The replatforming of the enterprise IT infrastructure utilizing microservices and containers is no small undertaking and is usually provoked by a shifting set of key business drivers. That is precisely the case today. The term “digital transformation” is in the hearts and minds and on the lips of top-level business executives and IT leaders alike. The underlying traditional or legacy infrastructures that have dominated enterprise IT for nearly 30 years simply cannot handle the workloads or power the applications that will drive business decisively forward.
Microservices & Containers
Both microservices and containers are destined to play a major role in this enterprise replatforming, for different reasons. Containers, for their part, hold significant benefits both for developers and the development effort as well as for the organization itself. Understanding this range of benefits is instrumental to securing IT budget for containers going forward.
In this DevOps Chat, Jim Scott, director, enterprise strategy and architecture at MapR, discusses the most promising and compelling tools, technologies and solutions destined to play a major role in this replatforming of the enterprise. Jim highlights how to stay one clear step ahead as IT undertakes what is arguably its most mission-critical task in a generation.
You can also download a great ebook on this topic by Jim at here.
As usual, the streaming audio of our chat is immediately below, with the transcript of our conversation below that.
Audio
Transcript
[su_pullquote align=”right”][su_custom_gallery source=”media: 118809″ target=”blank” width=”300″ height=”300″]Jim Scott
Jim Scott is Enterprise Strategy & Architecture at MapR Technologies and is very active in the Hadoop community. Jim helped build the Hadoop community in Chicago as cofounder of the Chicago Hadoop Users Group. He has implemented Hadoop at three different companies, supporting a variety of enterprise use cases from managing Points of Interest for mapping applications, to Online Transactional Processing in advertising, as well as full data center monitoring and general data processing. Jim also was the SVP of Information Technology and Operations at SPINS, the leading provider of retail consumer insights, analytics reporting and consulting services for the Natural and Organic Products industry. Additionally, Jim served as Lead Engineer/Architect for Conversant (formerly Dotomi), one of the world’s largest and most diversified digital marketing companies, and also held software architect positions at several companies including Aircell, NAVTEQ, and Dow Chemical. Jim speaks at many industry events around the world on big data technologies and enterprise architecture. When he’s not solving business problems with technology, Jim enjoys cooking, watching-and-quoting movies and spending time with his wife and kids. Jim is on Twitter as @kingmesal.[/su_pullquote]
Alan Shimel: Hey everyone, this is Alan Shimel devopsy.kinsta.cloud, and we’re here for another DevOps chat. We’ve got a nice chat lined up today. Lucky enough to be joined by Jim Scott of MapR. Jim, welcome to DevOps Chat.
Jim Scott: Thanks, Alan.
Shimel: Thanks for having – thanks for being with us today, Jim. So Jim – well, let’s start with this. Our audience may or may not be familiar with MapR, but let’s assume for the moment they’re not. Can you give us a little bit of background about MapR?
Scott: Sure. So MapR is a converged data platform. The operable words being “data platform.” So MapR provides a data platform for all data. All types of data, all locations, cloud on premise, and it can run in all of those locations simultaneously. The premise of the platform is to deliver a standard open API architecture on top of our data platform, so that customers can reap the benefits of our platform, but not have to worry about being locked in to the vendor, MapR, for the software that we provide through those open APIs, or even the infrastructure that you choose to run on.
So if you wanna run on your hardware in your own data center, or if you wanna run your software in the cloud or multiple clouds, you can run your software on top of MapR on any of that infrastructure, anywhere you choose, any time.
Shimel: Great. So Jim – and just for our audience information, what’s your role with MapR?
Scott: Oh, so for MapR I’m in charge of enterprise architecture, both internally and externally.
Shimel: Excellent.
Scott: So what that means is internally, I’m basically lining up and showing how we’re using MapR to solve our own problems, and then externally, it basically means I work with our customers a pretty substantial amount, helping them work through how to be successful with a big data platform. So what is the right way to do something. I’ve personally worked in a large number of different industries, and so my experience comes to the table quite often.
Shimel: Got it, got it, got it. We got a little vibration there, but I think it went away. And Jim, as we were talking off-mic before we started today, I was telling you I had covered MapR back in Network World when you guys launched, and I’m gonna guess that was around 2008 or so. Correct? 2009, maybe?
Scott: Yeah, the company went in – or was founded in stealth mode in 2009.
Shimel: Yep, I remember it. So certainly there’s been a lot of water under the bridge in terms of in 2009, cloud itself was quite the rage. It was relatively new, still, and people were still figuring that out. The whole big data market – there wasn’t a market for big data, frankly. Hadoop and these things had just come out.
But Jim, probably one of the biggest innovations or changes in infrastructure over the last two or three years, maybe four, has been the big move to containerization of microservices. I would imagine you’re seeing this at MapR as well.
Scott: Yeah, absolutely. So if we look historically, just say maybe eight, ten years back, message-driven architecture started becoming popular; service-oriented architecture, things of that nature. And that popularity was great – eh, maybe even 15 years back. But the problem was scaling out the messaging platform itself was difficult, it was expensive, and it was really just a pain from an administration perspective, to be able to scale out.
So we’ve seen this transition over the last handful of years, moving more towards a microservices model. And the term – a lot of people like to throw it around loosely and call something a microservice when it’s not, but the less monolithic in nature, the more difficult to handle the large scale.
Which is why the Kafka API and what MapR provides with MapR Streams helps enable the customers, because they have the ability to push through massive volumes at a linearly scaling cost model, so they know exactly where they’re going. So it’s pretty easy to push through something like 1.5 trillion events per day on a platform like MapR with as little as five servers.
And the more micro in nature, the higher the volume you’re going to need to be able to handle. And so those messaging systems of the past – just not there. Just couldn’t handle it. I mean, I remember being excited when we were getting 50,000 to 60,000 messages per second through the system.
Shimel: For good reason, Jim. You’re talking to someone who was excited when the 386 came out. So yeah, I hear you. But Jim, fundamentally what my – and I just had this discussion, because we actually have a little microservices journal, Microservices Neighborhood, within devopsy.kinsta.cloud. And I was talking to JP Morgenthal, who’s a CTO at DXE, actually, about this just yesterday.
Fundamentally, fundamentally – and we’re talking about real microservices now, not nonsense, right? But fundamentally, it has such promise to change the way we do development and to change the way our infrastructure runs, right? Especially when you marry it to containers.
Scott: Yep. Yeah, and I think what you’re alluding to, and this is one of the things that I have the biggest problem with when talking with people about microservices, is the fundamentals are that a microservice is really more about the deployment model than anything else.
And without a container to be able to put it in and deploy it, it becomes a very difficult and unwieldy thing, even though it’s so small.
Shimel: Got it. So Jim, you mentioned before you were working on both the internal and external aspects of this. Internally, if you can – let’s not give away any company secrets – but internally, is MapR utilizing your container-based infrastructure with microservices?
Scott: Uh-huh, absolutely. Yeah, matter of fact, we talk about it pretty regularly. So for our own website, we have implemented customer 360 capabilities. We run our software inside of containers, and we run it currently on one cloud, but we have on-premise hardware, and we will be in the not-too-distant future running multicloud and on-premise all simultaneously. And in order to do that you need a technology like a container to get that type of isolation from your infrastructure.
Shimel: Yep. An abstract, if you will; an abstraction – I had an interesting conversation, Jim, with I think it was at _____ recently, or another site, another large organization who had totally moved to a containerized infrastructure, and he was talking about what a profound change it was.
And I asked him about patching containers versus immutable infrastructure, just standing up new ones, replacing the old, rather than actually patching the existing ones. Where are you on that question, if you don’t –
Scott: Well, I love the concept of being able to go back to my base, default image and be able to run it through my entire devops process, continuous integration process. So I can go patch one instance in my dockerfile, I can test the core out, make sure it’s doing what it’s supposed to, and then I can let all of my downstream builds run, pick up the new container, and run them through their integration tests.
Shimel: Excellent. So Jim, I don’t know if everyone in our audience understands this whole idea of eating your own dog food, and what it means. But can you maybe give us an example or two of how things you’ve learned by using them internally at MapR have translated into better service, better product, better results for end users?
So how you’ve taken it out, how you’ve taken certain processes or waves of technology that you use yourself, and translated that into a customer experience.
Scott: Yeah, so there’s a couple that pop to mind, and number one is actually containers. We only introduced support for containers around the beginning of this year.
Shimel: Really?
Scott: But we’ve been using – yeah, it was – I think our press release that we did on it when we officially released support was around February time frame this year. But technically speaking, we have a number of customers who’ve been using containers with MapR for two, three years.
And little secret here: We use it internally, and have been for two, three years as well. So making sure that we had it fully vetted and very well baked from a support infrastructure perspective was really critical, but getting that out there for customers, really important.
Because it solves such a major problem with containers, which is you look at something so simple as security, right. If I am responsible for the web server for my company and you are responsible for the financial systems of your company, or of my – or our company, that software in a container has the ability to run on the same server.
But if they run on the same server and we are utilizing local storage on that server – because you can’t save data inside a container; it blows up. It’s gone when the container dies. So if you save data locally on that server, what happens? Well, suddenly I run these security risks of my web server having access to financial information – probably not a good idea.
Shimel: No.
Scott: So we implemented, within our MapR persistent application client container, the ability to talk to MapR from within the docker container. And because MapR offers NFS support, it’s almost invisible and there’s hardly anything to do. And you give it a ticket from your authentication environment, and you’re good to go.
Whatever’s running inside that container has a user ID, and when it talks to MapR, the data is saved and protected. You don’t have to worry about oh, well, if I’m gonna save data, I’ll save it to the local server. You get rid of that whole problem. It isolates where the data goes, already being protected and highly available, if your server physically dies, just like if your container dies, you don’t care. You don’t have to restore the server to try and get the data off of it.
Shimel: Got it, got it. That’s 100 percent – that’s the beauty of that whole abstraction layer, if you will.
Scott: Exactly.
Shimel: Jim, here’s an interesting question, and I don’t know if you have this info, but I figured I’d ask anyway. We’ve been doing a bunch of surveys about container adoption, and it’s funny, we’ve done several of these surveys now over, let’s say, the last two years, and when we first started, a lot of people had plans of looking at docker and containers.
Other people, a decent amount of people, had containers in their – they were in the testing dev environment kind of thing, not production. Few had them in production. Then recently, like our most recent surveys, let’s say, over the summer, that number shot up. Probably 40, 50 percent of respondents have containers in production.
That may be because it’s devopsy.kinsta.cloud, we’re in a devops bubble, and so you get people using this kind of new stuff. But I’m curious, out of the MapR customer base, a gut check if you don’t have the real number, what do you think the percentages are that are using containers in production these days?
Scott: It’s a pretty big number. I don’t have a hard-and-fast number, but if I just go by the customers that I talk with, I feel like it’s gotta be over 50 percent.
Shimel: Really? Wow.
Scott: Yeah. Yeah, we’ve got one extremely advanced customer in Australia, their name is Quantium. And they talk about how they use MapR all the time, and they’ve basically reinvented their entire operating model, and they’ve done it on top of MapR. There’s an enterprise architecture I documented that they talk about periodically; it’s called the zeta architecture.
They basically use an orchestration layer, they use MapR for persistence, and then they use containers to launch and deploy anything anywhere arbitrarily across their cluster of hardware for their customers. And they turned their entire internal platform to an as-a-service model for internal and external customer consumption.
Shimel: Got it, excellent, excellent. We’re hearing stories like this all over now, and the interesting thing is it’s almost wherever you see containers, you’re seeing microservices. But you’re also seeing microservices in places where you don’t necessarily also see containers.
And it reminds me of when I was in school, we used to learn all pasta is macaroni, but not all macaroni is pasta, or something to that effect. But microservices has a place outside of containers, though they seem to just go really well together.
Scott: Yeah, absolutely, and I think when you start looking at the different types of use cases that you would fit into a microservice, this is where you start seeing how people are going to choose to deploy and manage. If you’re looking at event-driven, message-driven, where it’s taking a message in, it’s doing some work and it’s dropping a message back out, versus it’s a restful service endpoint, where it’s a synchronous response.
Yeah, people are choosing to do things in different ways, but nearly – everyone that I talked to, they’re using containers in some fashion.
Shimel: Yep, yep. It’s true in my case too, but like I said, I always figure well, I’m in a bubble, so of course I’m gonna see that. Jim, what’s next for MapR?
Scott: Oh, that’s an in intriguing question. Recently, we announced our 6.0 launch, and we have greatly enhanced a number of features around our database capabilities. I seem to have this conversation a lot with people, is they start looking at big data technologies, and they say well, this is great and all, but I’ve built this software to work with mySQL or Postgresql or Oracle or whatever RDBMS.
So that’s fine, you can containerize those applications if you wanna start changing your infrastructure and how you orchestrate your software, and if it’s important enough to you, you could migrate it over onto a no SQL database like MapRDB document database, or you can just leave it running in a container so you have a more flexible infrastructure.
And the database technology enhancements that we’ve been making are really critical to kind of driving the future of getting people off of those super-expensive to scale RDBMSes that are being used for non-relational purposes.
Shimel: Excellent. Just time frames – when might we see some more on this stuff?
Scott: Well, it’s been announced in the last few weeks, and so we’ll start our 6.0 general availability very soon. I forget the exact date. Then we’ll just continue plugging along, adding more new, fantastic features to help enable the customer base.
Cloud integration with our platform is another really big one, making sure that we can help enable customers to benefit from the concept of cloud neutrality. Cloud providers are never just gonna get together as a consortium and say hey, why don’t we standardize our APIs to the benefit of our customers?
It just doesn’t happen. It’s not gonna happen. Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are never just gonna call each other up and say hey, what do you think about this?
Shimel: I agree. Agreed. Well, not – you know what – well, I was just, I’ve seen a lot of changes over the years, but that’s probably a pretty safe bet, Jim.
Scott: Yeah.
Shimel: Unfortunately. Anyway, Jim, believe it or not, as I told you when we started, the time goes really quick, and we’re about out of time for this version of DevOps Chat. But we’d like to maybe have you back on in the future. We’d love to keep up with what’s happening with MapR, especially as it relates to microservices and containers and some of the new stuff we have going on.
Jim Scott: Yeah, sounds great.
Shimel: Great. But in the meantime, if people wanna get more information about MapR, where can they go?
Scott: Well, I would recommend they go to MapR.com.
Shimel: Okay.
Scott: Or of course, you can always follow MapR on Twitter and/or any of the other social networks that you join and work with. But the website is always my favorite, because there’s a lot of great material there, including the MapR blog, and all of the ebooks, including the “Microservices and Containers” ebook that I wrote is out there, for free.
Shimel: Got it. Got it, got it, got it. All righty, well, we’ll have to maybe get some links to those we’ll put in the show notes of this as well.
Scott: Yeah, that’d be great.
Shimel: Fantastic. Hey, Jim, thanks for being our guest on this episode of DevOps Chat. Look forward to having you back soon and finding out more about MapR. Continued success, and keep us posted about what you guys are doing.
Scott: Thanks, Alan. Appreciate it.
Shimel: All right. Hey, everyone, this is Alan Shimel for DevOps Chat on devopsy.kinsta.cloud. Thanks for joining us, and we’ll see you soon on another chat. Take care, everyone. Bye-bye.
