devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Category: Ambassador Insights

  • Ambassador Insights: Value Stream Management

    Ambassador Insights: Value Stream Management

    Value stream management is the next critical evolution for enterprises and organizations that want to further mature their efforts toward smart, efficient and effective software development and delivery. The need for ongoing software innovation and delivery is becoming a top priority for all businesses today, thanks to the new digital demands organizations are facing from their employees and customers.

    Value streams help ensure that software and services under development deliver on the promise of value for employees or customers. But it’s not as easy as it seems; plenty of enterprises still struggle to know exactly what value is being derived from their software development efforts.

    In our third episode of Ambassador Insights we talk with DevOps Institute ambassadors Siddharth Pareek, the Global DevOps Center of Excellence Leader at NatWest Group; Garima Bajpai, the founder of Canada DevOps Community of Practice; and Steve Pereira, founder of Visible, about how value stream management can help enterprises on the next step of their software development journey.

    The video is below, followed by a transcript of our conversation. Enjoy!

    Transcript

    Charlene O’Hanlon: Hey, everybody, welcome back to TechStrong TV. I’m Charlene O’Hanlon, and I am here now with a group of very, very smart people in the value stream management space. They are part of the DevOps Institute Ambassadors, and they are here for our monthly installment of the DevOps Institute Ambassadors Insights Panel Discussion.

    This month, the topic is on value stream management, so like I said before, these guys are experts in the field, and I’m sure we’re gonna get some really insightful information from them. Thank you, all three of you, for joining me today.

    We have Siddharth Pareek, who is the Global DevOps Center of Excellence Leader at NatWest Group. Siddhartha, thank you so much for joining me today.

    Siddharth Pareek: The pleasure’s all mine.

    O’Hanlon: We also have Garima Bajpai, who is the Canada DevOps Community of Practice—is that correct, is that your correct title, Garima?

    Garima Bajpai: Yes, I’m the Founder for the Canada DevOps Community of Practice, and thank you for the introduction.

    O’Hanlon: Alright. Well, thank you for joining me today. And last but certainly not least, we have Steve Pereira, who’s the Founder of Visible. Steve, thank you so much, it’s great to see you again.

    Steve Pereira: Thanks. Great to see you, it’s great to be here.

    O’Hanlon: Alright, great. So, let’s talk value stream management. You know, it’s something that we’ve been talking a little bit about here and there on devopsy.kinsta.cloud over the last couple years, but it seems like in the last year or so, especially, it has taken on more steam, if you will. It’s definitely more significance, a lot more people having the conversation about value stream management and its role in organizations, but I think it’s probably important that we at least start at the beginning, level set a little bit, and maybe, Steve, we can start out with you. Can you just kinda maybe loosely define what value stream management is and what it means to organizations?

    Pereira: Yeah, absolutely. That’s a great starting point. I think folks in the DevOps space are familiar with the origins to a degree where we had agile kind of be wildly successful in boosting development performance, right, and then all of a sudden, we hit this block where it’s like, okay, well, we can’t really go any faster unless we look at the bigger picture, right, and we start to involve Operations.

    Well, that’s where I see value stream management now is that DevOps has reached this point where we’re seeing massive performance improvements, we’re seeing a lot of positive outcomes, and we’re hitting the boundaries of that where all of a sudden, the bottlenecks and the opportunities are elsewhere at a further zoom point. So, if we now zoom out again and look at a larger sphere of influence, there’s a ton of opportunity outside of DevOps where value stream management is really the recipe for success. It’s a holistic operational capability that allows you to tie together this big picture view of your organization—and not just software development, but value streams are everything in your business, right? Your entire organization is just a collection of value streams delivering value to customers.

    So, the ability to organize, visualize, measure, and manage all of that in a very, let’s say, low touch, high automation way is going to be a game changer for organizations of all kinds, whether they are primarily software driven or building and delivering software, or if they are supply chain health care logistics, it really doesn’t matter. It’s gonna touch everything, because it has to, to drive the level of performance that we want and that end to end level of productivity.

    O’Hanlon: Okay, alright. Garima, have you, in your position, you’re obviously very deeply embedded in the DevOps space, have you seen kind of an increased interest in value stream management over the last year, especially in the DevOps space?

    Bajpai: Yes, I have, and I actually come from a large enterprise background and I work with complex systems, largely monolithic environments, which are transitioning into cloud native applications.

    Now, when we talk about these large enterprises, value stream mapping, to me, has been a tool in the toolbox of value measurement. So, I would actually reflect from the standpoint where Steve had left. So, value stream mapping, to me, is as much an art as it is science. So, what Steve was mentioning, the scientific aspect of value stream management, which is basically leading to more productive, cost-efficient organizations where we can bring speed and scale.

    But it has also an element of creativity where we bring the discovery part of the value, right? So, how do we ensure your value stream management is able to discover new value for the organization? That’s the first point. The second point is, visualization of that value is also important. So, how your value stream management is able to map all the complex value streams which you have in an enterprise and bring it together to visualize that value in one way. So, that’s the second thing.

    I also wanted to bring another point, which I have experienced when working with large organizations. When you think about a data-driven approach towards value, there is no unified process to combine the value in one way, to build consensus in the organization. There are various functional silos and complex structures, and there is a maze of organizations which we have to bring together for consensus building. And that is where value stream management is pretty useful.

    And the fourth aspect I would like to bring from a creative aspect is, we also combine value stream management with applied data science to produce the future of the organization, the future state, defining the future state.

    So, these are the four elements I would like to bring into the conversation, probably changing the conversation a bit as well, so, let’s see how it goes. [Laughter] 

    O’Hanlon: [Laughter] Alright, great. So, Siddharth, kind of expanding on that, is your organization currently using value stream mapping or value stream management, and if so, have you guys noticed any changes in when you’re using it versus before you started using it?

    Pareek: I’ll put it this way. We’re at the starting phase of the journey of adoption of these value stream mapping concepts. And I could easily answer and say that what Steve and Garima said, I’m done with it. But I’ll add something to the flavor so that the audience understands value stream mapping more.

    What you are doing when you’re talking about DevOps is, you’re talking about reducing failures. We are talking about releasing early, we’re talking about less failures, less bugs, all those things. What is really the customer’s, the end user who is really worried about it, really concerned about it, maybe not. They are probably concerned about the customer satisfaction. They’re talking about how much reviews they’re getting on their product on different platforms, or maybe more.

    And what is happening is, there is a gap between these two things—what developers are delivering and what the customer is expecting. And that is where the role of value stream mapping comes from, where it bridges the gap between the IT side and the business side, which is clearly visible to everyone across the stream. And what it does is, it tells you a similar story for everyone. When you ask a Dev guy what are the values you’re delivering, he will not talk about incident reductions or chain failure occurrence or DORA metrics, all those things. They will talk about, we are delivering what businesses expect of us.

    Coming back to the story of why, how much it is done within the organizations of ours, I think this needs to be picked up and probably come up in the later conversations. Why it has not been done so much, because of the problems that exist within the organizations.

    So, in short, we are starting the journey, but miles to go.

    O’Hanlon: Okay, alright. So, it sounds like value stream management is a great idea and organizations really should be considering it, but it might not be as simple as just flipping a switch or saying, “Hey, let’s do value stream management.”

    So, what are some of the things, then, that may be tripping up organizations as they start on their value stream management journey? And Siddharth, since your organization is kind of in that place right now, what are you seeing as kind of the roadblocks, if you will, to value stream management in your organization?

