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  • DevOps Chat: Aqua Security Seeks To Secure Containers

    DevOps Chat: Aqua Security Seeks To Secure Containers

    The migration to container-based application infrastructures is accelerating at a faster pace even than we saw with hypervisor-based infrastructure 18 or so years ago. Hand in hand with this is the race to provide better security solutions that are native to and purpose-built for containerized environments. Aqua Security has established itself in the container security arena, recently raising $25 million in capital funding as it seeks to lock down the container security market.

    In this chat, we sat down with Rani Osnat of Aqua Security to discuss the recent funding round and the state of the container security market. Below is the streaming audio of our discussion. Below that is the transcript of our discussion.

    Audio

    Transcript

    [su_pullquote align=”right”]Rani Osnat[su_custom_gallery source=”media: 1739530″ width=”100″ height=”100″ align=”center”]
    Rani Osnat has more than 20 years of enterprise software industry experience, in project management, product management and marketing, including a decade as VP of marketing for innovative tech startups in the IT security and cloud arenas. Previously Rani was a management consultant in the London office of Booz & Co. He holds an MBA from INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France. Rani is an avid wine geek, and a slightly less avid painter.[/su_pullquote]

    Alan Shimel: Hi, everyone. This is Alan Shimel for devopsy.kinsta.cloud and Security Boulevard, and welcome to another chat.

    Today’s guest is Rani Osnat, VP of Marketing for Aqua Security, one of the leaders in the container security market, and Rani, welcome to our DevOps Chat.

    Rani Osnat: Thank you, Alan. Thanks for having me.

    Shimel: Thank you. Thank you for being here. So, Rani, the big news out of Aqua recently is, by anyone’s yardstick, a large raise of capital to fuel Aqua’s continued growth.

    Osnat: Yep, that’s correct. We raised $25,000,000.00 in a series B round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, which is a very well-known tier one VC.

    Shimel: Yep.

    Osnat: And, it’s—well, to the best of my knowledge, it’s the biggest funding round in our space in continuous security to date, and it also brings total funding for us to $38.5 million.

    Shimel: That’s fantastic.

    Osnat: So, we’re, I think, in a pretty good position to capture what we think is a tremendous opportunity in this market.

    Shimel: Sure. And so, Rani, we were talking off mic prior to recording today—you know, beyond the sheer magnitude of the number, right, 25 is a big number, 38 is a bigger number—but beyond that, there’s also the validation. Which is, you assume a company like Lightspeed Ventures, Microsoft Ventures is another investor in the company, Shlomo Kramer, of course, from Check Point is another investor. You would assume these people are pretty bright people and they don’t throw their good money away. That, if they’re investing this money, they invest it for two things. No. 1, they see the opportunity in the market, so the market itself is ripe and worthy of that sort of investment. And then No. 2, that the team and the product at Aqua are also worthy of the investment.

    Let’s first talk about the market, if we can, though. I mean, so this is a validation, I think, of the container security market, if you will, right?

    Osnat: Yeah.

    Shimel: The containers are real, that securing them are real, and there’s gonna be a big market for that coming up. What do you think?

    Osnat: Yeah, I mean, definitely, when we started Aqua just under two years ago, we didn’t quite know how fast the market would move and what kind of market it would shape up to be. And fairly early on, even when we were in beta in early 2016, it became fairly obvious that this is an enterprise market. That is that, you know, some of the biggest adopters of container technology are not just Silicon Valley startups or web-scale companies that kind of invented this, but Fortune 500 enterprises across verticals like financials, insurance, retail, aerospace, manufacturing, and so forth, as well as government.

    And so, paradoxically, you would expect this kind of new technology to be first adopted by startups, but the real boom in adoption comes from the fact that enterprises are adopting it very quickly, and I think there are several reasons for that. One is that the benefits of using containers are overwhelmingly positive, and the benefits are pretty immediate. So, you can see benefits in agility in terms of how fast you can deliver applications to the market, you can see benefits in moving to the cloud, and reducing your infrastructure costs and operational costs. And you can see much better control over what kind of applications you’re deploying, where, and when, et cetera, largely through automation.

    So, these benefits are overwhelming, and additionally, containers are easy, right? So, it’s—you know, one of the things that made containers, which in itself is not a new technology, it’s been around for a while, but what companies like Docker did is make containers very accessible and very usable. And so, the fact that they’re easy to use makes adoption easy as well, and you know, you kind of see a pincer movement of, on the one hand, grassroots adoption through developer and DevOps teams of containers, so they develop applications using containers. And on the other hand, you’re seeing a top down approach of, you know, CIOs, CTOs seeing the benefits of containers, adopting them, or mandating their use for, for example, cloud native applications to drive cloud usage, hybrid cloud, cloud migration—all of those good things.

    Shimel: Absolutely. So, Rani, you know—granted, I’m not as involved in container and container security as you are, obviously, but to me, a couple of different thoughts. Number one, in my limited—granted, limited expertise, containers aren’t that easy, right? I mean, I think when we talk about containers and then, like, Kubernetes and stuff to manage the whole environment—for someone who hasn’t developed on them before and is used to developing, let’s say, in VMware or in Bare Metal, there is, there’s a learning curve. Maybe once you pick it up, it’s easier.

    But the other thing is, I always try to compare sort of container adoption, let’s say, to hypervisor adoption or VMware adoption, and I would say that containers, their adoption curve is higher or steeper, faster than sort of hypervisor’s.

    Osnat: Yeah, that’s correct.

    Shimel: And really what I see, the last couple—you know, we’re always doing surveys here at devopsy.kinsta.cloud, announcing the new Security Boulevard site—what we’re seeing is, you know, we always saw people messing with the containers, right? R&D testing, what have you—but the numbers of containers, the percentage of companies that have containers in product deployment, you know, in real, frontline stuff? Where it was—jeez, just two or three years ago was low teens, below 20 percent—is now climbing, getting near that critical mass number, right, of 50 percents and stuff like that. And that’s huge, right? You’re talking about early adopters moving to mainstream in a matter of months, and that’s —

    Osnat: That’s correct.

    Shimel: — that’s the numbers you see as well?

    Osnat: Yeah, we see that. And again, I don’t think this would’ve been the case if containers weren’t easy, as I said. I mean, there’s always a learning curve with new technology, but I think if you’re a new developer, a new programmer working today, working on a greenfield application, there’s really no reason for you to use something that is not containers unless it’s something obscure for technology reasons.

    But mostly, it’s a much easier way to develop applications quickly than previous approaches. And I think, you know, if we take a broader picture, a container is—this adoption of containers does not occur in a vacuum, and we actually see a convergence of three trends that are kinda coming together and containers are probably the biggest enabler of those three trends. And these trends are happening independently of each other. So, you know, one trend is one that you are very familiar with, it’s the name of your site, is DevOps, you know, the proliferation of DevOps as a method, process, organizational philosophy, et cetera, which is all about delivering applications faster and in a more continuous way, and containers make that easier than before.

    Another trend is the move to microservices architectures, you know, for web applications or cloud native applications, which is basically adopting what web scale companies like Facebook and Twitter and Netflix started, and now bringing into the mainstream. That, too, is facilitated to a great degree by containers, because implementing microservices as containers is, today, probably the easiest method of doing that. I mean, there are the so—called serverless architectures, et cetera, but they’re much less mature than containers are at the moment. Not that containers are super mature, but they’re more mature.

    And the other aspect is the whole kind of hybrid cloud, cloud native movement where, you know, it took 10 years, but enterprises are adopting cloud services in a very big way, including industries that you would never dreamed of having on the cloud, on the public cloud, like pharmaceutical, health care, insurance, banking, federal, and so forth.

    So, all of these—and again, containers, because they’re portable, because they can run anywhere in the same way, they’re a really good way to realize this notion of hybrid cloud. For example, we at Aqua have a customer—who, unfortunately, I can’t name, but it’s a well-known company. And they are, for them, this is already a reality. They are deploying applications on both Amazon and Azure using the same framework, using the same security policies, and in a way that makes these clouds interchangeable for them, so they can run application A on Azure today and they can run the same application on Amazon tomorrow. So, that’s a real change that we see, and containers are a big part of that.

    So, all of these things together, I think, are what’s driving this adoption. And yet, you know, I think we have to distinguish between adoption and penetration or, you know, maybe some other word. But the fact is that today, if you look at the total workloads that enterprises are running, containers are a very, very small percentage of that. But, if you look at any new applications delivered over the next five years as well as looking at migrating legacy applications to the cloud, you’ll see this number growing exponentially over the next few years.

    So, yes, in terms of the number of enterprises now either looking at, working with, or already deploying containers, that number is growing very fast, and I think there’s probably hardly a large enterprise on the planet today that is not at least thinking about containers if not already using them. But at the same time, you know, it’s early days for them. Most of them—not all of them, but most of them, the vast majority are looking at the first few applications being deployed, and this is just the first drop of rain before the deluge. So, it’s gonna be a lot bigger.

    Shimel: Yep. Rani, a couple of comments, questions, follow ups. So, first of all—yes, DevOps, containers, they seem to go like peanut butter and chocolate. Again, so does microservices and containers, but to me, I—you know, when I was a kid, a teacher once taught us that all spaghetti is macaroni, but not all macaroni is spaghetti.

    Osnat: Sure.

    Shimel: So, it almost seems that, you know, wherever you see containers, you see microservices, but you don’t always see containers when you see microservices, right? In some regards, microservices can be even bigger, right? It has even more of a use footprint. Actually, on devopsy.kinsta.cloud, we’re launching a microservices channel which we hope will eventually grow into a standalone site, because I do think microservices is that big and has the potential to be that big.

    Osnat: Yeah, but microservices is not a technology; containers are. Microservices is an architecture, you know what I’m saying? There’s a difference.

    Shimel: Yeah, fair enough. Yep. But, you know, bringing it back—and, of course, loud usage and all of that. But, let’s turn for a moment and talk about the mission of securing containers and all of these architectures and platforms and so forth. That’s really what Aqua is, and when we talk about why they invested money, these investors, not just because the containers are so big, but because the mission of securing them is also big.

    Osnat: That’s true. So, yeah, I mean, when you look at—so, first of all, we’re not really, I mean, the fact that we’re a container security company might allude to the fact that we secure containers. That’s not exactly true. So, you know, we don’t look to secure a container or containers, we look to secure the workloads or applications that are running on containers.

    Shimel: Mm-hmm.

    Osnat: And that’s a difference. Because—and again, here, there are several trends that come into play. One is really that these things that I mentioned before, the DevOps trends, the microservices, architecture, and moving to the cloud, they also affect how you can and want to do security. You know, if we look at the cloud first—when you go to the cloud, a lot of the basics, you know, the bread and butter security that you use to invest in as an enterprise disappears. Why? Because these are services that are already taken care of or provided by the cloud service provider.

    So, you know, when you run your applications on Amazon, you don’t really have to worry about things like data center security, infrastructure security, network security to a degree, identity management to a degree. And so, a lot of these things are—you know, they’re basically taken care of for you. So, the focus shifts to the application layer, and that is one aspect.

    Another aspect, which is a really positive one for using containers, is the fact that, since you are now breaking up the application into a bunch of microservices, you can have much more visibility and control into what the application is doing. You know, if you look at an individual container or microservice, it’s much easier to understand the intended function of that container or service, and consequently, be able to understand what is considered good behavior, and be able to identify pretty easily what is bad behavior. And you do that at a very granular level.

    Additionally, if you look at the networking aspect, in a way, the networking has been brought into the application in a more visible way than before. Before, you could have things done within the application that maybe a malicious actor did within the application, and it’s all done internally, and it’s a black box. You don’t have visibility into it until it actually gets out.

    With microservices, you are able to see the interaction between the different components of the application, sometimes at a very fine grained level and, again, be able to identify any kind of weird or abnormal communication between, you know, parts of the application that are not supposed to be communicating that way. So, that’s another benefit. So, these things really allow us to have much more control and visibility over what the application is doing.

    The last piece is around DevOps, which is often nowadays coined as DevSecOps, which is the whole notion of shifting left security—i.e., bringing some of the control points not to the run time environment but to the developer environment. And why is that? Because containers are also immutable, right? So, if you’re using containers directly, you’re not supposed to see any change in one time environments. You’re not supposed to see patching, nobody is supposed to SSH into your host that’s running containers, it’s supposed to be entirely orchestrated and automated.

    And so, anything that happens there is by definition not good. But, at the same time, you have the opportunity to make the application more secure from the start, which is in the development phase, and that includes things like, you know, removing vulnerabilities, ensuring the configuration is correct, enforcing best practices. And if you can automate that—which we do—then you’re winning, right? Because you’re delivering a much more secure application to start with, you’re gonna have a smaller attack surface, and then in run time, all you need to do is make sure that there is no drift or no unexpected changes to the run time environment, which would be considered malicious or at least suspect.

    Shimel: Got it. So, Rani, we’re running a little low on time. We’re actually out of time, but let’s keep talking. [Laughter]

    Osnat: [Laughter]

    Shimel: So, now, we’ve got—what are you gonna do, how are you using the 25 million? What’s the plan?

    Osnat: Right, so you know, in our short life of two years, we managed to launch the product very early and get quite a few enterprise customers, many of them Fortune 100 customers across many industries, and that sort of traction is what really made Lightspeed and the other investors invest in us, and we need to continue this. The market is growing, right? As we mentioned, adoption is growing at an accelerated pace, so we need to be there.

    That means, you know, investing in the quality as well as the breadth and depth of our solution. There is—containers are not a singular technology. I mean, there’s a lot of variation in the stack, not just in orchestrators and OS’s, but in the container engines themselves, and this will become even more so over the next few months as things like, you know, additional run time engines are introduced, and not just the Docker open source run time engine.

    And so, this requires investing in the right technologies and making sure that we can fulfill the requirements of our customers and, additionally, of course, we need to expand our presence, both in the U.S. as well as in other parts of the world.

    Shimel: Let me talk to you about that a sec, Rani. So, I’m gonna assume U.S. probably represents at least 50 percent of your market, is that about right?

    Osnat: That’s correct, yeah. [Cross talk]

    Shimel: And probably Ameya the lion’s share of the rest.

    Osnat: At the moment, yes, but Asia is also growing, you know, there’s—

    Shimel: I also wanted to ask—what about AP?

    Osnat: Yeah, so Asia Pacific is growing as well. There are a lot of container users in places like Australia, China, Japan, and so forth. And so, this is—these are obviously big economies, there are big companies there. They’re as advanced in terms of cloud adoption as the U.S. in some cases. So, we need to be there.

    Shimel: Absolutely. Well, how do you—so, I was actually out at RSA APJ this summer, and it was in Singapore. And, you know, I had a chance—I actually put on a DevSecOps event there with RSA. So, I had a chance to talk to many of the RSA attendees, some of the vendors and stuff.

    I mean, what’s interesting there is, your infrastructure, you know, even in Europe, AWS is an 8,000-pound gorilla, right?

    Osnat: Correct.

    Shimel: Where do you—we don’t see that in Asia Pac. AWS is still a player, obviously, but there are other solutions there.

    Osnat: Mm-hmm. Yeah, that—

    Shimel: Go ahead. How does that affect you guys, or how do you deal with it?

    Osnat: Well, it affects us partially because mostly, you know, we’re pretty much cloud agnostic, right? We run on all the major clouds. It’s not a major effort for us to run on additional clouds. You know, even today, we support Amazon and Azure, Google, IBM Bluemix. And so, it’s relatively easy for us to support additional clouds, and it’s not a—that’s not the stumbling block, in most cases, right? It’s more like things like esoteric OS’s or weird configurations that we encounter sometimes. But, in most cases, that would not be an issue. Not to mention that a lot of companies are also running private clouds, using VMware or other types of virtualization infrastructure. So, that is really not a stumbling block for us, at all.

    Shimel: Good, good. Interesting. Rani, as I said before, we’re way over time, I need to wrap this up. But, first of all, congratulations on the raise. I’m sure Aqua has 25,000,000 good uses for this money as well, and we’ll see more coming down the pipeline in terms of both functionality products as well as reach around the world. You know, always good to have you on, you have a great handle on where the container market is and of course where the container security market is.

    So, thanks for being our guest today. We’ll have you on again soon.

    Osnat: Thank you.

    Shimel: Thank you. This is Alan Shimel for DevOps and Security Boulevard Chats. Thanks for listening. We’ll hope to see you soon on another chat. Bye bye, everyone.

    — Alan Shimel

  • DevOps Chat: Cloud Sprawl, DevOps and ParkMyCloud w/ Jay Chapel

    DevOps Chat: Cloud Sprawl, DevOps and ParkMyCloud w/ Jay Chapel

    I bet you know how many instances you have running AWS or Azure or Google Cloud. OK, maybe you don’t. But whether you do or don’t, do you really have a handle on what your cloud infrastructure looks like? If you are like most, the answer to the question is no. Cloud sprawl, multicloud, hybrid cloud … it is hard to get a handle on this. In this DevOps Chat we sit down with Jay Chapel, CEO of ParkMyCloud and discuss how really understanding your cloud infrastructure can help DevOps deliver better.

    As usual, the streaming media of our conversation is below, followed by the transcript of the conversation:

    Audio

    Transcript

    Alan Shimel: Hey, everyone, it’s Alan Shimel, and it’s time for another DevOps Chat. Today’s DevOps Chat guest is Jay Chapel, CEO and Co-founder of ParkMyCloud. Hey, Jay, welcome to DevOps Chat.

    Jay Chapel: Hey, Alan, how’s it going? Thanks for having us.