In a special episode of Electric Cloud’s Continuous Discussions (#c9d9), Gene Kim and speakers from the upcoming DevOps Enterprise Summit San Francisco (DOES17) discussed the deployment age, and how DevOps practices and automation can unburden teams and boost productivity.
The panel included: Mik Kersten, CEO of Tasktop; Robin Yeman, fellow at Lockheed Martin; Courtney Kissler, VP of digital platform engineering at Nike; and, our very own Sam Fell and Anders Wallgren.
Continue reading for some of their top takeaways:
Kersten discusses the importance of spreading the word about DevOps tooling: “I think the best thing we can do is accelerate this turning point by giving the rest of those 15 million developers working in all of those other companies the tools that they need to apply these technical practice and to reorient their organizations to actually leverage them.”
Yeman on the multiplier effect of automation: “DevOps is definitely all about the people, but the automation enables people to have such a higher outcome and better business results. It’s almost like a force multiplier for companies.”
It’s crucial to look at the bigger picture of software delivery, advises Wallgren: “If you don’t have a big picture of what your value stream is from one end to the other, it’s hard to convince people that the problem they’re looking at is in fact not the right problem to be focusing on, or whether that is the right or wrong problem.”
Organizations that employ transformational leaders succeed, claims Kim: “We see people driving DevOps transformations in large complex organizations, specifically the DevOps enterprise community, and my claim would be that these people are being promoted at a rate far higher than the population at large. My interpretation of this is that the value that’s being created by these leaders is appreciated and they’re being put into roles where they’re being asked to make an even greater contribution across even a broader portion of the organization.”
You can’t just optimize for cost and efficiency anymore, explains Kissler: “There’s this realization that we’re all shipping software and really embracing that and understanding that organizations that have typically optimized for cost and efficiency are not going to win. And so, optimizing for speed to value, the value stream is a huge shift as well.”
Yeman explains the awesome leadership structure at Lockheed Martin: “At Lockheed, most business leaders were engineers at one point in time. So, if you’re looking at the President or the Vice President, they started out in software, or systems, or as a tester. They have to have depth in their area because then they can really empathize with what we’re building and with, you know, the people that are building it.”
More on the wonders of automation, per Kersten: “Agile has scaled up, but it kind of hit a brick wall until automation came into play and organizations realized that they needed reliable, predictable, and safe ways to deploy. I think one of the most interesting things that happened when the technical practice matured around that automation layer is all of the other gaps it uncovered.”
Wallgren on the ironic manual nature of the software delivery industry: “I think that one of the paradoxes of what we do in software teams is we don’t use software at all, most of the time, to help us produce our own software. We use people.”
Kim reflects on revelations after reading “Disrupt or Die” by Jedediah Yueh: “The real value that DevOps will create is not going to be in the FAANGs, the Facebook’s, Amazon’s, Apple’s, Netflix’s, and Google’s of the world, but it really is in the large brands in every industry vertical as they either disrupt, get digitally disrupted, or digitally disrupt themselves.”
Kissler on how to respond to the exponential growth of digital disruption: “I think the acknowledgement of where we’re at and where we need to go and how fast we can get there is a huge component of responding to the digital disruption.”
Watch the full episode:
Want more Continuous Discussions (#c9d9)? We hold our #c9d9 podcast every other Tuesday at 10 a.m. Pacific. Each episode features expert panelists talking about DevOps, Continuous Delivery, Agile and more.
Anders Wallgren is chief technology officer at Electric Cloud. Anders has over 25 years’ experience designing and building commercial software. Prior to joining Electric Cloud, he held executive positions at Aceva, Archistra, and Impresse and management positions at Macromedia (MACR), Common Ground Software, and Verity (VRTY), where he played critical technical leadership roles in delivering award winning technologies such as Macromedia’s Director 7. Anders holds a B.SC from MIT.
In this DevOps Chat we speak with Steve Boone, product owner and development manager for Urban Code Deploy. Now that DevOps is in practice at more organizations, measuring DevOps success is a question many are asking. Steve has helped hundreds of companies adopt, implement and scale their agile and DevOps practices as part of their digital transformation. Steve gives us some insights into how can you measure your DevOps success.
As usual the streaming audio of our chat is below. Following that is a transcript of our conversation to follow along.
Audio
Transcript
[su_pullquote align=”right”][su_custom_gallery source=”media: 117787″ width=”100″ height=”100″] Steve Boone
Steve Boone is a DevOps SME at IBM. He has helped hundreds of companies adopt, implement, and scale their agile best practices including CI, CD, Environment Provisioning, and Application Release Automation. Steve is currently the Product Owner & Development Manager for IBM UrbanCode Deploy.[/su_pullquote]
Alan Shimel: Hey, everyone, it’s Alan Shimel, devopsy.kinsta.cloud, here for another DevOps Chat. I’m happy to be joined today by Steve Boone. Steve is the Product Owner and Development Manager for IBM UrbanCode Deploy, one of the leading CI/CD solutions in the market. Steve, welcome to DevOps Chat—how are you?
Steve Boone: Doing great, Alan. Thank you so much for having me today.
Shimel: Great. Steve, I wanted to talk to you—well, about a couple of things today. But let’s focus in first on, I’m just back from another major conference, and once again I’m—not amazed, because by this point, it’s expected. But still, you know, going strong, the biggest thing we get, or the biggest feedback that I hear from organizations looking to do DevOps transformation is—hey, this all sounds great, it sounds really good, but how do we know, you know, first of all, how do we get started with our DevOps transformation, and then once we’re doing it, how do we know it’s working? Right? How do we measure the ROI, or even if we can’t get to a real ROI, how do we measure progress? What does success look like?
And I would imagine, you know, the guys at UrbanCode, the team at UrbanCode has been dealing with this for some time. What do you tell people?
Boone: Yeah, that’s a great question, and it’s—you know, I think it’s a little different for everyone. And when we start looking at measuring success and first finding out, you know, where do we start, a lot of times we’ll work with customers to identify, you know, what are your problematic areas? There’s a lot of aspects to DevOps, it’s not all CI/CD, there could be aspects of agile planning, there could be release management. There’s a number of different things that come into play.
So, we usually sit down and try to focus on, you know, where do you think your bottlenecks exist today, and then start to address those. But when we went to measure—and you know, you’re right, the allure of DevOps comes with all of this ROI promise, right, where if we do these things and we change our people and our process and our tools, we’re gonna be better off for it, the business is gonna be better off for it.
So, how do we then make sure that’s actually happening, right? That the time and energy that I’m putting into changing my processes are actually showing me that ROI.
So, what we’ve seen a shift in the industry towards is really starting to gather the different sets of metrics that are coming from, really, the end to end products that we’re dealing with in DevOps whether it’s your build tools, your testing tools to understand what I’ll all our key metrics. So, you know, if in fact we are capable of speeding up our delivery to our pipeline, we should be getting to market faster, right? So, we look at statistics like cycle time—how long does it take for an application or a release of application to go from dev to prod? And then we look at that data over time. Is it, in fact, improving? And if not, we want to identify other bottlenecks that are kinda holding that progress up.
So, if I look at a set of components that make up an application and I see that the majority of those components have a really good cycle time, you know, we’re only as fast as our weakest link. So, if the database component, for example, is routinely slower to get through QA than the rest of the component, that’s going to slow down our time to market and therefore gonna slow down our release.
And the beauty is, in turning on the flashlight, so to speak, so that you can see that data and actually do something with it, a lot of times we look at it and say, “Well, we know we have automation and therefore we know we’re going faster.” But that just might mean we’re going to QA faster or we’re going to dev faster. We want to make sure that we’re actually getting that ROI, so if we can set baselines with teams and say, “Hey, prior to doing this automation, it took you four months to get from dev to production out the door, right? This past release cycle we did it in three and a half months—great. What is that time savings? What does that time savings mean in cost?”
And, we’re starting to see a big trend within the industry of many different companies starting to put together products to start to track these. So, I think it’s a whole new area for us to focus on, and in hopes—what we’re trying to share with customers is that, look, not only are the changes in people and process that you’re making working, but the tooling is working, and hey, here are some areas where you can improve those processes.
Shimel: Yeah. So, Steve, obviously, I want to—you said a mouthful, there. [Laughter] But let me focus in on one thing you said that I want to re-emphasize to our audience, and that is, you know, DevOps is so much more than CI and CD, right? There’s config management, there’s APM—there’s a lot that goes into this umbrella term that we call DevOps, and it seems to be growing every day.
That being said, though—you know, I once heard someone describe DevOps is the symptom and CD is the cure. So, you know, I don’t want to minimize the importance of CI/CD, but you know, automation—there’s so much that goes into this equation or this term that we call DevOps. And I think that’s—you know, Steve, it’s almost like it’s its greatest asset but it’s also its greatest liability, you know what I’m saying?
Boone: Yeah, there absolutely is. I think that a lot of times, we definitely see, when people are talking DevOps, their focus tends to be on CI/CD. And I think that’s because, you know, out of the gate, especially if you’re just starting off, it’s kind of your biggest bang for your buck, right? You can get a lot of fast return on investment just by improving your processes and automating them and making them consistent.
As we see teams mature, and as they transition into a more Enterprise wide DevOps solution, then we start to see—well, where are the real boundaries in my organization, right? Is it, we see a growing trend where app dev teams are focusing on automation, but there’s a whole different silo in infrastructure, you know? So, an app dev team wants to request an environment to do some testing in—they have automation, and the tools that they have for automation could easily provision that environment. But the business dictates that that’s the infrastructure’s just, and they have a completely different set of tools that they use for that, right?
And so now we get into this challenge of really continuing to try to break down these barriers to make sure that these assets and tools that are out there can work together, and that there’s clear cut guidelines on that.
So, yeah, I think it is a blessing and a curse, right? Because when we start thinking about DevOps, everybody wants that—you know, we’re a culture of having that instant gratification. So, it’s nice that we can get that with deployment automation and build automation and test automation. But we need to be looking ahead to the future, which is gonna be—hey, I’m gonna provision these things on demand and make these environments available to my teams, and today we use Amazon for that. What happens if, six months from now, we have to change and we need to support Azure or Google or SoftLayer or Bluemix, right? We need portability, we need full stack provisioning and config management on that.
And that’s—I think that’s something that, a lot of times, people just starting out, they don’t look too far ahead. And my suggestion to folks is—hey, it’s okay to take that first step. You should be cautious about the first step, but keep in mind where you wanna be two years from now, three years from now, five years from now. What’s your DevOps end goal?
Shimel: Yeah. You know what? So, Steve, I think that might be the first question we need to—especially for consultants out there who may be listening to this. You know, whether you work for an IBM or a small consultancy, I think that has to be the first question. You know, people come and say, “I want to do DevOps.” You gotta ask them, what’s the end goal, here? What’s the end game? Why? And that’s a huge piece of it.
Steve, if I can, I’d like to turn to a little bit more about UrbanCode and, you know, UrbanCode’s kind of a unique animal, if you will, in that, you know, it was one of the earliest, earliest kinda startups playing in the CICD space, right? And so it had that whole startup culture, if you will, the startup thing going on. And then, of course, you know, acquired by IBM and really become a linchpin of, you know, IBM’s DevOps, and not only DevOps, but you know, in IBM, as you know, DevOps is tied into cloud and hybrid and Bluemix and SoftLayer and all the things you mentioned. You know, it’s such a critical piece of that puzzle.
What is happening lately with UrbanCode? I saw Gartner give you guys some accolades recently.
Boone: Gartner gave us some accolades. We scored very well, as well, on the Forrester Wave that just came out.
Shimel: The Forrester—yes.
Boone: We were named as a leader in the—yep, in the Forrester Wave. So, that was exciting. It was a great score for us. We’re about as far right in that quadrant as you can be.
And there’s a lot of really good things coming out. I think the reason we scored so well is that they’re looking at the strategy within UrbanCode and seeing that, you know—as you mentioned, this isn’t our first trip around the block. We’ve been helping customers do this for over 10 years. And for us, you know, we work with companies that are small startups to everything that are enterprise financial institutions and healthcare and government agencies.
So, there are, at any given time, different, I’ll say, business focuses that are in a different spot of transition. So, I can go to an enterprise and talk to 30 different groups and organizations in that enterprise—they’re all in a different maturity, they’re all in a different level and area of that DevOps transformation. But what we’re able to do is, we have a solution that can help everybody regardless of where they’re at, and as they mature together over time, ultimately help them reach the goal where the company wants them to be.
You know, some of the new things that we’re focusing on—you know, last year, part of our vision, we had announced at Interconnect our DevOps Insights product as well as our continuous release product that are focused on helping customers one, transition into DevOps, do a lot of that deeper reporting and ROI analysis on where they are in their transformation, but as well as help companies manage to the cloud and for the cloud.
What I mean by that is, you know, today, we talk about cloud like it’s ours, but for large enterprises, it’s still very much a challenge. You know, it’s hard for a team to just go request access and say, “Hey, I’m gonna push my data to the private cloud.” There’s still a lot of—or even public cloud, whatever it might be. There’s still a lot of hurdles to that.
So, what we’re trying to do is, as teams embrace this and they’ve got deployments going on-prem and off-prem, how do we organize that? How do we have visibility and traceability and understand as you’re taking large applications and breaking them down, let’s say, into microservices? You know, some of those applications are easy to re-architect, some are not. And sometimes you’re left with applications where you’ve only got maybe three quarters of that application re-architected, or you’ve got databases that are always gonna be on-prem, or you’re using mainframe services.
And that’s really where the UrbanCode products excel, is allowing you to really deploy anything, anywhere, but also have a cohesive look at, what are the interrelated appendices of those parts? If something on my backend mainframe changes, how is that affecting the things that I’ve deployed into my mobile app? And if something needs to fall out of just release, you know, what’s the impact, even? How is that gonna affect business? And I think those are some of the main reasons why we scored well within the Forrester Wave and why they marked our strategy so high.
Shimel: Absolutely. You know, Steve, we’re coming up on the end of our allotted time, unfortunately, but I wanted to mention one thing if we can talk about it, and that is that you spoke about Interconnect, which has been the big IBM DevOps related show, as well as other technologies for the last couple years. This year, IBM is kinda consolidating a lot of the shows they do into a pretty big mega-event called Think 2018, and of course, that is gonna be once again at the Mandalay Bay in Vegas, and it’s happening March 19th to the 22nd. I believe the call for speakers has just opened, and I’ll put some links in the show notes so that people can, if they wanna speak or if they want to attend the event would be great.
But in any event, what’s UrbanCode’s plans around Think 2018?
Boone: Yeah, thanks. I hope folks do and are able to register and come out. It’s going to be a fantastic show, and it is very much a mega show for us. So, we’ve taken—I believe there’s 11 different topics that really, I’ll call them focal points or even think of them as investments within IBM. Everything from cloud to Watson to mobile to security, internet of things—there’s a number of different topics going on at this.
UrbanCode will be under the cloud focus, and we’ll—underneath the cloud topic, there’s a section specifically for DevOps. So, if that’s what you’re interested in, come out and check us out—we’ll be there. We’ll be talking about our latest release that we’ll have done at that time, and we’ve got a lot of really cool features that were actually in development and testing right now that we plan to announce at the Think conference, so without be demo-ing those, and we’ll have—as always, have a bunch of UrbanCode customers there sharing their ideas, sharing their experiences, and really helping educate how they’ve transformed their business.