    Pareek: I mean, we talk about value stream mapping, we talk about a holistic view of the place on the left-hand side where the idea generates to the place on the right-hand side somewhere, where the value is delivered to the customer. And over there, software development teams or a testing team has a small role to play. 

    The bigger roles are your governance, your security, your compliance. How can you visualize them? How can you make, you know, process re-engineer them? For example, the NatWest Group which I worked for, they have huge compliance laws that need to be followed. Can just a simple value stream exercise streamline them? Maybe yes, maybe no. And why I say either of them is, because it depends upon the deep-rooted problems that could be solved or could not be solved going forward.

    O’Hanlon: Alright, great. Steve, I know your organization deals a lot with companies that are going through the value stream management kind of adoption journey. So, what are you seeing as some of the things that organizations are having trouble with as they start out using value stream management or as, even in their consideration phase?

    Pereira: Yeah, there’s a lot going on. There’s tons of complexity. There’s a huge spectrum of circumstances. Certainly, Siddharth really touched on a major one, which is the existing requirements in an organization that enforce the status quo, right? The things that keep us where we are, are these powerful forces of, like, things need to be done a certain way and we expect them to follow process. So, thinking of how to improve process or things that will affect the flow of value through the organization always get pushed to the wayside, right? Because it would be nice to have that, but we gotta keep everything rowing as is, right? We can’t risk that and we can’t ever forget about the fact that nothing can fall through the cracks in the status quo.

    But that’s where we see that drift, you know, the slow drift into legacy and calcification and friction is that. That doesn’t mean that you’re moving forward, right? It doesn’t mean that you’re going to make progress. And the promise, here, of value streams is really in re-orienting the entire organization to be driving vastly improved value flow, but also, as Garima mentioned, innovation, right? It’s not only just making things better, it’s making better things and it’s making different things, right? It’s this idea of thinking in terms of value and orienting towards value allows you to re-imagine your entire organization, and that is kind of the promised land. 

    But to get there, you have to get over the realities of the org chart, right? The realities that we structure our organizations based on legacy hierarchies where everyone has to fit in and report to somebody and then they have reports and you have to go up and over through the org chart. If you look at an org chart and you map the flow of value to the org chart, it’s just this wandering path that goes all over the organization and no wonder it’s inefficient, no wonder we struggle to deliver value and really make meaningful improvements.

    So, I think I would say demoting the org chart in terms of importance and focusing more on the streams and the interactions between the streams, starting to see those streams, and then aligning our teams and aligning our activities and our operations to those streams is no easy feat, but we can start really easily by just seeing it, right? Just seeing what’s going on, just observing the current state, that lays the groundwork.

    So, I would say that there can be a lot of defensive reactions to the idea that the org chart is not that important to customers, to value delivery. That could threaten people who are really invested in that hierarchy and their position in it. But ultimately, it does bring everybody together in a much more meaningful way to think in terms of streams.

    The other challenge, I think, is that, when we think about surfacing gaps and surfacing issues, a lot of cultures means that people get pointed at, right, and it’s, they’re scapegoating and there’s people, individuals who are responsible or those challenges, and we know that that’s not true. But the cultures that are in legacy trouble, are in these calcified states and not succeeding with transformation efforts, it’s often because that’s the mindset. The mindset is, we need to find the person accountable and force them to tackle the problem. It’s not our problem, it’s their problem, because I have my problems and someone’s trying to scapegoat me for something, so it’s only fair it’s going around, right? 

    And the level of visibility and the metrics and the measurements that you can get from value stream management can be used or abused, right? You can use those measurements to draw all kinds of conclusions, and in the wrong culture, it can be weaponized. That’s not to say that there’s not a ton of value and a ton of promise there, it’s just, if it’s misapplied or it’s done in a way that’s more kind of tailoristic or legacy founded, you’re potentially doing harm by surfacing all of this reality that people tend to ignore and just go about their business.

    O’Hanlon: You bring up some good points, and obviously, it doesn’t sound like value stream management, adopting it, is a walk in the park, but obviously, there are clear benefits, otherwise organizations really wouldn’t be considering it.

    I’m wondering if you could maybe kinda choose one or two things that maybe organizations need to do to derive the value from value stream management. Garima, I’d like to start with you. What are some of the things that, as I said, organizations really need to do to kinda derive that value from value stream management? Considering all the things that Steve just said, it sounds like there’s really an uphill battle for a lot of organizations.

    Bajpai: Right, and I think we will start from what Siddharth as well as Steve has mentioned that, coming from a large enterprise background, I see that there’s a lot of valueless complexity in large organizations, which quickly leads us to job security. So, there is a lot of organizations which are struggling with this problem.

    Now, to disable this problem, I think what we will necessarily have to do is, first of all, nobody wants to do a useless job. We need to be sure that we have inculcated behavioral aspects into value stream mapping. And, you know, looking from a bird’s eye view perspective, there are three things which we need to necessarily do.

    The first and foremost thing is empowering people and building accountability where you can actually visualize that in your value stream map, everybody is accountable for a value, you know? Nobody wants to do a useless job, right?

    The second part of this whole problem is making the value stream mapping as efficient as there is a loop that is basically, you’re incrementally building the value, you’re not trying to kind of big bang this approach of doing your value stream mapping and engaging everybody to kind of ensure that we decompose this complexity in the organization.

    And the third aspect, which is really very important, is that, first set the strategy. Whenever you are trying to do a value stream management, what is the objective? There can be four objectives—cost, you might need to ensure speed, you might need scalability in the organization, or you want to introduce new value into the value stream. So, there are four possibilities. So, what are your key objectives? Just define that strategy before you prioritize or you do any kind of decomposition of the value stream, from a value stream management perspective.

    O’Hanlon: Alright. Siddharth or Steve, do you have anything that you’d like to add onto that?

    Pareek: Yep. One thing is, and the organizations started very wrongly is, to confuse value stream mapping with the process mapping, to think both are somehow a similar exercise. However, people need to understand, process mapping talks about a very micro view of what things are happening, whereas value stream mapping talks about the macro view.

    And why that is important to know is, if you go into the process mapping stage, you may optimize one component of your whole floor, which is good for that component, but if you look holistically, it may create chaos for other components as well. 

    So, let’s suppose, you know, you will have streamlined a manual process of delivering certain products at a faster rate. You’ve improved that process, but what you’ve done is, maybe for other components, you have created a long stack of inventory to clear it out. And that is where this value stream mapping would come across. Because you’re going one level above the thought process, or from micro to macro. So, that is one proof that people make it happen.

    The second thing that makes it happen is, people go with jumping on the value stream mapping exercise or sessions they need to have. The first and primary thing is, they need to get the buy-ins of those stakeholders, because after the exercise, this scenario, the output would be very scary for people, accept and to action upon. So, they should have a good acceptance that yes, we agree to what happens after these sessions. Two things. I think that’s it from my side.

    O’Hanlon: Okay. Steve, any thoughts?

    Pereira: Yeah, I think that one thing that I want to clarify for the audience is that we’re talking a lot, I mean, this session is about value stream management and we keep talking about value stream mapping. And it speaks to the starting point, you know? It speaks to how you actually start to make traction with this and get going is understanding the big picture and it starts with mapping. And for me, it starts with mapping outcomes to obstacles and key objectives in the organization.

