer, so open source was the key to my success and good developer tools.

    Alan Shimel: Sure.

    Kyle Campbell: And I came up through the cloud and open source era and then started founding developer platforms in 2014. The first company I built was a developer platform, the real estate space. Zillow acquired it in about eight months, which was interesting.

    Alan Shimel: Very.

    Kyle Campbell: And then I bootstrapped a DevOps agency quite successfully and started to find that there was a lot of opportunity for next generation developer platforms, which led me to cto.ai.

    Alan Shimel: Excellent, man. What a great story too. You still up in Nova Scotia?

    Kyle Campbell: I’m not. I moved to the other side of the country. I live in British Columbia now.

    Alan Shimel: Good for you.

    Kyle Campbell: Love the outdoors. Spend a lot of time with my son camping, fishing, and trying to get outdoors and just enjoy the beautiful-

    Alan Shimel: Loving it. Yeah, no, it’s beautiful. I mean, not that Nova Scotia’s not beautiful. It’s brutal in the winter, but it’s a beautiful country, part of the country.

    Let’s talk cto.ai now. So look, I’ve founded multiple companies myself. Every founder I’ve ever interviewed or spoken with in 30 years, they don’t just say wake up and say, “Oh, I feel like founding a company today.” There’s kind of like Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, right? There’s something driving you like, “I got to do this. This needs to get done.” What was driving you that needed to get done here with cto.ai?

    Kyle Campbell: Yeah. I mean, as I described my past, a lot of my journey was self-taught and stand on the shoulders of giants. And really important thing for me was developer experience and ease of use and tooling early on in my career because that enabled me to really drive my competencies as a developer and keep up with these people that had computer science degrees and master’s and all these things, right?

    Alan Shimel: Certainly.

    Kyle Campbell: So when I thought about that and I also thought about where the future’s going and my passion for platform engineering, it became pretty obvious to me that what was missing in the market was a set of tools that were designed to embrace the future of developer experience and how AI can impact that from code to cloud.

    So in 2016 or so, I started experimenting with the idea, and through 2020, I decided to formally launch cto.ai as a developer control plane is what we call it. The way to think about it is it’s a modern CI/CD platform where teams can compose their workflow across build, deployment, test, and preview. And as they work with these tools, they can interact with them in the CLI Slack, GitHub, talk to these workflows through sort of a prompt based model. And we collect telemetry data that allows them to then measure that against DORA metrics, which is-

    Alan Shimel: It’s standard.

    Kyle Campbell: … yeah, it’s a standard and I think, frankly, an empirical way to measure the developer experience. We don’t try to measure developer productivity. We think that’s the wrong question to ask. The question is how do I measure the experience the developer has in the same way that I would measure the experience my users have with my product? And if what we’re doing is building platforms to enable developer experience, we need a natively integrated way to measure that. And we also think that that measurement is a way to pave a future between how the developers experience those tools and how AI can support the developer experience and enhance developers with, frankly, superpowers over time.

    Alan Shimel: So I was recently at a couple of user conferences, big DevOps companies, and it was interesting. Three conferences all use the same metric, which is that developers only spend about 30% of their time developing.

    Kyle Campbell: State of DevOps Report 2018, I think?

    Alan Shimel: But it was in there and it’s been kind of verified in several others. What do you think about that? Is it good thing, bad thing, something to be proud of, something we should be working on? What’s the deal?

    Kyle Campbell: Yeah. Well, I think a pretty practical point of view in that as a software engineer, my goal is to release features that customers love and drive business value. And if I can do that at a higher velocity while maintaining quality, I mean, I think that that is a way that I, as an individual, can contribute to the success of the business and the team.

    But I think what often happens is we get really obsessed about the individual developer. And I think any developer who looks at the idea that they only spend 30% of their time adding value isn’t going to like that very much. And I think we need to reframe the conversation away from developer productivity towards developer enablement and look at the tooling and the process that the developer experience promotes and how developers go from code to cloud and ask ourselves as a business leader, as a CTO who we work with a lot, is the tooling and the workflow that we’re supporting our team with and that developer experience, what they’re experiencing, is that driving results?

    And I think DORA metrics is an empirical way to measure that, obviously, through anecdotes and surveys, but what we’ve really innovated on is creating a vertical integration with the tool chain that allows you to measure that in real time and then iterate on the tools quickly. And some of the teams can really own that themselves. And what the businesses should be doing is zooming out and asking themselves, “Yeah, how do we maximize the amount of time developers spend without individualizing that consideration?” There’s an innerloop and there’s an outerloop. And what DORA is really good for is measuring the outerloop of how we work in aggregate of teams. We need next generation platforms that make this data and this context more accessible to business leaders.

    Alan Shimel: I don’t disagree with anything you said there, so we’re there with that. What about have you guys released any news or anything? What do you got going on around the show?

    Kyle Campbell: Yeah, so for the last while, we’ve been focused on really building a rock solid workflow and tooling to basically set the premise of that next generation composable CI/CD vision. We’ve fed that data into DORA Metrics. You can now report on DORA metrics in real time, save those reports, share them with whoever one-on-ones, retros, so kind of up to you. And we’re starting to experiment with some data science, but something that’s really exciting that we just kind of put into production last week. We haven’t really officially announced, so I guess this is a first is we’ve released our first kind of AI-

    Alan Shimel: Heard it here first.