And I think what a lot of folks will find appealing is that it’s never a one tool solution, right? And that’s one thing I always encourage folks is, when you’re trying to be in a DevOps transformation, a single product, a single methodology—it’s not gonna do it. You really need to embrace the various tools that are in the market, you need to embrace existing tools that are already in your company, and these are gonna be working examples and explanations of how some of the top companies in the world are doing just that using UrbanCode and using a variety of tools that we support.
Shimel: Absolutely, absolutely. Alright, Steve, we’re actually way over time, I apologize, but I think we got some good information here that people will be interested in. I want to thank you for being our guest this week on DevOps Chat and invite you back soon. We want to hear more about Think 2018 as we get closer as well, but good luck with UrbanCode, Steve, and we’ll speak to you soon.
Boone: Hey, Alan, thank you. As always, appreciate you having me today.
Shimel: Alright. Steve Boone, Product Manager, UrbanCode Deploy—or Product Owner, excuse me, UrbanCode Deploy. Thanks for being our guest on this DevOps Chat. This is Alan Shimel, and we hope to see you soon on another DevOps Chat.
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.
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 isbecause 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 openingso 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.
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In the technology world, we are in a time of incredible disruption and innovation. Many years ago, my friend and “DevOps Handbook” co-author John Willis predicted that a decade from now, academics will call this period the “Cambrian explosion” — it was an incredibly vibrant 25-million year period that resulted in an incredible diversification of cellular life forms, including the appearance of complex, multi-cellular organisms, setting the stage for the diversity of life we see today.
Similarly, over the last decade, we’ve seen an explosion of incredible innovation and disruption in almost every area of technology: cloud computing, containers, virtualization; Agile, iterative development, continuous integration and deployment, and automated configuration management.
One can be forgiven if all this change is overwhelming; I think we’ve all had moments in our careers where we think, “I’m not sure if I I’m up to learning how to tackle this next big thing.” Even someone who loves learning can become cynical, or maybe just fatigued by change.
But most of us, maybe with some calm reflection, will recognize that there’s never been a more fun time to be in technology. And many of these new techniques and practices lead to massively better ways of working, where after an initial learning curve, we’d never go back to the old way. I believe this actually calls for excitement! And, I’m not alone.
We recently hosted a live chat with multiple leaders in technology who’ve spoken at past DevOps Enterprise Summit events. As we are in full prep mode for the next event in San Francisco this November, we asked our esteemed panel to share about their career journeys in tech and their passion for learning and change. It was a great pleasure to be able to pick the brains of Dominica DeGrandis from LeanKit, Dr. Nicole Forsgren from DORA, Erica Morrison from CSG International, Terri Potts from Raytheon and Robin Yeman from Lockheed Martin. During the course of the discussion, each person shared how they got their start in tech and many of the lessons they have learned over the past 20 years in the industry. It was echoed throughout the discussion that while things are rapidly evolving, it’s an exciting time filled with continuous opportunities to learn, plenty of room for growth and time to experiment with new tools and processes. For the full video replay and transcript of the discussion, please see below.
Also, don’t forget to register for the 2017 DevOps Enterprise Summit San Francisco to hear more from leaders in tech and get a glimpse into their organization’s journey into DevOps. Early Bird pricing discounts are available until July 31!
Gene Kim: Hello everybody, welcome to this episode of the DevOps Enterprise Summit live chat. We are assembled here today with a group of people I’ve known for years, and people who I genuinely admire. They’re all experts and leaders in the DevOps Enterprise community who are helping shape much of the practices that are going to almost certainly be commonplace in technology organizations over the next decade. Over the last 20 years I’ve been studying high-performing technology organizations, and more recently it’s led to studying transformational leaders and trying to understand how they became transformational leaders. What I find fascinating is there’s evidence to suggest that these are traits that you are not necessarily born with, but instead they’re actually learned.
Over the next hour, my goal is to learn about these leaders on this panel, their careers and experiences that shaped who they are today. My desired outcome is that we’ll all learn something that we can integrate into our own respective journeys. As you’ll surely find out over the next hour, these are all great people. As a reminder, the upcoming DevOps Enterprise San Francisco event is taking place on Nov. 13-15, and for more information visit events.itrevolution.com. And just a reminder, Early Bird pricing ends on July 31st.
Let’s go quickly around the panel, and everyone, if you could just introduce yourselves, name, company role, when did you present DevOps Enterprise and what did you speak on, and free to speak to share any professional accomplishment that you’re most proud of. Dominica, let’s start with you.
Dominica DeGrandis: All right. Well, I was a build engineer, spent 20 years bringing visibility to what version of what file was on what server in what environment. Currently, I am the Director of Training and Coaching at LeanKit. I’ve spoken at DevOps Enterprise Summit for four years in a row now, mostly speaking about experience reports and metrics and making things visible. And I guess, my most professional accomplishment, I think it would have to be finding my courage to get up in front of a group of people, and explain or present data, and demonstrate how to get leadership buy-in with metrics.
Kim: Awesome, thank you. Erica Morrison.
Erica Morrison: Hi, everyone. I’m the Director of Software Development and Operations at CSG International in Omaha. We’ve spoken the past couple years at DevOps Enterprise Summit chronicling our journey through the DevOps space, and we’ll continue to tell that journey. Something that I’m most proud of, probably the things that have brought the most challenges in my career have actually been in the DevOps space. We’ve undergone a fairly major transformation this past year, brought a number of teams through that, but one team in particular who have made substantial improvements as far as stability and automation. That’s been really something that’s been fun to be a part of.
Kim: By the way, following your experience reports has been my favorites among every year at DevOps Enterprise, fantastic. Robin.
Robin Yeman: Hey, I’m Robin Yeman, a Lockheed Martin fellow. I’ve been working in engineering about 23 years in the defense industry on everything from submarines to satellites, and everything in between. I think my biggest accomplishment is really being able to see the change. When I first started doing Agile in DevOps, you really couldn’t see it, but now I start getting contracts and RFPs from the customer repeating verbatim what I told them before. It’s cool to see that the influence is there. It might not be as fast as I’d like it, but it’s there.
Kim: That’s awesome, and then you spoke last two years of DevOps Enterprise San Francisco and London.
Yeman: You’re right. Yeah, the last two years on transforming large legacy organizations way back. A combination between Suzette Johnson from Northrop Grumman and myself from Lockheed Martin, because we both had very similar journeys.
Kim: Awesome. Thank you, Robin. Nicole.
Nicole Forsgren: Yes. Hello, I’m Nicole Forsgren, CEO and chief scientist at DevOps Research and Assessment, otherwise known as DORA. I spent years doing software development, enterprise storage at IBM, and then I went and got my Ph.D. that might be my professional accomplishment that I’m most proud of is that I’ve been studying and researching what’s basically known as DevOps for the last 10 years, and then applying it and bringing what I found to the industry and in my work with Gene and Jez Humble, and the team at Puppet on the State of DevOps Report. We all lived through that 2000 dot-com bust, and we saw many companies fail and I don’t want to see that again. Really helping to make an influence in the industry and make things a little bit better is an accomplishment for me.
Kim: Awesome, thank you Nicole, and you spoke in I think every year at DevOps Enterprise. Fantastic. Terri Potts.
Terri Potts: Hi, I’m Terri Potts. I’m from Raytheon Company, and I’m the Technical Director of the Software Development Organization. Like Robin, we are focused on doing mostly defense- and Intel community-related contracts. I started in the software development business actually in the Air Force and spent 11 years there, moving through the ranks and came to Raytheon, and moved on to be an architect after doing development for several years and have been a champion for technology transformation since the early 2000s.
I’ve spoken a few times at DevOps Enterprise Summit. Once about our legacy transformation since we have been around for long, and a lot of our code is quite old. Last year, I spoke about how you build up your staff of people that can support your DevOps transformation because it’s hard to just go out and hire those, some ideas around how to go do that.
Kim: Awesome, thank you much Terri. And by the way, I remember meeting you at the IBM Interconnect Conference in 2014, and you were actually one of the first announced speakers at DevOps Enterprise, very grateful for that.
First, let me just state an assumption I have that there’s actually never been a more fun time and exciting time to be in technology even though things are rapidly changing. Actually the pace of change is what’s causing much fear for many professionals about our livelihoods, our vocations, but I genuinely believe that the best times are ahead of us not behind us. Do you believe that? And if so, why? Erica could we start with you?
Morrison: Sure. I think about when I came out of college with a computer science degree, and I was focused on writing one language and writing that language well, and now we’ve got the proliferation of numerous different technologies, different languages. Like you said, the pace is moving much quicker. We actually hosted a hackathon here. We’ve done two of them for college students and just a number of different technologies that they use was absolutely mind-blowing to me, but I find it extremely interesting to continue to evolve for all these different things. It’s not just this one little dedicated space anymore, it’s constantly learning these new things which I love to do. Its new challenges everyday which keeps work interesting for us, makes work about being lifelong learners. I love that continuing to learn throughout our career, and it’s just focusing on learning different things now.
Kim: Awesome. Robin, how about you?
Yeman: I absolutely agree. I’d really think it’s the most exciting time. Just like Erica was saying, the college kids are coming in with 15, 20 different languages, they’re bringing all kinds of new technologies, they’re bringing gamification. They’ve really brought some different leadership styles. It’s very exciting. I know that some of our engineers get nervous, but if you just grab on and join the ride its fun.
Forsgren: Honestly, that’s one thing I love about technology. I mean, it kept me engaged, it kept me excited. Back when I was doing a bunch of development work, there was always something new to work on. As you said though, there’s always that other piece. There’s always the other side of it. We’re working in systems with growing complexity and that does make it really, really difficult, and that’s something that we’re seeing when we work with companies with DORA, in our assessment. You have to make sure that you can focus, but you need to know what your constraint is, particularly when we’re working on technology transformations. We need to make sure we can focus on the most important thing. We need to make sure that we can limit our whip, we can focus on our constraints, we can identify what the most important thing is that we don’t have sprawl and just contribute to technical debt. But, I think that’s what makes our work challenging and exciting and meaningful.
Potts: I love change, and that’s why my career has taken me where it has because the more different things you get into I think the more rounded you are, and the more you’re able to adapt new technologies. And the way I see it today is all the technology changes especially with the automation that many of us are going through that transformation, and I have always seen that as drudgery. If you’re working in some factory, let’s automate all the drudgery out, and then that gives us time on our teams to explore more around analytics or machine learning. That’s exciting for me.
Kim: Yes, you make it sound exciting. Dominica, you’re smiling.
DeGrandis: Well, I’m just thinking back at my first job out of school after I got my computer science degree. It was more configuration management back then, that was getting everything on the mag tape from IBM and putting that in a library, physical library somewhere safe in order to deploy it into production. But I think for me, it’s just the amount of opportunity there is now. There is this massive amount of opportunity for everyone whether they have a degree in computer science or not to go out there with all the sharing. The ability to share and learn now is much greater than it has been previously.
Kim: That is true. I mean, there’s never been a better time to be a learner. There’s no cost to entry it seems these days.
DeGrandis: Absolutely.
Kim: I suspect that this isn’t the first time that you’ve seen this dramatic change in the industry in your career. I’d love it if you could tell us about that time and how it affected your thinking about how you viewed your skills, your career, and where it took you. Robin, would you mind starting?
Yeman: Sure. When I first started we had a lot of ToR trend and ADA going on, and I was worried about the next generation of ADA, and whether they would even be able to keep up. So, just like that Dominica and the rest of the folks have said, I spent a lot of time at night trying to study, make sure I could stay on top of it because I was working with these amazing engineers and I just didn’t want to fall behind. I do the same thing now.
Kim: And by the way, I mean in a scale of 1 to 10 what level of fear did you feel? One is like it’s just another book no fear, 10 is existential fear of, “I might not be able to finish the book and therefore my career is over.”
Yeman: I work with some engineers—they’re smart that I was terrified. I’d say way up at 8 or 9 out of 10 because some people just get it quick and I have to work at it—I’m just not a natural. I was terrified.
Kim: by the way, it reminds me of learning Clojure very recently. It’s my first script language and I think I had to do 40 hours of reading before I could write a single line of code. It was just, it was very challenging, but very rewarding but all very intimidating. Nicole, how about you?
Forsgren: My first job in tech was when I was still in college, and it was on a mainframe. I was coming out of my associates in like ’99, and that was the big Y2K, everyone’s panicked, and it really fundamentally shaped what I thought about tech in many ways. Everyone was panicked, there was this big dot-com bust, and I alluded to this earlier, “Survival isn’t mandatory, companies can fail.”
That’s one piece where it really shaped what I do is that I don’t want to see companies fail. I’m sure you all have talked to me at conferences, and suddenly I just dig in, and I’m passionate. I have this drive to make sure we know we can find ways to help companies not fail, but it fundamentally affected me in a different way in that in the late ’90s, there was almost a tactical way to address the problem and it was teach everyone fundamental things. People look at me, they’re like, “How do you do mainframes?” It was mainframe, COBOL, Fortran and that was all we were teaching many students because we desperately had a very tactical need to make sure that when we hit 2000, the world didn’t end, technologically.
And then I did a bunch of consulting, and then I got a Ph.D., and then I was a professor. We’ve almost taken this other stance of we only want to or we’re very purposeful now, and I think it’s led to complexity sometimes in technology, but we want to make sure that we understand the purpose behind what we’re doing. We want to make sure that we have flexibility, we’re strategic, and we aren’t just tactical.
So, we designed the State of DevOps reports. They’re vendor and tool agnostic. We tell you about the principles that are important, the architectural designs that are important, the principles behind using version control are important. We aren’t going to tell you to use Git or Subversion, we’re going to tell you to use Subversion control. That’s the other thing that’s really impacted my career is that I need to make sure that if I walk into a situation I can tell someone from a conceptual level what’s really fundamentally important to improve their technology practice, and it won’t be tied to only a specific technology because that can end up being limiting. If you only tell someone teach someone a language, but not the fundamentals behind that language, it won’t work.
Kim: Principles are timeless and those things are not. Awesome, Terri.
Potts: When I think about this, the thing that comes to mind for me is probably about 20 years ago when systems software architecture started becoming a first-class citizen, at least at Raytheon. I remember seeing the first book, and one of my mentors saying, “Hey, I’m going to have a study group on software architecture do you want to join?” And I wanted to join and started seeing it as a way to grow my career, and be able to influence bigger parts of the system, and try to make things more maintainable, and really make good decisions going forward instead of just sort of stumbling into things. I wouldn’t say I was afraid, but I was really curious, and certainly felt like it was something that I needed to keep up with and did a lot of studying on my own outside of the office with study group, learning everything I can from them.
Kim: Sounds very interesting. In this case, it was like a mentor who actually sort of directed you down a certain direction. There seems to be a pattern of having great mentors. Fantastic, Dominica.
DeGrandis: When it comes to dramatic change, I have to say hands down 2005 or 2006. I was working at Corbis at the time managing environments, and we went from building out maintaining 25 servers to building out maintaining 250 servers over a period of 9 to 12 months. It was just impossible to manually build out servers. We had to start automating, and developers were like, “Builds take too long.” They wanted to put their own changes in their own dev integrated environment, and they took it seriously. They said, “Okay, then you get to own that dev environment like you build it, you maintain it. Then, I’ll just go build out maintain QA and staging inner prod.” That was huge dramatic change I think, and just being able to adapt to that and quickly was the biggest lesson for me there.
Kim: And specifically, was it dramatic because it was such a different way of doing things or it was dramatic because the role change and responsibilities for you, or what made it dramatic?