    Shimel: Oh, thanks for having—thanks for being here, Jay. So, Jay, I invited you on because I wanted to talk specifically about a problem that I first encountered, oh, I’m gonna guess seven, eight, nine years ago or more, and I called it cloud sprawl. Which is, you know, the nice thing about Amazon and AWS is, it made it so easy to spin up new instances and add new storage and what have you. The not so nice thing about AWS and those kinds of things is, it made it so easy to spin up new instances and storage and those kinds of things.

    So, it was—it’s come to the point, Jay, where I know many, many companies really have little control and even less insight into what they’re actually spending on, and what they actually have in terms of assets in the cloud. You know, and for anyone who’s gotten an AWS bill or tried to go through an AWS bill, my AT&T wireless bill is probably easier to understand, if you can believe that.

    So, it’s a real problem. Jay, I would imagine this is something that you guys are helping companies with an awful lot, and that’s the crux of it.

    Chapel: Yeah, that’s correct. I think there’s three problems we primarily see with customers that relates to Amazon, Azure, Google, and/or even multicloud. One of them obviously is what you just brought up, sort of cost visibility. A second, though, is once you get the visibility, it’s around control.

    So, I get a good view of what I have, how do I control those costs using things like reserved instances or turning things off and on. And then the third thing is, really automating that as part of your DevOps process. So, how do I automate that as part of how I’d spin things up in the cloud, spin things down, and really make that integrated into my infrastructure.

    Shimel: So, and hand in hand with automation, we tend to think once stuff is automated, we can reduce the cost of it, but we really can with automation and on and off stuff. You know, Jay, and we can talk later perhaps on another DevOps Chat, we can get into the kinda technical details of how this all works.

    But I wanted to focus our conversation today really at the business owner or business stakeholder, if you will, who is tasked with keeping a cloud budget on budget or under budget, who is tasked with making sure that there’s enough resources to do what needs to be done, but not—they don’t have excess resources—who really is, I mean, this is a major problem for them.

    Without naming names, Jay, can you give me some war stories, if you will, of kinda the worst messes you’ve seen some companies get into before they came over to ParkMyCloud?

    Chapel: Yeah, so, I mean, to your point around the business owner—so, we just talked to a large company yesterday that’s moved into AWS, and they actually had a team of people on the phone with us, I think there were five or six of them, and they all had cost management or cloud reporting or some kind of financial control in their title, even though they were technical people. So, people are—companies are putting people sort of in charge of this problem and spending money to help manage and reduce money.

    So, that’s a really large company with lots of resources, but then, for, I would say, companies born in the cloud, like whatever fintechs or health care or social media or ad companies that have been built over the last five or 10 years with all their infrastructure in the cloud, to really put that responsibility more on sort of the DevOps person.

    So, it’s kinda interesting as, even though they’re technical, they’re also responsible for controlling cloud costs, because somebody’s knocking on their shoulder saying, “Hey, this bill’s gone up. You need to manage this. Here’s a visibility into that—now you need to put controls and mechanisms in place so people just can’t spin things up randomly, and there’s some process in place.”

    So, it’s kind of a mix based on the size of the company, for sure, but that’s definitely a problem we see, and those are the people we talk to every day.

    Shimel: Absolutely. So, Jay, I don’t know if you guys have amassed any kind of metrics or anything, but give me a size of a company and kinda what their cloud bills are. And there’s probably a difference between native cloud and companies who are just starting to kinda go through their transformation. But what—you know, just so we have a kind of field of reckoning, what kind of budgets are we talking about?

    Chapel: Yeah, well, that’s an interesting one. So, lots of people you actually talk to on the phone don’t really know how much they totally spend per month on the cloud. [Laughter]

    Shimel: Oh, I know that.

    Chapel: But they do know the size of the infrastructure, so they’ll be able to tell you, “Hey, we’ve got 4,000 instances, and I’ve got this much in storage, and I’ve got this much in terms of database spend,” and things like that. But they really don’t know their total bill.

    But we talked to—we just talked to a company today with 4,000 instances, another one the other day with 7,000, another one the other day with 12,000. So, it’s really all over the map, but if you have 12,000 instances, you’re spending millions of dollars per month with either Amazon, Azure, or Google—in this case, it happened to be Amazon.

    But the more interesting thing is that, what we see is like—for a really good example, we’re just looking at a company today based in Canada that uses our platform, they have about 430 instances in Amazon, and they park 26 of those, but they save $18,000 a month just by parking 26 of those.

    So, what’s interesting is how big the instance is and then how much money you can save on it. So, if it’s a small or micro, you’re not gonna save much money, but if it’s a database and/or a large, extra-large, you know, the gargantuan instances, you save a lot of money on those.

    So, it’s really all over the map on how much you spend based on not always the instance count, but the size of those instances or databases you’re running in the cloud.

    Shimel: Got it, got it. It’s a crazy—I mean, when you think about it, the fact that they don’t know what they’re spending, Jay, and they have—you know, you’re talking to someone who, when I used to have to put a new server in would grab a screwdriver to rack mount it, right? [Laughter] So, 400 is a lot of screws.

    Chapel: Yeah. [Laughter]

    Shimel: But the fact that they don’t even know what they’re spending, I mean, at some point, that’s almost negligent, right? But yet, I get it. I get it, because it’s hard to put it all together.

    Chapel: Well, it’s hard to put it all together, but then, you know, it also depends on who you’re talking to. If you’re talking to the CFO or the CIO or CTO, they probably understand quote-unquote how much they’re spending in the cloud. But, as you move down the organization to DevOps engineers or IT operations or director level, they may or may not know the total bill, but they definitely know what they’re responsible for in terms of infrastructure. And then, more importantly, how are they charging that infrastructure back?

    So, we talked to some companies that do a pure chargeback model and they even do a cost uplift. So, let’s say that some organizations spend $100,000 a month in the cloud—well, they’re actually gonna cost uplift that and say, “Okay, well, I’m gonna put 10 percent on this or 20 percent on this for managing that for you.” And we talked to some companies that have no chargeback at all, that IT just pays the entire bill.

    So, it really—you know, it’s really very similar to a traditional data center in that sense; so, just depending on the way people put their cost models internally and if they charge it back to projects and stuff. Definitely very interesting conversations when you get to it with people.

    Shimel: Absolutely. Jay, just while we’re here, though, why don’t you give a little background on ParkMyCloud, though? I realize we didn’t really do that before, so what exactly—you know, give us a little background.

    Chapel: Yeah, sure. We’re a two-year-old company based in Northern Virginia. We’re right near Dulles Airport, if people know where that is. And basically, what we do is, we help people optimize their cloud costs by turning things off when they’re not being used.

    So, you could take a simple example of a customer that has maybe 100 instances in the cloud, maybe 55 of those are production and 45 of those are non-production. Well, those non-production instances generally don’t need to run on nights and weekends, and then we help them identify those instances, automate the sort of shut-down process based on schedules, and then bring them back up when they’re needed. And this is all integrated with single sign-on technologies like Slack and Jenkins audit logs and reporting, so it’s really an enterprise technology, and it even has an RBAC model that allows people to set up users teams, so you can do a whole role-based access control around that.

    But when you park an instance, the average savings on an instance is usually between 65 and 70 percent per instance per month. So, ergo the example earlier where this company is parking 26 instances and saving $18,000.00 a month. You can really get a significant ROI doing that. And we have a lot of large enterprises using the platform—Capital One, Unilever, McDonald’s, etc. They’ve been on the platform for a very long time, and we have born in cloud startups like ParkMyCloud using it as well. We do have customers all over the world now in about 15 countries.

    Shimel: That’s pretty amazing. Really amazing story. And Jay, what about you? What’s your background?

    Chapel: Yeah, so I’m a sales guy by nature. So, I’ve been in the IT industry since the year 2000. I used to work for a company called Micromuse. They had a product called Netcool, so if people are familiar with traditional data center service assurance, network assurance, etc. And then we got acquired by IBM Tivoli in 2006, and I spent a lot of time over at IBM.

    And funny enough, in about 2010, 2011, 2012, we were in Tivoli inside IBM and we sold infrastructure software like server monitoring, application monitoring, storage, and stuff like that. And we started losing stuff to born in cloud companies—companies like ServiceNow, companies like Splunk, companies like New Relic and AppDynamics, even solar ones and stuff like that. And what we—you know, and SaaS technologies.

    So, really got into seeing, okay, how are people gonna use the cloud, and then where is that gonna go over time? And obviously now, since it’s a utility, really, we really kind of turned ParkMyCloud into something that focuses on cost control and optimization. Sort of like Nest for the cloud—that’s how we got to where we are today.

    Shimel: Very cool, man. So, as I mentioned, Jay, we’re gonna have you and the folks on again, because I want to get more into the technical aspects of all of this. But I think what we’ve given people today is a good overview of the business case on why—I mean, if you don’t know what you’re spending on cloud to begin with? Call, right—give a call over there.

    If you don’t know how many instances you have or, you know, are you shutting stuff off automatically, or is it simply if you’re just wanting to automate this, right? Because this is really something that, to me, screams out to be automated—really, ParkMyCloud seems like a great solution that you should be looking into.

    Chapel: Yeah, it’s a single purpose platform, built solely to help people optimize inside AWS, Azure and Google. And we offer a free trial, and it’s, most of—I would say at least 75 percent of our customers are 100 percent self-service. So, we’ve never talked to them, they pay a subscription, they save money, and they love using the technology.

    Shimel: That’s a nice business right there, my friend. Alrighty!

    Hey, Jay Chapel, CEO, Co-founder of ParkMyCloud—thanks for being this week’s guest on DevOps Chat, and we look forward to hearing more about ParkMyCloud in the future.

    Chapel: Yeah, likewise. Thanks for the time, Alan. I really appreciate it.

    Shimel: Alrighty. This is Alan Shimel for devopsy.kinsta.cloud and DevOps Chat. We hope you enjoyed this, and we’ll see you soon on another chat.

    — Alan Shimel

  • DevOps Chat: Harness.io, Continuous Delivery as a Service w/ Steve Burton

    DevOps Chat: Harness.io, Continuous Delivery as a Service w/ Steve Burton

    Today marks the launch of Harness.io, continuous delivery as a service. The company is founded by some of the original team at AppDynamics. They want to take the same kind of approach AppDynamics brought to APM, to the CI/CD market. We caught up with Steve Burton, VP of product marketing at Harness to get the scoop on this exciting new company.

    As usual immediately below is the audio of our discussion and the transcript of our discussion follows after that.

     Audio

    Transcript

    [su_pullquote align=”right”][su_custom_gallery source=”media: 118147″ width=”300″ height=”300″]Steve Burton

    Steve is VP of Product Marketing at Harness, a new Continuous Delivery-As A-Service Platform. Prior to Harness, Steve ran Product Marketing at AppDynamics, Moogsoft and Glassdoor. Steve also started his career as a Java developer back in 2004 at Sapient. When he’s not playing around with technology he’s normally watching Formula 1 or researching cars on the internet. Twitter: @BurtonSays[/su_pullquote]

    Alan Shimel: Hey, everyone, it’s Alan Shimel, with another DevOps Chat here on devopsy.kinsta.cloud. Today’s chat is with Steve Burton, VP of products at an exciting new company – just launched today – called “Harness.” Steve, welcome.

    Steve Burton: Thanks, Alan. Great to be here.

    Shimel: Great to have you here and, hey, it’s a great day to launch a company, Steve.

    Burton: Yes. Sure.

    Shimel: Of course, you know, I’m reminded of what someone told me when I sold the first company I started, and they said, “Companies are like boats – the best two days are the day you buy ’em and the day you sell them.” So this is one of the good – this is one of the big days for ya. And speaking of that, though, Steve, before we get into what Harness is about and markets and stuff, you actually – you’re one of the founding team there, and the team’s really kind of a get-together of a lot of the guys who helped found AppDynamics, I guess, back in the day. Correct?

    Burton: Yeah, for sure, with a few AppDynamics guys here. We’ve also got people from Apple and Google as well, so there’s a nice mix. But, yeah, for sure. There’s Jyoti, there’s myself, Greg Howard, and Randy Boysen, so there’s – yeah, that’s what we love to do, is build start-ups.

    Shimel: Yeah. Getting the band back together. So, Steve, though, with Harness, though, you guys have taken an interesting kind of approach here in that, you know, you see a tremendous opportunity within the CICD market. Correct?

    Burton: Yeah. Yes. I mean, Harness has primarily kind of been built for continuous delivery as a service, so the kind of CD part of CICD, and we think there’s a big opportunity there. There’s a lot of excitement, there’s a lot of projects and customers, and there’s a lot of complexity to solve, and so, yeah, that’s what we’ve kind of founded the company to kinda help customers with.

    Shimel: Sure. And, Steve, I mean, here at devopsy.kinsta.cloud, we obviously follow the CD space pretty closely, and there’s certainly no lack of companies that have thrown their hat in the ring here, right, without naming names, from well-funded start-ups to big, traditional 800-pound gorillas, but the fact that no one has really captured a dominant market share probably indicates it’s because no one’s really come up with the killer CD app, if you will, or the – and if it’s not the app, maybe it’s the delivery means and everything else. Is that part of what drove you guys to, you know, go this route with Harness?

    Burton: Yeah, I mean, for sure. I mean, if you speak to Jyoti, one of the key reasons he founded the company was when he was, obviously, CEO and founder of AppDynamics, he met with a lot of enterprises and big customers, and they were telling him, “Hey, look, we have hundreds of DevOps engineers, but a lot of them are spending their time scripting and building automation platforms. And so there’s no real solution to help us kind of be like a Facebook or a Google, where we can do continuous delivery.” And so that was really the impetus for Jyoti to kind of take a step back and think, “This problem really isn’t solved yet.”

    Shimel: Yeah. No, I think you hit on something there ’cause there’s been some – not backlash, but there’s some talk on some of the DevOps channels that, “You know what? DevOps hasn’t been as successful as we thought it was going to be and a lot of organizations aren’t experiencing the success they hoped with DevOps.” And, frankly, a lot of it is subjective, not objective, and maybe some of it also has to do with hyped-up expectations that can never be met anyway.

    But, that being said, you hit on something there that I think is important, that, a lot of times, when we talk about DevOps teams and implementing DevOps, it’s time spent figuring out automation, right, and scripting automation. And, whether it be automated testing or automated integration or configuration or what have you, it’s kind of like groundwork, rather than actually doing the work. And you probably need to do the groundwork first, right, Steve? I mean, no one’s – I’m not saying that, but, with a SAS solution like Harness here, you can kinda not cheat, but you can get a head start on that.

    Burton: Yeah, for sure, and I think one thing we’ve tried to do is simplify continuous delivery, and so a lot of the scripting and automation that you might require teams of DevOps engineers to do, we feel we can give those teams a solid platform that they can build on top of, to do continuous delivery. And so I actually sympathize because, if you look at the complexity and the work involved to make continuous delivery work, it’s more than just provisioning infrastructure and configuration management. I mean, today, you’ve got release strategies, you’ve got canary deployments, you got blue-green. You think it’ll verify how those deployments succeed in production. You’ve got rollback, so, if things fail, how quickly can you roll back?

    And I think as well, from speaking to customers, one thing we hear a lot of is just the compliance and security around DevOps, and so DevOps is ultimately about empowering teams and giving freedom to developers and operations, but, at the same time, these companies need to control and audit and make sure that things are done correctly. So a lot of the boring stuff, like the credentials and secrets management and kind of visibility and reporting, that’s as much of the puzzle as a lot of the cool stuff.

    Shimel: Yeah, you’re talking my language, Steve. Certainly, security and compliance, and I tend to think compliance is the caboose on the security engine. You know, just doing compliance doesn’t make you secure. But, that being said, security and compliance are major – they could be your best friend or your worst enemy, in the continuous delivery game, right? If you do it right, you could automate a lot of that and shift it left. It could really help speed up a successful CD process, a successful experience. But if you don’t pay attention to it and you run afoul of your security and compliance, I mean, it’s like going back to “Go,” don’t collect the 200 bucks, and you’re starting from scratch. So it’s an important piece of the puzzle, for sure.

    Steve, give us a little background, though, in – you know, so Harness sees this and the team sees this opportunity with CD. It’s a SAS-based solution. What more can you tell our audience about what you guys are doing?

    Burton: Yeah. So, primarily, it’s SAS and we also offer on-premise software as well, so you can deploy either model. I think what we’re trying to do is three things, is one is automate the actual deployment aspects, and so, instead of needing kinda scripting or coding a lot of the configuration and wiring together all of your ecosystem, and so you kind of use CI in your repository tools, like Jenkins, Bamboo, JFrog, CircleCI; and then making those kind of work in sync with kind of Amazon cloud platforms, Kubernetes, Docker; and then, finally, all the configurations. So what we’ve tried to do is build reusable connectors and templates for all of the technologies in the ecosystem so that you can literally plug them together and build CD pipelines in minutes.

    And that sounds totally alien and kinda sounds too good to be true. We’ve managed to do it, but it’s been a lot of work and it’s been working with a lot of customers. And so, in the last 3, 4 months, we’ve literally had, I think, 270 kind of validation meetings with customers. We’ve got over 20 betas in deployment. And so it’s been understanding that complexity of how we can simplify the CD pipelines today. So, yeah, it’s still a lot of work to do, but I think we’re on the right path.

    Shimel: Excellent. And, of course, Steve, you mentioned something that I wanted to bring that out too, is that, you know, it’s sort of this “It takes a village” with CD, right? There’s no one tool that, soup to nuts, is going to do everything for you, and, as you mentioned, Harness already has integrations with a number of the most common tools that are out there, like a Jenkins and so forth.