    So, starting with clarity, and we’re talking about the difficulty involved here and how complex this is. Really, we’re getting so much better at adopting these techniques, because we’re starting to realize that you can’t get there with agile, you can’t even get there with DevOps, and we struggled for decades trying to make this work. The value stream thinking approach, the holistic approach, the fact that this is the entire organization and it’s entire ecosystems that are involved in this. The flow of value is larger than we imagined initially, right? It’s not software development, it’s not even Development and Operations, right? It affects everything in the organization, but that perspective puts you decades ahead of where we were stuck in the mud.

    And so, just adopting that way of thinking and stepping back and saying, “Okay, well, what’s really going on here? What are we dealing with in the current state?” That’s gonna put you in this really strong position to adopt things like value stream management. But value stream management to me is the act of managing the value stream. It’s not software. There are tools that are available to do that job and we’re in early days of that, but management is the act of managing value, right? It’s visualizing, it’s tracking the flow, it’s understanding the flow of value through the organization.

    So, that really, to me, starts with mapping and this baseline view. And I’ll echo everything that the other folks said—bringing in the right perspectives from the top to the bottom is really gonna make that happen. And it’s really, you know, the first opportunity where we’ve had that invitation in a very accommodating way, right? This is truly inclusive. There’s something in this for the business. There’s something in this for customers there’s something in this for technical folks, and everybody gets some value out of it. Everybody gets tons of value out of it, but it’s not just, “Yeah, you need to look at DevOps, because otherwise, this tech thing is gonna get out of control.”

    O’Hanlon: Mm-hmm.

    Pereira: There’s messaging and there’s value in it for the business, and there’s something in it for the customers, and that’s unique and that is a perspective that we’ve never had before, but is starting to come to reality.

    O’Hanlon: Alright. Well, definitely, as I said before, we’ve been having the conversations on devopsy.kinsta.cloud about value stream management and value stream mapping, and I firmly believe that, at the very least over the next year, we’re going to be hearing a lot more about value stream management. 

    So, Steve, Garima, Siddharth—thank you, all three of you, for bringing your expertise to today’s DevOps Ambassadors Insights Panel on value stream management. I appreciate it very, very much, and I do value your expertise, so thank you, all, for joining me today. I really do appreciate it.

    Pereira: Thanks for having us. Great to see you all.

    O’Hanlon: Alright.

    Bajpai: Thank you. Bye bye.

    Pareek: Thanks, Charlene. Goodbye, everyone.

  • Ambassador Insights: Cloud-Native

    Ambassador Insights: Cloud-Native

    Cloud-native is a methodology and a mindset that’s been gaining traction in the DevOps and application development space as more organizations look to leverage the benefits of cloud infrastructure, including scalability. As with many other topics in the DevOps space, however, cloud-native isn’t easily definable; rather, it is loosely described by the technologies it utilizes, including containers and Kubernetes.

    In our second episode of Ambassador Insights, featuring DevOps Institute ambassadors Leonardo Murillo, CTO of Qwinix Technologies; Tracy Bannon, senior principal and DevOps strategic advisor and software architect at MITRE; and Pawel Piwosz, lead system engineer at EPAM Systems, we delve into what it means to be cloud-native, look at some of the cloud-native technologies helping shape the landscape and address the security aspects of cloud-native applications and infrastructures.

    The video is below, followed by a transcript of our conversation. Enjoy!

    Transcript

    Charlene O’Hanlon: Welcome back to TechStrong TV. I’m Charlene O’Hanlon, and I am here with another episode of the DevOps Institute Ambassador Insights Panel Discussion. I’m so excited to have these on a monthly basis with some very, very smart people who also happen to be ambassadors with the DevOps Institute. And each month, we have a different topic of discussion to align with our monthly spotlight topics on devopsy.kinsta.cloud.

    This month, we are going to be talking about cloud-native and cloud-native technologies, and so, I have some experts in the field right now. First up, we have Leonardo Murillo, who is the CTO of Qwinix Technologies. Hey, Leonardo, thank you so much for joining me today.

    Leonardo Murillo: Thank you for having me, Charlene. I really appreciate it. This is great.

    O’Hanlon: Alright, alright. Next up, we have Tracy Bannon, who is the Senior Principal and DevOps Strategic Advisor and Software Architect at MITRE. Tracy, thanks so much for joining me, we really appreciate it.

    Tracy Bannon: Thanks for the invite.

    O’Hanlon: Great. And finally, last but not least, we have Pawel Piwosz, who is the Lead System Engineer at EPAM Systems. Pawel, thank you, also, for joining me today, we really appreciate it.

    Pawel Piwosz: It’s a pleasure to be here with you.

    O’Hanlon: Great, great, great. So, let’s dive right into the discussion. I know we’ve been talking on devopsy.kinsta.cloud and Container Journal a lot about cloud-native, but I’m not sure, actually, that a lot of people understand exactly what we mean when we say cloud-native, so maybe we should set the stage, if you will.

    Leonardo, maybe you can start us out since you are really focused heavily on cloud-native. Can you kinda tell us what we mean when we say cloud-native? What are we talking about?

    Murillo: Sure. So, I think when we talk about cloud-native, we’re talking about a specific mindset and patterns to apply when we’re building both systems as well as organizations, which is kinda one of the things that I wanted to discuss today, right? Because cloud-native is not just how you build technology, and you don’t really need the cloud to build cloud-natively, right? Usually, when you think in terms of cloud-nativeness, you’re thinking about loosely coupled architecture, you’re thinking about containerization, immutability, statelessness, right? All of these are components that are incorporated in a cloud-native solution, and I think the organization has also to become cloud-native, and that’s where DevOps becomes really important, right? To be able to leverage and really take advantage of all the different qualities, right, that the cloud has basically surfaced and made available, right? What do you think, Tracy?

    Bannon: To extend on that and sort of foot stomp for what you’ve said already and love that you want to talk about the organization, we can talk about, I call it a reverse Conway maneuver.

    Murillo: Right. [Laughter]

    Bannon: [Laughter] So, there’s a lot to be said—I’m actually finding that there’s not agreement on what cloud-native is. There’s an argument—it means containers. Well, yes, and let’s talk about serverless and the impact of serverless. So, it’s not a specific architecture pattern, but it does mean that we are building to take the best advantage of the infinite scalability, right, and the self-healing nature and other aspects of cloud. Love your point as well, Leonardo—while we say it needs to be on cloud proper, building for cloud, right, doesn’t mean that I’m necessarily hosting in an AWS GCP, et cetera and so on. It means that I have applied those principles, and I can do that within my data center, my private cloud, or whether I’m paying somebody else to be the host for me.

    Murillo: Yeah, great point.

    Piwosz: That’s true, and it’s not only about the application, it’s about everything what is around. For example, CI/CD, how we store our code, how we approach to the code, how we approach the security networking. Because this is something that we very often forget when we are going to the cloud, right?

    O’Hanlon: Mm-hmm.

    Piwosz: So, platform as a service, we have everything, we don’t need experts.

    Bannon: [Laughter] Don’t get me started at all!

    O’Hanlon: [Laughter]

    Bannon: But that’s an interesting point is that there are so many fantastic capabilities that are being provided as a service that I don’t think the folks actually know where to begin. I’ve had some awesome infrastructure folks who go out and they do some Googling and they do some research and they come up with a reference architecture. And heaven forbid, but God love them, they go out and spin it up and push the button, and—wow, this is a good solution for my firm or for my client or for my needs—and it isn’t, necessarily.

