Gene Kim’s DevOps Enterprise Summit UK is just a few weeks away, June 25-26. While DOES UK this year is shaping up to be a must-see event, there are also some great events taking place around DOES. One is sponsored by Electric Cloud (also a founding sponsor of DOES). It is a post-DOES workshop, featuring classes taught by Gary Gruver, John Willis and Helen Beal.
The workshop session lineup includes “DevSecOps,” by John Willis, “Leading the DeOps Transformation,” by Gary Gruver and “DevOps Essentials,” with Helen Beal. Helen’s DevOps essentials and Gary’s executive leader workshops are both half-days, so you can attend both. Each of these are great learning events as well as a great way to network with your peers. If you are in London on June 27, be sure to check them out.
As usual, immediately below is the streaming audio of our conversation, followed by a transcript so you can follow along.
Audio
Transcript
Alan Shimel: Hey everyone, it’s Alan Shimel and you’re listening to a special edition of DevOps Chat. We have three folks on our panel for DevOps Chat today, and each one of them, actually, are really kind of special people to me within the DevOps community. And let me introduce them to you right off. First and foremost, ladies first.
I want to introduce Helen Beal. Helen of course is DevOps fantastic at Ranger Four. But also, Helen was one of the first people I met in the DevOps community over in London and has been a friend ever since. Also has a position with the DevOps institute – an advisory role at DevOps institute as well. So Helen, welcome to DevOps cChat.
Helen Beal: Thank you very much, it’s a pleasure to be here as always talking to you.
Shimel: Thank you. My second guest really needs to introduction in the DevOps community. He has three – count them, one, two, three books around DevOps as well as many years of leading DevOps teams at HP and Macy’s and now consulting for many, many different organizations and helping them with their digital transformations and DevOps journeys, none other than Gary Gruver. Gary, welcome.
Gary Gruver: Hi, thanks great to be here, nice to be speaking with you again.
Shimel: Nice to have you here. And then certainly, last but not least – one of my good friends in the DevOps world, he runs marketing at Electric Cloud, which is also of course the founding partner of the DevOps enterprise summit (DOES) with Gene Kim and ITREV– Sam Fell. Sam, welcome.
Sam Fell: Thank you, Alan. Happy to be here.
Shimel: Okay, first thing I want to talk about today is we’re getting close to DOES London, which I believe is what? June 25 and 25 over at the O2 in London.
And I know you’ll all be attending there and of course we can – Electric Cloud is again one of the founding sponsors and we can get all that information over on the IT revolution site. But part and parcel with Does London this year, I wanted to mention two special events taking place on the heels of Does London.
One is a special post-Does workshop which, Sam, you and the Electric Cloud folks have driven. Why don’t you give us a little background here on what you guys are doing and why?
Fell: Yeah, great – thanks, Alan, I appreciate that. So Gary – you mentioned, he has had all this experience helping these large companies with their digital transformations. When we started our user conference back in 2013, Gene Kim came and spoke, Jez Humble came and spoke.
And we were talking together, we said these are exactly the kind of people – these old horses that are trying to do these transformations that we want to try and attract to a large conference, which is sort of what the genesis of the DevOps enterprise summit. The folks that show up at that show, a lot of them are in a tough spot.
They know they need to transform. Their business wants them to transform, they don’t know how to go about doing it. And so having a community of people that are available to talk to and learn from, admit mistakes to in a safe way, to know that you’re gonna get advice and counsel, it’s a fantastic show that the team has put together. And you can see by the success of it that the community really embraces it.
So our thought last year with Gary was why don’t we take somebody who has helped companies with these transformations and go to DevOps enterprise summit and listen to those stories and see what people are going through and then directly after that you get in a room with an expert coach who can say, now, let’s apply that to you. Let’s apply that to your situation. All those stories that you’ve heard, how does that work for you?
And last year we had just a fantastic time and so we decided to do the same thing this year at Does London. We’ll be doing the same thing at Does Los Vegas in October as well. And it’s just an opportunity for people to really put in practice and make real a lot of the things that they heard at the fantastic DevOps Enterprise Summit.
Shimel: Fantastic, Sam. And it is, it’s a great workshop. Gary and Helen – before I jump over to you, Sam – I forget I apologize. For people to register for the workshop, what’s the cause? What’s involved? Where do they go?
Fell: So it’s a heavily subsidized workshop. Helen, the DevOps institute, Gary, John Willis – these guys are giving their time in order to provide this for the community. Electric Cloud is helping to pay for the room and all this other stuff. So the cost is pretty minimal. I think it’s £195.00 for our early bird.
We don’t have that many tickets eft but there are some tickets. There’s a group rate as well. So you know, non-expensive and it’s an opportunity for you to really rub elbows with people who are always wanting to learn how to do these types of things. And as you mentioned, John, we do have these couple different workshops.