    Burton: Yeah. Yeah, and I think, if you look at a lot of the solutions on the market, they require you to rewrite your CD process and change the way you do deployments and potentially replace tools you already have, and kinda that never really works because most customers have invested a lot of time and money and resources in those tools, in those processes. And so what we do is we can fit around your existing ecosystem and tools, as well as your processes, and so a lot of the customers who’ve gone through our beta program, within the first three or four hours, they’ve actually been able to get a CD pipeline up and running and reuse the Jenkins or reuse all of the cloud technologies and platforms, in addition to the monitoring tools as well.

    Shimel: Excellent. So, you know, though today’s launch day, Steve, you guys have actually put in months and months, if not year, already of work on this, but where do you think it goes next?

    Burton: Yeah. Yeah, so, in the intro, I talked about us building the building blocks for the automation and getting the CD pipelines built. We’ve also architected Harness to do continuous verification. What that means is, once you’ve deployed code or artifacts in production, we’re actually gonna use machine learning to understand whether that deployment had a positive or negative impact on the business. And so we’re gonna verify things like performance, response times, errors, throughputs, in addition to looking at application logs to see if there’s any regressions or anything that’s been introduced as part of the deployment.

    And so that’s what we’re excited about. That really, we believe, is unique to Harness – the ability to validate a production deployment. And if we see failures or we see anomalies, we can automatically roll back to the last working version for the customer, with no interruption to their business. So, for me, the future, it needs to be more than just deployment. If you don’t know the business impact of your deployment in production, then you could say there’s been a lot of work and time and effort for, potentially, nothing.

    And I remember, when I was a developer, I worked on projects for months and our success was hitting the go-live day. And once we hit the go-live day, it was operations’ responsibility to deploy it and we never really knew whether we had a positive impact or a negative impact. And I think, in today’s world, with kind of continuous delivery and DevOps and going from an idea to money as quickly as you can, you’ve really gotta know the business impact of every change. And if you don’t, you’re letting your company down.

    Shimel: Agreed. Agreed. So, Steve, it sounds – you know, this is something that I’ve always wondered about with DevOps, which is we put so much effort into automation and doing it better, you know, getting better code, automating all of the stuff, automating CI, automating CD to the point where we actually deploy, and then, all of a sudden, post-deployment, we’re on to the next thing or we’re looking for our feedback loops so we can develop the next iteration of it. And I guess sort of APM sort of filled that next post-deployment monitoring and so forth, but it sounds here like Harness wants to fill that gap in there. Is that fair to say?

    Burton: Yeah. Definitely. I think we wanna automate how customers verify their deployments, and so the APM market is like $5-billion market right now because, literally, every company’s building software and their software keeps breaking. One stat for you is 30 percent of application deployments fail. This was an article that Wired.com wrote – I think it was a few months ago – but that’s a staggering amount of failure. And the reactive way to deal with failure is to go and buy an APM product to help you kind of troubleshoot in production, when you do a deployment.

    The smarter way to do it today is to start and do canary deployments in production, where you roll out the application to a small amount of nodes or users and then verify it before you then roll it out across the rest of your application environment. And so you can kind of think of Harness as a safety net – we’re gonna let you deploy in production, we’ll help you with canary deployments, and, if we see something that’s wrong or we spot an anomaly, you can roll it backward with virtually no business impact

    Shimel: Got it. Got it. Well, Steve, believe it or not, we’re probably a little over time here already, but, hey, we tried. Steve, before we wrap up, though, for people who wanna find out more about Harness, where can they go?

    Burton: Yeah, they can go to harness.io, is our Web address, and we’ve got lots of videos and will be a free trial coming shortly. And you can actually subscribe for the early adopter program as well, if you wanna show your interest there.

    Shimel: Oh, that’s excellent. Excellent. And I’m sure there’s plenty of stuff on the website where people can find out more information of all of these things. Steve, congratulations to you, Jyoti, and the rest of the team. It sounds like you guys are on to your next great adventure and I’m sure it’s gonna be an amazing journey. We hope to have you back here soon and we’ll be watching Harness closely and seeing what it brings to the market. Congratulations.

    Burton: Yeah. Appreciate it. Thanks, Alan.

    Shimel: All right. Steve Burton, VP product at Harness, at harness.io, if you’re interested. Exciting new entry in the DevOps space. Best of luck, Steve, and we’ll see you soon. This is Alan Shimel for devopsy.kinsta.cloud, DevOps Chat. We’ll see you soon on the next DevOps Chat.

    — Alan Shimel

  • DevOps Chat: Shift Ops Left, Shift Dev Right with Kristian Stewart, IBM

    DevOps Chat: Shift Ops Left, Shift Dev Right with Kristian Stewart, IBM

    In this DevOps Chat we speak with Dr. Kristian Stewart of IBM’s Cloud Event Management team. Kristian has some keen insights into the role of dev and ops and how they interact. Kristian calls it Shift Ops left, shift dev right. An interesting way of looking at things.

    As usual the streaming audio is immediately below and the transcript of our conversation is below that.

    Audio

    Transcript

    Alan Shimel:               Hello, everyone, this is Alan Shimel, devopsy.kinsta.cloud, here for another DevOps Chat. Got a really hot chat today and my guest joining me is Kristian Stewart of IBM’s cloud event management team. Kristian, welcome to DevOps Chat.

    Kristian Stewart:         Thanks very much for having me, Alan.

    Alan Shimel:               And I just wanna make sure I got it right – it is Kristian Stewart, right?

    Kristian Stewart:         Last I checked.

    Alan Shimel:               Okay. Well, sometimes my funny French accent throws people off, but, anyway – and, Kristian, I mentioned you’re working with IBM in cloud event management, but give our audience a little bit behind that. What exactly does that mean?

    Kristian Stewart:         Well, let me give you a bit of a background ’cause there’s some history here, in particular with respect to the topic of the podcast, which talks about operation tools. So I’ve been with IBM for ten years. I’m one of the lead architects for a suite of IT service management tools, and my own specialization is in event management, as part of IBM’s Netcool brand, okay? So I’ve been in this industry for 18 years.

    I worked for a small start-up back in the late ’90s – the company was called “Micromoves,” and we were focused on introducing tools for disciplined fault management into telcos, into communication service providers, during the dot-com boom of the late ’90s. And then, in the early ’00s, we pivoted and successfully sold into enterprise, finance, retail, as their IT infrastructures became larger and more complex and as they matured, from an IT operations perspective. So we were acquired in 2006 and we started to work towards applying interesting mathematical and analytical techniques, for increasing the value provided by our tools, and applying machine learning and problems to this space. So that was my background up until about three years ago.

    So what do I mean by “cloud event management”? Well, more recently, as part of the movement of the industry that we serve, as they move into cloud and their investment in cloud has increased, I’ve been working with teams to build software-as-a-service offerings  capabilities we had, till that point, only available on-premise, so it includes alert notification tools, runbook automation tools, and cloud event management. And so our particular interest in DevOps is twofold, right? So our transition itself, from going to shrink-wrapped client service software, that was originally deployed on-prem, has gone through to the development of cloud-native, cloud-scale, public cloud resident offerings, and with our guys embracing paradigms like micro-service architectures, 12-factor apps, and, of course, DevOps.

    And one of the biggest challenges or one of the biggest changes our teams have had to endure is that they now have to operate these deployments themselves, right? So they’ve gone from shrink-wrapped, “Give it to the client. Now it’s their problem,” – well, kind of – through to “Now we’re hosting this for you.” So we’ve had folks from development and QA transitioning to operations roles, and they’re required to apply software engineering skills and work with app developers to ensure that we’ve got robust capabilities in private cloud. And we’re providing 24/7 ops to support these offerings.

    But we find ourselves in a fairly unique position because we’re running operations but as a service product that themselves are designed to help people responsible for running operations for their own apps and services. So it’s just sort of a renewed empathy for our end users, especially as we start to angle our offerings towards teams that are embracing DevOps. Does that answer your question?

    Alan Shimel:               Yeah, and then some. [Laughs] But good stuff, Kristian. Thank you very much. So wanted to talk a little bit today bringing this back home to DevOps, right? And one of the trends that we’ve been seeing over at devopsy.kinsta.cloud recently is, really, around kind of putting the “ops” in DevOps, right? ‘Cause we’ve spoken now to a few folks in the DevOps space from both the vendor and practitioner side, who are really emphasizing the role that ops plays in DevOps. And one of my things about it, though, Kristian, is I get the opportunity to speak to a lot of people like yourself, a lot of people who are heavily invested in DevOps, but I also get a lot – the chance to talk to a lot of people who aren’t and are new DevOps or just dipping a toe in the water and planning their DevOps migration and transformation.

    And one of the things that I try to remind people is that “Don’t leave your common sense at the door,” at the DevOps door, right? Bring it with you, number one. And, while you’re bringing something with you, it doesn’t mean everything you’ve done in ops to this point and all the lessons learned and best practices accumulated get thrown out – you know, the baby with the bathwater. With DevOps, we evolve. We’re not necessarily revolutionizing; we’re evolving. And so building on best practices and time-tested ops practices and methodologies and processes is probably a better solution than, you know, scrapping the whole thing and starting from scratch. And who has the opportunity to do that anyway? What do you say to that, Kristian?

    Kristian Stewart:         Oh, I agree completely. And, you know, amongst our clients, we’ve got a whole array of clients, from telcos to finance to retail, right? You name it. Across those clients, we have people on varying points on the curve of maturity, with respect to adopting DevOps. But what I say to those clients, as they look at those paradigms, is that the business objectives of operations teams haven’t changed substantially, certainly since I’ve been in the business. There’s a lot that has changed, but the business objectives continue to be measured by KPIs like mean time to repair, mean time between failures, and pressure on costs, right?

    So disciplines – so, within a, let’s say, a mature enterprise that have invested heavily in ITIL, they adopt disciplines like event and incident management, and that leans on a key set of capabilities, which are equally applicable when you transition to DevOps. You know, the proximity of your developers to your operations and the smoothing of the processes and the interactions between those organizations, if anything, are enhanced by some of the traditional methodologies and tools. So, you know, to list some of them, you need tools which can consume events from highly heterogenous environments; you need to minimize the amount of management noise that’s presented to the people who have to respond to events; you need to be able to integrate with other systems; you need to be able to help pinpoint probable causes, drive efficiency in operations, do things like apply machine learning and advanced analytics to gain insight from your event and incident data.

    So, if you look at the evolution of these practices, historically, right, ITIL emerged in parallel with the practice of event incident management. It didn’t dictate it. You know, these standards emerged as – sorry, event and incident management emerged as de facto practices, driven by the availability of practical tools to solve real problems, and they still solve those problems. You know, if you look at the way that operations has evolved, look at telecom from the late ’80s and early ’90s, right?

    So, in a telco network operations center back then, you might have had dozens of very highly-skilled people, _____ network engineers, with training on dozens of different management tools, and these guys and girls were expensive, right? I mean, their time cost a lot of money, and then the introduction of event and incident management tools helped transition from that to having perhaps the same number or even more operations staff of a substantially lower skill. And so the first thing event management and incident management did was to try and lower the cost of entry for running an efficient operations team.

    But now, if you look at the changes in IT management now – so I was chatting to a large enterprise just the other day, and, ten years ago, they – so these guys have always been driven by those same metrics – MTTR, MTBF, cost, right? A few years ago, their job was to provision physical hardware, static middleware, and the management of that stuff from an operations perspective. Now these guys are having to provide platform-as-a-service tools, distributed runtime container and orchestration systems, and they still have responsibility for the existing infrastructure – the network, the physical servers,  the legacy monolithic applications. And all that still requires management. So, mainly, they’ve got the challenge of managing hybrid cloud, coupled with extremely tight expectations on time-to-market that working practices like DevOps and Agile software development allow for.

    So I’d say that event and incident management tools are as relative now, if not more so, than they ever were because, when you shift to practices like DevOps and site reliability engineering, you know, back to the olden days where you have ops employing of hundreds of you know, low-skill operators, best practice is transitioning to one where you have a substantially lower number of substantially higher-skilled operations staff. Right? So these guys and girls are highly skilled, but they’re time-poor. You know, your typical operations professional, in an organization that’s embraced DevOps, wanna be concentrating on automation, on liaising with dev early on in the release life cycle, on prepping for new rollouts. They don’t wanna be grappling through log files and sifting through performance metrics to find out what happened just so they can restore a broken service.

    And I think the eventual goal of the kind of tools that we provide – event and incident management – isn’t just to help the operator find the needle in the haystack; I think it’s to hand them the needle. And that’s useful, whether you’re a low-skilled junior operator in old-school operations or a time-poor, hyper-technical site reliability engineer with 20 years’ experience. Alan, you still there?

    Alan Shimel:               Yes. Kristian, I’m sorry. I had a little internet issue. So all really good, but, you know, one of the things I wanted to touch on, Kristian, is the subject of empathy, as part of kind of your DevOps mantra, right? Sometimes, people give cultural things short shrift, but empathy is important in DevOps. And what I wanted to ask about was the idea of “How do we get developers?” Right?

    For a long time, the ops people have sort of had to empathize with developers are doing and what they’re doing in terms of development to help in deployment and stuff, as part of DevOps, but now, putting that on the other foot, right, getting developers to empathize with what the ops folks are dealing with, as part of this DevOps equation. I mean, I’ve heard of some organizations where they’ll actually embed developers on the ops teams for short periods of time so that they get empathy the hard way, if you will, right?

    Kristian Stewart:         Yeah.

    Alan Shimel:               They gotta live it. What do you think about something like that?

    Kristian Stewart:         I think, in terms of getting the development professionals involved, I think – so you mention role rotation, right? And I think that’s one tactic. You know, I like to think of this as much as “shift-right dev,” as it is “shift-left ops,” right?

    Alan Shimel:               Yeah.

    Alan Shimel:               Good. Good.

    Kristian Stewart:         And, actually, you know, it reminds me of the situation in shrink-wrapped software development, maybe 20 or 25 years ago, between development, who were the coders, and QA. Right? So there was sort of a brick wall, prior to Agile software development, where it was throwing a pile of code over the wall. And I think Agile, with that shift-left testing, really helped to remedy that, to the extent that I see, today, developers and quality assurance engineers working really, really closely together and not depending on, you know, reams and reams of documentation to communicate with each other.

    So, I think, with DevOps, I think a similar thing is happening, and I think you need shift-right dev, as well as shift-left ops. So operating an application or a service, I think, has to be a shared responsibility, and I do think that dev need to get skin in the game. So that’s gonna include dev as an escalation point, when an incident occurs. It can also include role rotation. But, for mutual benefit, I think they both need to use the same operations tools, right, so that they see what each other are doing, when an incident or a critical event occurs in the environment. And then they’re motivated to improve the use of those tools for themselves, as well as for the sake of operations.

    I think, you know, a 3:00 AM incident notification, you know, like a page at 3:00 AM, is a great motivator. So, for ops people, it’s an incentive to get runbooks and automatic incident responses written so that service restoration is as quick as possible and, preferably, automatic. With dev, it’s an incentive to make their services or applications operable, right, so they need to get the right amount of instrumentation into the app so that ops can manage an incident or, better still, that some script can, so that neither of them get the 3:00 AM escalation. So I think there’s a – with all due respect to my dev and ops colleagues, there’s a carrot-and-stick approach there.

    Alan Shimel:               Mm-hmm. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Kristian, I want you to repeat what you said before. We need to shift ops left and shift devs right or did I have that backwards?

    Kristian Stewart:         Yeah, no, yeah, that’s what I said. Shift-right dev and shift-left ops, right?

    Alan Shimel:               Got it.

    Kristian Stewart:         So get them to have a degree of overlap with respect to their responsibilities. And, of course, what they do in response to those responsibilities can be quite different. You know, let me see if I can think of an example. So, for devs, under those circumstances, when they’re being involved in responding to an incident, it can be stuff as simple as being really clear in their application logs.

    So, if you think about events that are generated by, say, a container-based app deployed on Kubernetes, okay, so the event and incident management system is gonna be presented with logs from the app code; they’re gonna be presented with logs from middleware; logs from Kubernetes itself; logs from, potentially, external technologies and monoliths – NFS mounts, databases, legacy apps, network; and they may also be getting alerts from monitoring systems that are watching performance metrics for the running container, so transaction request rate between micro-services, CPU utilization, response time.

    So, if devs can make sure that something as simple as the concept of criticality or severity is included in the logs, that really helps with filtering _____ ops figure out whether or not something’s really a problem. You know, for example, is this event classed as a trace message? A debug message? A warning? An error? Is it known that this is service-affecting? Right?

    Alan Shimel:               Yeah.

    Kristian Stewart:         And, you know, how better to motivate devs to implement those sorts of practices than to make them consume log messages that are completely uninterpretable, right?

    Alan Shimel:               Agreed. Agreed. Hey, Kristian, we’re over time already, but, as I told you before we started, the time here goes quickly. But, you know, boiling all of this down, the last – whatever – 18 minutes down, really, I wanna make the point of – and I loved what you said about ops shift left, dev shift right – that our ops and devs can work together. And, as you said, they each will have different reactions with different roles and responses to given incidents or given stimuli, but they can work together and we can build on what ops has built over the last 50 years of the IT industry. And –

    Kristian Stewart:         Mm-hmm.

    Alan Shimel:               Right? We don’t leave that at the door of DevOps; it’s part of it. And one thing I want – you know, if we can ask people to take that with them. And you agree that’s key takeaways here for them?

    Kristian Stewart:         Absolutely. Couldn’t agree more.

    Alan Shimel:               Fantastic. Hey, Kristian Stewart, IBM, thank you for joining us on this episode of DevOps Chat. Love to hear more in the future about what you and the IBM team are doing around cloud and hybrid and some of the other stuff kicking around. And we’ll have you back again soon, but, for now, thanks for being our guest this episode.