DeGrandis: Because for the previous six years we have had this process where we just dole out responsibilities, who’s doing what and how we’re doing it, and now that was turned on its head because we had to deliver faster, we had to deliver better quality, we had to get these environments up and running, and everything just exponentially grew with the number of servers and the number of environments. The way that I had been working for the last six years which had been fairly successful was completely different. That’s the second law of thermodynamics, everything is always in constant change and motion.
Kim: I love it. This is the famous story that’s in David Jay Anderson’s book, and in your upcoming book, Dominica. Fantastic, and Erica your dramatic changes in a certain point of your career.
Morrison: In addition to the ones that have been mentioned, there’s a couple that come to mind for me. First of all, the introduction of Agile. I started my career very waterfall. I probably wrote code for three to six months before I even chucked it in to the point that other people were using it which now is obviously mind-blowing to us, but that’s how we did software development back then. That’s been a major upheaval in pretty much all of our processes is around how we do software development.
I think overall, all these items point to the fact that software is constantly evolving, it’s not a static thing. When the next thing comes out we’re used to this evolution of change. It’s something that as developers, we just accept it, and look to learn the next best thing and how we get to evolve and continue to get better.
Kim: And physically what’s different or dramatic about the Agile transformation from your perspective?
Morrison: Pretty much everything about it, just the concept of batching work up into small little pieces. I’ve participated in helping roll out Agile with other teams, and it’s somewhat mind-blowing to these teams that you can take this big amount of work and you can even slice it up into one week or one day increments, and chuck that in and have this daily accountability with my team members. That test is now my responsibility and how am I going to automate that because as a developer, we want to automate that test as much as possible. It’s just much more of this integrated, fast-paced, all of us owning all the work and focusing on flow through the system.
Kim: I do remember that it was around 2005, we had just started our first experiments on Agile and even finishing something in a week was mind-blowing. That’s how long it took us to fill out the PRD forms usually. I love these amazing stories that you’re sharing. If you could compare yourself now to the person you were 20 years ago, what were the most important and significant differences between yourself now and yourself then? What skills did you have to develop? Nicole, let’s start with you.
Forsgren: Twenty years ago, as you think back, there’s no Facebook, there’s no Twitter, there was barely email. It existed, but not really. I mean, definitely all the technical skills, but for me learning how to be a leader and how to interact with people, and how to exert influence in a soft power sort of away.
Again, going back and talking to people that I knew 20 years ago there was learning how to do things in more of a nuanced sort of way, which you need to do when you’re managing large projects. For me, it’s been a soft skills thing. I always joke that technology is easy and people are hard, even as complex as technology can be. That was probably my biggest piece of learning.
Kim: In many parts what we work on, they’re all volunteer projects. And even the softer skills are necessary when everyone’s volunteering their time. Great, Terri.
Potts: Twenty years ago I was finishing up my last year in the Air Force and doing some leadership things, but much more as an individual contributor. I have a good view of what it was like to be on the Air Force side managing big contracts, and testing systems and operations. But since then I think that there have been a few things that I really had to develop. One was my network, the group of people that I learned from, and that has definitely grown in the last four years outside of Raytheon. I had a pretty good network within Raytheon, but once I met Gene and started participating in DevOps Enterprise Summits and the Forum, I just love how that career or that network has grown from there.
I’ve also always been interested in really staying with modern technologies and finding ways to make our teams more efficient, I think that’s always going to be something that’s changing. You always have to stay on top of what the latest thing is that’s helping your teams be more efficient. And the Agile transformation too because definitely we were waterfall all the way in the Air Force, and for the first several years that I was at Raytheon.
Kim: That’s interesting you mentioned network. One my favorite quotes is, “You’re only as smart as the average of the top five people you hang out with.” But I think what is interesting is when you can actually bring that network to help other people with their problems. It becomes a really powerful asset and the ideas of everyone.
DeGrandis: Well, I think 20 years ago, I assumed that everybody else knew what they were doing, and that if they were doing the right thing and I intended to feel like I didn’t know what I would. I didn’t know what was up, I didn’t know what I was doing. I was just inundated with trying to learn quickly. And now I recognize that most people really don’t know what they’re doing. Nobody has all the answers and it’s absolutely okay to ask questions, and that in order to have your voice heard and become the voice of reason, how important metrics have been in order to present them in a way that others can understand.
Forsgren: Plus one on metrics. I will cheerlead for metrics all day long.
DeGrandis: I used to rant we don’t have automated testing, smoke tests take too long, and it just has got me nowhere. Now being able to present data calmly and confidently, to be the voice of reason in the organization is one of the greatest learning changes over the last 20 years. That and learning much more about Flow and Lean and Kanban and different methods out there—it’s why I wrote my book, Making Work Visible to help others see how to become the voice of reason. I think that’s super important one.
Kim: Awesome, we have a calm voice of reason. Excellent, Erica.
Morrison: I’ll echo the comments made about people and relationships, and, I think in college we don’t get an understanding that there’s nontechnical problems in addition to the technical ones. Really, we all look at the world differently and we’re going to have to understand that everyone that we work with isn’t going to have the exact same perception as us, and we need to partner together and get these diverse viewpoints, build these relationships, build these networks. That’s something that I probably didn’t get proper appreciation until maybe the midway through my career journey far. And I just wish someone had told me that earlier in my journey.
And then, I think appreciation for the ecosystem that we operate in I talked about that when I first came out of school as a computer science graduate. I was focused on my view of the world and the code I was writing, and I thought the big picture was understanding what the rest of the developers on my team were working on not understanding how do we deploy this code, how do we maintain it, what’s the infrastructure that we’re running on, how does our customer use this code. All those different sorts of things, which I we work on now to get that bigger picture for people, but that appreciation that that bigger picture makes you good at your specific piece of that. And then just that need to continuously improve yourself. It’s not about just being good with what you’re doing right now, it’s about looking at what’s next, how can I continue to evolve myself and improve myself that I can help move our company along.
Dominica: Well said Erica. Hear, hear!
Gene: I can resonate with all elements of that, but just to share a story. I was talking to a younger developer, he must been like around 25 hanging out with a bunch of ops people and I asked him, “Well, what are you doing here hanging out with a bunch of ops people?” He said something that I thought was hilarious, maybe not the most politically correct, but I couldn’t fault his curiosity. He said, “I just want to know where my code goes. To me it’s like I flushed it down the toilet and I just I’ve been doing it for two years, I just wonder where it goes.” Which I thought was unfortunate imagery, but man he was like, “Well I’m the minority of developers actually caring about the system as a whole.” Obviously, that made an impression on me.
One of the things that, if you go back to the topic of change, one of the things I hear a lot these days is how people in our profession often feel very uncertain about their own future, and specifically about how to maintain their own relevance. I’m thinking a person I met that I was actually able to interview on my blog, and yeah, he’s my age and despite having an MBA, despite having a Master’s in engineering management, despite being an expert in the theory of constraints, despite being an operations lead at Boeing, he wrote asking for career advice saying, “What do I do to make sure that I’m as relevant in five years as I am five years ago?” Specifically, what advice would you give someone who’s in operations and feeling like if they don’t take drastic measures they won’t be as relevant, and what actions would you recommend? Terri, why don’t we start with you?
Terri: I was thinking about this question, much of it depends on where he wants to take his career you have to know where you want to go, in order to put together a plan for how to get there. Given all of his degrees, and what he’s doing, it doesn’t seem like he really wants to go off and start re-architecting software or it didn’t sound to me like he would necessarily need to get a whole computer science degree. But if he wants to really understand how the automation works maybe he takes a few classes in Python or Ruby or one of the scripting languages to help with that, and get involved with that. But it seemed like it would be pretty drastic to go out because there’s lots of opportunities to lead transformations and he’s got those leadership skills apparently. I would say, “Look for the opportunities that really fit with your personality and your skills rather than going back to school for the answer.”
Gene: Indeed, and by the way, I just realized, sorry Robin! I didn’t forget your answer—could you say what advice would you give yourself 20 years ago, and what skills are most important? Then we’ll get back to our friend Pat Birkeland. Sorry, Pat.
Robin: Just like the others, I would say people and people skills. I was really type A and really driven building my code, and I thought the harder I work the more impact I would make, but as I got older I learned really the more that I build people around me the bigger impact I make. Being able to build those co-workers or people that work for me actually magnify that tenfold, and it just didn’t occur to me at that time. I would really focus on what you share. We tend to get rewarded for what we know, but if we rewarded people for what they share, you’d be amazed at what can happen.
Gene: Thanks Robin, and one of the things that I found impactful about your presentation even just in this last London event was you shared the story about how you had created this very informal community of people just sharing, and you met weekly or monthly, and 15 years later you’re still meeting, and then you’ve all sort of ascended together. Am I misremembering that story?
Robin: No, no, we’re actually still meeting and we’re building people. I think both me and Suzette [Johnson] are in the same boat because at the same time we were we were looking for others that would help us because we’ve started Agile pretty early in our careers, and we really needed any information. There just wasn’t a lot of like-minded groups to get together and build each other.
Gene: Awesome, and I guess if I were to sort of speculate that all are sort of very curious, all ambitious, all good at networking, and what a great collection people to learn from and collaborate with.
Gene: Awesome, thank you Robin. Let’s go back to this non-fictitious Pat Birkeland, he was generous in writing up some of his thoughts and experiences. Terri, your advice was the answer is not to go back to school, but maybe more crystal clear about where he wants to go in his own career and find opportunities. I love that. Dominica, your thoughts on Pat Birkeland.
Dominica: First of all, I could definitely relate because I had the same thoughts myself earlier, “Man, I should go back and get my Master’s. I need to. I just need another degree, make more letters at the end.” But really can’t do that because of working full time with little children at home. It’s just really hard. I didn’t have a nanny. I think that what somebody can do immediately is to learn the business better. Maybe just brought it again by a bit from the business perspective and see what the business challenges and risks are. And then, figure out how to reduce some of that risk maybe by making things a little bit more predictable to you. That’s going to be such a huge growth experience to go around, and maybe visit some of the other parts of the value stream and go look at the whole value stream, and see where things are stocking. And you got making that fall in faster.
Gene: That’s such an interesting piece of advice. And by the way, it reminds me, one of the things I was always envious, if I had to do my career over again, I would have loved to spend a couple years at a big four audit firm just because I was envious my friends who could actually see the big value statement, procure-to-pay, order the cash. It was something I was envious about, just even the language they spoke in. That totally resonates with me, Dominica. Erica.
Erica: One thing that I’ve told a number of our operations personnel that I’ve had this similar conversation with is “Good people will always find a way to be successful.” I’ll hire good people any day, and they’ll acquire those new skills. When it comes to being nervous about the situation I think as long as people are eager and willing to learn new things, they’re going to be successful. And then we as companies need to set them up for success. So they’re just personally able to talk with their manager and see if they have specific areas where they see that there’s opportunities for improvement. And then like Terri said, find your passion and invest in that particular area.
Gene: There’s no shortage of problems to be solved, I think is what you’re suggesting, Erica?
Erica: Exactly.
Gene: Yeah, that’s actually great. Pat, I hope you’re listening. I’ll have this transcribed for you. Robin.
Robin: The first thing I did when after the DevOps Enterprise Summit in London is to come back and tell everybody about Nicole’s research which stated that, “Transformational leaders really improve the likelihood of your success.” We’re short on those, I would think being able to build those folks around them and really drive, help the technical folks get things across to understand the value stream as Dominica said. I think there’s plenty of work to be done there, and that would be amazingly helpful.
Gene: That was great. In fact, I mean I do love the literature that says these transformational leadership traits are learned behaviors not that the old school was like these are things you’re born with. The great man theory, that you had to be born that way, otherwise you’re just, yeah, you’re just not wired that way. I think that’s exciting. Nicole, on Pat Birkeland.
Nicole: Yes, I would start by asking in an ideal world right, what would Pat be doing in six months, and in a year? And then, work backwards. What’s your ideal job? What do you want to be doing? And then what skills do you need? Because again you take a look at what he’s been doing, look at his credentials. He’s got an MBA, he’s a theory of constraints expert, and he has a master’s in engineering management. It sounds like he’s setup to be doing incredible things right now in leading a technology transformation. If he wants to be doing that, he might need to brush up on one or two specifics of a new technology in order to like really be able to speak to the developers or the operations staff on a few of his teams, but he might be there.
And it’s funny I say that especially as I was listening to what Dominica said she wanted a master’s so she could add letters. Some people walk up to me and they’ll say, “I want a Ph.D.” because I have a Ph.D., and I’m like why? And they look at me like like I want to be the only one at the Ph.D. I’m like, “No, like why do you want a Ph.D.? Don’t get a Ph.D. just for fun.” A Ph.D. is a research degree. If, for example, if Pat says I want to be doing research in six months or a year it’s going to take more than a year, then get a Ph.D., but if you want a Ph.D. because or if you want to degree because you want someone to know you have a degree that’s not the reason to get a degree. But if the job that you want in six months or a year is to be writing code, okay, then yeah then you’re going to need to either get a degree or do some Coursera or some Udemy or something. But if what you want to be doing in six months or a year is leading transformations, you’ve got it, you’re set.
Gene: There’s many easy ways to learn these days and Ph.D. is just one of them. By the way, if I could just go back to this and this more for me, but I remember a point in my career this must have must been, must be about 2005. And, I hear all these talk about “It’s easy to learn things, yeah, rah, rah. Change is good.” I remember when Microsoft changed their database interface – it would change from ODBC to ado.net, and the reaction I had was like, “This is crap. I do not want to learn another way to access database. This is horrible.” I had no appetite for that. I mean, sure you might have had encountered people who had that reaction, what advice would you give me in 2005? I’ll take any advice from anybody, otherwise I’ll call on.
Dominica: I’ve had friends, developers, who have been extremely frustrated at the continual change in the learning. But if they feel like they learned something really good, and then it just all changes again, and how frustrating that was for them, and it made them want to go be a business analyst. But, I think that is just the nature the demand. That’s the reality that we live in, and that there’s a need, we have to learn and adapt and changes are always there.
Terri: Right, I’ve had interesting reactions from people in our organization who seem to think that learning something new is going to threaten their job right like if you move to automated test then, perhaps they won’t have a job anymore. It’s always surprising to me when people don’t want to learn because learning is sort of what keeps me motivated and excited. Although sometimes, you feel maybe it’s a step too far beyond what your current skills are. But, yeah, there’s lots of, there’s lots of ways to do that these days and to figure out. And worse, if worst comes to worst get a few of your colleagues or friends that are in a similar boat, and you all want to learn about the same thing and you go through a course or a book together and maybe a group effort might make it a little more interesting, less intimidating.
Gene: It always helps to have a buddy is what I learned. Any other advice for Gene 2005 who is enraged by ado.net?
Robin: I would just say that it’s constantly changing, and that if you’re if you’re enraged by it you’re just going to be unhappy all the time. It’s almost like it’s just a given. You might as well try to learn to like it or pretend you do.
Gene: Awesome, Robin.
Dominica: Do you think though that there’s one thing that hasn’t been talked about yet, is this sense of fear that people have. They were really good at something and they knew this technology and they were at the top of their game, everybody went to them to ask advice on this one thing and now that’s changing. That’s scary for a lot of people like “Wow, just a year ago, I was awesome at this and now everything’s changed and what the heck do I do now? I mean look at some project managers now with the whole coming out of waterfall and PMI and Gantt charts. And now all that’s being shifted upside down and where are they going to go now?” I think addressing that fear of what people used to be really good at and now that’s gone is real.