John Willis is doing Dev-Sec-Ops hands on technical workshop that same day. So we’ve got two tracks that we’ve got set up basically. I don’t want to spill the beans on what Helen and Gary are going to be talking about, but the John Willis workshop we’re really excited about that. He’s gonna be showing people with a live pipeline how to incrementally improve it. how to bake security into your deployment pipelines.
And one of the types of things that you can do to enable your teams and your developers to ship secure codes. Fantastic stuff.
Shimel: Yeah, no, that’s gonna be a great hands on workshop for anyone interested in DevSecOps. We’ll have more info about DevSecOps in a little bit. But first, let’s turn to Gary. Gary – what is your workshop going to be about here?
Gruver: I think I’m gonna follow your lead. Let’s go with Helen’s first with lady’s first and get to that and I think that’s the order that we’re going in with the day. Why don’t you lead off with Helen and then I’ll follow up.
Shimel: Chivalry is not dead. Helen – go ahead.
Beal: Thanks, Gary. So I’m going to be doing the half day DevOps institute course – the essentials of DevOps which essentially kind of what it says on the tin, the fundamentals or the foundation and relevance of DevOps and things like the three ways and coms and how it fits with Agile and IT send and Lean, PK studies, linking it to this integration.
And continuous delivery. How they lead from one another. So that’s it. It’s a course really for people that are quite new to DevOps and they should expect to leave the course, really with an understanding of where DevOps has come from, why it’s important and what sort of business benefits people can anticipate from using DevOps practice and principles.
Understanding some of the vocabulary that those of us that kind of live and breathe DevOps are quite familiar with. So things like the theory of constraints and CD and things like that and hopefully with some kind of action plan of what they can take back to their desk the next day and start making some DevOps differences in their own organization.
Shimel: And it is the DevOps essentials course it’s really sort of a big time version of the full DevOps foundation, which Helen – you were instrumental in refreshing for this latest– I think it’s released three of DevOps foundation?
Beal: Yeah, it’s very nearly ready. So it’s been updated with lots of additional case studies, we’ve updated things like the surveys too, the latest versions of the state of DevOps surveys. I know there’s another one coming out. I don’t think we’re expecting it for another few months, and actually part of what we’ve been doing this update is following our own principles. So we’re actually aiming for a much more incremental release cycle as we move forwards rather than in frequent big updates.
I’m sure we’ll all be on board with that. And then, newer things have been coming through like liability engineering and more stuff around services and containers and those sort of things. Focused on safety culture, learning organizations and some of the things that John and Gene can cover in their beyond the finished product audiobook, also featured in there.
As is some of the material from Nicole’s and Jane’s book – accelerate. And some references to that. And then we’ve removed some of the stuff that kind of isn’t really around anymore in the DevOps World.
So things like NoOps – think it’s really gone away now. Rocket DevOps has been very overtaken by DevSecOps. So it’s a good solid refresh and hopefully the foundation will be able to keep refreshing it more frequently as this is such a fast changing world that we’re in – this DevOps world.
Shimel: It certainly is. Okay, that’s fantastic Helen. And I encourage listeners that may be in the London area that week, if you’re near to DevOps or you really haven’t taken any formal DevOps sort of education or classes, you know, listening – goes to Does is a great way to learn from real life examples. But really this is a great class to give you a nice foundation in DevOps. Gary, how about you?
Gruver: I’ll be doing my executive workshop that I do with most organizations when I go in and work with the executives to really help people put together their plans and figure out how do they approach it. The people that are gonna be at. Does are gonna be hearing a lot of different ideas, and a lot of perspectives on what they should be doing and I’ll hopefully be trying to help them put that in context.
My big thing I champion is there are different approaches you need to use when you’ve got large tightly coupled systems than you do when you have small teams that can independently develop and qualify and deploy code. We’ll be going through a lot of those differences. We’ll be going through the role of the executive in terms of leading the transformation.
A lot of this can be empowered if you have loosely coupled small teams but if you’ve got large groups of people who have to work together to coordinate the deployment pipeline in terms of being able to develop, qualify and release as a system, then you need to have the executives playing a pretty active role in coordinating the work across those teams and prioritizing the improvement. So we’ll be going through that.
How do executives get the team all on the same page? And then how do you get them to a common definition of what they’re gonna go do and agree to that? So my analogy is a pipeline ____ described an elephant feels like most discussions I start with organizations that are starting to go down their DevOps transformation.
And what I work to is a process and approach to give them a common view of the elephant and get people all rowing in the same direction. And helping people understand that the types of things they can and should do are different for large, tightly coupled systems versus loosely coupled systems. And then we’ll go through and we’ll help them understand where they should really be starting their transformation.
Which is different for a lot of different organizations. And I feel that starting point is really important, because this is a lot of energy. It’s gonna take a lot of effort to transform how you do software development.