    Kristian Stewart:         Alan, it was an absolute pleasure.

    Alan Shimel:               Great. Hey, this is Alan Shimel, everyone, for devopsy.kinsta.cloud, DevOps Chat. Thanks for joining us and we’ll see you soon on the next chat.

    — Alan Shimel

  • DevOps Chat: How DeployHub and OpenMake Software Help CI/CD w/ Tracy Ragan

    DevOps Chat: How DeployHub and OpenMake Software Help CI/CD w/ Tracy Ragan

    This DevOps Chat features OpenMake CEO Tracy Ragan. OpenMake are the producers of DeployHub and DeployHub Pro, which help DevOps with CI/CD. OpenMake is a company that was helping developers long before people spoke about DevOps. Using an open-source business model with DeployHub has transformed the company. We speak with CEO Tracy Ragan to find out how.

    As usual, the streaming audio is below with the transcript immediately following.

    Audio

    Transcript

    Alan Shimel: Hey, everyone, it’s Alan Shimel, devopsy.kinsta.cloud, DevOps Chat, and, in this episode of the chat, we’re joined by Tracy Ragan, CEO OpenMake Software. Tracy, welcome to DevOps Chat.

    Tracy Ragan: Thank you, Alan. Thank you so much for inviting me. It’s my pleasure.

    Shimel: Okay. So, Tracy, the last time I think you and I caught up, we were over at Jenkins World, out in San Francisco, a couple of weeks ago. And, you know, that was quite an event and it really kind of spoke to how big the CD space is becoming—you know, the CD market and the kinds of companies that are utilizing different CD solutions. Of course, OpenMake, you know, plays in that market arena, Tracy, but, for those of our listeners who maybe aren’t familiar with OpenMake, can you give us a little background?

    Ragan: Absolutely. So OpenMake Software has been playing in this continuous delivery space long before it was in fashion. Our initial product, our Meister product, was created about 20 years ago, and it was created to accelerate the process of compiling code once it was checked into a version control tool. So you check in and you build—we were doing that close to 20 years ago. Now we were just doing builds off of a trigger; we weren’t doing continuous integration. What we were doing was the hardcore build automation, and what I mean by that—the automatic generation of the compile and link scripts, the acceleration of the compile process, and the dependency management so you could do just-in-time builds, to speed up the process of moving code forward.

    So we were really early on in understanding the need for faster delivery of code and the ability to create what we call a “release candidate” at any point in what used to be call the “life cycle” and now what we’re calling the “pipeline.” So this is an area that we have heavy expertise in and a lot of heart for.

    Shimel: Absolutely. You know, Tracy, one of the things that I always find interesting, and somewhat sad, is that, when we talk CD, right, some people—I think most people still refer to continuous delivery, but others, you know, talk about continuous deployment, and then, unfortunately, I think there’s a Venn diagram kind of subset that think that somehow continuous delivery and continuous deployment are one and the same. And—

    Ragan: Yes.

    Shimel: – why don’t we start with destroying that myth? Right? What’s the difference? Is there a difference—I think there is—between continuous delivery, continuous deployment?

    Ragan: So if we look at the continuous integration process—and I think that’s where we have to start, to understand continuous delivery and then, of course, continuous build and continuous tests and continuous deployment underneath that— so continuous integration itself, I don’t wanna say it doesn’t do anything, but, in itself, it’s an orchestrator. It itself doesn’t compile code, it doesn’t test code, and it doesn’t deploy code. What does those steps are the unsung heroes who oftentimes write scripts or automation tools that sits underneath that process.

    Continuous delivery is the ability to have a release candidate ready to go at any point in time across what’s now called the “pipeline,” so, if you have a continuous integration at the dev state, you might also have one at a test state—now this sounds very waterfall, which is why I don’t like to describe it this way—but, in essence, what you’re doing is saying, “The development teams are ready and they have a release candidate they wanna push off to testing. Testing should automatically test it and then push it off to production.” Now what’s core, what’s the lowest common denominator between those simple three states, is the ability to get it out to end targets so you can actually run a test at dev or run a test at test or execute it at prod. That’s what continuous deployment does.

    I prefer to call it “continuous deployment.” We often hear it referred to as “application release automation,” or ARA, and that sometimes feels a little heavy and waterfall-like, but, in essence, that’s what those tools are doing, is they’re doing continuous deployment, in the same way as test automation tool does continuous test and in the same way, you could say, Maven or a product like our Meister is doing continuous build, all driven through a CI/CD workflow.

    Shimel: Excellent. Excellent. And, you know, you hit on something else there—ARA. And that, again, we’ve seen several vendors kind of stake—they’ll put a flag in the ground around ARA. So now that we’ve got some basic definitions done, Trace, let’s talk about how do we move right—in this case, it’s almost shifting right, right?—how do we move rightwards down this deployment—delivery, deployment, management—you know, timeline? And—

    Ragan: So I think what we have to do is we have to talk about DevOps, right? So we have this other big term that’s being thrown around, and that’s “DevOps.” Everybody I speak to has a different opinion of what DevOps is, so I’ll just share with you mine. DevOps is the process in which the development teams start taking over more of the operational tasks. And the operation teams’ role is mainly one of auditing or having some level of control. My guess is that, as DevOps is pushed left, so developers are doing more of the work, we’re going to see operation teams become smaller.

    And that’s really—if you really look at what companies are doing, they have large operation teams because they’re doing their own thing when it comes to doing software releases. They’re not part of the CI/CD process, in many of these cases. But, in reality, what happens is is that the developers are the ones who have to do the hand-holding at production, so the more we can get developers to declare their definitions around their software deployments, what their environment looks like, the easier it becomes for the data centers to become leaner. And that’s really what Agile, DevOps is all about, is getting, in the hands of the developers, tools that can automate these operational tasks to a point that the testing teams and the production teams can consume them and have some transparency and some level of control around them.

    Shimel: Got it.

    Ragan: So that’s what continuous deployment, application release automation, is achieving, is that ability for developers to dig in at the dev level, not with scripts because scripts can’t adapt across the pipeline, but to do that in a model-driven way that could adapt across a pipeline, so that the work – all the declarations are done down at dev, and the users of that are testing and production. Even down to a configuration change, if need be, at a Cisco router level. We’re talking low-level definitions.

    Shimel: Sure. Sure. So, you know, Tracy, it’s funny; you guys over at OpenMake have been involved in this space, as you said, 20 years, right? Way before we start using—throwing around the terms “DevOps” and “continuous” this and “continuous” that. And kind of living in the DevOps bubble, if you will, we think, “Oh, everyone’s doing this kind of stuff and this is the way it should be done and this is the way it is being done.” But, really, when you look at it—and you probably have a better view than most, Tracy—how far along are we on market adoption, around this, you know, more—I think it’s a more holistic approach to DevOps and continuous delivery and deployment, as well as ARA?

    Ragan: That’s a hard one to answer. I can give you my best guess and give you some numbers I hear from the analyst. If we talk about ARA, the analyst tell us about 20 percent of the companies have adopted ARA. Now, but, that being said, when I hear—yeah?

    Shimel: Yeah, I was gonna say that sounds high to me.

    Ragan: It does, but let me tell you why it sounds high. It sounds high because, when companies adopt an ARA solution, they’re often talking about a legacy product that somebody on the operations side of the house decided to purchase. And, oftentimes, they’re legacy because they have the requirement of in-target agents, so the decision to put an agent on every single production end point, including cloud or even define them to a micro-service, has to be done way right. That doesn’t mean that we’re doing continuous deployment; it means that their operations side of the house decided on a tool that may or may not be adopted by the left side of the house.

    You know, when I talk to companies, most of them will talk about that they’re adopting DevOps, but if you ask them if they’re able to solve a build in less than 10 minutes or if production can repeat the deployment that developers defined, the answer will be “No.” So the reason why it’s hard to answer that question, to get clear metrics on it, is because everybody’s definition of what that is is so drastically different.

    Shimel: Yeah.

    Ragan: In my mind, I’ve only met a few companies that have really established a real Agile, DevOps practice, and it’s not for the entire organization—it’s for a few teams—so we’re babies, when it comes to this. I believe we have a long way to go to really understand how to make that shift left so that this Agile concept of where testing and production are not separate states in life cycle and separate silos, but part of a circular process that is included everybody on the same team. So waterfall still persist, and to be quite honest, in continuous integration, if you look at what drives the CI process, we are still using the same waterfall scripts that we did, you know, five or 10 years ago, depending on how far you are in CI. Much of the stuff, they consider automated because a script executes it, but that’s not automation. It’s automation in the waterfall world, but it’s not automation in an Agile, DevOp practice.

    Yeah, these steps really have to truly be automated so that it’s transparent, there’s reporting, there’s clean metrics, there’s a continuous feedback loop, because that’s the best way to go fast. The best way to go fast in anything you do is control, right? The more control, the more speed. The problem with control, on the ARA side, is it costs too darn much, which is why we decided to do an open-source solution. It’s like developers, in order to achieve this, in order to really achieve this and really move as fast as possible and increase these release cycles, you have to have developers being able to get their hands on a product that will do the deployments without having to babysit a script for every state in the life cycle.

    Shimel: Agreed.

    Ragan: So we have a ways to go.

    Shimel: I agree 100 percent. But I’m gonna tell you—you know, and this, again, it’s not my original thought, but it’s something I’ve heard and I fully agree with, and that is I don’t think it’s the mission of DevOps or CD or ARA, you know, that we’re gonna totally eliminate waterfall. I think there are, you know, situations where waterfall—excuse me—where waterfall may, in fact, be the right solution to the problem. I think—[coughs] excuse me, Tracy—I think there are other areas where some sort of combination of waterfall and Agile, waterfall and DevOps, you know, some continuous kind of stuff, you know—it’s like that—you know, General MacArthur said, “Old soldiers never die; they just fade away,” or something like that. I think old development styles and techniques never die either, so I don’t necessarily believe in throwing out the baby with the bathwater. What do you think about that?

    Ragan: I think technology will change that. When you’re talking about monolithic applications that have been around for a while and they have some sort of a cadence that they’ve been going through, where they have developers developing and testers testing and production teams managing the production releases, you’re probably right. It’s gonna be some sort of a water-Scrum-fall or what we’re calling “bimodal” approach.

    But, with the introduction of microservices, that is going to change the way—if it’s not a monolithic application, as we move into microservices, even though it solves—microservice solves some problems, it’s going to complicate the landscape of the production environment, which means that the need to have these production operation types and these testing types working hand in hand, on the development team, will be critical. So, as we see microservices become more prevalent, we’re going to see waterfall slowly die.

    Shimel: Okay.

    Ragan: It’s just the nature of micro-services. Now it becomes—microservices becomes code as well. Everything has become code, which means that the productions teams are not gonna be able to track and manage that level of detail in the production environment. It’s gonna go beyond just a collection of DLLs or a WAR JAR file that’s going out to an end location. It’s gonna complicate matters and it’s gonna change the way we—it’s gonna change waterfall drastically.

    Shimel: Yep. And so it’s gonna change it drastically and maybe it does evolve, if you will, but I think that’s what technologies—I think—you know, one of the things I’ve learned over too long, being in this business, is we don’t see revolutions as much as we see evolutions. And then, when we look back over a five-, seven-, 10-year span, it seems like, “Oh, my God, that was revolutionary.” But, from the day to day, it’s rather evolutionary.

    Ragan: I would agree. When it comes to—you know, we have—if you look at the macro and the micro, when it comes to the micro level, we have changed—you know, software developer bank doesn’t evolve anymore; it’s revolutionized. And that is due to Agile. What happens is is that, in some of these enterprises, the fear of doing frequent releases has slowed down the adoption of lean practices at the production state. That, we have to fix because there should be a revolution. If an end user needs a fix, it needs to get out there. It shouldn’t evolve over a six-month period.

    Now, if we look at the macro, we take a—you know, we soar up a few miles up—when it comes to major shifts in the way the community at large does business, it is a evolution. Everybody—I mean, I was at the Gartner data center show last December, and very few of those enterprises had even completed the adoption of cloud. They still had big, you know, warehouses of servers, so you’re right. From the perspective, I would say, the data center adoption, it does evolve, but, at a micro level, I think that we see a revolution in the way developers want to develop software and are driving software, and that’s where the microservices is gonna change a lot of how we do things. And I think, as more developers push for that, I think it’s gonna happen faster than we think.

    Shimel: I don’t—I—so that, along with the evolution versus revolution thing, I think the speed of—you know, this internet time speed warps, you know, the world we live in. It just—I mean, it’s crazy. So it’s no doubt about that one. Tracy, we’re actually—I didn’t realize—we’re kind of over our time, but it’s okay. These things often run over. Let me just quickly bring it back to OpenMake. What are you guys—anything new? Announcements feature-wise? Or what’s happening over there that you may wanna share with our audience?

    Ragan: Well, we have our DeployHub product that you can become part of the open-source community and participate in freely-available continuous deployment at deployhub.org. We are also—we’ll be getting a press release out very shortly here, regarding a SAS version of our continuous deployment solution, which it will be both a supported version of the open-source, as well as the pro version which includes release management capabilities, all from a SAS model, so you don’t have to download anything. We can do that because we’re agentless. Makes it real easy to support people in a cloud model.

    Shimel: Excellent. Tracy Ragan, CEO of OpenMake Software. Thanks for being our guest on DevOps Chat. Hope to have you on soon—have you on again soon and you can keep us posted.

    Ragan: Okay. Thank you, Alan.

    Shimel: Thank you. This is Alan Shimel for devopsy.kinsta.cloud and DevOps Chat. Have a great day, everyone, and we’ll see you soon on the next chat.

    — Alan Shimel

  • DevOps Chat: IBM z14, Built for DevOps from the Ground Up, with Hayden Lindsey

    DevOps Chat: IBM z14, Built for DevOps from the Ground Up, with Hayden Lindsey

    IBM recently GA’ed perhaps its biggest zSystems mainframe release in the last decade or longer. The z14 mainframe from IBM has also been designed from the ground up to be DevOps-empowered. From APIs and other integrations to language support, the z14 is IBM’s most advanced mainframe ever. I had a chance to speak with Hayden Lindsey, VP of DevOps Enterprise Systems for IBM, about the z14.

    Hayden gives us the low-down on how the z14 has been designed to work in hybrid environments. It also works well with modern CI/CD tools such as Urban Code and others. Additionally, APIs give it the ability to integrate with many different environments, tools and apps. It is truly a mainframe for today and beyond. Hayden does a great job of describing all of this.

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

    Audio

    Transcript

    [su_pullquote align=”right”] [su_custom_gallery source=”media: 117632″ width=”130″ height=”130″] Hayden Lindsey

    Hayden Lindsey, Vice President & Distinguished Engineer – DevOps for Enterprise Systems. Hayden is responsible for the development, product management, sales enablement, and services of this portfolio. He has worked at IBM for 28 years and has held a variety of positions, including software developer, product architect, product manager, co-leader of the Eclipse tools platform, and director of the WebSphere Studio/Rational modeling and construction tools. He has a bachelor’s degree in Mathematical Sciences from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.[/su_pullquote]

    Alan Shimel: Hi, everyone, this is Alan Shimel, devopsy.kinsta.cloud, here for another DevOps Chat. Our guest on this episode of the chat is a good friend of ours, Hayden Lindsey, VP, Enterprise DevOps at IBM. Hi, Hayden, welcome to DevOps Chat.

    Hayden Lindsey: Hi, Alan. Good to be with you again.

    Shimel: Good to have you here. Hayden, it’s a big day—big day for the folks over at the IBM Enterprise team. It’s the general availability of z14 today, isn’t it?

    Lindsey: It sure is. Yes, we announced this back in the middle of July and we’ve now been making our products available. A lot of mine were available the latter part of last week, and now the box itself, GA, today. So—a big day.

    Shimel: Fantastic. And Hayden, just—you know, our audience being so focused on DevOps, they may not realize the full scale of what the z14 release is about. What it is, it’s a combination of hardware—as you mentioned, a new box. There’s a ton of software, there’s a tone of integration—it’s just chockfull of all kinds of goodies. Can you give us kind of a—at a high level, the scope of z14?

    Lindsey: Sure. And I think what you see is the result of pulling software, both middleware and tools, from the various divisions that we used to have like Rational and WebSphere and moving those into a single z or mainframe focused brand.

    And so, in contrast to most prior hardware releases where you’d be hearing about the speeds and feeds and, you know, the z13 had the fastest processor of any box on the planet—this time, the focus is more on the entire solution that involves both hardware as well as software and tools. And so I think—we worked on that, we did design thinking, we had sponsor users, we did the whole nine yards form the hardware up through the operating system, middleware, and tools, and I think that made a big difference.

    And so this time, for example, we have something called pervasive encryption. We all know how important security is, we all hear about these breaches that are happening—Experion being the most, or Equifax being the latest one. And, of all of the records that have been stolen, and I think it’s something like 9,000,000,000 since 2013—only 4 percent are encrypted. And this new mainframe lets you encrypt 100 percent of the data with no impact to performance. So, that’s just—that’s one example. Clearly, there’s hardware stuff there, but there’s also middleware that had to be involved in making this solution. So, that’s an example—it’s really cool.

    Shimel: That’s actually a big example, Hayden, because you know what? Encryption has been around—I mean, I spent 20 years in the security space and encryption has been around for most of that. The problem was the hit you took on performance when you encrypted and then had to decrypt and re-encrypt just the latency and—

    Lindsey: And the programmer had to do it. [Laughter] Or the database administrator had to set it up for the database, but then what about when it was being used in the application? And so that was—this is what is being solved, where you don’t have the time inhibitor of people doing it, and then you also don’t have the performance impact where it makes a system unusable.

