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Well, uh, today, you know, when, when, when the holidays roll around, you gotta, you gotta

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queue up some episodes.

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So today for you, the listener is in the past much further than it usually is.

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Uh, maybe what you could do is you can use some context clues and try to figure out what

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day we recorded on.

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Um, I don't, not really sure how that would happen.

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Did either of you have that book in maybe like the late eighties that was like a bunch

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of illustrated pictures.

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And it would, if you solve the puzzle, it would tell you like where there was like a

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million dollars in gold buried somewhere.

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Did you ever see that book?

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I don't know.

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I think your parents are playing a trick on you.

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That's right.

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Mysteriously, I dug all these holes in the, uh, in the shape of the new fence we needed

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to put in.

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I think you were aerating the lawn.

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I think that's what's actually happening.

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Aerating the lawn.

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Very nice.

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Uh, well, why don't you introduce yourself guest?

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Uh, we, we have, we have, we have someone on not only to talk about herself, but also

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to do a participate in a little bit of prediction type of stuff that we'll do at the end, but

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introduce yourself.

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Hi, my name is Paula Kennedy.

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I work at Pivotal alongside my lovely colleagues, Richard and Michael.

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So, um, I am the senior director for platform services and education for Pivotal in EMEA.

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So I'm based in London and I mostly worry about platform things and education things.

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Is that fun?

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It's a lot of fun.

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Yeah.

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It's a lot of fun.

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Yes.

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I love it.

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I have, uh, two teams and they're both filled with fantastic individuals and we have a lot

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of fun and we work with some great customers as well.

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And so I, I think, I think, uh, we on the podcast have talked about, have talked about

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platform stuff, uh, for a little bit and we'll, we'll get to that for sure.

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But like you recently started doing more education stuff, right?

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I mean, so what, what, uh, what, what does that mean around here?

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Exactly.

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It's interesting.

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So I, I've been doing the platform side of things at Pivotal since, well, maybe three

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years now, two or three years and the education side, something I've not focused on, although

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arguably the services that the platform team does are education as well.

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So we're, we're very focused on enabling our customers to do things for themselves.

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And so whilst I have not focused on education, it's always been actually a kind of a by-product

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of the engagements we do.

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But more recently at the start of this year, I volunteered to take on extra work.

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I don't know what I was thinking, but I decided to dive into the education team that we have

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at Pivotal and really understand what those services look like and how we can help customers

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learn more, honestly.

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And it's been interesting for me because on our education side, we focus not just on platform

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education, but also application developer education, which is a new area that I've not thought too

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much about in the past, but it's been really interesting for me to get involved, to understand

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what we teach at Pivotal, how we teach it, what our customers want to learn, how they learn.

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So it's been, it's been a really interesting few months actually diving into that whole area.

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Yeah.

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I mean, kind of like you're, you're, you're saying that the, the services that we offer have

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a educational component in them in, in, in, in the sense of like, let's, let's do new things

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together.

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Uh, you know, a Pivotal person and a customer person, but, um, you know, I guess there's,

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there's always room for more explicit education than just, uh, working on things together, but

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it does make sense to have that, uh, that you and the two teams would sort of, uh, be familiar

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with and know each other based on the way Pivotal functions.

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Yeah.

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And one of the things we've looked at a bit more this year is how we weave education

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more into our customer journeys.

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So we talk a lot at Pivotal about the customer's journey on how to get good at writing applications,

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how to get good at running platforms and education is always part of it.

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But what we've, what I've tried to focus on a bit more this year is placing kind of short

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pieces of education along the journey.

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So if you're going to engage and do a, an application modernization project, for example, you might

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want to start with doing some spring training for developers.

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You might want to start with an overview.

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We have these platform acceleration labs, which really are intense, very hands-on training,

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but, um, teach a lot of things that developers might need before they're going into an app

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TX, an app transformation kind of engagement.

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And so trying to broaden out a program of services and make sure that customers get, get the knowledge

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that they need, that they can learn the theory and then straight ahead, go and do the practical.

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So I, I was, I was, uh, I was touring around the UK in a few cities with one of our customers

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recently, and they, they were all, you know, also doing an educational sort of roadshow.

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It wasn't like, um, they weren't to the point where they're doing like workshops, but, uh, you

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know, they were visiting on various sites and just kind of introducing people to the, uh, to the

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platform for the pivotal thing they had in place.

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And there was, there was a lot of questions about, uh, basically, I guess, doing cloud

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native apps.

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I, I don't, I, I always lose track of the exact phraseology, but you know, stuff that can run

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in containers and might be microservices enabled and all of that.

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And so like, do y'all get involved in doing sort of like workshops like that, you know, kind

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of for customers and going around and setting those up and running them?

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Uh, yes, it's a, it's a combined effort.

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So it's not just, um, my education team, for example, that would be involved in that.

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We, we have lots of different people in pivotal doing similar work.

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So we join a program together.

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So for example, if you're, if you're a new customer to pivotal, you might start with some

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workshops from our platform architecture team.

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You might come in and look at a specific application and how to break it down into microservices.

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We do lots of beginner workshops on our website.

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We've got lots of content about, you know, things to think about and, um, reference material.

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So as a starting point, you might use some of those materials.

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Then you might want to engage on an app modernization program with pivotal.

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And we, again, we have a team that goes in and actually does, um, reviews of architecture

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and recommendations about which applications would make sense to kind of move straight into

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the cloud, which ones need refactoring, which ones should remain where they are for the time

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being.

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Like we, we have a whole suite of services that are tailored for precisely what the customer

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needs.

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And then on the education side, if, if the decision is made to refactor an application, then it

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could be that this pivotal acceleration lab that we do could offer those developers really

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a way of like brushing up their skills, understanding the concepts, really understanding the theory

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before the next thing they dive into is doing the work.

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Yeah.

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I like, I like, I like that idea of like, uh, staging out educational moments.

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Absolutely.

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What's, what's, what's the word we use with kids.

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It's a, it's a learning moment.

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I've forgotten the phrase.

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Like it's a, it's a teachable moment.

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Yes, exactly.

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Well, it's kind of, you know, it's interesting, Paula, unique here.

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Cause I spent some time the last few weeks looking through the public cloud providers

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training curriculum and kind of mainly their certifications and most of their certifications,

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not wrongly, but our, here's how you become, let's say an AWS certified engineer.

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And it's, here's how you use our services, how you learn Lambda or Azure does the same.

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Google does the same.

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So it's very much like, how do you build things with our stuff?

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So what I thought was interesting as you described this and what I've looked at, what we've been

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doing is we're still teaching, I think some general purpose things that have nothing to

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do with pivotal platform.

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I have nothing to do with Bosch or cloud foundry, or even Kubernetes in some cases, it's learn

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boot, learn how you modernize an app, learn.net.

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So, I mean, that, that feels kind of unique.

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I would, I would think, you know, the cloud version isn't wrong and you need to be experts

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in many of those technologies to use them.

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Right.

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But have you noticed when you work with customers and you start to think of those teachable

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moments that you're not trying to start up front with how do I immediately embed myself in

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this one environment's nuances and kind of sharp edges, but just how do I learn better

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programming?

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Yeah, it's, it's interesting.

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We, we are seeing demand from customers.

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Sadly, we had some audio issues, but here Paula fixed back up talking about what she sees

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out there.

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I just want to know how, how I should approach product management as an example.

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So last week we actually ran an experiment here in London where we offered a product management

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workshop for two days and we invited multiple attendees from different customers to come

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along.

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So previously we've run this workshop as a specific for one customer and we go to the customer

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site and we take a bunch of those product managers, typically application product managers

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and run a specific course for the customer.

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But last week in London, we ran a public class and anyone could come.

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And we ended up with a mixture of platform product managers and application product managers

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in one cohort for two days.

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And the, the, the material that we were teaching wasn't particularly product specific.

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It was much more about, well, what is agile and what is lean and, and how do I prioritize

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user needs and what are the features of writing good user stories?

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And so the skills we were teaching last week were not product specific, but they are critical

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for our customers.

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And we, we, we think about them a lot when we're talking about platform as a product, which

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is another thing I talk about a lot, but the product mindset is so important that for us

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teaching customers, those skills is just fundamental.

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Do you find that counter-cultural right now?

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Cause it seems like we've, as in, you know, maybe vendors were all at fault here, but that

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we were almost training enterprises even specifically to almost pick their tech stack before they've

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figured out their problem.

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Like, you know, this is going to be Lambda or it's going to be in containers.

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Now what are we building?

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And it's just kind of almost backwards, like choose the infrastructure first versus infrastructure

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and deployments, almost the late binding choice.

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Like it's the last thing you do.