    So, there’s a lot of trade space that we’re unintentionally losing with the rapidity that we’re moving, trying to move towards cloud. Architecture should be more important, not less important. It shouldn’t be a stalling factor up front, but I jokingly say that, in order to push some value, provide value out into industry or to my clients, I have to be doing that from vision forward, right? I can’t take a steel girder and put it through a wood chipper, right? It’s not going to work because it wasn’t constructed and thought of that way.

    But Leonardo, to your point earlier, as much as the technology to me is the fun and sexy part, the human aspect really needs to be dealt with as well. We talk about it a lot in the DevOps piece of it, the DevOps portion or support effort on it, but you really bring up that cloud-native requires us to think about the organizational structure and building a separate culture than what we’ve had before. I’d be interested in what you think about some of the emerging software factories, or should I say continued proliferation of software factories as the way to move forward on software?

    Murillo: I think that actually talks about kind of a different subject, and I’d like to kinda step back a little and think—because you mentioned something that is very much aligned to this, and it is the whole strategy as to how you approach the cloud, right? It’s not just about click a button and going in, right?

    Bannon: Mm-hmm.

    Murillo: And, to me, that has a lot of resonance to what DevOps is all about, right? If you think into kinda the cada mindset, right, define your North Star first, right, assess your current state, think about it consciously and mindfully, right?

    I think if organizations that are looking to go into the cloud or mature into the cloud do take that step, do take time, they will be able to maneuver this gigantic ecosystem of tools that are out there and technologies that are out there. Because I think there’s also an interesting component that we should discuss. You mentioned, Tracy, how it’s not just about the technology, it’s also about the humans, right, the people that are implementing.

    Bannon: Mm-hmm.

    Murillo: But I think that also resonates with the fact that technology is not there just for the sake of picking the latest and greatest tool, right? I read this great post by somebody that I can’t recall, that basically talked about how boring is good. You know, how boring technology is good because people are used to it and they’re kinda like aware of how it works.

    And I think the closer you are in your evolution path to what is comfortable, the better. And I think that’s one of the problems that I sometimes see in cloud adoption—people try to bite too big of a chunk of change at a given time, right?

    Bannon: Yep. Mm-hmm.

    Murillo: And there’s so much to choose from to make that huge bite. An actually targeted approach that is mindfully defined that is well strategized will solve a lot of these problems, right? Because it will give you a signal amongst all this ecosystem noise that teams are gonna be exposed to, right? So, Pawel, you are kinda like engineering these solutions, right? How do you work around this ultra-diversity of available technologies, right, when you’re building something?

    Piwosz: Mm-hmm. This is … a very big problem. Because right now, together with cloud, we gained much, much more speed with everything, really. So, imagine 20 years ago you had a server room with racks and servers there, so you’d change only the server, but the logical side was still the same.

    Today, we are jumping. Let’s stay with AWS. We are jumping from instituting analysis to microservices, then to serverless microservices, then to serverless itself. Who knows what we will find next year, for example, right? You need to switch your mindset here. This is something that especially all kinds of CisOps—well, I am all kinds of CisOps—people have in mind, right? The same for networking, for security. There is a huge difference in speed here.

    So, you need to incorporate into your mind things like do fast, fail fast, learn fast—especially learn fast, because we are forgetting about this very often; too often, I would say. And also, we are forgetting very often in the trenches about the security of the cloud.

    Bannon: Oh, gosh, yes.

    Piwosz: Because—yes, because we’re saying, okay, we have a shared responsibility model, so they are responsible for everything. We’re just running our application and not caring about anything else, what is really, really wrong, I believe.

    Murillo: And I think that points to a fundamental misunderstanding, right, of what security in the context of cloud native architecture is all about, right? And I also think about, Tracy mentioned this infinite capacity, right? And you mentioned, Pawel, going fast.

    I’ve been thinking a lot recently as to how those two components need also to be very effectively managed.

    Bannon: Yes.

    Murillo: By leadership, by those that are sponsoring these initiatives, right? Because after all—and this is something that I’ve been talking about lately, right? We have optimized for speed alone already without having, really, awareness of the impact that that would have on the environment and many things, right? And I think we really need to establish a mindset where engineering teams are aware that infinite capacity doesn’t mean just free for all, grab whatever amount of resources you have, that shared response security is not infinite, overwhelming security, right?

    And I think this is also relevant in the context of the tooling that we were talking about, right? Everything now is available kinda point and click. You download a package, you have an appointment. You download another package, you have authentication and connectivity, right? And we don’t go into details necessary to understand kinda the supply chain of all these solutions.

    So, I think that’s where—the mindset of DevOps, right, reduce waste also becomes very relevant, right? Just because you have infinite capacity doesn’t mean you can’t be wasteful or you don’t have to be constantly evaluating the outcome of your ongoing efforts, right? Yeah, so, I think that’s very important.

    Bannon: There’s a treasure trove of topics that you just landed on, so it sounds like it could be a longer collaborative.

    O’Hanlon: Yeah, right. [Laughter]

    Bannon: So, in terms of reducing waste, one of the things that I’ll put out there is that I believe, in what I’ve observed with teams that I run or teams that I’m reviewing the content is that some of the cloud capabilities have made us, I think, lesser programmers, lesser developers, because we’re not concerned about the same things that we were before. We’ve delegated authority or we’ve delegated that concern.

    I’ve seen some pretty hideous, performance-wise, if I were to run it anywhere other than being able to up my compute, it used to be that we had to be concerned because it cost a lot to add additional resources, right? If it wasn’t as performant as we needed it to be, you just threw more hardware at it. That went away for a long time because it was cost-prohibitive.

    We’ve almost gone back and revisited that in some ways. From a security perspective, it’s always been my perspective that it needs to be baked in. It has to be part of the ecosystem. So, when folks started talking about DevSecOps, I was actually against that, because DevOps means that there’s a security part of it, but I do understand that it was, at times, not thought about. Our developers need to be educated, but they need to be held accountable because it becomes—there is a group effort. Now, when I say developers, I mean the athletes who are hands-on, they’re engineering with us, they’re moving the software forward.

    But there are two pieces that come to mind with this. There’s a limit to how much they can consume. Mentally, there’s a limit to how much they consume. I’m looking at Pawel’s background and I’m thinking to myself, “I love all the stickers” and yet, those are all the technologies that he’s considering that he’s looking at. So, as leaders in technology, one of the things that we need to do is to provide guidance to the folks who are on our teams to help them reduce the noise. It doesn’t mean to ignore the new things, but it does mean go ahead and get to finish, get to done on one thing, get it working, learn from it, and then improve it. And if improving it means that there’s a certain amount of acceptable refactoring or pulling in another tool—absolutely, right? That’s technology insertion, that’s a good, smart thing.

    But it does also mean that we don’t instantly glom onto everything that’s coming along. I have one organization in particular where every team is allowed to have the autonomy and latitude and I’m just there as an observer, and it’s a little bit of melee. There are lots of good pockets of interesting things, but because there’s such technical diversity even in a small space, they’re having a hard time, because they’re not able to get crisp and good and deliberate with the first set of tools. To your point earlier, Pawel, they’re not getting good enough with what they’re doing before they’re switching on to something else.