    So, I think this could be really groundbreaking for the companies and the government agencies around the world that deal with sensitive data.

    Shimel: Sure—and we all do now. Hayden, you said something else, though, that I wanted to key in on, and that is sort of moving away from the speeds and feeds, if you will, metrics of—you know, to measure the value of anything. And I worked with a woman once, and she used to call that bag diving. Right? You know, when you gotta start getting into the speeds and feeds to show the value of your product, you’re diving into your bag instead of talking the true value.

    Lindsey: Right.

    Shimel: So, I’m happy to see that that’s kind of the path that IBM is taking, talking about the value, but I also think it’s a result, as you said, of so much being added into here, right, from the design thinking around the entire release, if you will, to the integration with things like cloud, with the DevOps entire tool set and methodologies that IBM and others have developed.

    This is so much more than just, “Oh, we put—this is the next iPhone with the faster processor.” This isn’t the next z with the faster processor, it’s much more than that. As I think I—maybe you said it earlier or maybe we talked about it off-mic. This is probably the most substantive release for z in at least a decade.

    Lindsey: I think it is, and of course, the market will tell us if our aspirations come to bear or not, but I certainly think the encryption element is just—well, I think it’s phenomenal, and it could be very, very, very significant for virtually any company out there.

    And then we’ve got more on machine learning and analytics so that you can do in transaction analytics rather than doing it after the fact and having to try to back out or just write off fraudulent transactions. And, of course, we’ve done a lot with our DevOps portfolio compilers. But I really do think, maybe, since we put Linux on the platform, it’s that significant.

    Shimel: Wow. Huge. So, Hayden, we are about DevOps here, so let’s focus in a little bit. I mean, one of the nice things is, I’ve seen some briefings around how you can use the new z14s with the IBM Enterprise DevOps solution and really sort of leverage—I don’t wanna use the term bimodal multi-speed nonsense. Leverage integrating your z system with cloud systems into one coherent business strategy. How’s that sound? [Laughter] So, talk about it.

    Lindsey: Yeah, so one of the three themes for the release is open and connected, and that obviously ties into a hybrid cloud strategy. It ties into, you know, a digital economy or digital transformation. It ties into API economy—whichever angle you want to take, you have to be able to make the data that resides on the mainframe, which is estimated that roughly 80 percent of the Enterprise data in the world resides on and is managed by the mainframe, and about 70 percent of the business transactions.

    And so, if you want to, though, make that available to your new iPhone X app, as we saw introduced yesterday—you know, or 10 or whatever they’re gonna call it.

    Shimel: Mm-hmm. Yeah, they’re calling it 10.

    Lindsey: They’re calling it 10 using a Roman numeral.

    Shimel: Yeah.

    Lindsey: But, you know, if you’re gonna do that, you have to make it easy to access the data and transactions, find those transactions, understand them, because very likely, they were written by somebody who’s not around any more or had moved on to other jobs. And so, you need to have tools that make API enabling and opening up and connecting to the mainframe easy and efficient, and just as easy, just as efficient as you would if you were opening up something on the Linux platform—although, of course, you have Linux on z—or a Windows box or anything else. So, that’s—it’s essential that we allow z to participate in the broader digital economy, API economy, and that’s what my team has been focusing on, along with other teams in IBM.

    Shimel: Sure. So, now, Hayden, in that same vein, you know, there’s still that mainframe attitude where, you know, we don’t open our mainframe up to all of these APIs, and maybe we don’t want to hook into our systems of engagement, you know, up in the cloud or what have you.

    For clients listening out there—and a lot of our listeners are Enterprise class, they work in Enterprise class organizations—how important is it that they really consider opening up, you know, their mainframes to this API economy, as you called it?

    Lindsey: Well, I think increasingly, certainly, the IT and line of business executives, the clients with whom I work, are realizing they have tremendous assets that they could leverage if they were to make them available. Nobody—at least no companies I know of, or government agencies, have the resources to just recreate everything from scratch. And, I think if you look back at what the analysts were saying back in the SOA era, they said, you know, it was five times faster to create a service leveraging something that exists that already does the same thing or something very similar than it is to create it from scratch—not to mention the fact that, if it already works, you’re likely to have higher quality as well. And I think the exact same analysis would prove to be true now that we’re talking more about RESTful APIs.

    So, I think more and more clients realize they need to expose that value. The key is, just, it’s sometimes daunting when you’ve got—you know, the estimate is like 250,000,000,000 lines of COBOL, not to mention PL/I and Assembler and 4GLs and so forth. It’s getting your arms around applications that were probably created in a more monolithic, less well-structured fashion. You need to do refactoring. You need to discover what is there, and then put together a plan for doing that API enablement.

    But I think people know they need to do it, it’s just, sometimes it’s viewed as a daunting task and they have to figure out how to get started, and we have something called the digital transformation model that we’re rolling out to help our clients put a plan in place.

    Shimel: Got it, and I agree. So, you’re just setting me up for my next things here, but—so, that’s the biggest question we hear at devopsy.kinsta.cloud, Hayden, which is—hey, this is all great. How do we get going? How do we roll this? How do I get executive buy-in? How do we—is there a one, two, three? Is there a blueprint I can follow.

    So, z14, let me throw it right back to you—where do we start? How do they get moving with this? How do they—and specifically, how do they start incorporating the DevOps and API stuff into this?

    Lindsey: Yeah, it’s the question that I hear from virtually every customer I talk to, and I’m getting ready to do a tour in Europe next week, and I’m sure it will come up in every single meeting. And the fact is, every customer is different, so there’s no single answer. And, within any given client, they have applications that span the gamut from nearing end of life to ones that are under active or brand new development. And so, what we’ve—but, of course, there are patterns and similarities across clients and application types, and there are best practices that we have gleaned by working with clients through the years, and that’s where I mentioned this thing called the digital transformation model.

    We’ve shifted to this way of working with our clients to focus on applications rather than one answer for the Enterprise—hey, you should start with deployment automation, or you should start with test automation. That answer should not be an Enterprise answer, it should be for this suite of applications because of what their current state is, the as-is state, and what you desire the to-be state to be. If you just need something to run efficiently and you’re gonna replace it in a few years or retire it, all you want it to do is run efficiently.

    So, use our latest compilers, but you know, the fact of the matter is, putting in a fully automated pipeline is likely a wasteful effort. Whereas, on the other end of the spectrum, for the things under very active development, that’s where you want to do DevOps in its fullest, and really, it’s just a matter of what steps do you take to get there.

    And so, this model that we’ve come up with has four levels—the first one I described about, just do your compiling, is run—just run it. Just run it efficiently. The next is maintain, the next is expose, the next is evolve. So—I mean, and I don’t know if we’ve got the best names in the world, but the fact is, you really need to think about, for the business, what degree of DevOps adoption do you need for a given application or application suite. So, that’s the more, I think, realistic answer that we’ve been using with clients this year and a tool that we’re using that’s different from what we’ve done in prior years.

    Shimel: Excellent. So, Hayden, I mean, just to illustrate this, I remember back at Interconnect last year, you know, we had the whole little DevOps TV booth set up, and I was interviewing some IBM clients. And one of them, it was a bank, and I forget if they were from Poland or the Netherlands now, or maybe even Australia. They were IBM’s z System customer and they had just updated, I wanna say, from COBOL 4 to 5—maybe it was 5 to 6, I don’t remember now.

    But they had just updated their version of COBOL, and it made a huge, huge difference for them in terms of performance and—

    Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. You know, we’ve—one of the things that our compiler team does every single release, and this starts from the very earliest days of, we were just imagining what the new mainframe or new power platform is going to be. We were working hand in hand with the hardware folks.

    And, you know, with COBOL specifically, where something like 70 percent of the world’s business transactions are running COBOL, obviously, performance does matter, and so this is where you can get into a little bit of feeds and speeds. Mainly because, not because—some of the numbers aren’t eye popping, but it’s because you can be more responsive for your clients. But with some compute intensive apps, they run 16 times—not percent, times—faster on the latest compiler, which is 6.2, versus 4.2, which may be where that client was coming from. So, that’s skipping the version 5 things, but we still have the majority of our clients on the 4.2 version.

    So, it’s tremendously faster, but this is by doing this joint development. You know, if you put new instructions or new vector support in the hardware and the compiler doesn’t generate these new instructions, well, then, obviously, no client is gonna be able to take advantage of it unless they want to write their own assembler. So, you know, our compilers are delivering tremendous value, and I gave you a COBOL example, but you get similar results with PL/I and with our automatic binary optimizer that basically just does the, tries to do the work that the compilers do, but just working on binaries rather than having you go back to the source.

    So, it’s a big deal. You know, and the less—it’s maybe a bit more mundane. Yeah, the stuff runs faster and, as you said, diving into the bag. [Laughter] But, you know, when you’ve got numbers like 16X or 5X or what have you, that’s huge.

    Shimel: It sure is, it sure is. So, Hayden, you know, I mentioned Interconnect, too, and as we’re running low here on time, I just wanted to quickly prompt you on that and let our listeners now.

    So, this year, Interconnect is part of an even bigger kind of unified conference that IBM has put together called Think—Think 2018, I believe it’s called, and if I’m not mistaken, it’s March.

    Lindsey: Yes.

    Shimel: Go ahead.

    Lindsey: Well, you might see a trend here. [Laughter] Because, you know, Interconnect was the combination of Impact and Innovate. Innovate—I think that’s the name it was. I’ve kinda forgotten, but anyway, we had a Rational conference, we had a WebSphere conference, we had IoT stuff and all that. And now we combine those into Interconnect—at least the WebSphere and Rational stuff. And it got bigger, and now we’re doing something that is more or less IBM-wide and it’s called Think. It’s gonna be the week of March the 19th at the Mandalay Bay in Vegas, so still in Vegas like most of our other conferences have been of late.

    And so, I think there’s pros and cons to having a more broad, where we can tell the full IBM story, and that’s the focus, and you’ve got SMEs from all the different areas of the country, be it cloud, cognitive, Zpower, what have you. But I think that’s great, but because you do have those experts, and we will have the breakout sessions or keynote sessions on specific areas, be it DevOps or z or compilers or deployment automation like UrbanCode.

    So, there will be still those specialty sessions, and yet you get the big picture. And the one thing that I would like to ask your listeners is, the call for papers is open, and you know, we are shooting for having 100 percent of the talks in the various tracks either be a customer or partner only, or being customer and/or partner jointly with an IBM-er, but we’re just really trying to get away from IBM-er talking head telling a story without a partner or a customer there saying what they’ve done in real life with a given solution in a given area.

    So, we’d really love to have as many partner and client nominations as possible.

    Shimel: I love that idea. You know, I shared a panel the last two years, Hayden, on Dev—I think they were on, well, it was on DevOps and then SecOps. But, you know, I tried really hard to balance it with—yeah, we had one person from IBM, but we also had an analyst and then we’d have a partner and then a practitioner. And I think that sort of balance gives it, it makes it—

    Lindsey: It adds some legitimacy to the whole thing and different perspectives.

    Shimel: Yep. Just real quick, for anyone listening, if you go to IBM.com/events/Think, you can get all the scoop there and follow the links to submit. And as Hayden said, if you’ve got something to say and share with people, it—having been to three or four of these, or more, it’s a great platform. So, I’d encourage everyone who would like to participate to do so. And even if you don’t want to speak, but if you want to go really understand what’s happening, whether it be with Watson or z Systems or hybrid cloud or Bluemix or any of those things. You know, if any of those are important to you, I think it’s a great show to attend.

    Hayden, we’re about out of time—we’re actually over time, but that’s okay. Thanks so much for taking the time on what is a busy day with the general GA of z14. Best of luck with it. Let’s check in, I don’t know, maybe before the end of the year, and see how—you know, what kind of market reception a lot of these features and capabilities are receiving and we’ll see where the rubber is meeting the road.

    Lindsey: Sounds good, Alan, and thanks, again, for your time.

    Shimel: Thank you for your time. Hayden Lindsey, VP, Enterprise DevOps with IBM on GA Day for z Systems z14. Thanks, Hayden, have a great.

    Lindsey: Okay. Bye for now.

    Shimel: This is Alan—thank you. This is Alan Shimel for devopsy.kinsta.cloud. We’ll see you soon on another DevOps Chat.

    — Alan Shimel

  • JAMstack Radio Podcast: Benefits of an API-First CMS

    JAMstack Radio Podcast: Benefits of an API-First CMS

    Welcome to JAMstack Radio, a podcast that discusses the JAMstack, a new way to build fast and secure apps or websites. JAMstack Radio is hosted by Brian Douglas, Developer & Advocate at Netlify. In this episode, Brian is joined by Stefan Judis and Rouven Wessling to discuss Contentful, a developer friendly API-first CMS.

    They explain the benefits of decoupling your website’s content from its presentation, including better cross-platform support. With Contentful, you are completely free to write your site in the language you want, while the service takes care of the CMS backend, storing and versioning your data, and backing everything up.

    This podcast is brought to you by Heavybit, a program that helps developer product companies take their product to market.

    [soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/329732086″ params=”color=#ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=false” width=”100%” height=”175″ iframe=”true” /]

    Brian Douglas: So, welcome to another installment of JAMstack Radio. On the line, we’ve got Stefan Judis.

    Stefan Judis: Yeah, I am Stefan, I am a developer evangelist at Contentful, based in Berlin. And I’m really excited to be here.

    Brian: Cool, and then we also have Rouven Wessling.

    Rouven Wessling: That’s almost correct. Yeah, I’m also a developer evangelist, but I’m also an ecosystem developer, so I don’t only just get to talk about Contentful. I actually build part of the product, mainly unveiling the PHP SDK. I also have my fingers in some of the other ecosystem projects we do—stereo saturators, family integrations.

    Brian: Cool. The audience definitely knows what Contentful is, because you guys have come up in conversation at least three times in previous episodes. But for those who maybe just found this randomly, do you want to explain what Contentful is?

    Stefan: I can take it. So Contentful is a headless CMS. So what this mean is that we offer an API, where you can retrieve your content, and on the other hand, we offer a web app where editors can edit their content. That’s basically a headless CMS, and we’re API first.

    Brian: Yeah, we’re big fans. At JAMstack, we love separating concerns. And the reason why Contentful keeps coming up is because we keep talking about front end solutions, to talk to APIs, and since you guys are API first, you fit right in the middle of the jam. It’s like a match made in heaven, really, for anybody who wants to have something super fast, but not worrying about collecting and maintaining their own infrastructure.

    Rouven: There was this amazing quote from a user we had just recently.

    Contentful is a CMS where the user gets the full CMS they want, but the developer doesn’t have to deal with us at all. 

    It’s just an API, it’s like any other API you would ever use, it’s just the same. You don’t have to think like a CMS, like it worked just like a Drupal, like a Adobe experience manager of all the gruesome things out there. It’s just an API. And that’s really what we want to be, we just want to be the API for your content.

    Brian: Cool. Yeah, I really like the approach too, because I literally have recently got into WordPress, for some things we need to test for work, and I’ve never done WordPress development before.

    Rouven: How was it?

    Brian: Not very good. Just the getting up and running, and getting you environment set up to host your own WordPress setup, it’s kind of tedious. Especially if you just want to manage a small amount of content to test out a small side project. It doesn’t seem realistic to reach for WordPress right out of the gate, which is why I love the solution of Contentful. You call it a CMS, so do you have an admin interface where users can actually interface and add data too?

    Stefan: Yeah, so we’ve got the Contentful app. This is the place where content managers or editors set up their content model first, so it’s completely flexible, you’re adding there, define what your content types are, you then connect items. And then you’ve got the actual editor interface, and this is where then the data editing happens.

    Brian: Okay, cool. And then, the data itself, we’re talking JSON, I assume?

    Stefan: We’re talking JSON.

    Brian: Yeah, which is very cool. So my last job, we built a growth hacking project to get people to find our site eventually. And because it was a growth hacking project, I worked really closely with the marketing team. So what I did is I built a CMS with Google Sheets. I built a quick scraper for Google Drive, to actually take that data and add it to a Postgres database to then serve to my front-rend react app.

    So I spent about, maybe 1 1/2 weeks researching it, and I spent about another a few days to actually to implement it, and I walked away feeling very proud of myself. And the very first day I showed it to everybody in the team as like, “hey this is what I built, now the marketing team can go into the Google Drive and add data and it shows up on our website that I built for them, this works perfectly.”

    And the first question that came up with the engineering team was, Why didn’t you use Contentful? And I was like, “Content-who? I’ve never heard of these guys, I don’t understand.” And then as soon as I got back to my desk after feeling very defeated, I actually Slacked and was, “Ah yeah, if you told me about this like two weeks ago, I would have used it, but I already built this, and I don’t want to do any more work, so I’m like kind of upset.”

    Rouven: But what you built sounds amazing, because you got the core thing right. You decoupled your presentation.

    Brian: Yeah.

    Rouven: The react app is about how you displayed the content from the part where you store the content. So you can switch out either end without having to redo the entire project. Now if you worked with WordPress, and you have a WordPress theme, and you have all the content in a WordPress database, you’re stuck, it’s never going to get out of there, unless you put in a lot of manual work.

    If you want to add a mobile app, or Alexa Skill, or whatever else you want to build for your content, and you want to reuse the same content, good luck in WordPress. 

    That’s not going to fly. I mean, it’s possible, don’t get me wrong, it certainly is possible, but it’s not going to be fun, by any means. And just grasping that and actually doing that right, is where most people who build websites today actually fail. Because they are thinking in a web-centered world, and everything they design is made for the web, and for nothing else.