    Kyle Campbell: … yeah, heard it here first. Our first AI feature set, which is AI code review. And what we’re doing is we’re letting teams start with these sort of base models for how they can leverage AI in the code review process to get developers’ feedback earlier. But then, we want them to be able to do is enhance that model to really customize it to their preferences on their own kind of hardware, to customize those models to take into consideration their own specialized requirements and obviously protect proprietary information that’s so core to their beliefs. So we launched that into production, announcing it here first.

    Alan Shimel: Really?

    Kyle Campbell: And we’re looking for early adopters who can kind of test it out and help us stress test it and figure out how do we further enhance the context of that model with some of the information that is derived in these DORA metrics as well.

    Alan Shimel: So here, we’re talking to this camera. Developers out there. You’re looking for them to kick this around a little bit. Kick the tires.

    Kyle Campbell: That’s right. Yeah.

    Alan Shimel: How do they do it?

    Kyle Campbell: You’re a developer and you’re interested in how AI can support your CICD workflow, specifically code review, come over to cto.ai, sign up, send a message. I’d love to talk to you personally, software development yourself, and love to hear what you think, what you think are the limitations and hesitations, and more importantly, how do you think we can enhance this with other use cases? Because I think there’s a whole exciting set of use cases for AI and software delivery that is going to help software developers.

    Alan Shimel: Absolutely.

    Kyle Campbell: We embrace-

    Alan Shimel: I had this conversation in an earlier interview today. Look, for people who aren’t tech, you show them an AI interface and some of the kind of parlor tricks it could do and they think it’s magical.

    Kyle Campbell: Yes. Arthur C. Clark.

    Alan Shimel: Right.

    Kyle Campbell: Yeah.

    Alan Shimel: Now, we know it’s not magic. It’s just putting one word in front of the other or one… but there are some uses that AI really shine certain. So it’s not meant to replace Google Search nor is it meant to replace software developers.

    Kyle Campbell: No.

    Alan Shimel: But it can empower software developers to be 10x more effective. And one of the ways it could teach you to code, right? You could put code in there and say, “Explain it to me.” It could review code, right? So either it’s writing code or it’s reviewing code. You shouldn’t have it doing both probably, but…

    Kyle Campbell: It’s true.

    Alan Shimel: Right. But if it’s using it for review, what a great use of the technology.

    Kyle Campbell: Yeah. We’ve seen that the number one thing that slows down time to market in feature sets for developers is waiting for code review. And while I’m not sure that it’ll be the same thing as you and I pair programming and getting into the nitty-gritty details, if we can make sure that every developer can get a code review instantly just by adding a label and then that we can tailor the quality of that code review with more context that is supported by how the team thinks about quality. I think this is an important example of how we can accelerate the needs of developers and the developer experience with AI that still leaves all the control in the hands of the developer to decide, “Is this rational? Is this a hallucination? Is this the appropriate time?” But the feedback loop that we can get from this is, I think, a really great beachhead and why we chose to start there.

    Alan Shimel: Absolutely. And we’ll see. I don’t think we scratched the surface yet on how we’re going to use AI, but this is certainly a real definitive first step that I see us going with, right?

    Kyle Campbell: I think so. And I think the call to action for other software vendors out there is to think about reinstrumenting what they’re offering to prepare for this because I think there’s a necessary hesitance around AI. I think rightly so. But if we can think about how we can take control of it, how softwares can take control of it. Software engineers are perfectly suited to be some of the first stewards of these problems. Just like we see AI and code generation, I think the next natural step is to support it within code review. And then we’ll start looking at how smarter deployments, smarter rollbacks, and obviously, operations can be enhanced with AI. And this place is a perfect example of people trying to solve that problem.

    Alan Shimel: Absolutely. Absolutely. And here’s the other thing. I’ve been in technology a long time. You don’t put these genies back in their bottles.

    Kyle Campbell: Right.

    Alan Shimel: Once they’re out, they’re out. And so like it or not, they’re here. And I think you could… if you can’t beat them, join them.

    Kyle Campbell: You can’t stop Moore’s Law. I mean, this the pathway that the world is on.

    Alan Shimel: No, you’re not. You’re just not going to stop it. That’s the way it is. It’s great stuff, man. I love the attitude. I love having you on here. Cto.ai. Again, if you’re looking to help Kyle out, kick the tires on this AI code review product they got coming on, it’s fantastic. So let’s check it out.

    Kyle Campbell: All right. Thank you so much.

    Alan Shimel: All right. Hey, Kyle, enjoy the rest of your KubeKon. cto.ai wrapping up day two in Chicago at KubeKon. We’re going to be here tomorrow morning. I think we’re on at 10. We’re only here till two tomorrow because it wraps early tomorrow. But we’ll be back with a full load. We hope you’ve enjoyed today. On Demand is available at Techstrong TV. And so if you missed anything, do check it out. This is Alan Shimel. We’re out.