    So, cloud native mindset is pretty important, but helping to folks understand cloud native from a, what is it from a patterns perspective, what are the architectural tradeoffs for it, and then helping them to make selections and stick with it long enough to get a success, I think, are really keys to helping organizations.

    O’Hanlon: So, do you guys think that cloud-native is kind of an all-or-nothing proposition? Are organizations—have you seen organizations kind of going all-in on cloud-native and then maybe pull back?

    Murillo: I’ve seen them going all in and I’ve seen them crash and burn. [Laughter]

    Bannon: Yes! [Laughter] Alright, then!

    Murillo: Yeah, I think—I was talking the other day as to, everybody knows juggling is really good for the brain, but if you try to learn to juggle with your most precious items, you’ll never learn because you’re gonna be very afraid.

    I think it’s the same about cloud and DevOps, right? Everybody knows it’s great, everybody knows there’s gonna be a lot of value out of it, but if you try to learn it with your most precious things—for instance, your entire organization—you’re gonna have a lot of resistance to getting it right.

    So, I think the same applies for DevOps and cloud-native. I think you need to iterate. You need to start small with projects that you’re capable of experimenting with, right? Kinda like the whole concept of a culture of experimentation and iteration is important, right? But there’s gotta be awareness to the fact that you cannot just experiment with everything, right, or with everything at the same time.

    So, what I mentioned, right, bite small pieces at a time, iterate, do concepts, and use those concepts to build kinda your operating model, right? What does a cloud mean to you for your organization, right? And then expand up until you have a very solid framework that is well establish, well understood, and then you can kinda start juggling with fire, but not until then.

    Bannon: That also helps us think through greenfield versus brownfield. I deal a lot with governments and a lot with federal governments and different agencies in defense. And there’s a tremendous amount of brownfield. It doesn’t mean that there’s old brownfield, but it means that there’s something pre-existing, so there have to be decisions made about where do I add on the cloud-native? Do I do it around the edges, is it incremental, am I doing strangler fig tree patterns, et cetera and so on? That’s one piece of it. Net new sometimes is a good place to try cloud-native, right, because you do have perhaps less confines around it, so take something smaller that’s greenfield and make your first foray that way.

    I think it’s an interesting conversation about the starting and stopping points for cloud-native? I noticed—and I’d like to hear, Pawel, if you’ve seen the same thing—I saw everybody lift and shift as quickly as they could. “I wanna get rid of my data center, so I’m just gonna move my workloads, right? IAS, I’m gonna move my workloads.”

    So, they moved their workloads, and I naturally thought the progression would be to pass or would be to cloud-native and to the refactoring. What I actually observed was a pendulum swing to the analytics side. And so, there was a tremendous, I have all of this compute available to me, I have less expensive storage, I’ll move over to the analytics side, and we’re just starting to see, a real increase in the cloud-native application space. Unless you’re truly talking about upstarts and greenfielding, there has been much less of it with the brownfield and the incremental improvements.

    Piwosz: Yeah, I agree with you. So, first of all, if you just do lift and shift to cloud, whatever we call the cloud, you will cry very soon. So, this is the first thing.

    The second—yes, we have a lot of possibilities regarding analytics, we have beautiful words right now, buzzwords like observability, telemetry, et cetera, et cetera. So, we’re just expanding our monitoring, let’s say old-fashioned monitoring to the new areas and collect more and more and more, and more structured things.

    So, this is something what is very, very easily achievable, but also—and this is in relation to the previous topic here, if you start with cloud, well, you are already in the cloud. There should be still a logic behind everything. Because, today is so tempting, because you do not have to do the initial investment, right? You just click a button and start using serverless or just create a big, big cluster of something, right?

    And then, in my work, I observe this multiple times, then you create a crazy, really crazy solution for a very simple thing. Well, what can go wrong in this, right? So you are using like 10 or more technologies which are completely different, you are trying to wire them together and then you are saying—okay, I know 20 technologies, it looks perfectly well in my CV. But when you talk with people, you just realize that it doesn’t work as it should work, really. That’s why, very often, organizations which are going to cloud and do not take logic in this, how it is organized, how it is architected, how this even developed, they are paying much, much more, not just because they did lift and shift, but they started to create very, very crazy solutions, right? And this is the kind of waste that you mentioned as well.

    Bannon: I’m gonna throw out just a couple quick words that’ll make people cringe, but when I think about—so, agility 20 years ago, right, the agile manifesto, there’s a woman named Linda Northrop from the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon who said it was one of the worst things that ever happened to software architecture, because unintentionally, there was this emergent architecture, my architectures will just emerge, I don’t have to worry about them in advance. I want to push forward that enterprise architecture needs to still exist, but in a different form, in a different format. There still needs to be, it’s okay for there to be somebody more senior, somebody who is helping to drive the architecture and helping to pick which cloud technologies and where cloud native is the most appropriate.

    Because there’s different trade space, right? Even if I talk containers, there’s different trade spaces between how I’m using the containers and how I’m moving forward with that. Does that resonate with you, Pawel and Leonardo?

    Piwosz: Yes, yes. I would even add here that if you want to be cloud-native, your developers need to be cloud-native. So, there is no more, “It works on my machine”—this is obvious, right? But also, I will be bold here, so even development should go into cloud. And this is another layer here, which we didn’t touch, but it is very important, I believe.

    O’Hanlon: Well, I feel like we could have this conversation for at least another hour, but unfortunately, we gotta wrap things up, guys. But I do appreciate Tracy and Pawel and Leonardo for your insights. You guys are great. I’m gonna have all three of you back on and we’ll talk about other things in the future. We have lots of topics to get through this year.

    The level of intelligence and insight you guys bring to these conversations is just so, so value added, so I do appreciate your time in joining me today for another one of our DevOps Institute Ambassadors Panel Discussions. So, thank you, guys, again. We really do appreciate it, and please do stay in touch with me. I’d really absolutely love to get your expertise back on the show, so.

    Bannon: Alright, fantastic. Be well. Stay safe, everybody.

    Murillo: Thank you very much.

    Piwosz: Thanks, everybody. Thank you.

  • Ambassador Insights: Enterprise Digital Transformation

    Ambassador Insights: Enterprise Digital Transformation

    Digital transformation has been on the minds of many organizations for a few years now, but since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic last year the need to transform IT infrastructures has taken on a sense of urgency. The rush to work from home coupled with the shift to online everything has pushed organizations to adopt the tools and technologies necessary to enable IT agility for all users.

    In this inaugural episode of Ambassador Insights, featuring DevOps Institute ambassadors Sean Davis, information security advisor, DevSecOps, at TransUnion; Jennifer Fischer, executive director of the Center of Innovation and Professional Studies at Felician University; and Pankaj Gupta, senior director of Product Marketing, Cloud ADC, and SD-WAN at Citrix, we take a look at some of of the factors driving digital transformation, the need for security in digital transformation initiatives and how organizations can get started on their transformation journeys now, if they haven’t already.

    The video is below, followed by a transcript of our conversation. Enjoy!

    Transcript

    Charlene O’Hanlon:  Hey, everybody, this is Charlene O’Hanlon, Chief Content Officer at MediaOps, and I am just thrilled to pieces to be introducing a brand new segment that we have on TechStrong TV which we’ll also be running on the devopsy.kinsta.cloud website. It is a panel discussion that I’ll be having monthly with DevOps Institute ambassadors—you see three of them right here on the screen with me. As I said, it’s the first in what I hope will be a series of monthly panel discussions with these ambassadors and other ambassadors on the future topics that we have on devopsy.kinsta.cloud.