Terri: Those are really good points Dominica.
Gene: And by the way, I had no illusions that I was good at ODBC. I mean, I was barely competent. I felt like their people are just randomly shuffling chairs just to force people to upgrade from Windows 95 or whatever it was just, I saw no value in it. Yeah, but I loved that it is a fact of life and something genuinely miraculous. It’s like, who would want to go back to the old way?
We did a webinar. It was on the topic of how to get your DevOps Enterprise submission accepted to the conference, and one of the people who was on that panel was Margo Cronin. She was an Enterprise Architect at Zurich Insurance and she’s now at AWS, but we actually accepted her through the CFP process. It was fantastic to see her perspectives and the advice that she gave, but one of the things that she said really made an impression on me. She said, “Have confidence that you have an interesting story to tell.” I think she even said, “Just because you’re not the lead developer or using the new cutting-edge technologies that’s not necessarily as interesting as someone who’s helping drive behavior change and transformation in large organizations.” Do you agree with her? And if so, what advice would you expound to anyone who has a story to share, but maybe are hesitant to. Let me call on you Dominica. And Dominica this is great because you’re on the programming committee.
Dominica: I hear this a lot! People don’t feel like they have a story to share, but everybody does. It’s a different perspective that they can bring and there’s a lot of similar nuances that we all go through, but I think to hear, especially somebody that we haven’t heard from before, a new fresh perspective and their challenges always makes for an interesting story.
Gene: Maybe you can shed a little light outcomes of the process right now. We’re looking at every one of these submissions and we are looking for interesting stories.
Dominica: Yeah, how many submissions did we have for San Francisco?
Gene: It’s over 250 almost 300.
Dominica: Yeah, going through all of those is a challenge and one thing that I really look for is original, real wording of people telling a real story and not shying away from using their own language. I don’t think people feel should feel that they have to conform to using the book-written perfect language in a submission. Just say whatever—what’s the problem, why it matters, what they did about it. The real story that’s what I want to hear what worked, what didn’t work, what was some of the failures, and where they are right now, and where they hope to go.
Gene: Great. Yeah, the lull of deliberation. In fact, one of the things that maybe most people might not know is just the level of the intensity of some of these debates of who we accept in the conference. I mean is that something that gets very, very heated. I’m not sure it was actually hung up and out of the meetings, but sometimes very close. Erica, how about you?
Erica: So, yes I actually had a conversation with a co-worker of mine after we attended a local DevOps meetup here, and she said, “I would love to at some point work towards a goal of presenting at this [event].” And she actually comes from a non-technical background and she has participated in a lot of the same things that I have in our DevOps journey and I said, “You know, I think it would be interesting to hear the same story told through your eyes, and I think it would be a different story than my version of it, and just the different things that stick out to you and were amazing to you.” I really encouraged her and I said, “I’d like to hear this story.” Even just the two of us telling that same journey, different perspectives on that are very, very interesting.
Gene: And are you referring to the portion of the presentation you gave last year, which was when a dev manager takes over ops?
Erica: Yes, yup.
Gene: I would love to hear that story. In fact, three of your colleagues actually did submit through the CFP. I’m eager to see where that goes. Thank you for any encouragement that you gave them. Thanks Erica. Robin.
Robin: Just like Erica, I think everybody has a story to tell, and through another person’s eyes it’s a whole different perspective. Sometimes the things that we do every day seems commonplace. That happens to me all the time, but then, when you tell somebody else they’re like, “Wow, I didn’t even know that existed or how would you even do that.” I think, again, just having confidence in yourself and realizing you actually have something unique to sell other people is what you need to do.
Gene: Interesting, thanks. Nicole.
Nicole: Yes, sometimes when I think about what might be a good topic to talk about when I go to conferences, I think about things that I do pretty commonplace or things that are pretty easy and think about what used to not be super easy, right? If it’s a process that I’ve done or a process or what we’re working through right now, and then what that journey has looked like. Right? Because if I can do it now, and it’s pretty easy, and it’s almost habit or reflex, when was it not a habit and reflex. And then, how did I get here? What were the steps that I got here? Did we have a checklist? What were the crazy hurdles? Because if it’s easy for me now and it probably wasn’t easy for me at some point, I had to learn to get there. That’s probably going to be useful or at least interesting to someone.
And then, write that up. And then, that’s the story, but then writing it up I think is another piece. And like Dominica said, I’m on a budget program committee, write it up that when I’m reading 300 submissions or a 1,000 submissions it stands out to me and it’s interesting I can tell you’re going to have some personality onstage and let the audience know what they’ll get out of it. That’s when they read it in the brochure, they know like which talks to go to. What takeaways am I going to get from this? Am I going to have a few tips and tricks? Am I going to know what to avoid? Am I going to know where to start? Those are some tips in terms of like writing submissions. And sometimes I forget when I write my own submissions, so none of us are perfect.
Gene: Awesome.
Nicole: Keep trying. I mean, I still get CFPs rejected. We all do.
Gene: No, it’s so true. Terri Potts.
Terri: Yeah, I do this a lot with people in my organization because moving up the career chain at Raytheon often requires you if you want to stay technical to start presenting. First maybe internally within Raytheon and then externally.
Nicole: I love that.
Terri: Yeah, so a lot of times people think, “Wow, what I do? That’s boring.” I try to just have a conversation with them to get them to tell me some of the things that they’ve done recently. And some of the things I really like to hear about is, “Okay, you started using Puppet or you started using Chef, did that just go perfectly the first time?” “Well, no we tried this and that didn’t work. Then we did this.” I’m like, other people would love to hear that they don’t make those same mistakes. So write something up to say these are things that we found that work really well and these are things that we found that didn’t work so well, so don’t repeat those mistakes.”
Gene: That’s great. As a professional conference goer, I mean I love one of my favorite variances like the internal technology conferences because this is a hope of the shared context that’s already shared. There’s a mercenary reason why you want to help people within your own organization that isn’t present in a more industry-wide conference. I mean I just really I got to attend the one at Capital One and at Nationwide Insurance. I just, they really stand out in my memories. Just incredibly unique experiences and so great for internal technologists to be able to show off the amazing things they’ve done.
All right, we’re almost out of time, one last question. I think a theme that’s come up over and over again is we’re lifelong learners. Learning is part of the game, in this game that we’re playing. Learning is definitely part of it whether we like it or not. Hopefully, we’d like it far more than we don’t. What are your top resources for learning? Maybe answer two ways—of all time and maybe right now here in the moment. Erica, let’s start with you.
Erica: Sure. Of all time, once upon a time I had like my C++ book that I referenced all the time before I really even used Google, so there was those sorts of things. But, much more recently, I rely heavily on Twitter, and a lot of the things that I see on Twitter and on leaders in the DevOps space, and what are they reading, what are the things that they’re tweeting about. There’s obviously books like The DevOps Handbook. And The Phoenix Project and I try read probably about one book at a time, but then I like to just see what’s going on space. Yeah, I’ll see whether there’s a conference going on and I’ll go look for that conference and what’s going on with that conference and the slides that are coming out of that, and that helps me stay current. And then just rely on co-workers as well. They’ll send out emails and different articles that they’ve read.
Gene: That’s awesome. By the way, one of the things I just want to punctuate is several of you mentioned, it always helps to learn with co-workers. I mean I remember teaching myself JavaScript in React, and it was incredibly gratifying, but it was horrible beyond words because there were like 40 tools I had to learn what they were and I didn’t care. Just that it always helps to have a buddy in learning things. I love that pattern. Thank you, Erica. Robin, top resource for learning.
Robin: So, I again I follow Twitter just like our counterparts here. I am a big fan of LinkedIn, I read LinkedIn and read the latest things there. I have a membership to Safari Books. They always have the latest technology books which I just love. And I read the blogs. It’s interesting because you get many different perspectives on the different blogs you hear and what Mike Cohen thinks is cool and Ken Schrader, and then you turn around and hear David Anderson. Maybe they don’t all play nice in the sandbox, but it’s interesting to hear what they have to say.
Gene: Twitter, it is interesting and we always used to dismiss it as a toy, but more and more I find it interesting just to some of the most interesting reading comes from what other than what my friends are reading. Interesting Robin. Nicole.
Nicole: For my overall best learning it’s probably my Ph.D. because it taught me how to do a lot of critical thinking, statistical thinking, pulling things apart, how to design, and critically pull apart research and think about things in a really concrete, consistent, detailed way. And then overall in today, Twitter, news sites. I try to make sure I keep it as well-rounded as possible. New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Al Jazeera, and I try to keep up on what my friends are reading, but then I also try to occasionally do a random search to get exposure to things that my friends aren’t reading.
Gene: Great. Thank you, Nicole. Terri.
Terri: Let’s see, far all time, I mean I’ve kept a membership for IEEE and ACM for years just trying to keep track of what’s going on, but now things are a lot more electronic. Some of the things I do regularly is I try to listen to most of the Software Engineering Daily podcast episodes.
Gene: Oh, great.
Terri: And all the SE-org podcasts, which they’ve had a tremendous amount of podcasts that I found really, really useful. And of course, I do go to a few conferences every year, so I’ve learned a lot at DevOps Enterprise Summit, and this year I presented at the SEI’s Architecture and Technology User Network Conference, and it was really, really good to see the amount of architecture work going on around figuring out how to transform legacy systems and architect for automation in this assembly.
Gene: That’s great. And by the way, I echo your endorsement of the Software Engineering podcast as they have great people in there.
Nicole: Yeah, and I’ll plus on IEEE and ACM. ACM Queue has been really fantastic.
Gene: Yes, and then last is Dominica.
Dominica: Yeah, I’ve learned much from watching TedTalks. That’s one of the greatest sources of learning for me for years now. I mean Hans Rosling, “Let my dataset change your mindset”—in 20 minutes what you can learn from that. Or David McCandless in “The beauty of data visualization”—just phenomenal. And then the DevOps Enterprise Summit videos over the last four or five years, from the tech side great, great learning resources straight up on YouTube, easy to get to.
Gene: Awesome, yeah, because there’s a YouTube channel you can just subscribe to it, and then you’ll be notified whatever there’s a new one. In fact I was going through them last night. Awesome, well, hey thank you much. I so much appreciate your time and you sharing all of your experiences. This is a topic that is near and dear to my heart, and I think we were actually going to be writing this up that people can actually access it in written form and the summary of it.
I look forward to seeing you all soon, one way or another. At the very latest at DevOps Enterprise in San Francisco. I hope you’ve learned as much as I have today.
Thank you to all the panelists who are doing amazing work in all your respective organizations, and you will be able to see them too Nov. 13-15 at DevOps Enterprise in San Francisco. It’s at the Hilton Union Square location and look for updates on the website at events.itrevolution.com. In fact, we’ll be announcing more speakers in the next week or two as we start processing the CFP submissions. And just a reminder, last reminder early bird ticket pricing ends on July 31 be sure to register soon for a 20 percent discount!
With that, thank you much Erica Morrison, Robin Yeman, Nicole Forsgren, Terri Potts, and Dominica DeGrandis. See you next time, all.
In this DevOps Chat we sit down with Cliff Utstein, director of Offering Management, IBM Cloud DevOps and CJ Paul, distinguished engineer and chief architect, IBM Cloud DevOps. Cliff and CJ give us some insight into how some of the biggest trends in technology today—DevOps, cognitive, IoT and blockchain—are connected. It is a great discussion with some of the people at IBM who are dealing with these subjects day in and day out.
As usual, the streaming audio file is immediately below, with the written transcript of our conversation below that. Enjoy!
Audio
Transcript
Alan Shimel: Hey, everyone, this is Alan Shimel of devopsy.kinsta.cloud and we’re here for another DevOps Chat. We have a really interesting DevOps Chat today and it’s regarding how DevOps kinda interacts and can help you get started with some of the leading sort of technology trends out there today and talking about things like cognitive and blockchain and IoT, etc. So a lot to cover in our 15-minute show, but we’re gonna do the best we can. I’m joined today by two friends from IBM. First of all, a returning guest to DevOps Chat, our friend CJ Paul, distinguished engineer and chief architect, IBM cloud. CJ, welcome to DevOps Chat.
CJ Paul: Thank you, Alan. Glad to be here.
Shimel: Thank you and welcome – glad to have you here. And, secondly, we have Cliff Utstein, and, Cliff, if I mispronounced your last name, I apologize, but Cliff joins us from Boston and he is the director of DevOps product development for IBM Bluemix and cloud. Cliff, welcome.
Cliff Utstein: Thanks, Alan.
Shimel: Did I mess up the title or the name?
Utstein: I actually lead product management for IBM’s Bluemix – IBM’s cloud DevOps.
Shimel: I apologize. So much for me for following the show notes. That’s what you get. [Chuckles] But, okay, fantastic. So, guys, you know, three big, kind of meaty topics out there—cognitive, blockchain, and IoT—and then how does DevOps help you get started with all of them. Let’s start with cognitive because, certainly, IBM is a market leader in cognitive and it seems like they’re building cognitive into everything. So let’s talk a little bit about that. CJ, I’ve probably spoken about this with you in the past, so, if you don’t mind, let’s start with you. How can DevOps help you get started with cognitive?
Paul: Well, we find many customers evaluating several of these cognitive services that Watson provides. They are available as APIs in Bluemix, so this is – such as natural language understanding, natural language classifiers, the Watson conversation service, and many others like that. And many companies are looking at how to take advantage of those combination services to build interesting applications, like chatbots, that they can deploy for various use cases. So, as they look to build these applications, clearly, the way you build these applications is important.
What DevOps proposes now is an iterative model where you rapidly take ideas and get them into code and deliver them out to market and see how effective they are. And then, you know, measure the usage and iterate rapidly from there, so using the DevOps practices and toolchains that we provide, it can greatly speed up a company’s ability, the developer’s ability, to build and deliver these leading-edge cognitive applications.
Here are some other DevOps Chats you may want to listen to:
Shimel: Sure. Cliff, what do you think about that?
Utstein: Yeah. As CJ said, a lot of organizations right now are looking to build cognitive applications and what they’re thinking about often, with that, is how to move to the cloud, how to improve their overall processes within their organization, and even how to change their culture. And DevOps cuts into all of these—giving an organization a way to go through, really, a set of changes that let them develop a much tighter customer relationship, ultimately, through faster iterations in the development cycle, getting to the customer with their MBT faster, and doing it in the cloud so that they’re able to utilize all the advantages that the cloud offers them, as far as getting to the customer faster and understanding what the customer wants.
And what’s behind this, as CJ said, often, is a whole set of cognitive needs to improve their apps, based on utilizing these cognitive services, so we see it in the financial services space; we see it in health care; we see it in retail. We see it in a lot of industries, where businesses are looking to incorporate these cognitive abilities into their apps, to build the customer relationship, ultimately.
Shimel: Sure. Hey, Cliff, if you don’t mind, I wanna dig in a little bit on the whole cognitive thing. You know, with IBM, a lot of people sort of make Watson and cognitive synonymous, right? I mean, it’s the IBM brand, if you will, for cognitive, if we wanna say that. But we’re hearing so much today about artificial intelligence, machine learning, right, automation, all of these things. And automation is obviously closely tied into DevOps. Just to be clear, Cliff, when you’re talking about cognitive, first of all, it is synonymous with Watson and certainly for IBM’s purposes. Is that correct or incorrect?