And you really want to pick the changes that are gonna have the biggest impact on your business first off so you can create that positive momentum. I think if you just go down the path of doing DevOps without picking those things that will have the biggest impact, you’ll start doing it, you won’t see the benefits, and over time the organization will kind of disengage and you’ll lose momentum on your transformation.
So a lot of what we focus on is trying to highlight those key lynchpins that you can really start making the big differences and how to go analyze that for different deployment pipelines in your organization.
So it’s really that. I’ll be there. But there will also be a lot of your peers in the room. So it’ll be a good opportunity to take the things that you learned at Does to reflect on them and talk with myself and your peers about what you’re thinking about doing.
And learning from it. And I would say that I’ve been doing this for a long time, and what I tell people is that just gives me more opportunities to have made the mistakes that you’re gonna make.
And so if I can help you avoid the mistakes I already made so you can go make some new ones, learn from that, that’s kind of my goal. My experience is this stuff is such a breakthrough for the business that we’ve gotta have more people doing it. But how can we help people best we can so they realize those same benefits.
Shimel: Excellent. Gary – you know, one of the things I think sometimes people get confused or question is when we talk about this is aimed at executives. It’s sort of a loaded term. In a large organization like a Macy’s, executive might mean CIO, it might mean VP of IT. in other organizations it may mean a director level. Can you give us a better definition or how you define you know, the executive who is gonna get a lot of good out of this workshop?
Gruver: I think they all will. I’ve done it all the way from the CIO and I do execution workshops down to – to the leaders that are responsible for a tightly coupled deployment pipeline and then some organizations that might be a director or senior manager that’s over development and ideally, it’s nice that you can bring your partners in QA if it’s separate, and in operations if it’s separate. Maybe your security people, maybe your audit people.
And come together as a team after Does. So if you’ve got a group of people that have gone to it and gone to a lot of different presentations, having them come together on that will be helpful. So this is the group at whatever level in the organization you think will be leading the transformation, or driving the changes. It can be – typically the CIO when I do the executive workshop is more to inform them of their role in it. Then at some level, we get down to a specific deployment pipeline.
And the deployment pipeline may still be 1000 people if you’ve got a large tightly coupled system, like we had at Macy’s.
Which requires large numbers of people working together, or it may be small. And if it’s small, you can do a lot of the things that you’ve seen unicorns do. And if it’s larger, the same principles apply but the practices are a little bit different.
Shimel: Excellent. Yup. Great. So guys, we’ve covered a lot of ground here. Let me do a quick review. Sam, what day is the workshop?
Fell: The workshop is the day directly after DevOps enterprise summit. Wednesday June 27.
Shimel: It’s June 27.
Fell: That’s correct. Right before… DevSecOps days on the 28th!
Shimel: Yes, and Sam – I will put in our show notes a link to the URL about the workshop and registration. But where is it being held specifically?
Fell: It’s conveniently located in exactly the same location as the DevOps Enterprise Summit which is the InterContinental – O2 in London. So if you’re in London, very convenient area to get to also. So come on by.
Shimel: Excellent.
Gruver: And you don’t have to have gone to DOES or the DevSecOps. If you’re in Europe and you wanted to stop by.
Shimel: Excellent point. It’s not a pre-req if you’re looking for some good, hands on DevOps training and networking and education, this workshop is a standalone event. It’s fantastic as well. So let’s cover the three different workshops actually being conducted that day though. Number one is we’ve got none other than John Willis himself leading a real hands-on DevSecOps. Is Anders working with John on that one, Sam?
Fell: Anders will be in there, yeah, he’ll be hanging around. But this is really John’s show. And this is his passion. And he’s driving the technical aspects of this workshop where people are really gonna be able to get their hands dirty with the technology, have a pipeline. Put some vulnerable code through it, and deploy it and then figure out how do we put automated steps in place and how do we sort of put the – get the developers thinking the right way to make sure that that kind of stuff can happen and what are the practices that need to be put in place. So really, for folks who want to try and get that level of specificity of how to do it, not just the high level, interesting, interesting workshop for people.
Shimel: Absolutely. We’re all hearing a lot about DevSecOps. Gary made reference to DevSecOps. I think Helen did as well. And we talk about this DevSecOps rugged DevOps etc. This is really gonna be hands on. so it’s great whether you’re a DevOps person or a security person. Then we have Helen who is delivering the pre-req 101 DevOps essentials, based on the latest upcoming version of DevOps foundation from the DevOps Institute. And Helen, people who take essentials – do they get any kind of credit or anything towards a foundation or being able to take a certification or anything like that?
Beal: As you said earlier, it’s basically a cut down version of the DevOps foundation course and that’s a certified course. This isn’t a certified course, so I’m sure if people wanted to follow up with the DevOps foundation, we could sort something out.