    The first inaugural discussion will be on Enterprise Digital Transformation, and the featured topic will be changing every single month, so this week it’s Enterprise Digital Transformation, next month it will be on Cloud Native.

    So, I’m looking forward to all these discussions, but I wanna go ahead and kick off this first one with our speakers today. First up, we have Sean Davis, who is Information Security Advisor, DevSecOps, at TransUnion. Hi, Sean, thanks so much for joining me today.

    Sean Davis: Thanks for having me, Charlene.

    O’Hanlon: Next up, we have Jennifer Fischer, who is Executive Director of the Center of Innovation and Professional Studies at Felician University. Jennifer, thank you so much for joining me today. Good to see you.

    Jennifer Fischer: Thank you, Charlene. Pleasure to be here.

    O’Hanlon: Alright, and last but certainly not least, we have Pankaj Gupta, who is the Senior Director of Product Marketing, Cloud ADC, and SD-WAN at Citrix. Pankaj, thank you so much—as always, great to see you.

    Pankaj Gupta: Thank you, Charlene. Glad to be here.

    O’Hanlon: Okay, great. Well, as I said before, the topic of this panel discussion is on Enterprise Digital transformation, which I know is a huge topic to swallow. There are so many things that we can say about Enterprise Digital Transformation, but it’s certainly a topic that has been on a number of organizations’ minds, especially since the onset of the pandemic and the rush to basically align their business practices with digital transformation efforts to be more productive and to stay relevant in today’s fast-paced business environment.

    But as I said before, a lot of things have changed since the onset of COVID, and I want to kinda maybe set the stage a little bit by asking you guys—where do you think digital transformation and these initiatives have kinda progressed since the onset of COVID-19 and that rush to remote work that so many organizations have had to kinda go through? Whoever wants to start?

    Gupta: I can take the first crack, Charlene. This is an excellent question. The impact of COVID is twofold. First of all, it’s realization by IT and business for the need of the digital transformation. So, that’s first, is the faster realization of the need for digital transformation.

     And the second thing is about execution speed of digital transformation has increased tremendously due to COVID in the last one year or so. IT and business are more in lockstep than ever before. IT is more aligned now with the business outcomes. In the last 12 to 18 months, we have seen four phases of it. The first was, it started just with business continuity. How do I get my business moving in this new COVID environment? Then focused more into employee productivity, because as they started working more from remote.

    And then, more people started working remote, workers started working from remote, then security became very paramount, that, “How do I secure all of them?” And I think the next phase which is coming is that digital transformation will be more about hybrid workforce; some of the employees coming back to the office. So, that’s the fourth phase which I see for that.

    And in this environment, talking to customers, I have seen CIOs, the number one priority is to keep employees engaged, remain productive from anywhere, from any device they are working. They want reliable connectivity for every employee whether they are working from home. They also want us to ensure that same application experience, whether they are there in the office or now working from home.

    But what is also keeping them awake is that now these workforces working from home and home networks are not as secure as the corporate infrastructure. So, when employees access these applications or direct Internet access, their endpoints or home network doesn’t become an entry point for vulnerabilities into the infrastructure.

    O’Hanlon: Right, right, right.

    Fischer: Yeah, I fully agree, and I echo the need for a focus on security and a remote workforce. I think that really will become the foundation for digital transformation going forward. And I think it’s really interesting to look at the longer term impacts, transformational impacts on some key industries. So, when we think about things like telehealth and online learning and consumer facing applications like in retail and grocery and food delivery and those types of things, you know, you really have to plan for this hybrid environment as we’ve discussed going on for an extended time.

    And, you know, whether some of it will ever truly sort of come back, right? I think, to some degree, you know, some of the convenience and the productivity and the benefits that have been realized through this will be here to stay for the longer term.

    Davis: Absolutely. I’m thinking about—the pandemic has been a really great pressure test of a lot of these concepts that we’ve heard for years across the industry, remote work being one of them. You know, everyone says, “Oh, we get better productivity because there’s remote work.” But what this seems to have done is, it’s really allowed the business to pressure test how well they can pivot. What does that mean for their customers? Because now customer needs are different, what they’re looking for that’s a priority to them is a little bit different. Internal needs of the organization are different. Now, you know, you’re shifting focus from just delivering those products to ensuring they’re highly secure, right?

    So, a lot of these things we’ve been preaching in the industry for a very long time, especially around DevOps and DevSecOps, are really starting to take a front seat in organizations. One of the brilliant things that I’ve seen because of the pandemic over the last year is, even organizations who don’t have formal transformation initiatives and efforts in place are forced to still go through some type of transformation with their organization to maintain competitiveness or even survive. Because now it’s not just about thriving in the environment, it’s about understanding how to pivot to even survive. We’ve seen a lot of retail industries go bankrupt, we’ve seen a huge shift in real estate, right—so, how businesses decide, even with their hybrid strategies, how they’re gonna renegotiate contracts with all of this office space that’s sitting idle right now, and does it make more sense for them to shift there?

    So, there’s a lot of operational considerations that are being made by organizations as well as some unique opportunities and unique challenges are starting to be presented. I think HR is starting to take a front seat a lot more in initiatives. You look at employee wellness—it’s more important than it’s ever been, and it’s giving the opportunity for these guys to stand at the front lines and finally be cheerleaders or their organizations in a way maybe they haven’t had an opportunity to have a spotlight shined on.

    Because a lot of us think HR sits in the background, and now, a lot of their programs are really pivotal and the cornerstone of how businesses are going to move forward and look at employee care, satisfaction. You know, onboarding is a lot different. You know, it’s pretty reveletional to see just a lot of these things we’ve been talking about in the industry, even before DevOps, that people have played around with and said, “These are better concepts or better ways of business,” but now we’re actually pressure testing them through a real world tragedy and pandemic and seeing how that plays out and what that looks like for each and every organization.

    O’Hanlon: Yeah. You know, it’s interesting, because we’ve been talking about digital transformation for years now, and there was a lot of talk, but not a lot of action. And I think it was because a lot of organizations really just couldn’t wrap their brains around it. You know, they didn’t have, like, a reason to do it beyond, you know, providing customer satisfaction or keeping up with their competitors.

    But, you know, having this pandemic occur kinda gave them a reason to really go and say, “Alright, this is what we need to do to (a) keep our employees productive, (b) provide that top quality customer experience, and just kinda keep the wheels on the bus.” And, you know, before, it was more like—okay, well, we’ll see these, we’ll measure by certain metrics and maybe we’ll see an increase, maybe we won’t. Is that enough for us to do digital transformation?

    But I also think that it’s important for—and Sean, you alluded to this—digital transformation impacts so many different areas of the business, it’s not just about improving customer experience. It’s not just about making employees more productive. It’s about keeping them same, you know, [Laughter] with the HR apps and things like that and employee wellness. It’s amazing how, by having that laser focus on digital transformation, once there was a reason to do it, a real, legitimate reason to do it, companies that have undergone the digital transformation and are still undergoing them have really started to thrive and they’ve been able to pivot their business successfully. And that, to me, I think is—you know, it’s a success story. If you really take a seat at, you know, take a look at what’s been done so far and just the fact that so many organizations have been successful so far in their efforts.