Utstein: You know, I think that Watson provides us with a whole set of tools and applications providing cognitive abilities. I think, in addition to that, however, we can look at the cognitive abilities in DevOps as well, in machine learning, to determine some basic things like whether a release is likely to succeed or fail in production. We’ve got algorithms, cognitive algorithms, around that today, to help organizations figure out whether or not they’re gonna have success with a release, based on prior releases, based on patterns that we’re able to interpret within the code as well. So it means a lot of different things, Alan.
Shimel: I agree. Agreed. I just wanted to clear that up for our audience in there too and I think, you know, and, in my mind, anyway, when I look at the relationship between DevOps and cognitive and cognitive and DevOps, there’s a little bit of “chicken and egg,” in that I think cognitive can help you with your DevOps transformation and move to the cloud and everything that’s wrapped around digital transformation, while, at the same time, that same digital transformation and DevOps transformation can help you, you know, accelerate use of cognitive technologies to make your business better. So it very much is a win-win, two-way street. CJ, what do you think?
Paul: Yes. Absolutely, yeah. One is actually the building and deploying of cognitive applications itself and applying the DevOps principles; the other is using cognitive technologies within the DevOps tools themselves. Yeah. They’re both very relevant and things that IBM’s been working on.
Shimel: Excellent. Guys, if you don’t mind, ’cause time is always an issue here, I’d like to move on to the next topic, which is blockchain. So, you know, I just came off of a world tour roadshow around DevOps and other kind of issues, and, wherever we went, blockchain was incredibly hot, was incredibly popular. People wanted to know about it; people wanted to hear what the story was around blockchain. But, at the same time, I had people who were like, “What is blockchain?” Right? They didn’t understand what we meant by “blockchain” and why was it tied into bitcoin and these kinds of things and why should we care. Cliff, if you don’t mind—and I don’t know how much you know about it and, if not, CJ—can we do a level set for the audience about what we mean when we say “blockchain”?
Utstein: So, you know, I think that might be a different talk, Alan. I think, from a DevOps perspective, what we’re seeing is the need to deliver the processes, the culture changes, the tools to support developers that—especially in financial organizations, that are today looking to incorporate blockchain into their applications. And that’s really been our focus, is helping them do that quickly, securely, with governance and all the controls that a financial organization needs in order to be successful with blockchain.
Shimel: Good. Fair enough. I think that’s kind of DevOps CJ, what do you think?
Paul: Yeah. So blockchain is the Hyperledger technology that underlies offerings such as bitcoin, but that underlying technology, though, can be used to secure financial transactions, right, or different kinds of transactions around the world. So it’s driving a level of transformation in the financial industries, that lot of companies wanting to build new applications to take advantage of this technology. So that’s where, as they try to build these new applications, the DevOps techniques and tools that we’re providing can greatly help them, you know, build those applications and get those applications out there faster. So, essentially, DevOps is sort of the foundation that helps them innovate more rapidly in these new domains.
Shimel: Got it. So, Cliff, you’re the product guy; I wanted to talk a little—ou know, what are IBM’s customers doing around DevOps and blockchain? Can you give us a couple of examples? And you don’t have to mention names—you don’t have to name names, obviously—but couple of examples.
Utstein: Yeah, I think—I mean, what we’re seeing, really, is, as CJ said, in the financial sector, we’re seeing the application development really accelerate around blockchain technologies today, and what these organizations are doing is using it as an opportunity to make the changes in their organization around digital transformation. They’re doing it in the cloud, they’re doing it using open toolchains in the cloud, and, obviously, the ones that I’m most familiar with are doing it using IBM’s Bluemix, IBM’s cloud, and our continuous delivery offering with open toolchains. And that means that they’re using a set of modern tools, like Git and other tools in the cloud, to do this rapidly, and they’re iterating very quickly.
The thing that we’re hearing from our customers is that they’re making changes in production daily, that they’re getting to their customers with changes in a matter of days after the customer makes these requests. And that’s really the big difference that we’re seeing, is how quickly they can meet their customers’ needs in this space, using templates to quickly get their new developers up, using an open toolchain so that they’re using the common industry-leading tools in each of the categories around collaboration, around tests, around source code management, around issue tracking, so that they can deliver that, using those common tools, using the technologies of blockchain to deliver to the customer quickly.
Shimel: Got it. And so, Cliff, I imagine that’s a big part of your focus and, CJ, you as well, in architecting, is making sure that Bluemix and the IBM cloud—it’s still called “IBM cloud,” right, Cliff?
Utstein: It is. It’s—I mean, we call it “the IBM cloud” and it means—you know, there’re a lot of elements of the IBM cloud, but “IBM cloud” is a good moniker.
Shimel: Okay. Just wanna make sure. So, you know, part of your job, obviously, and CJ as architect, is you’ve gotta make sure these underlying tools are there in place for people, as they onboard, as they start making this migration, this transformation. And many of them are, at the same time, adopting DevOps type of customs and culture and tools to facilitate this as well. So it’s almost like you have to stay one step ahead of anticipating what these guys are gonna need.
Paul: Yes. And that’s what—now we look ahead. We look at what some of the early adopters of these technologies have observed and we’re trying to remove the roadblocks, right, both in terms of providing sample applications, quick ways to get them started with their own enterprise applications, and then, as they get started building these applications—nobody builds an enterprise application as a lone developer; they always work in a team. So we wanna make sure that we enable these teams to be productive very quickly.
And that’s where, as Cliff mentioned, we support a open-toolchain fabric, unique in the industry, and then, on this fabric, we template-ize the toolchain that these things need to get going quickly, so we can instantiate those templates within minutes and, basically, onboard a team, with both starter code for their applications, as well as the toolchain they need to get it out into production, so we’re pretty excited about that. You’ll see those kinds of capabilities show up in the way you build these Watson applications and the financial applications and the IoT applications on Bluemix and on IBM cloud.
In fact, what we tell customers is “DevOps is the way you build any application on the cloud, given that all of the infrastructure can be provisioned through APIs—you know, it’s all infrastructure, this code, on the cloud—so you don’t have to wait for your contracts to close. You can just make API code and get your infrastructure and provision your runtimes and deploy your application. So there is no other way to do it but to use DevOps.” And that’s why we are working hard to enable all of these developers to have an outstanding experience on IBM cloud, working the entire developer journey, from how they get started with the sample apps, how they get started with their enterprise apps, and how they build and deploy with toolchains.
Shimel: So let me just repeat that one line ’cause that was the money line, CJ: “There’s no other way to do it but to use DevOps.” I love it. Cliff, what do you think about this? Are you in violent agreement with CJ? Anything to add there?
Utstein: I’m in violent—oh, CJ and I are always in violent agreement, Alan. Yeah, we’re seeing—and I think, as these companies move to the cloud, as they take advantage of Watson and blockchain and IoT, it’s critical that they adopt DevOps practices or else they’re unlikely to succeed. It’s gonna take them much longer to get to market, they’re gonna do it with less customer satisfaction, lower quality, and they know it. I mean, the data’s in. I read it on your website, Alan. Go to devopsy.kinsta.cloud; you’ll see.
Shimel: Absolutely. Guys, we’re kind of running a little bit low on time. We have a few minutes left. I wanted to talk—we had IoT on our list and I don’t wanna shortchange you because it’s important. You know, IoT, to me, guys, is—I mean, there was so much hype around this, let’s say, a year or even two years ago. We went suddenly from IP4 to IP6 because every refrigerator’s gonna be connected, but it’s not just the refrigerators and toasters, right? It’s all of the little gadgets and how many IoT devices are on our cars, even if we don’t own a Tesla. How many—you know, I signed up for a contest yesterday to get one of those free RFID tags that you can put on your keychain so you won’t lose your keychain anymore, and it’ll show you where it is or your wallet or anything else you wanna find. And, to me, you know, even in my house, we’ve gone smart home and I’ve got all these IoT devices now that I can control from my phone. So the hype is real, but, first of all, how much IoT are you guys seeing with the cloud and in the IBM customer base? Either one of you.
Paul: Yeah. I would say the IoT scenarios—you mentioned smart home as an example, but connected cars are another big driver because now you can buy cars that have built-in WiFi plans, right, that are paid for, for some number of years, by the manufacturer itself. So you can see maps and understand, for example, what the traffic durations are or there’s burglars in an area, even as you do navigation on your car navigation system.
So lot of these connected devices both pull and push data to the cloud, and that is where a lot of the data collection and analysis applications are actually being built out, to support these devices on the edge, because lot of the compute that backs them up is out in the cloud, right? And so, again, all of these are brand new applications that nobody had before, so they have to build it and iterate on it rapidly and get it out and get feedback from the users and continue to improve it. And there, again, all of the practices and the toolchains are very relevant to any of the teams building the IoT applications.
Shimel: Sure. Cliff, what do you see on your end?
Utstein: Yeah, I mean, as CJ is saying, I mean, automative is a big driver right now of IoT and BMW’s CarData platform was created to run on the IBM Bluemix cloud, in fact.
Shimel: Oh, right.
Utstein: That was just announced two weeks ago. And it really gives the new platform access to IBM Watson IoT capabilities, so that’s a big deal in the space and they’re talking about 8.5 million BMW customers globally taking advantage of this service, and it’s really about data. I mean, as we talk about IoT, it really comes down to big data and needing a cloud to manage the big data and needing practices like DevOps, if we tie it back to DevOps here. It’s really about practices and giving developers the ability to take advantage of these practices to build that relationship with the customer so that the customer can make sense of that data ’cause that’s what the cloud can do best.
Shimel: Yeah. I mean, my sense, guys, is that, with all—you know, CJ, you mentioned a few applications. Cliff, you literally put the rubber on the road with BMW relationship—you’re right. But I still feel like we’ve barely scratched the surface between how IoT—connected devices, if we will, interacting with the cloud, are gonna change the fabric of our lives. Right? And I think we haven’t even touched on the medical aspects of it, when you have nanotech running in your body, reporting back somewhere to the cloud about your vitals and your bodily functions and so forth. I mean, it’s gonna change things.
But, Cliff, you hit on something that I think is really important about all of this. Underlying all of these things is big data and big data analysis and analytics, and that’s where cognitive becomes the game-changer, in my mind, anyway. I mean, what do you think, Cliff?
Utstein: Yeah, I think that’s it. I mean, I think IBM’s cloud bringing together the platform for big data and cognitive together, with a set of DevOps processes, I mean, is truly differentiated.
Shimel: Absolutely. Guys, you know, I promised you 15 minutes; here we are at 22. So we’re gonna need to wrap things up here, but, you know, each one of these areas—cognitive, blockchain, IoT—probably, we could have done a podcast on each of ’em, but I’m glad we were able to hit what we did. Maybe we could come back on in another time and part-two this and dive a little deeper ’cause I did wanna touch on the connection between, let’s say, cognitive and IoT, and I think we’ve just scratched the surface. But, for now, we’ll call it a wrap on this edition of DevOps Chat. Cliff, thanks so much. I know it was your first time on; I hope we didn’t scare you away and you’ll come back and join us again.
Utstein: Thanks, Alan.
Shimel: Thank you. CJ –
Utstein: Would love to.
Paul: Thank you, Alan.
Shimel: CJ, always a pleasure having you on, my friend. I look forward to seeing you soon.
Paul: Thank you, Alan. It was a pleasure.
Shimel: All right. CJ Paul, Cliff Utstein, IBM’s cloud and Bluemix team. This is Alan Shimel for devopsy.kinsta.cloud and DevOps Chat. Thanks for joining us and we’ll see you soon—or listen to you soon, on another DevOps Chat.
Log analysis has become a big data issue. As we collect and want to analyze more and more information, the amount of data to analyze seems to grow by leaps and bounds. One answer to this issue is AI Log Analysis (apply artificial intelligence). While I will spare you the obligatory “machine learning” references, there are companies that are bringing AI to this issue.
One such company is a startup from Israel, Loom Systems. devopsy.kinsta.cloud sat down with Loom Systems CEO Gabby Menachem in this episode of DevOps Chat. As usual, the streaming audio of our conversation is below, with the written transcript of our conversation immediately below that. Enjoy!
Alan Shimel: Hello, everyone. It’s Alan Shimel, editor in chief, devopsy.kinsta.cloud, for another DevOps Chat. On this episode of DevOps Chat, we’re joined by Gabby Menachem, who’s CEO of Loom Systems and comes to us today from Israel. Hello, Gabby, how are you?
Gabby Menachem: I’m great. Hi, Alan. Thanks for having me.
Shimel: Thank you for being our guest today, Gabby. Gabby, I guess we should start with – I’m gonna imagine that folks in our audience are not familiar with Loom Systems, so would you mind giving us just kind of a quick background on Loom Systems?
Menachem: Sure. Loom Systems is a platform—a solution, actually, to predict and prevent problems in your digital business. We actually are able to analyze logs and semi-structured machine data for immediate visibility into the company’s digital environment, any environment going from legacy systems to the latest application, your homegrown application that you just wrote. And, by doing that, we can significantly reduce the cost and complexity of working with operational analytics on IT. And, using our tribal knowledge bank, which is called “TriKB,” we’re actually able to find issues proactively using log analysis and bring them to IT’s attention and help them resolve them in minutes, instead of hours or days.
Shimel: Got it. So, Gabby, just to be clear, is Loom actually the log gatherer—in other words, gathering the logs—or is it just analyze logs that are provided from another solution?
Menachem: So that’s a great question and, for the most—in most environments, we’re not focused on gathering the logs, so we come to places, in most cases, where they already collect logs, although our solution can handle the collection of logs as well. What we focus on is the actual analysis, so we find that businesses today have a problem utilizing their personnel that they already have, in order to find a root cause and do root cause analysis of issues in the logs. And, as we all know, when you have a problem and with today’s digital transformation, you have to go into the logs in order to find issues that affect your customers. And so, by using Loom Systems, you’re able to get help with that root cause analysis and you get actionable recommendation on how to solve these issues in minutes. And that’s how you can actually use a solution that helps you with the analysis phase and not with the ingestion or things like that.
We also provide a way to do collection and all the other features of a log management tool, but it’s not out focus and we’re, to be honest, in most cases, we’re happy to find that businesses have already put effort into looking at logs in a centralized manner. That kinda gives us the signal that they’re already operational and they’re looking at logs as a way to solve issues and find the ROI in that case.
Shimel: Excellent. So, Gabby, give us an idea what kind of log gathering tools does Loom System integrate with. Is it Splunk and that type of thing?
Menachem: So we work, basically, with every tool in the market. I’m not aware of a customer that we went to that we weren’t able to connect in less than 90 minutes, so that’s our claim for fame and you can test us, if you want.
Shimel: Mm-hmm.
Menachem: And it takes us—the main thing with our platform is that, from whatever source that you would stream logs from—it could be Splunk, as you said; it can be open-source tools like Logstash or proprietary tools that are Syslog, for example—and, from there to streaming information into Loom, what would happen is that Loom would parse the logs automatically and find anomalies and trends and can actually alert you on things before it affects your business. So we’re appealing more to the business layer, where we want to connect what IT is doing to what the business is looking for, in terms of understanding users’ behavior, anomalies that affect the customer experience, and, basically, our ROI, in most cases, is measured on preventing churn from customers that are actually looking for a better customer experience with all these businesses’ ongoing and digital transformation. Does that make sense?