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So it seems like we've kind of flipped.

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So is you and the team trying to focus on lean and product management and core programming patterns

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and architecture, you feel like you're swimming upstream in the enterprise, but they're like,

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well, just show me how to use MongoDB.

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Show me how I should, you know, deploy this to Kubernetes.

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Or do you find it's a receptive audience that says, no, we need these fundamentals about just

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defining products and building good architectures.

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And then we'll figure out how this gets deployed and run.

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I think we're, we're certainly seeing more, I'm seeing more demand for that more kind of

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generic methodology training than ever before.

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And the most recent one we've had seemingly quite a lot of demand for is, uh, extreme programming

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workshops.

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So we have an, an introduction to XP workshop, again, that we've run ad hoc for customers as

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they've requested it, but we're starting to see demand, more demand for that.

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Um, and I think it's, it's partly a by-product of the fact that we're, we're going into customers

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almost assuming that everyone knows the stuff that we know.

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And it turns out that's not always the case.

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And so therefore when, when we expect a customer who's going on a big journey with us, for

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example, and really wanting to be all in on pivotal platform, they want everything running

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on, on the application service or the container service, and they want to do things like we

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do them because they know it's going to drive their success.

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Turns out that they, they, they understand that they need those other learnings as well.

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They can't just learn the technology.

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They have to learn the methodologies.

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They have to understand that product mindset.

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And so it's, it's, we're starting to see more demand for sure, which is great.

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It is great that, uh, those fundamentals you mentioned.

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So I tweeted something last week as someone wrote, just a really good introduction to like

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software architecture.

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My, my comment was, you know, I've seen people talk about this at conferences too, that we

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have to go back to basics sometimes because we just get so obsessed with, oh my gosh,

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here's this latest thing that you can't even use yet.

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It's on some experimental branch, but this is crazy.

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Meanwhile, people are just like, can you under, can I, can you describe like even just basic

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12 factor apps?

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Cause I don't really get that.

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So is there something that is an industry we're assuming is common knowledge that isn't

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right now, especially as you go talk to enterprises and they go, Hey, Hey, can you back up a little

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bit?

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Cause we're not even, we're not at this step yet.

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Not cause we're not dumb.

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It's just, we get in our bubble and we think everyone's further along.

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It's so interesting.

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I had this conversation today with someone in my team.

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We were talking about, um, Kubernetes, obviously it's like the, the word that just, that we

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talk about all the time.

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Right.

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And, um, it feels sometimes in our echo chamber, everybody knows what Kubernetes is and everybody

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wants it.

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And it's the, it's the thing to have.

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Um, but I had a recent experience where I hosted a hackathon in the London pivotal office

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and it was the NASA space apps hackathon.

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So it was very interesting.

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It was open to the public.

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We had a 48 hour hackathon and it was a complete cross section of individuals that came into

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the office.

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We've probably had 60 to 70 attendees of all different backgrounds.

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Some were students, some were enterprise, some were startup, some were developers, some

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designers, product managers, like a complete real cross section of the tech industry.

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And so I stood up and did my five minute pivotal pitch, uh, which was fun.

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And then I talked about Kubernetes.

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We, very briefly, I had my, my VMware Tanzu t-shirt on with the Kubernetes logo on the back.

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So I turned around and I was like, and you know, if you're like Kubernetes, come work at

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Pivotal.

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Um, and then I asked the question to the audience, who's actually heard of Kubernetes?

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And out of 60 attendees, I think two put their hand up to which I was like, Oh, sometimes

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I forget that we're in this, this world where Kubernetes is the thing that everyone's talking

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about every single day.

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And actually there's like huge swathes of people that have never heard of it and don't

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care about it.

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And it's just an implementation detail somewhere off in the background.

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And it surprised me and, and gave me a little reality check that just because, uh, we think

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it's like top of mind for everybody doesn't mean it is.

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Well, on that topic and something you mentioned earlier.

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So also the other, the other area, uh, you're involved in is the, the, the platform operations

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or platform as a product or platform as a platform, uh, area.

248
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I don't know.

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We were discussing what the, you know, various names for it, uh, a while ago.

250
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I don't know if we came up with platform as a platform, that, that would be fun.

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Uh, but, uh, so, so what is, uh, what, what does that team do?

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So my other team, the platform services team, I think is what we like to be called.

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Now we, we help customers, uh, figure out how to run their platform basically.

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And we, it's, it's an interesting thing.

255
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I've been talking about it a lot and it's a, a similar problem where I sometimes forget

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myself that just because it feels like I've been talking about this for a long time and

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other people I know have been talking about this platform as a product for a long time.

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It, it doesn't mean that it's, um, well understood within our customers or in the, in the kind

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of the broader market, like, um, essentially to try to summarize what it is.

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Uh, we think about the platform as being kind of the foundation within your, your company

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within enterprise to run your applications on top of, and as the people running that platform,

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the platform team, your customers, therefore are those developers who want to deploy the

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applications onto your platform.

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And so what we typically see is what we've seen in the past, let's say is companies will,

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will buy a pivotal platform.

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They'll form a project team to install the platform and then it's installed and then it's

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done.

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And there's, there's not really a sense of the fact that the platform should be an ongoing

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product.

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It needs to meet developer needs.

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It needs to continuously evolve.

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It needs to have, um, kind of outreach to the developers to make them excited to use the

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platform.

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Basically it's everything we think about for, if you are launching a product, we want to have

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that same mindset for internal platforms.

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Yeah.

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The, the way that, you know, the thing that I find interesting about it, well, there's

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many things, but one, one thing in particular is that product part where there's a, I don't

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know, you have basically a product manager or you have multiple people who are, um, product

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managing it, which, which, uh, you know, I don't think people in operations think about product

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managing too, too much.

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It's they, I, I don't know.

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I mean, you tell, tell me what you encounter, but I think the, when, when I've talked about

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it with people, the thing that I, I encounter is they still have, uh, or not still most everyone

285
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has a service delivery mentality, kind of like what you were describing, right?

286
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Like we set up this project and deliver a service.

287
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And then like, if you want to change it, let's start another project, but it's not, it's

288
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almost, and I feel like this must be unfair, but it's almost like there's not this proactive,

289
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uh, gardening of the set of features that the infrastructure might have that you would

290
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see, see in a product.

291
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But, um, I don't know, what, what do you, what do you encounter when you sort of introduce

292
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this idea of like, Hey, you need a product manager or many of them?

293
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Like how does that conversation go with people?

294
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It's not the easiest conversation, honestly.

295
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Um, and, and, and I, and I can understand it.

296
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I mean, if I put myself in the shoes of a, someone who's been sysadmin for years or running

297
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the infrastructure part of an organization, it is a change in mindset and change is hard.

298
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Change is always hard, but for those people that, that embrace it, those are the customers

299
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we see the most success with.

300
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And it's a difficult thing.

301
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I sometimes have, again, remind myself that just because I know it works and I know it

302
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works because I've seen it work, it, it's hard for people who haven't seen it to actually

303
00:18:31,660 --> 00:18:32,760
believe it.

304
00:18:32,880 --> 00:18:40,120
I remember going into a customer and an early customer of Pivotal, uh, and having this conversation

305
00:18:40,120 --> 00:18:43,800
and we, we tried lots of different experiments with our customer.

306
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We ran a product management workshop, we introduced, um, people who were running products in other

307
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parts of Pivotal to do kind of lunch and learn topics for the customer.

308
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We really, really went in with them and trying to position this product mindset.

309
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And in the early days, one of the, uh, platform operators gave me feedback that said, this is

310
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all well and good, but it sounds like marketing nonsense to which I was like, yeah, well, let's

311
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just, let's just suspend disbelief.

312
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Let's just plow on.

313
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Um, and actually that's now one of our most successful customers in Europe, honestly.

314
00:19:20,440 --> 00:19:22,340
Um, but it is tough.

315
00:19:22,420 --> 00:19:23,700
It is a tough conversation.

316
00:19:23,700 --> 00:19:28,780
And especially when, uh, typically within an organization, those people with the skills

317
00:19:28,780 --> 00:19:30,800
aren't in those teams.

318
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So a typical infrastructure team doesn't have product managers or they don't have people

319
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that have come from that background.

320
00:19:35,760 --> 00:19:42,940
So we see, uh, people who get given the job title of product manager who might be project

321
00:19:42,940 --> 00:19:47,580
managers or, or system administrators, or just the most senior engineer on the team.

322
00:19:47,580 --> 00:19:53,660
And so trying to teach the skills of how to manage a product is, is a challenge.

323
00:19:53,660 --> 00:19:55,800
That's where education can, can really help actually.