    And I didn’t want to take that off the rails, but I wonder how much of that is, when we’re talking about DevOps, where does that fit into a lot of these kinda success stories, if you will, with the organizations? I mean, is it a central core of digital transformation efforts, or is it more of a tool, if you will, within a larger process? Whoever wants to answer that one.

    Davis: I’ll hop in first this time, if you like.

    O’Hanlon: Yeah, sure.

    Davis: So, with DevOps, I think there’s a unique opportunity that a lot of organizations are taking. At the core of most digital transformations, at least I’ve been part of and been privy to from peers in the industry, they’re very centered around technology. You’ll hear the term “every business is a software company” being thrown around. Now, while that may not always ring true for everyone, I believe the spirit of what they’re trying to say is, there’s a better way for us to use technology to enable a better customer experience, a more valuable outcome or our customers, and through leveraging that technology, we’re able to see better returns and give back to the community in a lot of different ways beyond just our products.

    DevOps, I think where the real value comes is, there’s been this evolution over the last year or two where people are starting to realize that a value chain, or the supply chain of an organization and the value that’s being delivered doesn’t end when the product is in our customers’ hands, but it’s when value has been delivered to our customers’ customers, right? So, we go to that Nth degree to make sure that not only are we just selling something and saying, “Hey, have a great day” because we got it in your hands as fast as possible, but we’re able to use feedback loops and telemetry to actually say, “How successful is this for your customers? You know, what type of experience are your customers having? How can we work with you and partner to have a deeper relationship than just a buyer and seller?” Right? So, we’re starting to see a lot of that proliferate the industry.

    The pandemic’s also provided us a really great opportunity to take a step back, because everyone is slowing down, everyone’s having to adjust and pivot and say, “How do we overhaul all the systems?” Right? Instead of looking at this, you know, where, “Let’s improve this silo” or, “Let’s improve this area of the business,” we’re able to start bridging a lot of those areas instead of just saying, “Well, you know, let’s throw the hammer down and start busting these silos”—

    O’Hanlon: Right.

    Davis: – “let’s start bridging a lot of these areas and understanding where the challenges are.” It allows us as leaders of our organizations to dig much deeper to understand broader problems with the organization, and we can see that, once again, going back to how that’s being pressure tested, right.

    We all know, as building continuity plans, that looks really great on paper, but if it’s not put into practice every year, and what better way, unfortunately, to practice that than actually experiencing a real outage, a real security breach, a real pandemic do we put those things through the paces to say, “Is the theory and the practice that we put on paper actually practical and applicable to what we’ll do in real life?” and then suss out where those problems or challenges are with the execution of that plan to be able to reinforce that plan and strengthen it so we can deliver better value, both internally to our organization and externally to our customer and market.

    Gupta: I think before the pandemic, for many of the organizations, digital transformation was an initiative. It was a goal, it was a project.

    O’Hanlon: Mm-hmm.

    Gupta: But during the pandemic, digital transformation has become a necessity.

    O’Hanlon: Yes.

    Gupta:  And when a project becomes a necessity, that means that what you’re really looking for is the agility and speed and ability to respond faster, almost in real time. And this is not just about IT, this is about wall to wall, end to end processes. And IT is that connecting tissue of the overall digital transformation, and the foundation of that is the DevOps. Because DevOps brings automation, brings ability to respond faster. And the technology trends which have happened in the last five years, like the emergence of the cloud, ability to auto scale in cloud, ability to automate things from the cloud, more and more people are working remote. Ability to deploy automation tools which are delivered from cloud, because IT is not going back to the office.

    So, DevOps has become a very critical component to achieve that speed. Every company’s starting point is different. For cloud native companies, they already have a lot of implementation of their IT into the cloud already—if not, more and more companies have started moving. And that is actually creating new opportunities for the DevOps engineers overall. It is their skill set which is tremendously needed in this marketplace, and it will continue to grow. And that’s where the places like DevOps Institute help to build that skill set for IT teams across the world.

    Fischer: Yeah, absolutely. And I would add that, from the point of view of transformational outcomes, you know, one of the key things there is making sure that cultural change has been institutionalized. And so, you know, from the standpoint of DevOps, and sort of coming back full circle to your question, Charlene, around, you know, is it a core or is it something broader—it’s both, right? Because, of course, it’s underlying the technology and the ability to achieve success is there, right, within the pipeline.

    But beyond that, you know, there’s relevance as well, even in business functions, if we’re talking about the opportunity to identify new revenue streams or looking at the overall impact of building a continuous learning culture and the ability to accelerate change—these are things that translate to every area of the business. So, from my perspective, you know, DevOps really has that overall end to end impact to be able to deliver against. And I totally agree with my co-panelists that the pandemic has been that driving force to be able to surface that and really, you know, sort of shine a light on the value that it can add in a time of crisis. But from a long-term perspective, the value certainly continues to be there.

    Innovation as well has a significant role to pay here, too, right? So, just in terms of being able to innovate faster, to be able to look at that pivot point as was described earlier that, you know, that’s a huge learning curve. I mean, there’s some pain that went along with that, you know, having to do it through the pandemic, but there’s also some long-term gains in being able to understand resiliency and responsiveness in that time of crisis.

    O’Hanlon: Yeah, it’s really, it’s been amazing for me to see how quickly organizations have been able to undergo these digital transformation efforts and really understand what their business needs. It’s almost like they—you know, they just kinda launched, if you will. It’s just like, from zero to 60 in, like, nothing.

    Fischer: Exactly.

    Gupta: Mm-hmm, yeah.

    O’Hanlon: But, that said, are we too late for organizations that haven’t started their digital transformation processes yet? I mean, those that may be a little slow to start, they recognize the value, they just haven’t been able to kinda get their stuff together yet to do it, but you know, is it too late for them? And if not—I hope not, I hope not—but if it’s not, what are some of the things that maybe they need to keep in mind as they start to think about undergoing a digital transformation process? You know, what are maybe some of the best practices that they need to consider?

    Jennifer, I’m gonna let you start with this one because, you know, this is your turn, so. [Laughter]

    Fischer: Sure, sure. And I think, you know, interestingly, I think the same principles hold true, right, in terms of best practices for digital transformation, whether we’re talking about, you know, in terms of the pandemic or not, right?

    O’Hanlon: Mm-hmm.

    Fischer: The key thing, the most important thing is that introspection and insights, right? So, really understanding and being honest about and knowing your business, right, understanding what those end to end processes are, knowing and understanding your marketplace, knowing and understanding your customers so that, to Sean’s point, when you do wanna deliver to that Nth degree, you’ve got the insights there as part of your end state, right, that you wanna achieve.

    So, I think all of those things hold true in either case, and then bringing them together into a well-defined strategy that reflects—honestly reflects, right, the strengths and weaknesses of your own organization. And then, last but not least, I think something that often gets not as much attention as it needs to, having metrics in place, right, so that you’ve got that continuous learning ability over time and being able to come back and not only say, you know, “Did we achieve what we set out to?” but on an ongoing basis, where do we need to continually pivot and shift our efforts to make sure that we stay.

    And, of course, as goals change—I mean, we talked a little bit before about what happens when this is done, right? So, be it a hybrid workforce or some of the other trends that we might expect to see in 2021 with DevOps and, more broadly in business and in the economy, how do we help ourselves and our business partners to be able to continually pivot in that very agile way? And, you know, so to me, it’s about those three things, right? Having the right insights, the right strategy and tactics to find, and then third, the right metrics in place to keep you on point.