    Brian: That’s very true.

    Stefan: You need a mental shift though. With WordPress, you have the holy WYSIWYG editor, where people start messing around with all the content, but when you want to go cross-platform, then you’re stuck. When you have markup in your text blocks, there is no way getting out then again.

    Brian: Yeah, and especially if you have to, like you mention, handle multiple platforms, and now we have the Amazon Echo which has no actual visual interface, like it’s just reading data from strings. It makes a lot of sense to decouple your markup from your API so that way you can present that nicely.

    Stefan: And also you have much more choice of not just reusing content, but also how you have your editors think about content. Like my absolutely favorite feature of Contentful is the images API, where you can seriously resize and mitigate images on the server. And how many people implement CMSs with structured fields where you have to upload the same picture five times at different sizes for different viewport sizes.

    The editors hate it and the developers hate it but people still do it. But the much smarter solution is to resize images on the server and cache them in the CDN.

    And I’ve even seen people with Contentful implemented that way, because they are so stuck in the mindset that they have multiple image fields for different sizes, while it’s much much easier to just use the power of the platform, and just resize images on the server and be done with it.

    And to think more in abstract terms about your content, independently of the platform where you show it, is a mind shift people just have to make. And once you’re there, a whole world opens up to you of just reusing the content you have. The most amazing thing companies usually produce, is content, like this podcast, it’s content, and it’s actually really good content, cause people learn from it, people study it. Bringing the content to multiple places to be more accessible to people, is an incredibly important thing to do just to get it out there. And making that mind shift is so important.

    Brian: Reuven, at the top of the show you mentioned that you also, not only that you’re an evangelist, but you also implement some SDKs. Contentful, do they have SDKs for multiple platforms as you mentioned?

    Rouven: Yes we do. So I have the probably unpopular with this audience job of maintaining the PHP SDK. So if you’re coming from WordPress, I’m the guy who’s going to get you on Contentful. But we do have SDKs for obviously JavaScript, for all the mobile platforms, Swift, Objective C, Java for Android, Python, Ruby.

    All the common languages used on the web on mobile, we have covered. I think it’s right now eight in total, so whatever platform you’re on, we can probably get you hooked up on SDK so you don’t have to actually write raw API interactions ever.

    Brian: Cool. Yeah, that’s like the best thing about, one, separating your concerns, separating your markup, but also being able to use like, these SDKs for example, if I wanted to create a react app or ingar app, or something fancy. If I can just drop in a quick connection to that API and reuse that same data, that kind of unlocks a real world, so it makes sense how Contentful really is serving the space really nicely.

    Stefan: Yeah, you just have to drop in the JavaScript SDK and then you’re already flying.

    Brian: Yeah. Apologies if I broadside you guys with this question, but do you guys have search integrated in there as well? Like if I had a long list of content that’s being implemented, is there an easy way to pick certain items for certain situations?

    Rouven: We do have a full text search. It’s not Algolia-quality search, so if you want a really powerful full text search, use Algolia with us, it has actually quite a nice integration and there are some open-source projects to do it.

    Brian: Oh nice.

    Rouven: But if you have just basic search needs, we actually run off Postgres, we have I think like a dozen different search operators. Including like geographic searchers, range searchers, bounding box GU search, very fancy, but the most important thing is full text search across all the content users have to get you to the result. Whatever humans actually type in, not just computers do.

    But the powerful thing about Contentful is, we really just want to do one thing very well, and that is content and managing your content, and if you want another thing to do with your content, somebody else may do it better than us. So if you want really really good search for your website, or your app, or your Alexa Skill, or whatever else, use Algolia.

    Brian: Yeah.

    Rouven: Push your content from Contentful to Algolia. If you want AB test, use Optimizely.

    We want to really get away from the monolithic view of “your CMS does everything and everything lives in your CMS.

    But you use the most powerful, most advanced tool for whatever you want to do, and you just store your content with Contentful, and you integrate with all these tools. So you’re not locked into using whatever happens to integrate with Contentful, you just use whatever is the coolest thing right now.

    Brian: I’m glad you mentioned Algolia, because an episode that hasn’t been out yet, they’re actually on, I believe it’s the last episode, so the one before this will be about Algolia, which is great because all they need is JSON, which makes sense, if you guys have integration to pass your Contentful data straight to Algolia. It’s amazing how many APIs here work for each situation, and how perfect the JAMstack works.

    Stefan: You just have to connect pieces, right?

    Brian: Yeah.

    Stefan: We’re really reaching that state, and that’s quite nice.

    Rouven: It’s an amazing world we live in right now. I’ve been, the past couple of months, to a couple of API conferences. It sounds absurd on the surface, it kind of is to be honest, but like just discovering how many APIs are out there to do all the things, it’s a great world we live in.

    Brian: Yeah. Do you mind sharing what API conferences were you just at?

    Rouven: The last one I was at was actually APIdays Australia, in Sydney.

    Brian: Okay.

    Rouven: Before that it was APIdays Paris, Nordic APIs. So around the world, mostly US, Europe and Australia, there is a conference where it’s API implementers usually come together, exchanging best practices about how to best implement an API and document an API and get developers started with an API. How to make the first API call as easy as possible. This is incredibly important for us, because

    Entering your content through the web app, editors know how to do that.But integrating content through an API entry each occasion is something new for most developers. 

    So we just exchange knowledge there about actually getting started. And it’s amazing to see how many companies now open up their data. I met somebody from Lufthansa. Lufthansa, the big airline, now has an API, where you can carry flight information. I think it’s the first big airline to do it, and it’s amazing that these old like 19th century companies are starting to open up their own data for the world to use, for us developers to use.

    Stefan: Yeah, this is exactly what we wanted right? You mentioned the react use case. For example, I’m storing the information for my personal website also on Contentful. And just because I can and I have an API available, I built myself a little app that schedules all my travels. Because I do a little traveling, these are the events, and that wouldn’t be possible without an API, that’s really sweet.

    Brian: Yeah, it’s super nice. I really like the catering to, I don’t know if you want to call them non-technical users as well, but having a marketing team or an editing team that’s pushing out content while the rest of the app’s actually being built. That was one of the big use cases why I opted for building my own API-first CMS with Google Drive. It was because we were building a proof-of-concept for a project, and at the time we needed a lot of content for it.

    So we couldn’t wait for the app to be built while we were collecting content, so we started adding content to the Google Drive to eventually port it over manually. So I was like “hold on, we have the content already, let’s not double work,” so I ended up doing way too much work to get this thing to work. But if I’d used Contentful, we would have had all the content being populated as the app was being built, and then click a button and then it populates all our data. And I liked your use case for traveling too as well.

    Stefan: It works pretty well for me.

    Brian: Yeah. I love providing data. Every other episode I talk about this app, but I built an app to tell me whenever there’s a home baseball game. I don’t know if you guys have baseball in Germany.

    Rouven: Rarely. It’s not really, rumor is there is a team someplace in Germany, one, just one.

    Brian: One team? At least you’re keeping up with everybody else in the Western ecosphere. Yeah, so for the listeners who don’t know what baseball is, it’s basically where grown men stand around and watch one tiny white ball get thrown around for hours.

    Rouven: That’s so how it feels to me.

    Brian: Yeah, there’s beer involved, and hot dogs.

    Stefan: I went to a single game in my life, I was bored to death.

    Brian: Well, if you guys ever make it out here to the SF, I’ll bring you guys to a baseball game, and we’ll get drunk.

    Rouven: I think we have a deal here.

    Brian: All right.

    Stefan: I’m up for the drunk part, I’m not sure if baseball’s necessary for that.

    Brian: All right, well we’ll go next to the stadium to a bar and listen to it.

    Stefan: That’s a deal.

    Brian: So the app I built basically is just scraping ESPN data and making sure I know whenever there’s a home game for the Giants, and it just will ping me and tell me whenever not to go to the city, and avoid any sort of baseball traffic. So it sounds like I could use Contentful for that, just to collect all my data for me, and then be able to ping me with the notification, just a serverless function.

    Stefan: These kind of stories make me so excited, that we’re kind of developers and we’re able to build these kind of things. Sometimes I’m like “holy shit, this is amazing.”

    Brian: Yeah we’re at a really awesome time to be a developer, because a lot of the, not all the problems have been solved, but a lot of the hard problems have actually been solved for us, so we can just use our knowledge and collect all these APIs and collect all these use cases.

    Rouven: Just an API callable year. Google and Amazon too have been opening so many amazing APIs for natural language processing, AI context-based language meaning, image recognition, video recognition just opened by Google. I mean, it’s not open source, open source would be nicer, but just an API call away, and maybe three cents charge per API call is a breadth of knowledge, that at least I am incapable of developing by myself.

    Like I can’t build a natural language processor, that’s definitely not my level of skills. But I can just access one that’s really really good by making an API call. And that ability, as a developer, is amazing.

    Brian: Yeah. Even things like VR, and we talked a little bit about the Amazon Echo as well. People have already solved those problems, and you just drop in a JavaScript library to do VR on your phone, or language processing from your phone or other third-party device. It’s amazing and also scary. Because you know, everything’s super easy and attainable to do, so the possibilities are almost endless for the good and bad.

    Stefan: There’s always stuff to go, right, always.

    Brian: Cool. And sorry, Stefan, do you also do code at all, at Contentful?

    Stefan: I was developing many front-end stuff in JavaScript before and now anchor the developer relations team, which means I’m responsible for blogging and hanging around and chatting with people. Coding these days is side projects and try-outs.

    Brian: Okay, cool. Well I’m sure Contentful gives you access to nice stuff for your account so you can continue to build your scheduling applications.

    Stefan: I’m building all this stuff with Contentful now, I need an API, okay let’s do that.

    Brian: Yeah yeah. I feel the same way Netlify, like I’ve had three sites before I was a Netlify employee, and now I have like 50, just because I can. I don’t need to think about whether or not I need to pay for something. For one, if you’re a developer, Netlify’s pretty much free, but for two I get to try out every new feature that Netlify has, so I’m just rolling out always. If I think of something, it goes on Netlify. And hopefully I’ll do the same thing with Contentful, coming up pretty soon.

    Stefan: I tried Netlify last week the first time, and I was like, “That is nice.”

    Brian: Yeah.

    Stefan: It was really easy.

    Brian: Yeah, we try to make it easy.

    Stefan: HBB2 and CDN and yeah it was really good.

    Brian: Cool, I’m glad you liked it. So speaking of which, examples. I was trying to rack my brain, you guys have any good examples of use cases for Contentful working at companies?

    Rouven: All right, let me start. They’re not actually doing static sites, but it’s my favorite customer ever. They’re right up in London, it’s the British Museum, world-famous institution, very like old school dusty name. It’s the British Museum, they have the mummies.

    Brian: Could you do it in a British accent?

    Rouven: I can’t. You can tell my accent is horribly German and I lived in America for a year, and I still haven’t gotten over a German accent.

    Brian: Well, I don’t know if you watch any 1950s and ’60s movies, but all Germans are British in movies.

    Rouven: I haven’t heard that one. So before I left for the U.S. I was an exchange student they told me that in American TV Germans are either portrayed as Bavarians or as Nazis, so don’t be offended. So I always wanted to be the Bavarian. So the British Museum, dusty old mummy house, but they actually have an amazing digital agenda, they have a digital director.

    And Contentful is their default CMS now for all things. And they’ve done some amazing things, which is actually my favorite use case, because something nobody thought of, when they designed Contentful. Audio guides, like the things you rent for 5 pounds, and walk around the museum and they tell you about the exhibit.

    Brian: Yeah.

    Rouven: These are running off Contentful.

    Brian: Wow.

    Rouven: So all the audio files, the pictures, the text, they are stored in Contentful. The curators and the editorial team, they add to it throughout the day. So the British Museum is a very old building, with very very thick walls, which is harder for wifi, so they don’t have wifi throughout the building. So they just have wifi at the booth where they rent out these devices. And they use our sync API to sync down the entire content onto the device.

    And then you take the device, you go through the building, and you have all the content available to you, without actually connecting to Contentful. And it’s my absolutely favorite use case, because I’ve been there, I’ve used the audio guides, they’re incredibly well done, they’re informative, they have pictures. The pictures are changing while the audio’s playing, they have like the family quiz version where you have tasks to do with your kids, like do pantomimes, or makes sounds and stuff.

    So it’s incredibly good content, it’s really well presented, and using our technology to enable it. So this is my absolute favorite. They do some other things, they have some websites running, or some signage systems, but these audio guides are so amazing. If you’re in London, go to the British Museum, take five pounds, it’s going to a good cause, partly to us, get an audio guide, just experience it. They’re incredibly well done, and it’s using the same CMS you can use to call your block. Just think about that. This is a big institution with a lot of money, and they’re using the same product you can use for free to call your block. That’s my absolute favorite.

    Stefan: Yeah, speaking of which, just to make that clear. Contentful is actually a set of APIs, so it’s not just only retrieving data, we also have a read-write API, so when you need your own interface, or a simplified version for that, that’s also available, and then also preview API. So when you for example don’t want to publish stuff but want to build an environment to see edited things, this is also included.

    Brian: Okay.

    Rouven: And the Images API, my favorite API to downscale images. Also one of our APIs.

    Brian: I’ll have to check that out. And then as far as Contentful, you guys have like a trial period or a free plan to check out?

    Stefan: The free plan is up to 50,000 API calls per month.

    Brian: Oh, okay that’s totally doable.

    Stefan: I think so too, that this is enough for a side project.

    Brian: Yeah, and if you go over that then you probably want to talk about investment, and maybe getting some VC funding or something.

    Stefan: Exactly. This is the normal reaction that happens then. When you have the problem that you’re dragging 50,000 requests, you have different problems than.

    Brian: Yeah, than paying for Contentful.

    Rouven: Especially since 1,000 more API calls are just 15 cents. So if you pay us 15 cents, you get to keep using the API.

    Brian: Yeah.

    Rouven: We’re very cheap for Germans. We’re easy, just give us some beer, we’re good.

    Brian: Cool, I’ll keep that in mind, I’ll send a case of my finest Budweiser.

    Rouven: Um, Czech Budweiser you mean, not American, right?

    Brian: Well, Budweiser is not the best beer, it’s not our best export.

    Rouven: The Czech one is really good, it’s also called Budweiser, but it tastes way better.

    Brian: Cool. I really appreciate you guys talking about Contentful and kind of giving us the rundown, but for now, let’s go ahead and transition to picks, if you guys down mind. So yeah, these picks are jam picks, anything that you’re jamming on, things that are keeping you goin, that you like to do to keep your work going, or just even outside of work. So technical or non-technical are totally fine. But I’ll go first.

    My first pick is Webpack. Webpack is a build tool. A year ago I barely knew what it was. One of my lead engineers, actually Christian Schinzler, I worked with him, and he was a big Webpack fan.

    So Christian was actually on Episode Number One on the JAMstack Radio, so for anybody who remembers that far back, but yeah he was a big Webpack fan, I didn’t know anything about it. And I finally got around to actually learning it well. So I highly recommend checking out the webpackjs.org docs, because they did a really good job of making sure it was clear.

    Rouven: Version two is much better, right?

    Brian: Yeah, version two is much better, you can actually understand what’s going on, it’s very clear. So I’ve been doing offline plugins, service workers, I’ve been optimizing our build to make sure it’s not crazy heavy-weighted and stuff like that. And just from a little reading I was able to improve our bundle size and stuff like that. So highly recommend Webpack.

    My next pick is actually Service Workers, too, just roll right into that, there’s a cool offline plugin for Service Workers, which I’ve implemented in Netlify. It’s not in production yet because I’m trying to figure out some crafty ways to offline our docs to as well, currently just our homepage is offlined, so hopefully when you lose network requests on your phone or your desktop, you’ll be able to at least read our docs.

    And all that will be cached, will which be super awesome, so check that out, Webpack and Service Workers. My final pick is Luke Cage, which is a Netflix series. So I don’t know if you guys get all the Netflix series in Berlin, do you?

    Rouven: Yeah, most of them.

    Brian: Most of them? Well Luke Cage is made by Netflix, and it’s a Marvel series. He’s an African-American super hero, and he came out during the jive-talking ’70s, and that’s where he kind of was birthed in the comic books, and they’ve modernized him and put him into a Netflix series, Marvel series, and they’ve also brought along some of the ‘70s undertones too, which is really cool, a lot of the music, a lot of the stuff that came from that comic book.

    I’m very impressed that they were able to intertwine it and not make it as cheesy as the comic books were. So I just finished it, it took me a while to finish it, cause I have no time to watch TV as of late. I do a lot of coding and a lot of side projects, so I just don’t find the time. So I just finally finished the last couple episodes, so I just wanted to recommend, anybody who hasn’t seen Luke Cage, check it out, and then maybe read the comic and try not to laugh. Stefan, since I introduced you first, you have some picks you want to share?

    Stefan: Sure. One question though, have you SW Toolbox when you play around with Service Workers?

    Brian: I haven’t. What’s SW Toolbox?

    Stefan: That’s actually a Google library. And I did a Service Worker implementation six months ago, and it took a while to get my head around it, because you have to hook and to activate and fetch and all that stuff. With SW Toolbox, it’s five lines, reconfigure it, you can say cache first, network first or whatever, and I implemented it and it was like “Wow, I lost a lot of time here.”

    Brian: Yeah, I definitely did spend at least a week on just tinkering and manipulating different things and fetching and pushing.

    Stefan: Check it out, you will see that it’s not that hard then.

    Brian: Okay, cool, I will, I definitely will check it out.