324
00:19:56,400 --> 00:19:57,920
Yeah, it's, it's like you were discussing earlier.

325
00:19:57,920 --> 00:20:02,340
There's, uh, there's always an interest in general topics, the general topic there being

326
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just product management.

327
00:20:04,160 --> 00:20:05,760
What does that look like?

328
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And, and I guess, I guess that it, I mean, that's, that's a good example of, of what,

329
00:20:10,000 --> 00:20:14,800
what you and Richard were talking about earlier, where it's, uh, uh, I think, especially if

330
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you work at a software vendor, like you kind of, you at least have a halfway decent knowledge

331
00:20:20,340 --> 00:20:25,960
of what a product manager does and is, and, you know, cause it's become a huge part of creating

332
00:20:25,960 --> 00:20:30,300
software, but, uh, yeah, I mean, I think, I think if you don't work at a vendor, it's probably,

333
00:20:30,300 --> 00:20:33,740
uh, a strange role that you've only maybe heard about before.

334
00:20:34,080 --> 00:20:34,400
Yeah.

335
00:20:34,440 --> 00:20:37,100
I mean, what's the, then what's the need, Paula?

336
00:20:37,180 --> 00:20:40,180
I mean, cause someone may look at this and go, that sounds cool, but man, like we heard

337
00:20:40,180 --> 00:20:40,960
it SpringOne, right.

338
00:20:40,980 --> 00:20:43,220
When Schaefer talked about the change, you actually have to have a need.

339
00:20:43,220 --> 00:20:45,340
There has to be something that really triggers you.

340
00:20:45,460 --> 00:20:49,940
So you walk into a company and say, platform is product and they go, that's marketing or that

341
00:20:49,940 --> 00:20:50,460
seems goofy.

342
00:20:50,960 --> 00:20:54,320
What, what is their pain point that would say, shoot, we'll give it a try.

343
00:20:54,780 --> 00:20:55,740
What do you see over and over?

344
00:20:55,960 --> 00:21:02,100
One of the biggest challenges that we see is competing priorities.

345
00:21:03,120 --> 00:21:09,820
So, um, if I give you an example, you have a platform team, customers spent some money

346
00:21:09,820 --> 00:21:10,880
to buy a new platform.

347
00:21:10,880 --> 00:21:14,880
It doesn't matter really what it is, whether it's application servers, Kubernetes, new platforms

348
00:21:14,880 --> 00:21:15,360
come in.

349
00:21:15,480 --> 00:21:17,400
This is the answer to solve the enterprise problems.

350
00:21:17,600 --> 00:21:18,000
This is it.

351
00:21:18,080 --> 00:21:19,760
This is the one thing that's going to fix everything.

352
00:21:20,160 --> 00:21:27,720
So the platform team are responsible to build, configure, start the running, even if they're

353
00:21:27,720 --> 00:21:31,560
going to hand over running to some other team, but there's, there's a effort to get the platform

354
00:21:31,560 --> 00:21:31,940
installed.

355
00:21:32,460 --> 00:21:38,380
And then typically, I mean, hopefully, but also typically within an organization, you've

356
00:21:38,380 --> 00:21:43,800
then got all these different teams who've all got applications that wants to move onto

357
00:21:43,800 --> 00:21:45,200
the new shiny platform.

358
00:21:45,960 --> 00:21:54,240
So then for the platform team, one of the biggest challenges we see over and over again is how

359
00:21:54,240 --> 00:21:57,360
to prioritize, which, which things do they start with?

360
00:21:57,480 --> 00:22:01,180
If everybody's shouting, which, which is the first service that they should implement?

361
00:22:01,540 --> 00:22:02,980
Which database should they use?

362
00:22:03,040 --> 00:22:04,600
Which messaging service should they use?

363
00:22:04,740 --> 00:22:08,720
If there's a hundred apps within an organization and each one is using a different thing, how

364
00:22:08,720 --> 00:22:11,800
does the platform team drive the standardization?

365
00:22:12,580 --> 00:22:15,820
How does the platform team know which thing is the most important thing?

366
00:22:16,640 --> 00:22:21,700
A product, what one, one pain a product manager could help solve for is precisely that it's

367
00:22:21,700 --> 00:22:26,940
acting as a heat shield between the platform team and all of this noise around them.

368
00:22:27,020 --> 00:22:32,920
So actually filter out all the noise, allow the platform team to focus on getting things

369
00:22:32,920 --> 00:22:38,740
done and actually prioritizing the list of things that are coming in and being able to give status

370
00:22:38,740 --> 00:22:39,860
back out again.

371
00:22:40,120 --> 00:22:46,580
It's like a, a, a kind of a wrapper around that platform team that can just increase their

372
00:22:46,580 --> 00:22:49,960
efficiency and increase communication back out to the business.

373
00:22:51,300 --> 00:22:52,240
Yeah, that's good.

374
00:22:52,360 --> 00:22:58,040
So I was, uh, I watched the video of you and Colin at SpringOne talking platform is, I'd

375
00:22:58,040 --> 00:23:00,120
say it was research for this podcast, but I'm not that good.

376
00:23:00,140 --> 00:23:03,840
I was actually preparing a Pluralsight course and that video popped up for me.

377
00:23:03,840 --> 00:23:04,760
I'm like, I should watch this.

378
00:23:05,260 --> 00:23:10,120
Um, one of the breakdowns you did in your talk was talking about the personas that make

379
00:23:10,120 --> 00:23:11,440
up a platform team.

380
00:23:11,500 --> 00:23:12,860
So humanize this for us a little bit.

381
00:23:12,940 --> 00:23:17,460
So what are the, the major roles that form these sort of product teams that run a platform

382
00:23:17,460 --> 00:23:19,800
and what kind of skills do you need in those to be successful?

383
00:23:20,960 --> 00:23:27,440
So we normally talk about, um, in a, in a sort of the smallest, the smallest possible configuration.

384
00:23:27,660 --> 00:23:33,440
Ideally, you're going to have at least two platform engineers and a product manager.

385
00:23:33,880 --> 00:23:39,160
So I mentioned already one of the, one of the activities a product manager does is helps

386
00:23:39,160 --> 00:23:45,500
prioritize the backlog, helps, um, shield the platform team for the platform engineers.

387
00:23:45,740 --> 00:23:50,360
Some of the things that we look for, I was thinking about this, like, what's a, what's

388
00:23:50,360 --> 00:23:52,700
a key skill to be on the platform engineering team?

389
00:23:53,340 --> 00:23:57,380
Um, and then I thought, well, is laziness a skill?

390
00:23:57,500 --> 00:24:02,440
Like one of the things, one of the things that someone in my team described is you want

391
00:24:02,440 --> 00:24:06,180
platform engineers who really hate manual toil.

392
00:24:06,460 --> 00:24:10,440
They really hate those repetitive tasks and they will do anything they can to just automate

393
00:24:10,440 --> 00:24:15,900
the toil away, which comes back to kind of a, a site reliability engineering practice from

394
00:24:15,900 --> 00:24:16,160
Google.

395
00:24:16,160 --> 00:24:19,340
But you want to automate as much as possible.

396
00:24:19,340 --> 00:24:23,940
You want to reduce kind of like manual intervention and effort.

397
00:24:24,380 --> 00:24:29,020
Um, you actually also want to look for folks who are quite curious.

398
00:24:29,020 --> 00:24:35,180
We talk about like engineers being curious of really wanting to, um, add the next thing,

399
00:24:35,300 --> 00:24:38,460
do the next thing, make the platform as, as good as it can be.

400
00:24:38,460 --> 00:24:41,900
We ask the questions to the developers about what they actually need.

401
00:24:42,760 --> 00:24:47,380
Um, and the team doesn't have to be, like I said, it doesn't have to be particularly big.

402
00:24:47,720 --> 00:24:51,740
Actually, it, it can start small with just two, uh, a pivotal.

403
00:24:51,920 --> 00:24:53,620
We talk again about extreme programming.

404
00:24:53,620 --> 00:24:57,300
So we like to have pairs of people who compare together for us.

405
00:24:57,320 --> 00:25:02,180
That's really important for kind of sharing knowledge, um, and producing very high quality

406
00:25:02,180 --> 00:25:02,520
code.

407
00:25:02,520 --> 00:25:04,020
When you've got two people working together.

408
00:25:04,740 --> 00:25:10,860
Um, and then as your team grows, you might bring in specialists, kind of, kind of people

409
00:25:10,860 --> 00:25:12,280
in the team with slightly different skills.

410
00:25:12,280 --> 00:25:17,160
You might have someone who's got more, um, software development skills, who's really going

411
00:25:17,160 --> 00:25:21,260
to be focusing on, on doing more and more coding on the platform, adding more and more things.