Shimel: Yeah, it makes total sense. So, Gabby, one of the probably most overused terms we’re hearing in the market today, but I don’t see it mentioned in the Loom Systems, is this idea of machine learning, if you will. And, you know, machine learning kinda goes hand in hand with AI and stuff like that. Is that kinda what Loom is doing then, in performing this analysis? Or something different?
Menachem: Yes. So the way that we actually are able to do all of that is based on machine learning and AI. We don’t want to use the hype of the words as much as we want businesses to understand that this is actually the future of being able to analyze data, so one of the key hurdles that we see or the barriers that customers experience is that, when you want to analyze information, first of all, you need to get a data scientist, which they’re hard to find these days, and you need to have a good methodology of how to analyze your data.
And one of the key issues here is that Loom is able, through AI and through the heuristics that we’ve put in, to actually do this for you. So we’re trying to abstract away all the complexities of using machine learning and working with features that most data scientists do today, and, that way, we can actually use your, well, highly skilled personnel, but they are not now proficient with using these machine learning systems. So this is the way for you to use super advanced analytics and AI without having to go through extensive training or something like that. The machine would just act as if it’s a human and as if you’ve got a new IT person in your environment that can actually go through the logs all day, without getting tired, and just alert you, call you, and say, “Alan, come look at this. This looks interesting. And, by the way, when I saw this last, we had a problem with our database and we were able to fix it by applying this patch from Oracle,” for example.
Shimel: Got it.
Menachem: Does that answer your question?
Shimel: Yes, it does. So, Gabby, give us an idea of—and we realize Loom is a startup, but what is the target? Who is the target customer here?
Menachem: So we’re marketing to medium-sized businesses through enterprises. Mostly doing insight sales these days, less of an enterprise sale, per se, but what we’re doing is we’re going to these organizations and we’re talking to anyone from the CIO down through directors and IT leaders and DevOps, in order to explain to them that one of the biggest, most sought after solutions that they were always thinking about, which is “How do I actually find things – surface things that are of interest from my logs without any prior configuration?” So you don’t wanna do the big project of parsing your logs and explaining to a system what is important, what is not. You don’t wanna do all of this that is in the market today, which is based on supervised learning, where you have to give a lot of feedback and explain to the system how things should work. You just want the system to act as if it’s a human and understand by itself what is meaningful and what is not.
And, with that approach of unsupervised learning with a few feedback loops that we employ, what you can actually get is a very sophisticated tool with a very simple approach to operating it, which I think is what IT operations is looking for all the time. We want the simplicity and—actually, we want the complexity of our environments to not transcend to the complexity of the tools that we use, so simplicity in the tools gives us better way to manage these problems. We don’t wan to suffer from alert fatigue and we don’t want to interact with systems that take years to learn and to know how to operate, and that’s the way that we’re actually able to give better customer experience for our customers and solve issues faster.
So, today, when we go into a business, it takes us about 90 minutes, as I said, to install and get running. And you see the value from your Loom installation in the same day. Do this either on-prem or in our SAS, in AWS or in Azure, so you have all the possibilities there, and we go to both big businesses, like banks and insurance companies through retail and e-commerce, and down to businesses with 200 people. But our main audience is the medium businesses all over and DevOps leaders that are looking for the next generation of proactive alerting.
Shimel: Got it. So, Gabby, in a lot of ways, this type of intelligence—you know, I come from a security background and we’re seeing this more and more in security, providing actionable intelligence, analysis of—because, I mean, the good thing about big data is it’s big. We have a lot of data; we’re seeing a lot of things. But trying to make heads or tails of it and boil it down to actionable intelligence is key; otherwise, we just drown in data. How did you guys kinda come up with the idea to do this?
Menachem: So, first of all, the big thing here is what you described—the fact that we were—a lot of the team was working in intelligence, in fact, before that, and we’ve seen a lot of this use cases where you’ve had to look at a lot of information and be able to sift through it and find interesting things, in order to bring them in front of a human that can make the business decision.
So there’s a layering system, where you look at data as the lowest layer and on top of it there’s the what we call “information layer,” which is where all the tools today are. So it’s a way to have a mapping between data and visualization, so let’s take the number of errors that you see in your logs, for example—that could become a graph. And, on top of this graph, what people are doing today is they’re looking at it and figuring out if there’s some anomaly or a trend there that they should be looking at, and then they go back to the data and make sense to out of it. This is the third layer, which is called the “intelligence layer,” and this is where our tool operates. On top of this, there’s one more layer which is called “wisdom,” and that’s where you connect the intelligence layer, which tells you what is going on with a business decision that you have to make, and then you can take action.
So an example would be—and sometimes we get this question of, “Why don’t you connect this to automation tool to actually resolve issues automatically?” And what we say is that resolving issues is a business decision. It’s not just about, you know, if it’s Black Friday and our system is finding that there are one percent of your users that are experiencing a problem, you don’t want the server to restart because you’re gonna lose a lot of business, so the business decision has to remain in the hands of DevOps leaders.
And, coming back to why we started this business and how we came up with the idea, it’s basically—I think what happened in intelligence is actually happening in the commercial market, so big data is a new thing in our world, but it’s not a new thing in intelligence. It’s been there for 50 years. And, as the intelligence community grew and came to the conclusion that something had to be brought into a visualization tool, they built this information layer, and then the next phase was to actually build “smart systems,” as people call it today, to analyze information for you and come up with things that people just can’t handle, in terms of capacity. So the cognitive ability that we built into the solution perfectly aligns with what happened in the intelligence community, and now we’re bringing it to the commercial market, for the use of all these businesses doing digital transformation.
Shimel: Makes sense. Makes sense. So, Gabby, we’re coming on the end of our time—as I mentioned to you, it goes fast. Where can people find out more about Loom Systems?
Menachem: So through our website, loomsystems.com, is the best way to get information. You can sign up there or you can even talk to us with a chat online. We provide free trials, so it’s very easy to start streaming information to our SAS business, and we can converse with you and start understanding your use case. We’re very fast to operate and you’d see value in the same day. I invite everyone to come talk to us and you can also meet us at a lot of the industry events. We’re gonna be in OpenStack next week and hope to see you there and talk to you.
Shimel: Got it. Gabby, just so the audience knows, what is a typical engagement price-wise or how is it priced?
Menachem: So it’s based—today, it’s based on the number of instances sending information into Loom, so one of the differentiators, in the way we price this, is it’s not data volume-based, so you can actually send us as much information as you want, unlimited data, and we just count by the number of instances sending information into Loom. And the regular prices, they start at about, I’d say, $20,000.00 for the smallest amount, and most installations are in the $50,000.00 to $100,000.00 on annual deal.
Shimel: Got it. Excellent. Well, Gabby, thanks for sharing this information with us today and thanks for being our guest on this episode of DevOps Chat. Continued success with Loom Systems and we’d like to hear more maybe, going in the future—if my mail program would stop making noise, we’d be okay. I apologize. Gabby, we’ll check back in on Loom Systems perhaps in a few months and see what kind of—what’s new, but until then, keep doing what you’re doing. This is exciting, kinda representing the future of where we are with analysis and using computers, so congratulations and continued success to you and Loom Systems. This is Alan –
Menachem: Thank you very much, Alan.
Shimel: Thank you, Gabby. This is Alan Shimel for DevOps Chat and devopsy.kinsta.cloud. Thanks for listening, everyone. We’ll see you soon on another DevOps Chat.
We sit down with Sarah Plantenberg of IBM to talk design thinking. Sarah has been featured on several DevOpsTV videos around the Bluemix Garage. But she recently took on a new role at IBM around bringing design thinking to cloud customers. Sarah gives some great background on design thinking and why it can help you. Have a listen for yourself and we think you will find it informative.
As usual, the streaming audio of our conversation is below with a transcript of our conversation below that. Enjoy!
Alan Shimel: Hey, everyone. This is Alan Shimel, editor in chief, devopsy.kinsta.cloud, and we’re here for another DevOps Chat. Our guest on this episode of DevOps Chat is Sarah Plantenberg of IBM. Sarah, welcome to DevOps Chat.
Sarah Plantenberg: Thank you. It’s great to be with you again.
Shimel: Great to have you on again, Sarah. As we spent, oh, a good half-hour chatting before we went on air today, just catching up, and it’s always great to hear what’s going on in your world, and, obviously, one of the big things is you now have a new title at IBM. I’m not even gonna attempt to repeat it because I know I’d mess it up. I’ll leave it to you to tell our audience what exactly is your new title, Sarah?
Plantenberg: My new title is I’m a design lead, the designer for the offering management section of our cloud technical engagement organization, so I’m a senior consultant specializing in applying design thinking to our business and helping our clients apply design thinking to their businesses.
Shimel: Absolutely. And, though that may not roll off the tongue, it’s actually a mouthful, in terms of how important and how much value IBM puts on this whole concept of design thinking. But, Sarah, some people in our audience may not be familiar with design thinking. Design thinking 101 for people who don’t know what it is, how would you describe it to them?
Plantenberg: Design thinking is about understanding and then innovating in a really human-centered way. We understand the person that we’re building something for. We understand their current situation. We understand the greatest pain points they have or if you’re bringing something new to the market, what’s the greatest opportunity for your business. And then we innovate around that by really—we have some really great techniques and tools to help people come to ideas that they would not have come to if they were just sitting down, doing what they call a typical “brainstorming session.”
Shimel: Mm-hmm.
Plantenberg: Once you have those ideas, you have to take those and put them back in a context of that human being’s world. How many great ideas have we all come across? The example I give is that I have 150 applications on my phone and I use, honestly, probably 15 of them.
Shimel: Yeah.
Plantenberg: There’s a bunch of great ideas. [Laughs] But they don’t reach me in the right way at the right time. So design thinking is really a set of—a framework and a set of tools around helping bring all of those things together, and, in IBM, we use it to bring the right technology to the right person, at the right time.
Shimel: Excellent. And, of course, Sarah, design thinking, while IBM is probably one of the leading advocates in the world for the concept of design thinking, it’s not—this is not a new concept, per se. design thinking has been around for a while. Again, design thinking 101 for our audience—give me a little, if you can, a little of the history that you know of there
Plantenberg: So, yes, design thinking’s been around for many years. What IBM has done with design thinking is said, “You know, we really need to apply this … ” We’ve done three things. The first one is to say, “We really need to apply this to the way that we work . We need to understand how we’re positioning ourself, how our clients understand us, what they need, and really target IBM’s capabilities towards those.” And, in some cases, even a couple steps ahead of the game, what we see coming in the market, which is really where the cognitive capabilities and the way that Ginni Rometty is steering our company—that’s where that comes from, is understanding that’s really the heart of design thinking.
The second thing that IBM has done with design thinking is help us use it at scale and teach our enterprises to use it at scale. It’s easy to do design thinking in the small, but to do it when you have a development team of 250 or when you have a development team that’s in India, China and New York? That’s a different ballgame. So IBM design thinking, IBM’s part of that is at speed and at scale.
And then the third thing that we’ve done with it is what we’ve done in Garage, which is really to take an incredibly lean and integrated approach—you don’t have to integrate design thinking into your development, but we do. And we do that in the Garage and it’s been amazing because it’s helped people use design thinking and kind of allow it to permeate everything that they do, so we put it at the beginning to understand the users and come up with innovative ideas and then design those and develop them for users towards business outcomes, but we also use it to say, “Okay, now you’ve adopted that cloud, Client A.” Let’s pretend. You know, just talk about a client without using their name. “You’ve adopted the cloud; you’ve brought in the IBM Bluemix Garage Method. You’re iterating really quickly. Your agility now means something to the user.” Before that, without including the user, agility more often has strong IT economic benefit, but it doesn’t always follow the business, and so design thinking really connects those two things together.
And then, once you adopt the cloud, it ripples. The impact of that ripples, so you can’t run your operations organization in exactly the same way that you did before because you have different tools and you’re running at different speeds or maybe you’re running at just one speed that’s a lot faster, and you have somebody else managing your cloud, so what does it mean to do DevOps? So we created a design—we applied design thinking to how people reorganize their operations organization, and that’s been a great tool for us, both to learn, as IMBers, about how our clients need to shift and also to help our clients really take an outside-in approach, a human-centered approach, to how they’re gonna run an operations organization.
And I think the last thing I would say about that is you can also use design thinking at the business process level as well, so it’s—I could go on and on with this answer [laughs], but I would say it’s—
Shimel: Oh, it’s okay.
Plantenberg: —it’s really stepping back and looking at the big picture and understanding, rather than following the thread. You know, it’s taking a holistic approach, rather than a linear one, to operations.
Shimel: Yep. And, you know, Sarah, one of the things about the Garage and the Garage Method is really kind of taking this design thinking kind of way, if you will, and applying it, in real world, to scaling at enterprise levels and in a agile fashion, right? And by “agile,” we don’t necessarily mean Agile manifesto, Scrum, but agile in a larger sense. And, Sarah, that’s actually something that you and I spoke about off-mic earlier, and that is what I call, or Gartner actually calls, this concept of “agile IT,” but it’s also something, as you pointed out, that has been preached from the highest levels at IBM now for at least the last couple years, which is kind of agile everywhere or, you know, going agile, if you will. Why don’t you, if you can, share with our audience a little bit about what that means to you and what is IBM’s kinda vision on that?
Plantenberg: You know, what that means to me, I can’t separate my life at IBM from my life as a designer, when I answer that question, ’cause I’m a designer because I think like one—I didn’t choose to be one; it kinda chose me.
Shimel: Yeah.
Plantenberg: And, from that standpoint, I think that the only reason to be agile is to be responsive. There’s no other reason you would need to be able to shift quickly, unless you’re in response to something. In my world, that’s a user, and a user can be my manager; the user can be my team, when I was managing a design team; they’re my client. They’re the people I interface with because I’m doing something for them. Whenever I’m doing something for someone that’s my user, I need to be agile. But, as we talked before, where agile meets non-agile, you end up with kind of a mess. It’s a little bit of a—there’s cognitive dissonance. People can’t work together because they’re working in two different ways—it’s a square peg in a round hole.
And so the concept of agile in the large, “Let’s all operate in the same way and let’s all have that way be inclusive,” meaning we integrate together, we know how to pass information together. We are all aligned around the same priority, so, when you ask me for something and I say I can’t get it done because X, Y, Z, say, “Yeah, I understand that, actually. Let me make sure—let me put this in the right priority.” And are all responsive to changing business needs—I think that’s the most important thing. When the tides shift, we all see it together because we’re aligned together. We can then respond together. And it’s an incredible way of working.
Jeff Smith had brought this into the CIO’s office, and it’s been incredible, the results. I wish I had them in front of me. The reduction in the amount of time spent getting things done, streamlining the organization, and I literally mean streamline the organization. It got smaller. It’s tighter. It’s faster. It’s more responsive. We’re now rolling that out under Sean Reilley who’s the vice president. Moved over to GBS, our global business services, and that’s now an offering for our clients.
And it’s very, very interesting to our enterprise clients who are having to do more with less—I hate that phrase, but it’s true [chuckles]—and they’re having to be more responsive because business is changing so fast, the conversations people have now about the cloud are vastly different than they were only two years ago, so enterprises can’t be responsive not only to emerging technologies but to what their users need and how the markets are shifting. They’re struggling, you know? And so this is really a fantastic answer ’cause it’s not a thing that you buy; it’s a way of being and a way of thinking and a belief system.