    O’Hanlon: Alright. Sean or Pankaj, do you guys have any best practices you want to share?

    Davis: Sure. So, I want to answer your earlier question—no, it’s not too late.

    O’Hanlon: Okay. [Laughter]

    Davis: There is no such thing as too late. Please, if there’s any business out there, you have not gone through a digital transformation now, it is never too late.

    O’Hanlon: Good.

    Davis: Now, the second part of that I will caveat with, because I think it just needs to be said. A lot of the practitioners feel this way, but it’s not often announced, and I don’t believe it’s always heard enough—transformation is not about just carrying you from one state to the other. I really wish that the industry as a whole would start to adopt digital evolution. Because that’s really the truth of what we’re doing. We should be evolving every single day. We’re adapting to the pandemic, and then we will adapt to the next event that occurs within our industry—good or bad.

    We’re constantly adapting to the needs of our employees. We’re adapting to these new technologies and frameworks and ways of doing business every single day. That’s an evolutionary step that will never change. The transformation is just the spark, the catalyst, if you will, for that evolution to begin and to be recognized and, you know, as Jennifer had mentioned earlier, institutionalized in the organization, right? And that’s your culture, that’s your people, that’s your technology, whether it’s DevOps, whether it’s agile—whatever it is, right? There’s never, it’s never too late to start.

    From the perspective of best practices, I know I’m gonna sound like a broken record to all those that have probably seen millions of videos on the culture of transformation, but start with your culture. And I don’t just mean implementing programs that are making onboarding easier or customer satisfaction—employee satisfaction. But I mean, really start by taking stock of where your organization is right now. You don’t have to be light years ahead, you don’t have to be like Netflix, you don’t have to be like Amazon or Microsoft. You are your own unique entity. You will be the next whatever company, right, that somebody is going to want to model the great things that you do.

    I always think back to the TPS system, Toyota Production System, right? Toyota was massively successful in being one of the best manufacturers in the entire world despite giving the secret away to the rest of the world and all these other manufacturers adopted it, but they still were not able to achieve the same level of performance as Toyota, because it was built by Toyota, for Toyota. This was the way they did business, they felt this worked best for them.

    And I think that’s a sorely missed or overlooked area in a lot of transformations is—there’s so many frameworks, there’s so many ways of doing it, there’s so many quote-unquote best practices that are out there. Take a look at where your organization is. Take a look at where your people are and think about where you want to be. And then find things that align to that, that help you be successful, and eventually, you’ll start noticing you’re creating your own processes—you’re creating your own frameworks, you’re creating your own ways forward, and then share those with the world, right? Because it’s not just enough to consume something, see that it works, and move on, but take the lessons that you’ve learned and the things that you’re creating and share that out in the world. Maybe someone else is able to use that and perpetuate their business in a positive direction.

    O’Hanlon: Alright.

    Gupta: I think Sean and Jennifer covered many, many great points, and there are so many great practices. We are in 2020, so if you sum all the numericals in 2020, it comes to the fore, and I’m going to cover the 40 best practices.

    First, I think Sean and Jennifer did a wonderful job explaining that embrace the cultural shift. It is a new way of thinking, it’s a new way of doing. But to succeed in this cultural shift, IT skill set is the most important part. You must shift the culture, all ________ aligned, but if you don’t have a skill set inside that organization, you will not succeed. So, as you are embracing this cultural shift, invest in the IT skill set. That’s the first.

    The second one is design and build for speed. Because the automation and the speed to respond to the market differentiates the winners versus losers.

    So, the philosophy should be to automate everything you can, and that’s where the DevOps comes into the play. Look for every possibility which you can automate. And automation requires the DevOps skill set, but it also looks at your applications in a different way. What I can modernize so I can reuse those functions—that’s what the microservices kind of application brings into that.

    DevOps is also about modernization and connecting them together, so they work like a machine, one after another, one feeding another. So, that’s that whole part.

    Also, start thinking, as we move into 2020 or 2021—how do I build a self-correcting infrastructure? And cloud is already giving you auto scale, resiliency—all those pieces into that. We don’t have to go into detail, but when you’re building and designing for the speed, see what are things that can achieve that.

    Third thing, which is going to be more and more critical, is the security first, security first, security first.

    O’Hanlon: Yes.

    Gupta: The recent SolarWinds example taught us so much. A small component on a broader enterprise, a small crack or vulnerability can impact the whole ecosystem.

    And in this world of application and API, where API has become the lifeline of the businesses and more and more digital transformation related business, are you protected your applications in API? As we move into the world of the multi-cloud, do I have a consistent security posture across multi-cloud? So, those are some of the things, that security first rather than the bolt-on.

    O’Hanlon: Mm-hmm.

    Gupta: And the last is that build for visibility. What I mean by invest into your observability stack, build into tools and mechanisms to give you a visibility inside what is happening in your infrastructure, what is happening in your application. Because if you don’t see, you can’t fix it.

    To summarize—embrace the digital shift, embrace the cultural shift, but make sure you have the right skill set to do that, design and build for speed, security first (no more bolt-on security) and visibility, visibility, visibility. Because if you can’t see, you can’t fix it.

    O’Hanlon: Excellent. Excellent. Well, all are great points, all are great best practices, and I want to thank all of you, all three of you for your expertise today during our discussion. Great stuff.

    If organizations have not begun their digital transformation efforts, now is the time. I think every organization understands the importance of digital transformation now more than ever, and it’s great to hear that it’s not too late—thanks, Sean. And it’s security, as Pankaj and Jennifer both mentioned—super, super important, and it should be an integral part of digital transformation efforts.

    We have lots of information about digital transformation and what’s happening in the space in general and some—you know, again, some of the best practices on devopsy.kinsta.cloud. So, I do urge everybody to check out the website and read up what we’ve got on digital transformation.

    Guys, before we close things out, any parting words, any parting advice on digital transformation or DevOps in general?

    I guess not, alright. [Laughter]

    Gupta: This is the time—this is the time that will create the stories which you will tell to your grandkids.

    O’Hanlon: True. Absolutely.

    Davis: Yeah, I think focusing on doing what’s right for your organization and doing what’s right for your customers, take care of your people, take care of your customers, don’t just do what’s easy. Because there can be so much change that’s going on that it’s very easy to say, “Okay, well, we can revisit this,” right, and generate a lot of cultural debt that never gets paid back off.

    Fischer: Yeah, I was thinking similarly, you know, there’s—in some way, too, you know, the reality of the pandemic conditions has been a level of exhaustion, I think, as well. And even despite that, it’s important not to keep focusing ahead and making sure that things that might be beneficial, particularly, coming up on the radar, trends for ’21 that could be taken advantage of—you know, don’t lose the momentum. Even though it’s been an exhausting past number of months, keep the momentum going and take advantage of the exciting trends that are on the way for 2021.

    Davis: Absolutely.

    O’Hanlon: Excellent. Alright. Well, on that note, I do want to thank all three of you, Sean, Jennifer, and Pankaj. Thank you so much for your time today, thank you so much for your expertise, and love to have you guys back on a future panel discussion or even on TechStrong TV. So, thank you, again, I appreciate it, and thank you, all, for watching and we’ll see you next time.

    Gupta: Thank you.

    Davis: Thanks, Charlene.

    Fischer: Thank you.