412
00:25:21,260 --> 00:25:25,720
You might have someone who's more focused on infrastructure side, but you, you want to have

413
00:25:25,720 --> 00:25:32,460
a balanced team and a balanced skillset within that group that then means that platform team

414
00:25:32,460 --> 00:25:36,320
is just highly efficient and running extremely well.

415
00:25:37,200 --> 00:25:38,060
Yeah, that's good.

416
00:25:38,200 --> 00:25:39,280
So I want to run digital ads.

417
00:25:39,360 --> 00:25:41,360
It says, if you're lazy and curious, apply here.

418
00:25:42,800 --> 00:25:44,620
Like just see what kind of candidates we get.

419
00:25:44,660 --> 00:25:45,180
I like it.

420
00:25:45,640 --> 00:25:45,820
Yeah.

421
00:25:45,820 --> 00:25:46,120
Yeah.

422
00:25:46,120 --> 00:25:46,300
Yeah.

423
00:25:46,400 --> 00:25:46,600
Yeah.

424
00:25:46,600 --> 00:25:52,200
I think that there probably is a word that, uh, in a, uh, uh, judgmentally positive way,

425
00:25:52,200 --> 00:25:54,560
uh, encapsulates that laziness.

426
00:25:54,560 --> 00:25:57,580
Uh, you're, you're efficient is efficiency laziness.

427
00:25:57,580 --> 00:25:58,760
I'm never really sure.

428
00:25:59,060 --> 00:26:02,040
Or, or, uh, more efficiently use your time.

429
00:26:02,040 --> 00:26:03,000
It's like, yeah.

430
00:26:03,000 --> 00:26:06,940
Have y'all ever seen that cartoon where there's like, there's like two tigers watching,

431
00:26:06,940 --> 00:26:08,340
a human jogging.

432
00:26:08,400 --> 00:26:11,000
And one of them is like, why, why is he jogging?

433
00:26:11,060 --> 00:26:12,880
He's not chasing any food.

434
00:26:12,980 --> 00:26:17,960
He needs to conserve his energy for when he's chasing food, which, uh, you know, much more

435
00:26:17,960 --> 00:26:19,160
efficient to not jog.

436
00:26:19,760 --> 00:26:23,580
I think that was in your treasure hunting coloring book, but that's right.

437
00:26:23,640 --> 00:26:24,580
That was the back pages.

438
00:26:24,920 --> 00:26:29,800
That explains my, uh, my, my attitude or lack thereof when it comes to exercise.

439
00:26:29,800 --> 00:26:33,800
I learned from the tigers at a, at a young age from the tigers.

440
00:26:34,000 --> 00:26:34,480
Yeah.

441
00:26:34,520 --> 00:26:35,820
That's your autobiography title.

442
00:26:36,060 --> 00:26:38,200
When I've got to run to a FIBO and pick up a burger.

443
00:26:38,200 --> 00:26:46,700
Uh, so yeah, uh, the, the, uh, the, the, the, the last question I had on this topic and

444
00:26:46,700 --> 00:26:49,700
then, and then we'll do our, our, uh, our prediction stuff.

445
00:26:49,700 --> 00:26:58,360
But, um, so like, like part of the platform is that like you're running stuff in it, uh,

446
00:26:58,360 --> 00:26:59,780
and running people's applications.

447
00:26:59,780 --> 00:27:06,700
And I think like what, when, when I've sort of lost track and I think most everyone has

448
00:27:06,700 --> 00:27:11,940
of like where, like when it comes to DevOps, like where the lines are drawn, which I guess

449
00:27:11,940 --> 00:27:13,200
ironically is the point of it.

450
00:27:13,420 --> 00:27:14,760
So that's why you would lose track.

451
00:27:14,760 --> 00:27:20,520
Um, but presumably there's some sort of set of like production level operations.

452
00:27:20,520 --> 00:27:26,840
The platform team does versus like some set of production-y type of stuff that the product

453
00:27:26,840 --> 00:27:28,140
teams, the developers do.

454
00:27:28,560 --> 00:27:34,780
And like, what are, what are, how do, how are people never, never minding the ideal state

455
00:27:34,780 --> 00:27:35,280
of things?

456
00:27:35,280 --> 00:27:37,060
Like, what do people actually do?

457
00:27:37,740 --> 00:27:43,500
Like, like, are, are there, are there actual like product teams who are like solving production

458
00:27:43,500 --> 00:27:49,380
issues or is it more just like this theoretic thing that they would be, you know, carrying

459
00:27:49,380 --> 00:27:51,080
a pager for their apps in production?

460
00:27:52,880 --> 00:27:53,880
That's a good question.

461
00:27:54,080 --> 00:27:59,980
So there's what we, there's the ideal state that we would love to see happen, which I should

462
00:27:59,980 --> 00:28:07,920
describe, um, is where application teams have kind of as much autonomy as they need.

463
00:28:08,020 --> 00:28:11,440
They've got self-service access to the portal for their platform.

464
00:28:11,580 --> 00:28:14,760
So therefore issues come up, they can fix them themselves.

465
00:28:14,880 --> 00:28:15,780
They're running their apps.

466
00:28:16,020 --> 00:28:18,260
They're, um, writing the apps.

467
00:28:18,520 --> 00:28:19,980
It's DevOps in a, in a nutshell.

468
00:28:20,820 --> 00:28:22,520
Um, but we don't.

469
00:28:22,880 --> 00:28:24,460
We don't always see that.

470
00:28:24,860 --> 00:28:26,560
Um, I mean, I'm working with a customer.

471
00:28:27,260 --> 00:28:31,300
It's going to sound very snarky, but I was, I'm working with a customer at the moment where

472
00:28:31,300 --> 00:28:32,820
we were talking about DevOps.

473
00:28:33,160 --> 00:28:34,280
What's the definition of DevOps?

474
00:28:34,900 --> 00:28:40,820
Um, and this customer said, well, I have a DevOps team, but that's excellent.

475
00:28:41,160 --> 00:28:41,580
Excellent.

476
00:28:41,700 --> 00:28:42,260
What do they do?

477
00:28:42,660 --> 00:28:50,300
Well, uh, actually what, what happens is the DevOps team are the engineers who install the

478
00:28:50,300 --> 00:28:52,660
platform, but there's a whole other team.

479
00:28:52,880 --> 00:28:56,080
Um, the ops team who run the platform.

480
00:28:57,220 --> 00:29:04,060
So I said, well, that's, that's interesting because that sounds a little bit like you've

481
00:29:04,060 --> 00:29:10,180
got a dev team to do the building and then you have an ops team that do the running.

482
00:29:10,360 --> 00:29:15,800
So it sounds a little bit like dev and then ops.

483
00:29:15,960 --> 00:29:18,260
It doesn't really sound like DevOps.

484
00:29:19,020 --> 00:29:19,540
Right.

485
00:29:19,640 --> 00:29:19,840
Right.

486
00:29:20,660 --> 00:29:24,360
Which I looking back was a little bit not kind.

487
00:29:24,700 --> 00:29:29,300
Actually, uh, I wasn't, I wasn't fulfilling my, my pivotal values very well when I tried,

488
00:29:29,360 --> 00:29:30,720
but I tried, I tried to say it kindly.

489
00:29:30,780 --> 00:29:35,300
I wasn't trying to be sarcastic, but, um, it's a thing that we see a lot.

490
00:29:35,600 --> 00:29:40,600
It's still the case that you've got, you've got people building and people running and DevOps

491
00:29:40,600 --> 00:29:42,820
isn't really happening at least at the platform level.

492
00:29:42,900 --> 00:29:44,400
I think it's better at application level.

493
00:29:44,800 --> 00:29:50,920
I hope it is, but it's, it's not, um, the ideal state is not, it's not running everywhere.

494
00:29:51,940 --> 00:29:55,900
I hope that, uh, I hope that interaction had a lot of awkward pauses because I just think

495
00:29:55,900 --> 00:29:57,760
of a British comedy with you doing that.

496
00:29:58,500 --> 00:30:00,620
I was really trying to be very kind.

497
00:30:00,740 --> 00:30:01,520
I really was.

498
00:30:01,640 --> 00:30:02,800
It was just difficult.

499
00:30:03,440 --> 00:30:04,080
Did that work?

500
00:30:04,300 --> 00:30:07,140
Like, do you feel like you were talking them through to a point where they realized that

501
00:30:07,140 --> 00:30:09,540
like maybe, maybe they had separated that?

502
00:30:09,780 --> 00:30:12,580
Like, do you think that that helped at all walking them down that path?