And I think the last thing I’ll say about it is it really allows the people on the ground to use their capabilities to help change the business. Instead of being told what to do, they’re leading with what they know, within a framework that gives them a voice and gives them a method of working together. It’s just—it’s fantastic work.
Shimel: Excellent. Excellent. So, Sarah, as you mentioned at the top of the podcast, you recently moved into a new role, where, before, you kind of really weren’t in the Garage and around design thinking with the Garage and Garage Method. You’re now helping IBM’s sales, marketing team, customer engagement teams both understand design thinking internally there, as well as taking those lessons and bringing it to market, to IBM’s clients. Is that correct, fair to say?
Plantenberg: Yes, it is.
Shimel: And, in that role, Sarah—and I’m sure you’re very excited; it sounds like an exciting new role and we all like to embark on new opportunity—what does success look like for you there?
Plantenberg: Oh, what a great question [laughs]. Success … I often success for myself as having created something that doesn’t need me ’cause if it needs me, than it’s more about me than it is about an outcome, so I will say that that’s the preface ’cause my answer might, without that, sound a little weird. Success to me is that I can stand back and watch our clients move from the beginning of their cloud journey to the point at which they have a hybrid cloud and they’re running in the cloud method and getting tremendous value out of it and hopefully even having spread agile methods throughout their business and adopt design thinking and that human-centered approach, and they’re doing beautifully with IBM’s tools integrated with anything else that they may have. I want it to be easy for our clients to find what they need on the cloud – about the cloud, on the cloud methods, tools, understanding the capabilities on Bluemix and growing their businesses with those and being independent and thriving on Bluemix.
Shimel: Great. That is great. And so, I mean, the Bluemix and all of that is still there. One—I think we have time for maybe one more question we can go into, Sarah, and that is I wanted to talk to you about the concept of multi-clouds, right? We become more nuanced in our understanding of what it means to move to the cloud. We’re not all moving all of our infrastructure up to Amazon or Azure or one of these public infrastructures, the service providers. Cloud exists in many forms, right? We have public cloud; we have private cloud; we have hybrid cloud; we have lots of flavors, almost as many flavors of computer clouds as there are different types of clouds in the sky. What does this mean to you and in terms of your role?
Plantenberg: It means understanding the people who are having to make the decisions. I think that your analogy of clouds in the sky is really—it’s a great one because you don’t—we can’t expect people to only want cirrus clouds, and here comes a cumulonimbus cloud. “No, I’m sorry. I can’t have that. It’s not gonna work for me; I only do cirrus.” That’s not how the world is. We have to be comfortable and understand people are making different decisions and connecting these different clouds togethers, and, often, I actually meet clients who have one area of their business using one cloud and then another area, using another cloud because the business folks had a small, little consultant group who’s working on Amazon and the IT organization decided to go with Bluemix, and now they have to figure out how to integrate these two.
That’s the world we live in, and people make choices for reasons. If we understand, from a design standpoint, “Why do you have these multiple clouds? How are they working together? Where do you wanna take your business?” then we know how to fit these things together and knit them together and do automations. In fact, we have some automating tools that say, “Okay, we can run a dashboard that helps you see all of your clouds,” so IBM no longer believes in backing up the IBM truck and saying, “Us or the highway.” That doesn’t work; it’s not the kind of world we live in. And everything is integrated—it’s really the name of the game—and so, for me, it’s understanding how people got to where they are and understanding where they wanna go and being able to bring them there with what they have.
Shimel: Got it. Got it. Well, Sarah, we’re about out of time, so we need to end things in a little bit, but I wanted to, first of all, thank you for appearing on this episode of DevOps Chat and, secondly, really wish you nothing but the best of luck with this new role and responsibilities. We’ll be checking in to see how things are. And then, of course, we’ll see you next year, hopefully, at IBM InterConnect, and that’ll give us maybe six months or eight months of retrospective to take a look at and we can see what it’s about.
Plantenberg: Oh, I count on seeing you there, Alan. [Chuckles]
Shimel: Okay. That’s—I guess we’ll call it a wrap on this episode of DevOps Chat. Sarah Plantenberg, IBM, design thinking. Thank you so much for being our guest on this episode of DevOps Chat. This is Alan Shimel for DevOps Chat and devopsy.kinsta.cloud, and we hope to see you soon on another DevOps Chat.
In this DevOps Chat we speak with Jonah Kowall, VP of Market Developments and Insights at AppDynamics. Of course prior to that Jonah was a VP of Research IT Operations at Gartner. Jonah actually gave us a great overview of the evolution of APM and how the market has evolved. He also tells where we might be heading now.
It is not often you can get the lay of the land from an expert like Kowall, so I highly recommend you give this a listen.
As usual, immediately below is the streaming audio of our discussion and below that is the transcript of our conversation.
Streaming Audio
Transcript of the Conversation
Alan Shimel: Hi, everyone. Alan Shimel, devopsy.kinsta.cloud here for another DevOps Chat. Our guest on this episode of DevOps Chat is Jonah Kowall of App Dynamics. Jonah, welcome to DevOps Chat.
Jonah Kowall: Thanks, Alan. Happy to be here—great to speak with you and everyone else listening.
Alan Shimel: Thank you. So Jonah, before we jump into App Dynamics, you have a—you’ve had a bit of a career already. Why don’t you share with our audience a little bit about kinda your journey to how you got here today?
Jonah Kowall: Yeah, definitely. Well, I always knew I wanted to be a technologist and, for many years, I worked at about six or seven different startups. I co-founded one of the first content filtering companies back in the early 2000s and, you know, got acquired a couple of times.
And I kinda shifted careers a few years ago, about seven years ago, and moved into the analyst world and kinda moved away from running ops and security and infrastructure and application performance and decided to take the analyst path, and did that for about four years, which was very interesting and different, learned a lot of new skills, a lot of new muscles were built.
And I joined App Dynamics a little bit over two years ago, and I work with our co-founder and CTO running product strategy. I do a little bit of marketing, but quite a bit of product management and kind of looking into where we’re going as a company to solve the next generation of problems that we’re starting to see in our customer base.
So that’s a little summary of where I came from and however you’d like to take it is great.
Alan Shimel: Sure. I guess the real question is, do you know where you’re going, but we’ll come back to that in a second.
Jonah, as I spoke to you offline about, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about what I have seen, you know, as an observer of the market at devopsy.kinsta.cloud. In terms of the evolution of what used to be just a few years ago, a very kinda stable space called APM, right? We had, the APM space had a handful of players—App Dynamics was certainly one of them—who were, by the way, all doing pretty well, it seemed.
And what we’ve seen in the last few years is, you know, in the—first of all, more people joining the fray, but more than that, in the race to distinguish one from the other, many players within this space are kinda rephrasing their mission, their—not running away from APM, but their APM plus, maybe. And so we’ve seen, you know, alphabet soups of ARAs and a whole bunch of different combinations.
What’s your take on that, Jonah?
Jonah Kowall: So, when you look back—and, you know, when I started at Gartner, there was a lot of confusion around application performance and application monitoring. And there was like a general belief that anything that monitored some kind of application or even monitored the network and tried to extract application information was, in fact, APM.
And what I kind of tried to do in my time at Gartner, and I think it sort of changed some things, was really focus APM on instrumentation of applications. So, how do we see the code, how do we get inside the application, how do we trace from end to end and really provide that visibility and the diagnostic capabilities that are really gonna be needed in today’s applications, which are incredibly complex and diverse, and consist of a lot of new technologies?
So, building that kind of visibility is really hard to do. I mean, if an APM company—and there are plenty of them that have started over the last couple years—they have many, many years before their instrumentation becomes decent, if they’re even going down that path. And the ability to extract information from a running application, without breaking it, is very, very difficult to solve. It takes a lot of time, a lot of experimentation, a lot of work with customers.
And so this market is very hard to enter into and compete with the three leaders in the space. It’s just a big challenge, and you’re looking at five to six years before these things mature, if they continue to pursue them. So what you’re kind of seeing, and what you alluded to, is that companies are trying to take a different angle and avoiding the deep instrumentation and just trying to provide SVKs and tools for developers to build those, you know, that visibility. But it’s a big challenge, because in enterprise and packaged applications, those products don’t work, and that’s really the challenge that I continually see out there when I observe the industry.
Alan Shimel: Got it. So, you know, certain—I’m sorry, Jonah, I have a little tickle. App Dynamics, you know, in, let’s call it an immature industry, rapidly become an 800 pound gorilla, and I think we’ve all seen the proof of that in recent news around acquisitions and so forth. But I’m not gonna go there, Jonah—suffice to say, App Dynamics is a market leader in its space.
How does this evolution, if you will, changing dynamics, you know, you said you’re working on future problems—how do you think this plays into the future of App Dynamics?
Jonah Kowall: Yeah. Well, I think that applications and technologies will continue to evolve, and you know, we’re already starting to see a lot of new application paradigms that we’re gonna have to shift a lot of our core technology to support and to essentially leapfrog what the rest of the market is able to do, and we’re hard at work doing that.
But aside from the deep, you know, introspection of software, there is also a big push for us to really understand the business, because today’s enterprises, regardless of what they do, whether it’s extracting natural resources from the earth or building cars or providing mortgages—these companies are all software companies, and their businesses depend and are driven by their software. And our goal is really to understand the business execution and the user experience of those transactions that are critical. And, in kind of taking that to the next level is really, how do we look at the outcome of software and of these business transactions as they come together.
So, our vision is not only to increase our capabilities of the core of what we do in APM, but also to really provide a lens into the business that really provides that IT business alignment that everyone talks about and everyone struggles with today. So we really see that as the differentiator in these large enterprises that are really challenged with a lot of legacy and a huge amount of demand to change their businesses.
Alan Shimel: Got it. Got it, got it. So, Jonah, let me pivot a little bit to, there was another area I wanted to touch on with you, and that is this whole area of containers, micro-services—but containerization. Virtually every call, every briefing that I’m on, somehow or another containers make their way into the conversation. How big a focus is it over in the, in terms of product and in terms of the strategy at App Dynamics?
Jonah Kowall: Yeah, I mean, micro-services and containers are definitely the peak hype, let’s say, of the day—there’s no question about that. And they provide a lot of benefit, but a lot of people really feel that containers and micro-services are the answer to every problem. And this is something that we’ve seen over and over in our industry where, you know, there’s a new kind of angle to an existing set of technologies that we feel is really gonna make the biggest difference. And although containers and micro-services are both important paradigms, they’re not the answer to everything.
Our customers are clearly retooling some of their applications around a micro-services architecture, and they’re definitely running workloads on containers, and these things are important for us to support, but are they more important than, you know, building core functionality to support new languages and new frameworks and really helping our customers with their more core business problems. It’s hard to say. I mean, both are clearly critical, but a lot of it is hype, and you know, the hype obviously fades as people become disillusioned with the fact that containers and micro-services don’t solve all your problems. They create a lot of new problems, and that’s just the reality of technology.
So, as an industry, we’re very over rotated to containers, micro-services, and public cloud, and you know, we’ll soon realize those aren’t the answer to all of our problems—and oftentimes, they create new problems, as well. So, you know, I think it continues to be a cycle and, you know, I really think the evolution of cloud into a decentralized model will be a pretty interesting trend over the next, you know, 5 to 10 years as well.
Alan Shimel: Got it. I think we’ve barely scratched the surface. You know, Jonah, I was on a call previous to this and it was around software defined storage and networking and stuff, and it just—listening to it, I had such a déjà vu of sitting back in on the VMware stuff, you know, back in, I guess mid-2005, around then.
Jonah Kowall: Yep.
Alan Shimel: It just seems to promise so much change for us here; it’s crazy.
Jonah Kowall:[Laughter] It always does, and you know, it comes with challenges, always, and people become kind of disillusioned, but there are benefits to those that embrace it, do it well, and you know, have the types of problems that those technologies can solve.
Alan Shimel: Yep. Excellent. Well, Jonah, we’re just about up on our time. I’m gonna give you a surprise question here, if you don’t mind—if you can’t answer, that’s okay.
Jonah Kowall: Sure.
Alan Shimel: But I usually ask, the last question I always ask my guest is—recommend one book to our audience that you really think they should read to help them with their careers.
Jonah Kowall: That is an interesting one. I actually tend to, I do a lot of traveling. I actually flew over 200,000 miles in 2016.
Alan Shimel: Wow.
Jonah Kowall: So, when I actually get to read, I tend to read lighter materials, or I read very deep, technical materials that kind of help with some of the product work that I’m doing. So a lot of the books I read tend to not be too inspirational, but I do really enjoy participating in some of the open Slack communities. I enjoy reading a lot of blogs and other content that tends to be fresher.
Alan Shimel: Mm-hmm.
Jonah Kowall: You know, I read probably about 500 blogs in my RSS feed regularly, so that tends to really be how I get information, and I do really enjoy reading some of the Google Scholar, if you set some interesting alerts up, you can get some great research papers coming out from universities that are very interesting and forthcoming, just kind of highlighting some of the next generation thinking from the educational institutions all over the world.
So that really tends to be more what I tend to read versus, you know, something that’s more career focused, I would say, or inspirational in that manner. So sorry I don’t have the best answer, but that’s what I tend to do.
Alan Shimel: No, no—that’s fine, and that works for us. Well, Jonah, I think we—well, we are out of time, but I want to thank you for joining us today on DevOps Chat, and I look forward to perhaps having you on again in the future.
Jonah Kowall: Sounds great. Thanks for your time, Alan, and thanks, everyone, for tuning in
Alan Shimel: Thank you. Jonah Kowall, App Dynamics, our guest today on DevOps Chat.
This is Alan Shimel for devopsy.kinsta.cloud, and we hope to see you soon on another DevOps Chat.
I think we accidentally just set the bar pretty low, but …
… here we go. Let’s begin with a prerequisite pithy quote from an objective industry observer:
“If agile software development was the opening act to a great performance, continuous delivery is the headliner,” according to Kurt Bittner of Forrester Research.
Kurt explains this concept further by saying, “The pace at which consumers expect change is causing a crisis in application development and delivery … agile was a good start, but it wasn’t sufficient to drive better business results; continuous delivery forges the broken link in the value chain, connecting business strategy with business results.”
So there, you have it. At least according to Forrester, continuous delivery (CD) is one of the most important evolutions of agile methodology within the modern software factory. But, there’s more.
Andrew Binstock from Dr. Dobbs fairly well echoes this sentiment, saying: “It’s becoming clear that agile alone is no longer sufficient to keep up with the demands of the present day … software complexity and the need for constant updates are making it difficult for leading edge organizations to keep up without moving beyond agile and embracing continuous delivery.”
Episode 3 of our podcast series discusses the importance of Agile Transformation along WITH Continuous Delivery to automated some of the development, test, and release efforts to remove some of the bottlenecks downstream in the software development life cycle in the build, test and release phases.
Lean Agile + CD can create these 1+1=3 types of results.
Episode 3 of the Continuous Delivery 101 Podcast can be found by:
Anders Wallgren is chief technology officer at Electric Cloud. Anders has over 25 years’ experience designing and building commercial software. Prior to joining Electric Cloud, he held executive positions at Aceva, Archistra, and Impresse and management positions at Macromedia (MACR), Common Ground Software, and Verity (VRTY), where he played critical technical leadership roles in delivering award winning technologies such as Macromedia’s Director 7. Anders holds a 