    Stefan: Okay, well cool. My first pick is Unsplash, this images API, where you can get beautiful images under Creative Commons License, for free. That’s awesome, I love that. Especially when I do conference talks or something, I spend a lot of time just looking for beautiful images, so this really helps me out.

    And actually, three days ago I came across an app that is called Zoomi, or Zoom-eye, which is basically a MacOS app which queries a lot of image services that are all Creative Commons, so I now just have to type in a phrase and I can choose out of 100 beautiful images what I want to use for my presentations, so this will definitely save me some time, I recommend it.

    And extra today, when I was younger I was a little more into music, this kind of disappeared when I started coding. But accidentally I came across a band I used to listen to, which is Marot Rockel, it’s a little bit funky electronic music, and I listened to them the last time six years ago, and I discovered that they released three more albums, and I had a dancey day today, it was really good.

    Brian: A dancey day, it’s too bad this is an audio medium.

    Rouven: Stefan really cares about his stock images. Stefan is our slide quality obsessed evangelist. Whenever I had to do any presentation I had my slides to Stefan, and now I get a list, a Google Doc two pages long with all the things wrong with them back. And after I go through it they’re going to be perfect, but he’s really obsessed with the quality of his slides, and he’s great at it, so he loves his images.

    Stefan: It has to be pretty, right?

    Brian: Yeah. I was going to say I was going to look up some of your talks so I can try to mimic some of your talking in slides. Most of my slides I throw it together last minute, so you probably won’t be proud of mine.

    Rouven: Yeah, me too, Stefan is different, Stefan is amazing.

    Stefan: Well thank you.

    Brian: Reuven, you got some picks for us?

    Rouven: Yeah, of course. I’m late to the party, because I got late to Germany, but I’m really in love with the Alexa API right now. I’ve done two skills right now, I’m working on my third one, all of them using Contentful, because “ooh multi-platform.” I get to use content in a non-visual way, which is breathtaking to me still. But even beyond that, just the quality of the interaction, but also the work that goes into the interaction, and actually having to think about, “Hey how do people want to interact with something where you can’t click” is to me just fascinating.

    So I love the API, I love that I can use it AWS lamda, so I don’t have to run a server anywhere, I don’t have to think about hosting it anywhere, I just upload it to Amazon, and Amazon takes care of all the crap for me, but also the thought pattern, having to evolve from, I’ve always done either PHP band dev, or JavaScript phone-in dev, so it was always very visual, and having to think about in a different fashion is to me super engaging right now.

    And the other thing I was raving on today is, for lunch today with a co-worker I made the most awesome omelets ever in our brand new kitchen, we just moved to a new floor with my team. I just love food and today’s omelets were amazing and we had some good wine for it for lunch, and it was the best lunch I had for a long long time. It was amazing. Shout out to Linn for actually having the idea of making us omelets today.

    Brian: Nice. You can’t underestimate a good omelet. Anyway, guys thank you very much for coming on, jamming with me and talking about the JAMstack, talking about Contentful. I’m very intrigued, I’m definitely going to be using this for some future side projects, and getting real used to it.

    This podcast is brought to you by Heavybit, a program that helps developer-focused companies take their product to market. Throughout the program, founders work on developer traction, product market fit and customer development. If you like what you hear, be sure to subscribe to Heavybit’s Podcast Network on iTunes.

    — Malia Powers

  • DevOps Chat: The Continuous Delivery Map w/ Scott Wilson, Automic

    DevOps Chat: The Continuous Delivery Map w/ Scott Wilson, Automic

    Wouldn’t it be nice to have the entire continuous delivery topography laid out in a nice map that shows how they are all interconnected? Sort of like a subway or metro map? Well now you have it and it is interactive! The good folks at Automic, a CA Technologies company just released their Continuous Delivery Map. It is really cool and they are adding to it all the time.

    I caught up with Scott Wilson of Automic and had a chat about the Continuous Delivery Map. As usual the streaming audio of our conversation is immediately below, followed by a transcript of our chat.

    Audio

    Transcript

    Alan Shimel:                Hey, everyone, Alan Shimel, devopsy.kinsta.cloud here for another DevOps Chat. Welcome and welcome to our guest, Scott Wilson, Automic, a CA Technologies company. Scott, welcome back to DevOps Chat

    Scott Wilson:               Thank you, Alan. I’m glad to be here.

    Alan Shimel:                Glad you’re here with me. So, Scott, you know, lot going on with Automic, obviously – always is – but I wanted to focus in today on some pretty cool interactive graphic – well, it’s more than just a graphic. It’s really a whole project that you guys have launched and it’s called the “continuous delivery map.” For those following along at home, if you wanted to check it out, you can get to it at automic.com/continuous-delivery-tools and – dash or a hyphen. Scott, you know, assuming people are listening to us but not able to get to the site this second, can you describe for us what the continuous delivery map is?

    Scott Wilson:               Yeah, so the continuous delivery map is really just a way to visualize a topography, if you will, of all the different tools that are in the continuous delivery value chain, and there are lots of tools. And we found, in talking with a lot of prospects and just other companies in the industry, that amongst IT professionals there’s a bit of confusion on what kind of the best use case is for many of the tools, mostly, Alan, due to so many of these tools having a great deal of crossover functionality, right? It’s kind of muddied, blurred the lines a bit.

    And so, in thinking about a good way to help people out and kind of visualize the tool chain used to get an application into production environments, we took inspiration from metro rail systems, like the London tube or the New York subway, and so we built out a map that looks similar to that.

    Alan Shimel:                Yeah. I mean, for those of you, as I say, who maybe can’t get to a computer right this second, as you’re listening to this, it really is. It’s based on a subway map or a tube or it could be the Washington metro or the Boston or Tokyo or anyplace else, in that you have a central hub and then there’re different lines that are color-coded. And each of these color-coded lines represent a lineage or a line of a particular functionality in the continuous delivery world. So, for instance, there’s a line for cloud, IaaS and PaaS. Another line for middleware, another one for CI tools. Another one for artifact repositories. And, along that line, the stops are all of the different companies that kind of play within that are or are on that, and it’s not just companies – it’s actually the products of these companies that play on that particular branch, if you will.

    So it’s actually pretty cool, Scott, and what I like about it too is, though, look, plainly and clearly, Automic is a vendor. I mean, there’s no favorites here. You’ve done a pretty exhaustive mapping or the whole topography of the continuous delivery world, it looks like, to me anyway.

    Scott Wilson:               Absolutely. We really wanted this to be agnostic for the tools. We’re really just trying to help the community understand, you know, the landscape for continuous delivery, and, as you mentioned, the central hub is really the way you would bind all those many plethora of tools into a coherent pipeline, right, to safely and reliably deliver apps to production environments. And, yeah, this definitely respects that. Ultimately, we’re gonna be opening this up to the community so that people can comment or keep this updated ’cause there’re always new tools coming on board and other tools or open-source projects that kind of fall out of vogue, so we’re looking to really make this more interactive and far – we’ll keep it up to date.

    Alan Shimel:                Yep. And, you know, again, trying to visualize or paint a picture for people who don’t have it in front of them, at every stop on every branch, if you will, it’s a link, and if you click on that link, it gives you a little pop-up with a little information about that particular company or product but also links through to their full websites or what have you. So it really is – I could see this being a really useful tool for anyone interested in the CD kind of world. There have been – I mean, clearly, Scott, right? Full disclosure: there’ve been other companies that have tried to organize, if we will, the CD world, but, really, using this paradigm of the subway map and the branches and lines, if you will – maybe it’s just ’cause I’m from New York and I’m used to subway maps –

    [Laughter]

    – makes a lot of sense to me.

    Scott Wilson:               Right. Well, we’ve heard that feedback as well that that’s just – well, you know, continuous delivery’s about movement, right? You’re moving things along and it just seems to help visualize it. You know, a lot of the data from what other folks have done is similar, right – a big list of tools – but just being able to put it in a format like this, we’re finding a lot of people go, “Ah, this makes sense. I would use these set of tools. Source code management fits here and deployment automation fits there.”

    And it’s helpful because I think, without presenting it this way, you’re just left to a hodgepodge of tools and you’re like, “Yep, I got ten of these and two of those and I’m good.” When you look at it in this format, you realize, “Oh, well, I could actually go further. I could do more or I could better organize things,” or maybe even take some of the burden off a tool that you keep having it be more than it was designed for and actually use a best-of in another category, or, as we represent it as, a color-coded rail line.

    Alan Shimel:                Yeah. Yeah. And, of course, you know, the thing about projects like this, Scott, is they’re, in some ways, a never-ending story. They’re constantly morphing, changing, growing. And, I mean, the good news is you’ve got a great start right here; the bad news is you guys need now to keep this up, week in, week out, month after month. What are the plans, going forward, to keep it current and fresh?

    Scott Wilson:               Excellent observation and point. We are looking to ultimately open this up to the community, so this page will not only be as it is now; it’ll be far more interactive, where visitors can come in and recommend tools that aren’t on here, maybe further defining particular lines or branches that we have, upvoting, downvoting various tools, and, yeah, so we’re looking to have that community help us keep it up to date. In just doing the research for this and playing with many of these tools and looking at their viability to be on the map, as you said, it was a ton of work. And so it’d be impossible, with the growing market, to do that on our own, and we’re definitely looking forward to collaborate with the DevOps community at large in keeping this current, the information current and fresh and, of course, far more interactive and useful, as we go forward.

    Alan Shimel:                Yeah. I mean, you know what? I mean, this is great and I don’t know how you would visualize it, but it would be great to show sort of connected dots, in terms of how companies or products actually integrate or work together. But that –

    Scott Wilson:               So, yeah, not to give away – [chuckles] – so much what we’re planning, but, yes, you’re absolutely correct. That is something that is on our roadmap, what we’re planning. Indeed, what we think would be useful for this is to allow us to kind of rank or order the tools and use a kind of a most popular or what the market, the community says, “Now this is the best practice set of tools.” A simple example would be SQL Server and Oracle. Right? If you’re going down the RDBMS line, the database line, then, well, those two are kind of the giants. And so by ordering them such a way, you would be able to come in, list the tools that you have, and be able to visually see, “Are you kind of following what everyone, what the consensus best practice is? Or are you have a lot of outliers?” And I suspect a few outliers here and there are okay, but, you know, if you’re going two four outlines, you might be putting yourself at risk.

    And sometimes I think it’s just to help you answer that big question, is “I don’t know. Should we go with this tool or this tool?” Well, you could come here and, in future releases, be able to see what the community is saying the best of or the next best of, right, and have it ordered and you’d be able to see that in a nice map, visual way, to understand and help you to, hopefully, make decisions on what tooling you should consider or not.

    Alan Shimel:                You can also see if you’re taking the express or going on the locals. There’s a lot that a clever marketing person and someone with a good knowledge of the market here in the CD space can really make some hay with this, Scott. And, you know, beyond cute, it’s actually pretty – a really useful tool here.

    Scott Wilson:               Yeah. Appreciate that. Like I said, we’re looking to make it far more useful and what you hinted to and what I’ve just discussed is really make it really interactive and help you measure yourself against what the market or the community is doing, what the norms are, best practices and so forth.

     

    Alan Shimel:                So I’ll include a link to this, Scott, in our show notes when we publish, but, for those who may be listening on iTunes or SoundCloud or audio only, again, the URL for this CD map is automic.com/continuous – dash or hyphen – delivery – dash or hyphen – tools. And you could check it out there. Scott, you know, in real DevOps fashion, upgrades here will be continuous, right? There’s not a Linux version planned or anything like that, I would assume

    Scott Wilson:               Correct. Yes. So we have continuous sprints planned. New vendors are actually in our current sprint, that are coming out, and, yeah, so you’re absolutely right. If we’re gonna do something on continuous delivery, then we ourselves are looking to be agile and looking to keep it fresh and then, ultimately, have one of the inputs to those sprints be the community, community feedback and input.

    Alan Shimel:                Got it. So, Scott, this is really great. Congratulations to the whole team at Automic who worked on it. It’s a piece of work here that I think is highly useful. What else is new at Automic, Scott? Anything noteworthy you wanna report on

    Scott Wilson:               Well, what we’re shipping here lately, in the next few weeks, is a incremental release of our application release automation product, version 12.1. There are several enhancements that are coming out, going GA here, in the coming weeks. We’re pretty excited about that and some of the additional enhancements. There’ll be a lot of information coming out in a few weeks about all of that and the functionality and things that we’re doing with that. And then, you know, just additionally, the growth and recognition within the CA company, as an automation business unit, and, yeah, we’re keeping pretty busy with automating not just things within the continuous delivery value stream or DevOps tool chain, but also within the CA ecosystem itself. There’s a lot of growth. And so, really, what’s happening with Automic is we’re really able to help show how we can automate, really, the modern software factory.

    Alan Shimel:                Yep.

    Scott Wilson:               That’s kind of one of the – falls in line with what CA is trying to do, one of the core tenets. They’re trying to reach out to the community and the marketplace.

    Alan Shimel:                Absolutely. All about software development life cycle and software supply chains.

    Scott Wilson:               Yeah.

    Alan Shimel:                Well, Scott, thanks for giving us a peek behind the scenes at the continuous delivery map. We’ll try to feature this on devopsy.kinsta.cloud and we’ll be watching as it continues to develop, adding even more features or functionality, but it’s pretty cool stuff.

    Scott Wilson:               Well, thank you very much and, as always, I love being here and grateful you had me.

    Alan Shimel:                Well, we’ll have you back on again then. You know, Scott, flattery will get you everywhere.

    Scott Wilson:               [Laughs]

    Alan Shimel:                Thanks

    Scott Wilson:               That’s so true, isn’t it?

    Alan Shimel:                Yep. We’ll have you on again. Scott Wilson, Automic, a CA Technology company, talking about their new continuous delivery map here on DevOps Chat. Scott, thanks for coming. Hey, everyone, thanks for listening. Hope to see you soon on another DevOps Chat. Until then, I’m Alan Shimel for devopsy.kinsta.cloud and we’re out of here. Thank you.

    — Alan Shimel

  • DevOps Chat: Chef Update with Ken Cheney, Chef CMO

    DevOps Chat: Chef Update with Ken Cheney, Chef CMO

    There are always new developments going on at Chef. We caught up with Chef CMO Ken Cheney to give us an update. Last time we spoke with Ken was right after ChefConf. Since then, Chef continues to move forward on several fronts including Habitat, Automate and INSPEC. We speak to Ken every other month or so, as it is always good to know “what’s cookin’” at Chef.

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

    Audio

    Transcript

    Alan Shimel: Hey everyone, Alan Shimel, editor in chief of devopsy.kinsta.cloud here, for another DevOps Chat. Today’s guest on DevOps Chat is our friend Ken Cheney, CMO of Chef. Ken, welcome back to DevOps Chat.

    Ken Cheney: Alan, it’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.

    Shimel: Thank you. Ken, I apologize, between your schedule and my schedule, it’s been a while since we’ve had a chance to catch up. I think the last time we left off it was – was it right after Chef Conference, ChefConf?

    Cheney: It was actually right before ChefConf. So it’s been a couple months, right? Given that was at the end of May. 

    Shimel: Ken, I don’t think I’ve been home for more than two or three days at a time since then. So yeah, it has been. But for our listeners who maybe aren’t lucky enough to be down in Austin and ChefConf this year, can you fill us in a little bit about maybe what we missed?

    Cheney: Yeah, so ChefConf this year, as you mentioned, was in Austin, Texas. And you know, I think the highlights of ChefConf, on the product side, were some announcements we made around Chef Automate and bringing in our open-source tooling fully under that umbrella of Chef Automate. So Chef Automate is our commercial offering. And first and foremost, we brought in InSpec fully, so now, from one spot within Chef Automate you can see both how you’re doing in terms of your infrastructure and how your infrastructure automation is going with Chef, but also from a compliance perspective you can see what’s happening in terms of policy through the Chef Automate UI. So it’s really – the product has evolved from how it was working before, where we essentially had two servers for and now you have a single, common UI for looking across all the various data points

    In addition we brought in the Habitat data so now you can see the state of your Habitat instances that are running in the wild.  And you know, what I find really interesting about what’s happening with the compliance front is that, you know, we’re really evolving quickly from just being focused on sort of core compute elements to now expanding InSpec out to cover up on cloud-based APIs. So we can now go at AWS and Azure and be able to scan those, as well as VMware environments. So you know, we’re expanding InSpec to be a language that’s not just appropriate for compute, but also for broadly managing all of your infrastructure as code. And so that was announced as well at Chef Conf. And I think that’s a bi move forward. You’re going to see that continued expansion of that InSpec language and capabilities to go after a broad set of other types of infrastructure in the near future.

    And it’s an area where we see just a tremendous interest and uptake from our customers and users. So anyone who hasn’t tried out InSpec, I really encourage them to try it as part of Chef Automate if you want to actually see that InSpec data roll up into common policy views and really understand how you’re doing at an infrastructure level, both in terms of the state of your infrastructure but also how your infrastructure is conforming to policy around compliance and security. You get that from one place. And in this world of WannaCry and other exploits that are happening, it’s amazed me how many organizations, when tools like InSpec exist, still have giant vulnerabilities, right? And here we have this open-source tool that can solve this problem of really understanding what is your exposure. And then you can use a tool like Chef to actually remediate and fix it. It just blows my mind that it’s still a common occurrence.

    Shimel: It blows your mind, Ken? For 20 years it’s blown my mind. For those of us in the security space, it’s no secret that well over three-quarters—actually, probably over 80 percent or 85 percent of attacks and successful attacks actually take place not because of what we used to call Zero Day or unknown vulnerabilities, but because known vulnerabilities were not patched.