503
00:30:13,140 --> 00:30:21,540
I think it, it highlighted the issues that that customer currently has, but I don't think

504
00:30:21,540 --> 00:30:26,140
yet we have reached the place of being able to help them change it.

505
00:30:26,740 --> 00:30:28,100
It's a very difficult thing.

506
00:30:28,340 --> 00:30:35,820
Um, you know, big customers have ingrained practices and ingrained compliance and reasons

507
00:30:35,820 --> 00:30:37,300
for the way things are.

508
00:30:37,300 --> 00:30:41,120
And it's, it's not just a technology problem to solve.

509
00:30:41,420 --> 00:30:45,100
It's not just as easy as saying, well, now you're going to have one big team and they're

510
00:30:45,100 --> 00:30:45,860
all going to do everything.

511
00:30:46,600 --> 00:30:52,960
Um, and sometimes it feels like I was thinking about the quote where they say the future's here.

512
00:30:53,020 --> 00:30:54,280
It's just not evenly distributed.

513
00:30:54,720 --> 00:30:56,940
I think that's true for practices as well.

514
00:30:56,940 --> 00:31:03,680
It feels like for some of our customers who are able to like really, really kind of change

515
00:31:03,680 --> 00:31:05,640
their practices and follow a DevOps methodology.

516
00:31:06,280 --> 00:31:08,120
That's where we see the success for other customers.

517
00:31:08,260 --> 00:31:10,720
It's just very difficult, very difficult to change.

518
00:31:11,280 --> 00:31:13,040
And so I'm trying my newest resolution.

519
00:31:13,220 --> 00:31:14,340
Let's think about the future.

520
00:31:14,420 --> 00:31:19,260
My newest resolution, have a bit more empathy for our big, big customers and how hard some

521
00:31:19,260 --> 00:31:20,280
of these things really are.

522
00:31:21,740 --> 00:31:22,640
That seems fair.

523
00:31:22,640 --> 00:31:28,180
I think, uh, you know, the, the, the main thing being hard, like the, is the, uh, I don't

524
00:31:28,180 --> 00:31:30,500
know, uh, to, to, to return to a snarky level.

525
00:31:30,500 --> 00:31:34,640
It's sort of like people often forget that like, you know, transformation requires doing

526
00:31:34,640 --> 00:31:35,320
things differently.

527
00:31:35,640 --> 00:31:41,240
And, and so it's, uh, it's important to sort of make sure that you're trying to figure out

528
00:31:41,240 --> 00:31:44,080
what things you should be doing differently and how you should be doing them.

529
00:31:44,140 --> 00:31:49,100
Otherwise, you know, no need to suffer through all that change remain the same and not do

530
00:31:49,100 --> 00:31:52,700
anything, uh, if, if everything's going well, but, uh, all right.

531
00:31:52,760 --> 00:31:54,540
Well, those are, those are good overviews.

532
00:31:54,540 --> 00:31:58,340
And, and, you know, like we were saying, it makes sense how those are, uh, intertwined

533
00:31:58,340 --> 00:31:58,740
together.

534
00:31:58,740 --> 00:32:05,140
It's a, it does seem like fun to answer the question at the top, but now we should, since

535
00:32:05,140 --> 00:32:07,400
it's the end of the year, we should have our predictions.

536
00:32:07,400 --> 00:32:09,360
We had a new year's resolution, which is good.

537
00:32:09,420 --> 00:32:10,260
More, more empathy.

538
00:32:10,520 --> 00:32:13,200
I haven't even started thinking of my new year's resolutions.

539
00:32:13,860 --> 00:32:19,600
Uh, resolution, such a, for, you know, foreboding word, like it sounds like some law that you're

540
00:32:19,600 --> 00:32:20,220
going to pass somewhere.

541
00:32:20,300 --> 00:32:24,460
Maybe it should just be like, you know, a new year's try.

542
00:32:24,900 --> 00:32:25,780
New year's suggestion.

543
00:32:26,180 --> 00:32:26,440
Yeah.

544
00:32:26,620 --> 00:32:26,860
Yeah.

545
00:32:26,940 --> 00:32:32,520
Or, or it should more, maybe what to use another, uh, old word, you know, just like a resolution.

546
00:32:32,520 --> 00:32:36,280
It should be a petition, you know, in the sense that like, this is, this is an idea that

547
00:32:36,280 --> 00:32:36,800
I have.

548
00:32:36,800 --> 00:32:41,740
If only the monarch would look at it, just imagine all these people with paper standing outside

549
00:32:41,740 --> 00:32:45,340
the hallway trying to petition and, uh, maybe one of them gets through anyways.

550
00:32:46,020 --> 00:32:51,320
Uh, yeah, but you know, it's fun to do predictions and, uh, we, we, we've, we've each come up with

551
00:32:51,320 --> 00:32:53,720
a few of our own, but why don't, why don't you start off with one Paula?

552
00:32:53,920 --> 00:32:55,000
We'll put you on the spot.

553
00:32:56,080 --> 00:32:56,800
Okie dokie.

554
00:32:57,140 --> 00:33:03,840
Uh, so when I was thinking about predictions, um, I've been thinking about it over the weekend

555
00:33:03,840 --> 00:33:13,520
and, um, I, I, I kind of went a bit big, honestly, in my predictions, my predictions were, were not

556
00:33:13,520 --> 00:33:16,760
kind of, were not focused on like the day to day.

557
00:33:16,820 --> 00:33:21,220
I was trying to think about like, in an ideal world, what would 2020 look like?

558
00:33:21,660 --> 00:33:28,240
And, um, the first thing that came to my mind was, was really the focus on climate change.

559
00:33:28,560 --> 00:33:36,420
So I was thinking about 2019 and how much we've seen on, you know, um, like activism and we've

560
00:33:36,420 --> 00:33:42,740
seen like more awareness of just how things are in the world right now.

561
00:33:42,740 --> 00:33:48,400
And if we don't do something drastic, it feels like we're not going to be around much longer.

562
00:33:48,780 --> 00:33:50,700
Honestly, the world won't be around much longer.

563
00:33:51,300 --> 00:34:00,600
And so my prediction and more my hope, honestly, is that we will see 2020 as the year where more

564
00:34:00,600 --> 00:34:05,120
technology is used to solve our climate change problems that we're facing.

565
00:34:05,500 --> 00:34:06,360
That's my hope.

566
00:34:08,320 --> 00:34:08,800
Yeah.

567
00:34:08,980 --> 00:34:09,160
All right.

568
00:34:09,220 --> 00:34:10,860
You're going to also have to do your second one.

569
00:34:10,900 --> 00:34:13,620
Cause I'm not following that with something about the tech space.

570
00:34:13,900 --> 00:34:16,980
So yeah, you're doing, you're doing two predictions up front, Paula.

571
00:34:17,760 --> 00:34:19,000
Ah, fine.

572
00:34:19,140 --> 00:34:19,660
Okie dokie.

573
00:34:19,920 --> 00:34:26,480
So my, my second one, these are all much more hopes and wishes than the, uh, uh, practical

574
00:34:26,480 --> 00:34:27,840
applications for technology.

575
00:34:28,220 --> 00:34:30,060
I think, I think that's the secret.

576
00:34:30,180 --> 00:34:33,920
That's the secret of all predictions is really, it's just like things you want to happen.

577
00:34:33,920 --> 00:34:38,980
Well, unless you're a real downer of a person and you're like, oh, I don't know, world will

578
00:34:38,980 --> 00:34:39,300
end.

579
00:34:40,880 --> 00:34:42,920
Oh no, mine are very optimistic, right?

580
00:34:43,000 --> 00:34:45,620
So like I say, I hope that technology is going to save the world.

581
00:34:45,860 --> 00:34:46,680
That's the first one.

582
00:34:47,040 --> 00:34:47,200
Nice.

583
00:34:47,540 --> 00:34:52,320
Uh, my second one is more in the kind of ethics space.

584
00:34:52,900 --> 00:34:56,940
So again, it's felt a little bit like, I don't know if it's just me, but it feels like

585
00:34:56,940 --> 00:35:01,880
2019 has just, it's just, there's been a lot of bad news.

586
00:35:01,880 --> 00:35:07,540
There's been an awful lot of stories of like companies doing bad things, whether it's the

587
00:35:07,540 --> 00:35:12,960
employees doing bad things or companies signing up for contracts to do bad things.

588
00:35:13,600 --> 00:35:17,680
It's just felt a bit sad and awful at times.

589
00:35:17,800 --> 00:35:21,600
I mean, maybe that's because I spend all my time on Twitter actually, which is, can be a

590
00:35:21,600 --> 00:35:24,760
dark place, can be a dark place at the best of times.