Shimel: Fantastic. And then certainly, last but not least, aimed at DevOps leaders and executives, Gary is gonna be in essence, delivering what many organizations are paying thousands and thousands of dollars for. His course on kind of leading the transformation. That’s taken right from one of your books, Gary. I apologize. But really, dollar for dollar, what a great line up, what a great deal for anyone who is looking for DevOps training and education. I also wanted to quickly before we run out of time here, I wanted to mention that the day after the workshop is the first DevSecOps days in London.
Again, headlined with John Willis. I think, Helen, you’re speaking there as well. Correct?
Beal: I am, indeed. Yes.
Shimel: Give us a little preview, what are you talking about?
Beal: So John saw a talk I think I did in Belfast or somewhere – maybe last year. It might have been all day DevOps, can’t remember. Anyway. But basically we’ll be talking about DevSecOps engineering as a concept. As you probably know, the DOI at DevOps institute is just about to release a new course for DevSecOps engineering. So we’ll be talking about that role and what the requirements are to be successful in that area.
Shimel: Yup. And DevSecOps days also promises to be a fantastic day. Sam and the Electric Cloud folks – we’re grateful for your sponsorship. Electric Cloud is one of the sponsors there. I will put in the show notes where you can get more information on DevSecOps days as well. But you can go to DevSecOpsdays.com and that’s the long and short of it right there. Guys, a couple of minutes left, let’s wrap up.
Helen – beyond all of the great stuff you’re doing with DevOps institute, what any good news? Any new things going on with Ranger Four?
Beal: One of the nice popular things that we’re doing at the moment is one of my favorite things conveniently as well. Which is our version of Phoenix project simulation game. That we kind of developed with our partner Gaming Works out in Amsterdam. So it’s a one day business simulation so experiential learning rather than classroom learning. We’ve got a free, public version of that coming up in London on the 19th of July. It is quite close to being fully booked.
But if people want to find me on Linked In or would like to come along, we do have a couple of spaces left.
Shimel: Excellent. And I’ve done the Phoenix Project simulation game, I love it and I’m sure you guys will deliver a rousing version, highly recommend. Gary, how about you?
Gruver: Oh, I’m just spending more of my time with individual companies, learning from their journeys and trying to help them avoid the mistakes I’ve made and help them to learn from new mistakes they’re finding so I can help point it out to other people so that people can accelerate their journeys and be more successful. So that’s where I spend most of my time is just coaching different teams that are trying to transform their software development delivery processes.
Shimel: You know what, Gary – what we should have mentioned though – for maybe folks listening out there who may want to engage your team to help them, where do they get information?
Gruver: They can just go to garygruther.com – my website. And they can also go there and download a free copy of my latest starting scaling DevOps and enterprise, the electronic copies are there. I self-published that so I can give it away. Authors don’t really make money on books. So it’s out there, so I can give it away.
If you read the first three chapters and then click at the end, you can get the rest of the chapters if you just give me your name, your title, where you work and where you live so that if I happen to be in the region – I keep thinking I’ll use that as a marketing tool. I haven’t sent anything out to it yet, but I’m still collecting names of the people that read the book because it feels like a good contact for me.
Shimel: And of course, you’ve updated your privacy regulations to be GDPR. Anyway, Sam let’s see – DOES – you guys are the founding partners of DOES, you’re doing these workshop, you’re helping us with sponsoring DevSecOps days. What are you doing in your spare time?
Fell: Next week we’re gonna be at Velocity San Jose if anybody is in the area, we’d love to have you stop by and see us. Yeah, we’re just looking forward to seeing everybody out in London. And it’s gonna be a super fun filled week. I mean, it’s a whole week of DevOps. I could not be happier. I’m super excited about it. really appreciate all the work that everybody is doing to try and make this community event a success. And looking forward to being in London.
Shimel: As am I. I will be at all three of these events as well and you hit it there, Sam. Both the workshop and DevSecOps, these are community events. London has a fantastic DevOps community. Looking for your support, and I think it’s gonna be a great week for DevOps. So with that being said I think we’re about out of time here. Helen – as always it’s a pleasure to hear your voice and have you on the show with us. Look forward to seeing you in person.
Gary, always a pleasure, my friend. I’m sorry, Helen – I stepped on you there.
Beal: I was just gonna say, thank you very much for having me on and really looking forward to seeing you guys as well.
Shimel: Great. Gary – as always, a pleasure.
Gruver: It’s always a pleasure to get a chance to speak with you, Alan, and look forward to helping out the DevOps community.
Shimel: Very cool – and Sam, what can I say that hasn’t already been said?
Fell: I don’t know. You could say “goodbye?”
Shimel: Okay – in that case, goodbye. This is Alan Shimel. You’ve just listened to another DevOps Chat. See you all in London for DevOps week.
— Alan Shimel