    Cheney: That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right, yes.

    Shimel: And that’s the key. I mean even today –

    Cheney: Yeah, and –

    Shimel: It’s crazy. I’m sorry, go ahead, Ken.

    Cheney: Oh I was just going to say, one of the common things, you know, as many organizations haven’t really fully automated – and so they reintroduce the vulnerabilities into the wild all of the time. And what I love about what you can do with InSpec is you can actually – because you’re managing as code, every time you test your software, every time you push a configuration with Chef, you can verify that you’re not reintroducing to file that or something on a keyboard the reintroduces that potential hole in your organization.

    Shimel: Yep, you know – I’m sorry, can you hear?

    Cheney: Yeah, yeah, go ahead.

    Shimel: I’m getting a little audio back. I hope this is recording well. Ken, we did a survey a while back where only 75 percent of organizations are actually scanning their code for vulnerabilities prior to deployment. And you know, what are the other 25 percent thinking?, is kind of what I think. But anyway, on the topic of security, Ken, I wanted to quick mention that Matt Ray of Chef is actually speaking at a conference I’m doing as a part of RSAAPG on DevSecOps next week. And Matt, I think, is based in Australia, correct?

    Cheney: Yes, he is. Yeah, Matt is based in Australia and he will be talking about InSpec, and folks who are there can attend his session and learn more, for sure. 

    Shimel: So maybe it’s because I’m traveling to Singapore and so it’s kind of right in my face, but to me, it’s this global – I mean, DevOps has really become a global – I don’t want to use the word “phenomenon” – but a global force. And we’re seeing it

    Cheney: Yes, it is.

    Shimel: – you know, certainly in EMEA, but we’re seeing it in AP. And then just this week, Ken, I think Chef just announced their first Latin American partner, right?

    Cheney: Correct, correct. Yeah, we are definitely seeing DevOps at a global level and seeing broad interest. And what’s interesting is that – Alan, I’ve been in the industry a while, and it used to be a little bit of a lag – you know, a several-year lag before you’d see markets such as Latin America or parts of Asia pick up technology that would originate in the United States. Or process ideas. But things move much more quickly now and you’re seeing global companies with operations in India and operations in China. And so we as a company do a lot of activity at a global level. You know, if you look at how we’re doing meet-ups and where we’re doing meet-ups, they’re happening all over the place. And our partner ecosystem, which is well over 300 partners, covers the globe, because we see that demand.

    Now how we enter any given market varies depending on what’s going to work best in that market. So some markets we address through partners and some markets we actually put our own physical presence in that market.

    Shimel: Yeah, we see the same thing at devopsy.kinsta.cloud, Ken. You know, our readership when we first started was almost three-quarters U.S.-based, and now it’s only about 37 percent, with the rest being global. But it’s more than just spreading through the world. It’s what you said – there’s not as great a lag time. At one point, Latin America was three – we used to tell people, “Oh, it’s three years behind what we’re doing here.” And that’s not the case anymore, certainly.

    Cheney: Yeah, I’ll tell you, the highest volume of leads that we get come from the Asia Pacific region.

    Shimel: Really.

    Cheney: Yeah, so there’s just a tremendous amount of demand coming out of there. I’ll tell you, if we do a meet-up in Bangalore or Delhi, we’ll have 300 people show up to that meet-up.

    Shimel: Wow, that’s fantastic. You know, we’ll talk more about that off-mic. But Ken, a lot of what’s driving strong numbers like 300 people at a meet-up and stuff like that is training and availability of training, right?

    Cheney: That’s right.

    Shimel: And that’s something Chef has always done really well. But you guys recently rolled out – not Pilot, excuse me – what is the name of the –

    Cheney: Chef Automate. The Chef Automate Pilot, yeah. We actually rolled out a whole new online learning site called Learn Chef Rally and it’s gotten very fast adoption and has a lot of users hitting it every day. And as part of that we have what’s called the Chef Automate Pilot, which is really targeted at an individual who wants to really understand Chef over the course of maybe a lunch, right? So that kind of lunchtime evaluation where they want to get a feel for how Chef works and what it does for them. But as a whole, Learn Chef Rally constitutes a whole set of modules that will walk you through the various parts of our technology. So if you want to learn about compliance, there’s an InSpec module and a Chef Compliance module. If you want to learn even about DevOps concepts, you can go and learn about them there on the Learn Chef Rally site.

    And we’ve had such strong uptake. You know, we’ve seen a lot of customers who would like to bring that learning site in-house and customize that learning environment for their own company. There’s been such a strong interest. So it’s a great resource and I encourage people to go look at it.

    Shimel: Sure. Ken, well, the logical question then is, how do they get there?

    Cheney: Yeah, so it’s very easy to get there. You can just go to learn.chef.io and you can get started.

    Shimel: Excellent. That’s a good one. So that’s Chef Rally and it’s highly recommended. It sounds like there’s a lot and I’m sure you guys are planning to add more into that. So Ken, we are kind of in the dog days of summer here but it’s certainly not slow, it doesn’t seem, anywhere. Any other news, events?

    Cheney: Yeah, well we just passed the one-year anniversary of Habitat and I’ll note that, you know, we at ChefConf made some Habitat news. So we announced a Habitat build service and we made improvements to the Habitat scaffolding, which are essentially build packs to make it easier for people to package up their applications, as well as we’re writing a set of enterprise-ready Habitat plans or common languages, common platforms, such as like BigData, Cassandra, Spark and real common kind of web apps. And so Habitat continues to evolve, and just in the past couple of weeks we announced the pre-release of Habitat for Windows. So along with what we had for Linux support, people can now use Habitat to package up their Windows-based applications. And from our view, Habitat is now the premiere packaging solution for containers. It’s the fastest, easiest way to package an application and have it run in a container and be able to manage it across the life cycle.

    Shimel: That rocks. I mean, because certainly, Ken, the one thing that we’re seeing here is the – you know, we talk about the Internet time crunching or compressing time. The pickup on containers? I’m old enough, and probably you are too – remember when VMware first came out, right?

    Cheney: That’s right.

    Shimel: And through virtualization, it went really quick. The move to virtualization went a lot quicker than let’s say the move off of client server or something like that, from peer-to-peer, or peer-to-peer to client server or what have you. But the move to containers – man, I’ve seen several surveys recently that showed container in production numbers upwards of 50 percent of organizations. And I thought frankly this wasn’t true, but it says something. Right?

    Cheney: Yeah well, you know what’s interesting though about that move? What’s interesting about that move, Alan, is that the majority of containers that are running out there are being used almost like a VM. You know, 75 percent of containers right now are running a full OS.

    Shimel: Yep.

    Cheney: And they’re basically just using it as a way to kind of attempt a higher level of abstraction and remove a little bit more of the infrastructure complexity that they were encountering when they were using VMs. So what I think the next wave is going to happen, I think people are going to actually figure out how to actually better package their applications to actually take advantage of what they can do to remove unwanted dependencies and remove a lot of the weight around the application that they’re currently doing today when they just package up the full OS and all of the broad set of unassociated dependencies that they’re packaging right now. So I expect that’s going to be the next wave and we’re there to help them when they go there.

    Shimel: Agreed, agreed. Ken, any shows or conferences coming up, other than of course the DevSecOps that I mentioned, where Chef will be presenting or a part of?

    Cheney: Yeah, well yeah, we will be at VM World, coming up. We’ll be at Microsoft’s big event that’s coming up. And of course as we look toward November we have our own community summits that happen in the fall timeframe. So those are a great way that we bring our community together. So the first one is going to be in London Oct. 10 and 11. So that’s coming right up as well. So expect to see Chef and our brand showing up at a lot of different places in the coming months.

    Shimel: Great. Very cool. Well Ken, we’re about out of time here. 15 minutes goes quick. But hopefully it won’t be a few months before you’re back on –

    Cheney: Yeah.

    Shimel: – and we can pick up where we left off here.

    Cheney: Yeah, Alan, enjoy your travels and thanks so much for the time today.

    Shimel: Not a problem. Ken Cheney, CMO of Chef, here on DevOps Chats. This is Alan Shimel for DevOps Chat and devopsy.kinsta.cloud. Thanks for listening, everyone, and we’ll see you on another DevOps Chat soon.

    — Alan Shimel

  • DevOps Chat: DevOps and the Road to Cloud with JT Giri, CEO, nClouds

    DevOps Chat: DevOps and the Road to Cloud with JT Giri, CEO, nClouds

    For many of us in the IT industry, migrating to the cloud is old news. Even the concept of how DevOps can help on the road to the cloud is not a novel idea. However, we need to remember that while many organizations have some cloud-based infrastructure, the real migration to the cloud is still ahead of us. By the same token, while DevOps is more popular than ever, the percentage of organizations that have fully adopted DevOps is still small.

    My talk with JT Giri, CEO and co-founder of nClouds, dives into this truth and how companies like nClouds are helping organizations big and small to make the move. As usual, the streaming audio of our conversation is below, followed by the transcript of our chat.

    Audio

    Transcript

    Alan Shimel: Hello, everyone. This is Alan Shimel, editor in chief of devopsy.kinsta.cloud, and we’re here for another DevOps Chat. Today’s DevOps Chat guest is JT Giri, CEO of nClouds. JT, welcome to DevOps Chat.

    JT Giri: Hey Alan, great to be here. Thank you.

    Shimel: Thank you. Thank you for being here. So JT, let’s start off a little bit about – before we get to nClouds, let’s start off – I don’t know if everyone in our audience has heard of JT Giri and your background. So why don’t we go there first, so you can give us a little background.

    Giri: Absolutely. I spent the last ten years doing DevOps consulting before it was called DevOps – so helping companies to streamline their operation and managing complex infrastructure and helping them to put processes in place. My end goal was always to make sure the customer could focus on their end goal, like delivering greater value to their clients. So that’s what I’ve been doing the last 10 years. 

    Shimel: Got it. And then you founded nClouds. When was nClouds founded?

    Giri: Yeah, so it was kind of a transition from consulting to founding this company with the mission of helping companies with cloud adoption and helping them to manage modern infrastructures that would integrate continuous delivery, continuous integration, building better culture. So we transitioned from consulting to a company.

    Shimel: And you know what? You’ve done it and congratulations. I’ve done it now several times. And it’s scary, right? It can be a little scary when you – you know, it’s a big responsibility, but ultimately that’s what makes an entrepreneur, right?

    Giri: Yeah, absolutely. And I think at some point you realize you can add far more value to your clients if you grow it as a team, especially 24/7 support. One of the DevOps principles is to take ownership, right? So we wanted to provide that to our customers and every gig we do, we make sure we are there for them. You know, we provide 24/7 support and make sure we are responsible for their infrastructure. It’s just simply very hard to do it yourself, you know? So that’s why we transitioned into a company and it’s been great. We’ve done over 100 AWS implementations and the transformation for our clients has been amazing. Before where it used to take them three months to deploy code, now they can deploy everyday. So it’s just been an amazing journey. 

    Shimel: Yeah, it has. And I mean, you know, again, as an entrepreneur and you having done this too, JT, it’s nice to get some recognition beyond – I mean other recognition is putting the money in the bank and growing the business, right? But it’s also nice to get awards, kudos or some industry recognition that things are moving in the right direction or the arrow is pointing up, as they say in football. And JT, recently nClouds received some recognition like that, didn’t they?

    Giri: Yes. Yeah, so we’ve been nominated in the 20 most promising DevOps providers of 2017 and as I was saying, it’s really exciting for us, because we’ve been doing great things for our clients and the transformation has been amazing, where now the customer can focus on delivering value to their clients faster. You know, we help them with cloud migration and streamline their operations. So it feels good to be recognized, definitely. [Note from Editor: Just after our interview, nClouds was named to CIOReview’s 20 Most Promising DevOps Solution Providers – 2017.]

    Shimel: Got it. And JT, you know, nClouds is working pretty closely with Amazon AWS, isn’t it?

    Giri: Yes, we are an Advanced AWS consulting partner. We’re also an AWS Managed Service provider and DevOps competency partner.

    Shimel: Got it. And how is that, JT? Because again, for our folks out in the audience, I’m sure many of our listeners are actually working on AWS-hosted infrastructure right now. But you know, from my experience anyway, there’s people who work directly with AWS and they muddle through it. They may get some training and maybe they’re old hat at it. And then there’s a large segment of I think the industry and of the customer base who really, they need the nClouds of the world. They need AWS expertise to help them make it happen. And I’ve got to assume that that forms a good chunk of your customer base right now, yeah?

    Giri: Yeah, absolutely. So Alan, you know, you’re in the space and you know how confusing things are right now. You know, there’s people already moving to server-less and there’s Kubernetes, Nomad, and you know, there’s like five or six container schedulers … They want to be like Amazon or Netflix or Google of the world, but it’s very hard to get there. Since we’ve done this so many times, we have experience working with the client and taking one step at a time. Because if you’re starting out it can be intimidating, because you don’t know – you have a good vision and you want to release code fast and you want to make sure you can innovate fast. You want to migrate to AWS, but it’s very, very tough. And Alan, when we speak with customers, some of them are still starting with the config management conversations, right?

    Shimel: Mm-hmm.

    Giri: And so we have to kind of tone it down for them. For them, the next step is, “Hey, let’s figure out – maybe we need to work on implementing some kind of config management for you before we even think about micro services,” right? So that’s when someone like us can come in and help you to understand, where can we get the biggest bang for the buck? What should be the next step? And really help you pave the way to go to this transformation with a DevOps path.

    Shimel: Yep, agreed. So JT, you know, when we start talk about it though – I want to turn back – you actually wrote an article back in May that was up on devopsy.kinsta.cloud about why your company needs an automated infrastructure now. And when you were talking it kind of triggered that for me. For our listeners out there, why do their companies need an automated infrastructure right now?

    Giri: So if you subscribe to lean thinking, anything that doesn’t add value to your customer is a waste, right? So you need to define your work rigorously to be used that way. With automated infrastructure you can actually facilitate that. You can scale up and down based on your customer needs. And then you can focus on adding value to your customer and you can also lower the cost, where you just scale based on the client’s needs – and all this can yield better reliability. You know, the customers will be happy. If you’re not leveraging automation and if you’re treating the cloud infrastructure like on-prem, then you’re not really getting any value out of the cloud. So that’s why I wrote that article, just illustrating that you have to focus on automation and the cloud so you can lower the cost, have efficient workflow, and in return deliver better reliability and better customer experiences.

    Shimel: Excellent, excellent. So you know, JT, you and I and people like us, we’re living in a DevOps bubble. We think DevOps is great. We think this type of methodology, this way of thinking, this kind of cultural organization is a no-brainer and of course it has to make things better. But there are a lot of people who maybe haven’t drunk the Kool-Aid, or they just don’t see it. And they’re saying, “Okay, that’s cool. That’s this week’s buzzword. What’s next? How do we keep this going?” Where do you see this going, JT? And when I say this, I mean this whole sort of – I call it Agile IT, because I heard someone at Gartner use the term. But DevOps, Agile, this new way of doing things – where do you see it going

    Giri: Yeah, so I think we have a long way to go, Alan. As I mentioned earlier, you know, we are in the Valley and we are drinking this DevOps Kool-Aid. And because we have experienced this, right? Like I’ve done a lot of DevOps transformations and I can see before and after and it’s just amazing when you get the results. But there are a lot of companies out there, as I was mentioning earlier – they’re still beginning to think about config management systems, right? And they’re still doing config management in Pearl. And another challenge I face, especially when we’re working with enterprises, people have gotten used to doing things a certain way and all of a sudden there’s like so many better ways to manage your infrastructure.

    So Alan, I think we have a long way to go and I think when people feel like, “Oh, this is just a buzz,” what we try to do with companies is take small steps, right? If they’re still working on config management, try to implement that and show them metrics on how things were before the implementation.

    Shimel: So JT, what about nClouds? What’s next with nClouds? I know recently you guys have added some talent there and you’ve got this award going on and you’re getting buzz in the industry. Where do you see the company going?

    Giri: Yeah, so our mission from day one has been to drive this cloud adoption and help companies with DevOps transformation. So companies like Google or Netflix, the unicorns, they can really attract a lot of DevOps talent. But there are a lot of companies and a lot of enterprises out there and they’re not able to attract that kind of talent. So our mission is to bring DevOps transformation to all of these companies, right? That’s why we’ve been hiring. And Randy Newell joined recently, so we’re very excited about that, and we have been hiring very talented engineers.

    And we also released a product called nOps.io, which manages security and change management of the cloud. So over the last several years the focus has been a lot on infrastructure tooling, like Terraform and (AWS) CloudFormation. And I think we’re missing the process piece of the puzzle in this DevOps. So that’s what we’re trying to bridge, where if there’s a hundred people or ten people making changes in your infrastructure, how do you manage those changes? How do you make sure security is not an afterthought? How do you make sure every single change is documented and traced without slowing people down? So we’ll continue to innovate and help companies in the DevOps space, yes.

    Shimel: Got it, got it. All right, well JT, we’re about out of time here. Thanks for coming up and appearing on this episode of DevOps Chat. Continued success with nClouds. And we’d like to see more articles from you up on devopsy.kinsta.cloud, actually. I’m sure our audience – our audience really liked the first one, and we’d like to see a lot more.

    Giri: Thanks, Alan. Thanks for having me.

    Shimel: But good luck. Thank you. All right. Hey, JT Giri of nClouds – CEO and founder of nClouds, thanks for being this episode’s guest on DevOps Chat. This is Alan Shimel for devopsy.kinsta.cloud and DevOps Chat. We’ll see you on the next episode of DevOps Chat.

    — Alan Shimel