591
00:35:24,760 --> 00:35:33,300
Um, but my hope, my hope for 2020 is that we see a rise in ethics in technology.

592
00:35:33,580 --> 00:35:42,160
I hope that we see more companies pledging, making ethical pledges or, um, choosing to

593
00:35:42,160 --> 00:35:47,620
do things like, uh, consequence scanning, which is the thing I've, I'm starting to read up

594
00:35:47,620 --> 00:35:54,720
about recently, um, understanding that technology can be used for good and can be used for bad.

595
00:35:54,720 --> 00:36:03,040
And we have to try to, as technologists, we have to try to do good, honestly.

596
00:36:03,500 --> 00:36:08,820
And so I'm hopeful that maybe 2020 is the year we see more good than bad.

597
00:36:10,280 --> 00:36:12,560
So, so what's, uh, what's consequence scanning?

598
00:36:13,180 --> 00:36:14,400
Well, yeah, I like the term.

599
00:36:16,100 --> 00:36:17,320
So it's interesting, right?

600
00:36:17,340 --> 00:36:25,500
There was, uh, there was a very specific example this year where we saw, um, Seth Vargo, who,

601
00:36:25,500 --> 00:36:28,200
uh, I think used to work for chef.

602
00:36:28,540 --> 00:36:34,420
He had some open source code and then it was being used in a way that he didn't, uh, ever

603
00:36:34,420 --> 00:36:35,720
intend it to be used.

604
00:36:35,720 --> 00:36:42,040
And so he pulled it from GitHub and so, um, or from open source completely so that people

605
00:36:42,040 --> 00:36:42,860
couldn't use it anymore.

606
00:36:43,260 --> 00:36:50,140
And so it's where, um, you build something, take facial recognition as an example, right?

607
00:36:50,280 --> 00:36:56,180
You might have very, very positive intentions for why you want to build facial recognition

608
00:36:56,180 --> 00:36:56,660
software.

609
00:36:56,820 --> 00:37:01,940
Maybe you want to make it easier for people to log into their phone, for example, but then

610
00:37:01,940 --> 00:37:08,400
it turns out that governments can use it to track people and can use it to start building

611
00:37:08,400 --> 00:37:09,600
databases of people.

612
00:37:09,920 --> 00:37:14,840
And there's unintended consequences for the technology that you've built that had you known

613
00:37:14,840 --> 00:37:18,560
about them in the first place, maybe you wouldn't have built that technology.

614
00:37:19,880 --> 00:37:22,900
And so consequence scanning is a, is a framework.

615
00:37:23,680 --> 00:37:30,120
Um, it was actually created by, uh, an organization in the UK called dot everyone, which is a non-profit

616
00:37:30,120 --> 00:37:37,580
organization and it's a, it's a way of trying to just ask a few questions of the code that

617
00:37:37,580 --> 00:37:39,400
you're writing or the thing that you're building.

618
00:37:40,880 --> 00:37:46,460
If, if some evil mastermind was to get hold of this and use it for bad, what's the worst

619
00:37:46,460 --> 00:37:53,760
thing that they could do, for example, and just try to put an ethical framework around what

620
00:37:53,760 --> 00:37:57,780
you're doing, why you're doing it and asking some, some basic questions.

621
00:37:58,460 --> 00:37:59,600
So I quite like it.

622
00:37:59,660 --> 00:38:05,080
It's something I, I, like I said, I hope to see more, more ethical considerations being

623
00:38:05,080 --> 00:38:06,560
thought about in, in 2020.

624
00:38:08,000 --> 00:38:08,320
Yeah.

625
00:38:08,320 --> 00:38:11,240
I think it's fascinating when the cat gets out the bag though, that if you're years into

626
00:38:11,240 --> 00:38:15,000
said technology, then all of a sudden there's a certain implication of trying to pull it

627
00:38:15,000 --> 00:38:17,400
back when it's being used in all kinds of good and bad ways.

628
00:38:17,500 --> 00:38:19,840
So if you try to harm the bad way, you're going to impact the good way.

629
00:38:19,920 --> 00:38:23,680
And I wonder if next year you see companies not doing business with companies that do

630
00:38:23,680 --> 00:38:27,140
have a strong activist point of view because you worry that, well, maybe they'll pull this

631
00:38:27,140 --> 00:38:29,700
technology in a few years with a eager employee.

632
00:38:29,700 --> 00:38:33,780
It's like, it's a very inter intermingled conversation we're having right now, which is

633
00:38:33,780 --> 00:38:36,680
fascinating because things that can be used for good can be used for bad.

634
00:38:36,880 --> 00:38:39,380
And those definitions of good and bad are different.

635
00:38:39,440 --> 00:38:42,740
So it's such a fascinating way where you can't step back and just say, well, let's see what

636
00:38:42,740 --> 00:38:43,140
happens.

637
00:38:43,140 --> 00:38:48,140
But at the same time, there's a lot of real implications of pulling things offline or taking

638
00:38:48,140 --> 00:38:49,700
source code away or things like that.

639
00:38:49,780 --> 00:38:51,000
There's a blast radius.

640
00:38:51,460 --> 00:38:52,620
It's hard to calculate now.

641
00:38:53,260 --> 00:38:53,600
Absolutely.

642
00:38:54,020 --> 00:38:59,300
And it's interesting around, I've seen a lot of discussion online about open source licensing

643
00:38:59,300 --> 00:39:07,140
and how you could somehow have a license that, as you mentioned, like only would allow your

644
00:39:07,140 --> 00:39:09,280
technology to be used the way it was intended.

645
00:39:09,280 --> 00:39:13,900
And if it's used in a different way that you as the creator don't agree with, could you

646
00:39:13,900 --> 00:39:17,280
refuse to give someone access to the source code?

647
00:39:17,820 --> 00:39:25,240
It's, um, it's not an easy area actually, but I, I think the more, at least people think

648
00:39:25,240 --> 00:39:28,500
about it, like that, that's, that's the only hope I have.

649
00:39:28,540 --> 00:39:35,480
Like, I don't think there's an easy answer, but, um, if we all, if we all had good intentions,

650
00:39:35,480 --> 00:39:36,980
it would be, it would be good.

651
00:39:38,340 --> 00:39:39,000
No, good.

652
00:39:39,120 --> 00:39:39,900
Those are two good ones.

653
00:39:40,020 --> 00:39:40,260
All right.

654
00:39:40,340 --> 00:39:42,860
So what do I have that's, uh, not remotely as meaningful?

655
00:39:43,680 --> 00:39:44,120
Sorry.

656
00:39:45,240 --> 00:39:46,920
I just did a very big picture.

657
00:39:47,140 --> 00:39:47,320
Yeah.

658
00:39:47,380 --> 00:39:47,840
Good Lord.

659
00:39:48,340 --> 00:39:49,460
Paula goes third next time.

660
00:39:49,800 --> 00:39:52,480
Uh, no, I mean the one, now that I'm thinking more negatively, I think that we're going to

661
00:39:52,480 --> 00:39:58,920
hit a, uh, call it the trough of disillusionment, whoever's, whatever analyst says that term

662
00:39:58,920 --> 00:40:02,760
on things like microservices, Kubernetes, some of these things that are now, we're finally

663
00:40:02,760 --> 00:40:06,660
in year two or three of probably being deployed at big places, right?

664
00:40:06,660 --> 00:40:08,980
Like we're not first year kicking the tires on these things.

665
00:40:08,980 --> 00:40:12,080
Now, as you said, that could partially be our bubble because plenty of people are still

666
00:40:12,080 --> 00:40:15,940
brand new on this, but it seems like for a decent number of companies, we're far enough

667
00:40:15,940 --> 00:40:19,820
along now where maybe now you start hitting scale challenges, skill challenges.

668
00:40:20,380 --> 00:40:21,760
Everything feels more fragmented.

669
00:40:21,760 --> 00:40:27,020
The open source explosion is amazing and all this choice, but all of a sudden now the complexity

670
00:40:27,020 --> 00:40:28,660
is, is getting pretty intense.

671
00:40:28,660 --> 00:40:33,000
I just wonder if we're going to hit a point mid year or sometime next year where people

672
00:40:33,000 --> 00:40:34,880
are back to like, Hey, modular monoliths.

673
00:40:34,880 --> 00:40:39,180
And Hey, you know, back to platforms that have a higher level abstraction because all these

674
00:40:39,180 --> 00:40:44,900
primitives while powerful have this such a more tricky configuration and monitoring surface

675
00:40:44,900 --> 00:40:45,940
and security surface.

676
00:40:45,940 --> 00:40:49,460
And maybe we don't all need these raw primitives to build our own stuff.

677
00:40:49,460 --> 00:40:53,060
We really should figure out something like Zite, something like what we have with Paz,

678
00:40:53,140 --> 00:40:57,560
something like all these Heroku, these other things that still simplify things.

679
00:40:57,660 --> 00:40:59,060
So I mean, you're always going to want the primitives.

680
00:40:59,220 --> 00:41:03,040
I just wonder if there's going to be a little bit of a whiplash back to something that hides

681
00:41:03,040 --> 00:41:06,460
more of the complexity because now people are going to start hitting a scale point where

682
00:41:06,460 --> 00:41:07,840
that complexity emerges again.

683
00:41:09,480 --> 00:41:09,920
Yeah.

684
00:41:10,020 --> 00:41:15,080
You know, like for the listeners trying to place when this was recorded game or dig some

685
00:41:15,080 --> 00:41:19,220
fence posts in the backyard, you know, like there was a, there was reinvent last week and

686
00:41:19,220 --> 00:41:24,360
it like every time there's a, that laundry list of things that are available, plus everyone

687
00:41:24,360 --> 00:41:25,400
else's laundry list.

688
00:41:25,540 --> 00:41:31,900
I always think like, man, I'm glad I'm on this, this, this side of, of the technology sort

689
00:41:31,900 --> 00:41:36,280
of usage, because like, if not that I'd have to like know all this stuff and like evaluate

690
00:41:36,280 --> 00:41:37,160
it all and figure it out.

691
00:41:37,160 --> 00:41:42,080
So there, there is like, it's almost like there's too much stuff too frequently to sort

692
00:41:42,080 --> 00:41:49,160
of get a handle on, which I think, you know, on the one hand it's a lot of work to decide

693
00:41:49,160 --> 00:41:52,960
what to use, but I think that also has kind of a slowing down effect that you, you enter

694
00:41:52,960 --> 00:41:56,800
analysis paralysis of just like looking at everything and evaluating it.

695
00:41:56,880 --> 00:42:00,400
And then you go back to just doing things the old way because, because you know, you know

696
00:42:00,400 --> 00:42:04,240
it works, but yeah, it's a, there's a lot of stuff out there.

697
00:42:04,240 --> 00:42:08,860
And so, you know, there could even be the, I don't, I don't think the, uh, the hype cycle

698
00:42:08,860 --> 00:42:13,200
or the, uh, well, I forget what that's based on, but there should also be, there should

699
00:42:13,200 --> 00:42:18,440
be something before, uh, something between inflated expectations and trough of, uh, like

700
00:42:18,440 --> 00:42:23,480
disillusionment, which is like, you know, I don't know, oatmeal bowl of overwhelmingness

701
00:42:23,480 --> 00:42:28,280
of just like, there's, there's just too much stuff and, and, uh, you can't get this disillusioned

702
00:42:28,280 --> 00:42:32,180
if you think there's all this other stuff fogging up your vision, but I don't think that stuff

703
00:42:32,180 --> 00:42:32,640
standardized.

704
00:42:33,020 --> 00:42:33,340
Yeah.

705
00:42:33,340 --> 00:42:34,400
That stuff's not going to go away.

706
00:42:34,440 --> 00:42:37,500
I mean, Steven O'Grady wrote my, my favorite summary of re-invent.

707
00:42:37,560 --> 00:42:39,480
He just had some really thoughtful points in there.

708
00:42:39,540 --> 00:42:43,340
One of them is that look, Amazon, I think actively resists the sort of integrated solution

709
00:42:43,340 --> 00:42:43,720
approach.

710
00:42:43,720 --> 00:42:46,800
They just build a lot of primitives partially because that's how their org is set up.

711
00:42:47,220 --> 00:42:48,880
Partially that's what their customers ask for.

712
00:42:48,980 --> 00:42:53,100
So they, you know, I was expecting it reinvent some more of these integrated experiences kind

713
00:42:53,100 --> 00:42:56,260
of hide me from more of the muck, roll these things up and they didn't do it.

714
00:42:56,680 --> 00:43:00,000
And I don't know if they ever really will, or if their thing is just, that's not what they

715
00:43:00,000 --> 00:43:00,300
offer.

716
00:43:00,560 --> 00:43:03,940
And so for some people, look, those primitives are going to keep growing like crazy because

717
00:43:03,940 --> 00:43:07,760
people love them, but it still seems like that opens up a slot in the market for people

718
00:43:07,760 --> 00:43:11,540
who say, maybe there's a lot of people out there who really don't want to stitch it all

719
00:43:11,540 --> 00:43:13,640
together and you're going to want both, right?

720
00:43:13,640 --> 00:43:18,500
I don't think either one wins, but I think you will potentially see a return to things

721
00:43:18,500 --> 00:43:20,400
that are just helping me focus back.

722
00:43:20,420 --> 00:43:25,000
As we first started talking about, help me just build good stuff and make all the infrastructure

723
00:43:25,000 --> 00:43:26,360
the last thing I get to decide.

724
00:43:26,600 --> 00:43:27,140
I don't know.

725
00:43:27,180 --> 00:43:29,120
I personally think we're going to move more back towards that.

726
00:43:30,220 --> 00:43:30,620
All right.

727
00:43:30,640 --> 00:43:31,560
Do you have another one, Richard?

728
00:43:32,300 --> 00:43:32,620
Yeah.

729
00:43:32,620 --> 00:43:38,200
The last one I'll put in, I added a couple of mine together, was back to the explosion of

730
00:43:38,200 --> 00:43:38,800
everything space.

731
00:43:38,800 --> 00:43:43,020
It feels like we're going to see some of these database vendors join forces next year, potentially

732
00:43:43,020 --> 00:43:43,900
acquisitions.

733
00:43:43,900 --> 00:43:48,180
Same with APM, which is seemingly harder to be differentiated among all these different monitoring

734
00:43:48,180 --> 00:43:49,800
logging observability vendors.

735
00:43:50,040 --> 00:43:53,200
It seems like it's harder and harder for all of them to differentiate a little bit.

736
00:43:53,300 --> 00:43:57,840
So I wouldn't be surprised to see a number of those get picked up or consolidated just because

737
00:43:57,840 --> 00:44:02,680
is there that much differentiation there among all these different databases, all these APM

738
00:44:02,680 --> 00:44:03,000
vendors?

739
00:44:03,140 --> 00:44:07,320
I wouldn't be surprised to see the cloud vendors pick some up or a couple of them to join forces.

740
00:44:08,260 --> 00:44:12,080
Well, you know, definitely there needs to be some acquisitions in the APM market because

741
00:44:12,080 --> 00:44:20,880
the way that market operates from my being in it and observing it for the past 25 years is there's a team of people who do some revolutionary.

742
00:44:21,380 --> 00:44:22,500
I guess it's not revolutionary.

743
00:44:22,500 --> 00:44:27,120
They do some innovation and then they have a good company that gets acquired and then they

744
00:44:27,120 --> 00:44:31,160
quit that company and start another company which gets acquired and they start another company.

745
00:44:31,700 --> 00:44:36,820
But I think that original set of people from Wiley is probably getting close to retirement.

746
00:44:37,380 --> 00:44:41,960
So we need to get a new little core team together that's going to go through all these companies

747
00:44:41,960 --> 00:44:49,660
and continually reinvent and evolve APM monitoring, which is always fun.

748
00:44:50,380 --> 00:44:50,460
Yeah.

749
00:44:50,540 --> 00:44:55,780
Well, I'll just go over one, which I think is related.

750
00:44:55,940 --> 00:44:59,780
So I was asked to do a predictions thing a while ago, which made me think we should do one here.

751
00:45:00,420 --> 00:45:07,600
But I was, and also like those people I was talking with recently and other things related to what we were saying.

752
00:45:08,720 --> 00:45:15,280
Yeah, there's just like, I think there's a lot of people who would just be kicking off their modernization programs.

753
00:45:15,740 --> 00:45:21,380
And the reason I think about that is a lot of the questions that one of the blocker questions I get very frequently

754
00:45:21,380 --> 00:45:27,180
when I'm talking with people out and about is like, well, what about if there's this one team

755
00:45:27,180 --> 00:45:29,620
who doesn't ever do anything, right?

756
00:45:29,620 --> 00:45:34,740
And therefore it's this backing service that they control and we depend on that service

757
00:45:34,740 --> 00:45:37,380
and it's not really evolving as quickly as we need to do.

758
00:45:37,460 --> 00:45:40,000
And it's not always like a mainframe team.

759
00:45:40,260 --> 00:45:44,660
I mean, sometimes that's, you know, it's actually kind of a minority of the case that it's someone there.

760
00:45:44,720 --> 00:45:50,700
But there's inevitably in, if I haven't used all the time talking and there's actually some questions,

761
00:45:50,900 --> 00:45:56,700
like one of the questions will basically be like, how do I motivate other people, other teams to do stuff?

762
00:45:57,660 --> 00:46:02,500
And part of that do, and that doing stuff is like, you know, you don't just want them to do stuff

763
00:46:02,500 --> 00:46:03,960
because you enjoy watching motion.

764
00:46:03,960 --> 00:46:08,920
I guess that could be a reason, but you want them to actually change something you depend on

765
00:46:08,920 --> 00:46:10,940
or like provide access to something.

766
00:46:11,080 --> 00:46:16,120
Like it could be something as simple as like, we need to, uh, use the inventory system to know

767
00:46:16,120 --> 00:46:19,780
which store a thing is in and getting that is difficult.

768
00:46:19,780 --> 00:46:24,320
So it's, it's made me think a lot over the past several months that really like there's a huge amount

769
00:46:24,320 --> 00:46:27,680
of modernization efforts that, uh, that need to be going on.

770
00:46:27,680 --> 00:46:31,620
And so I was, I was looking up some figures of, of like how much there is.

771
00:46:31,620 --> 00:46:33,900
And, you know, there's all sorts of various things like that.

772
00:46:33,900 --> 00:46:38,760
But one of the, I think a good rule of someone is that Gardner had one last year that basically

773
00:46:38,760 --> 00:46:45,620
like 70% of most people's budget is spent on legacy applications, which makes sense, right?

774
00:46:45,620 --> 00:46:46,680
To keep them up and running.

775
00:46:46,680 --> 00:46:50,580
And there's a lot more legacy applications than new applications by definition.

776
00:46:50,960 --> 00:46:58,160
But I think, I think what's important about that is just realizing that the bulk of all these things, uh, exist out here and they need to be updated and changed.

777
00:46:58,160 --> 00:47:04,260
And, and indeed, I think, uh, I see little hints and pieces of that, especially in talking with people about platform stuff.

778
00:47:04,260 --> 00:47:10,440
So I think, I think that'll be a big topic and what we'll see people doing a, uh, a lot of in, in next year.

779
00:47:10,440 --> 00:47:19,020
Now, you know, and, and I think, I think the other driver for that is like, I, I think everyone's decided that Kubernetes is what they should be running.

780
00:47:19,180 --> 00:47:23,180
And, you know, then you got to select a distro or whatever and, you know, get it up and running.

781
00:47:23,180 --> 00:47:29,700
But like, as, as we were kind of talking about earlier, pretty soon what you're going to encounter is like, Ooh, we got this cool new infrastructure running.

782
00:47:29,960 --> 00:47:35,260
And now we need to make it so our applications can run on it, uh, which is basically modernization.

783
00:47:35,480 --> 00:47:38,680
So in moving things over, you'll have to, uh, fix them up.

784
00:47:38,800 --> 00:47:41,860
And hopefully, hopefully my life insurance company will do this.

785
00:47:41,860 --> 00:47:49,500
Cause you know, it's the end of the year, you got to pay your premium and, and my life insurance company, I don't know if y'all have seen this, but it's does that thing where like, it's got a shiny new UI.

786
00:47:49,860 --> 00:47:53,520
And then you actually click on some things and it goes back to this really old UI.

787
00:47:53,700 --> 00:47:57,120
So they've got like a hybrid, uh, hybrid transformation happening.

788
00:47:57,120 --> 00:48:02,380
And, and most comically, uh, I, you know, they're, I'm sure they're a fine company.

789
00:48:02,500 --> 00:48:15,360
I won't name them, but most commonly they just added this, this past few months, this feature to do auto pay out of your banking account, instead of having to fill out a PDF and upload it to them to, uh, authorize auto payments.

790
00:48:15,780 --> 00:48:18,260
So, uh, way to modernize.

791
00:48:18,660 --> 00:48:22,900
I think there's a lot of that to, uh, to, to work on over the next few years.

792
00:48:24,120 --> 00:48:28,740
And then, and then, and then in, in, uh, in the vein of Paula's like, uh, predictions are just wishes.

793
00:48:28,920 --> 00:48:32,020
I was thinking earlier, I really liked that iPad mini.

794
00:48:32,180 --> 00:48:33,640
I don't know if you've ever used one of those.

795
00:48:33,720 --> 00:48:36,920
I used to have one, but they have one that only works with the old Apple pencil.

796
00:48:37,100 --> 00:48:45,480
So I keep thinking I should buy an iPad mini, but then, you know, when you buy a new computer thing, you want to make sure it's, uh, you got, uh, forward compatibility.

797
00:48:45,560 --> 00:48:52,680
So like, I'm hoping I'm predicting they're going to come out with an iPad mini that works with the new Apple pencil and not just the old one.

798
00:48:52,680 --> 00:48:55,980
So I will feel much better about buying this mini one.

799
00:48:55,980 --> 00:49:00,220
Cause that one will actually like fit in a jacket pocket and, uh, various small places.

800
00:49:00,340 --> 00:49:04,840
And, uh, it's much easier to hold if you're like reading a book as I did.

801
00:49:05,100 --> 00:49:09,800
Do you, do you, do either of you have dedicated Kindle devices or like ebook devices?

802
00:49:09,940 --> 00:49:10,920
I have a Kindle.

803
00:49:11,400 --> 00:49:14,160
What's, what's the, what's the theory of operations of that?

804
00:49:14,220 --> 00:49:16,420
Why don't you just use like your phone or an iPad?

805
00:49:16,760 --> 00:49:22,420
Like what, uh, Oh, well, my phone is too small and I don't have an iPad.

806
00:49:22,620 --> 00:49:23,540
Oh, there you go.

807
00:49:25,240 --> 00:49:28,200
I'm a Paula's, you know, American doppelganger then.

808
00:49:28,200 --> 00:49:29,460
Cause that's what's what I have.

809
00:49:29,560 --> 00:49:30,340
I mean, that's the same thing.

810
00:49:30,380 --> 00:49:32,900
I don't read on my phone and yeah, I don't have a tablet.

811
00:49:32,980 --> 00:49:33,640
I like my Kindle.

812
00:49:33,700 --> 00:49:34,540
I can take it everywhere.

813
00:49:34,740 --> 00:49:36,120
I love my Kindle.

814
00:49:36,420 --> 00:49:37,720
30 something books a year on it.

815
00:49:37,720 --> 00:49:39,080
It's just easier to carry that around.

816
00:49:39,360 --> 00:49:39,600
Yeah.

817
00:49:39,880 --> 00:49:40,160
Yeah.

818
00:49:40,260 --> 00:49:40,740
All right.

819
00:49:40,800 --> 00:49:44,880
I tried out one of those paper whites at the airport and I still, the refresh thing

820
00:49:44,880 --> 00:49:45,900
on it still bugs me.

821
00:49:45,960 --> 00:49:49,780
Like whenever you turn a page, like, I don't know, I read on my phone.

822
00:49:49,860 --> 00:49:51,040
So I must be the weird one.

823
00:49:51,240 --> 00:49:52,980
That'd be fun to see what the divide is.

824
00:49:53,460 --> 00:49:55,040
Well, thanks for being on Paula.

825
00:49:55,600 --> 00:49:55,820
I think.

826
00:49:55,820 --> 00:49:56,660
Thank you for having me.

827
00:49:56,720 --> 00:49:57,660
I've had so much fun.

828
00:49:58,080 --> 00:49:59,680
We'll see what happens over the next year.

829
00:49:59,800 --> 00:50:03,920
I think, uh, I think all our predictions will come true except the bad ones.

830
00:50:06,820 --> 00:50:10,920
You have to go through the trough of disillusionment to emerge at the plateau or product.

831
00:50:11,280 --> 00:50:11,840
That's right.

832
00:50:12,440 --> 00:50:13,240
That'll be fine.

833
00:50:13,440 --> 00:50:14,500
Even that's a good one.

834
00:50:14,980 --> 00:50:17,540
Uh, well, as always, this has been a Pivotal Conversations.

835
00:50:17,540 --> 00:50:23,440
If you want to get the, uh, the back catalog, the wonderful multi-year back catalog of, uh,

836
00:50:23,560 --> 00:50:27,160
of this podcast, you can go to soundcloud.com slash Pivotal Conversations.

837
00:50:27,700 --> 00:50:33,960
And, uh, usually every Thursday we post the full show notes, uh, at pivotal.io slash podcast.

838
00:50:33,960 --> 00:50:35,960
And with that, we'll see everyone next time.

839
00:50:36,280 --> 00:50:36,680
Bye-bye.