1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:07,360 well you're back again brian ross uh for maybe your second appearance is that right yes 2 00:00:07,360 --> 00:00:14,960 thank you so much yeah a little while i think the last one was uh early this year that sounds 3 00:00:14,960 --> 00:00:21,600 about right yeah something like that yeah yeah yeah well we we were we were uh talking with each 4 00:00:21,600 --> 00:00:27,920 other through slides and dming and stuff and and you i think you brought up a intriguing question 5 00:00:27,920 --> 00:00:33,360 that i i uh i haven't contemplated in a long time it's like nowadays there's a lot of people who 6 00:00:33,360 --> 00:00:38,880 interested in a path to production a golden path even a secure software supply chain to do my 7 00:00:38,880 --> 00:00:45,200 obligatory joke i don't think anyone wants an unsecure supply chain so whatever but it's always 8 00:00:45,200 --> 00:00:51,840 good to emphasize things and uh uh and and i think i think you raised the point that like well i mean 9 00:00:51,840 --> 00:00:58,240 haven't we been doing you know uh automated builds since the day if anyone remembers of cruise control 10 00:00:58,800 --> 00:01:02,720 and then you had i think it was hudson and then oracle had a trademark little problem and then it 11 00:01:02,720 --> 00:01:08,480 became jenkins and then you had uh i think atlassian has some you got this that and the other all the way 12 00:01:08,480 --> 00:01:14,000 up to like uh you got github actions that people seem to be incorporating into their things and so 13 00:01:14,000 --> 00:01:19,680 like what's up with like uh this golden path path to production talk like are we like uh what what's 14 00:01:19,680 --> 00:01:26,400 new here what's what's the consideration you know it's really interesting that um all that is new is 15 00:01:26,400 --> 00:01:33,280 old right um as i say we've had a lot of this technology before and i'm out talking to lots of customers 16 00:01:33,840 --> 00:01:39,280 about golden path about platform engineering and these terms have got a lot of buzz and a lot of 17 00:01:39,280 --> 00:01:46,560 following and the risk with it i think is that we always end up looking at that thing as something 18 00:01:46,560 --> 00:01:52,800 new that we should follow in itself um you know kubernetes would be no different here right brand new 19 00:01:52,800 --> 00:01:59,520 technology we should definitely deploy that we want to have a kubernetes platform and my job is largely 20 00:01:59,520 --> 00:02:04,080 to ask why why are we doing these things what is it we're looking to achieve and so when i think about 21 00:02:04,080 --> 00:02:08,960 golden path i think less about the tools that are in place and a bit more about what the value is 22 00:02:08,960 --> 00:02:15,600 we're trying to get and i think that's one of the areas that i'm seeing now and i'm on the cusp of um 23 00:02:16,400 --> 00:02:21,600 thinking about a blog article around the sins of platform engineering because i'm hearing a couple 24 00:02:21,600 --> 00:02:27,360 of key phrases now that kind of signpost to me that perhaps we're not doing platform engineering 25 00:02:27,360 --> 00:02:32,720 perhaps where we're just focusing on too much on the tools and it came from a the idea of a friend of 26 00:02:32,720 --> 00:02:39,600 mine so for example you're asking about the the differences i think the the main thing is that 27 00:02:39,600 --> 00:02:46,240 developers have been doing cisd for a long time and i think with golden path what we're trying to do is 28 00:02:46,240 --> 00:02:52,960 be a bit more abstract about how we approach that so it's not just one way of deploying software 29 00:02:52,960 --> 00:02:57,120 because developers did that already with hudson and jenkins and everything that followed it 30 00:02:57,840 --> 00:03:04,560 but a golden path for me is the ability to build something that developers want to use in other 31 00:03:04,560 --> 00:03:12,240 words you have a cicd pipeline that is flexible enough that many development teams give up their 32 00:03:12,240 --> 00:03:17,920 own environments in order to use your central one and that's the critical thing i think there's so many 33 00:03:17,920 --> 00:03:24,000 organizations i speak to that have deployed effectively a cicd and they're still disappointed 34 00:03:24,000 --> 00:03:30,240 that developers are refusing to use it they know that the developer's own one is more locally optimized 35 00:03:30,240 --> 00:03:35,440 does things that perhaps the central one can't do it's tooling they're really comfortable with etc etc 36 00:03:36,400 --> 00:03:44,240 you know like what what is your because what's your sense for how many organizations are building out 37 00:03:44,960 --> 00:03:52,640 let's say a kubernetes cluster or or a general cloud infrastructure strategy with the intention of it 38 00:03:52,640 --> 00:03:58,160 being used to run their own software to be used by developers application developers like 39 00:03:59,520 --> 00:04:07,840 i feel like i talk with maybe i'll be a little aggressive or overly whatever maybe 50 of the 40 00:04:07,840 --> 00:04:13,440 people i talk with who are in that situation what they're saying is they've built it and like developers 41 00:04:13,440 --> 00:04:20,400 aren't really like as we would say back home cotton into it like they're not really like uh uh attracted 42 00:04:20,400 --> 00:04:26,560 to it or wanting to use it like what and and you know there is a selection bias for both of us 43 00:04:26,560 --> 00:04:32,480 that we often because we work at a vendor and ultimately we're trying to help of course we're 44 00:04:32,480 --> 00:04:36,400 trying to make the dreams come true of the people we talk with but we're also trying to help sell them 45 00:04:36,400 --> 00:04:41,200 stuff and so obviously if everything is running perfectly and they don't need any help we don't talk with them 46 00:04:41,920 --> 00:04:46,000 sort of but uh so there's a bit of bias there or whatever but like 47 00:04:47,200 --> 00:04:54,800 how common do you think that situation is i think it is very common certainly the the experiences i have 48 00:04:55,520 --> 00:05:03,280 most organizations they have a a cloud strategy that is normally based around one vendor or more 49 00:05:03,920 --> 00:05:10,800 and they have a kubernetes strategy which is weird in itself right like you could you have a kubernetes 50 00:05:10,800 --> 00:05:15,680 strategy or should you have a cloud native strategy or an application modernization strategy 51 00:05:15,680 --> 00:05:22,080 something that's going to achieve a business outcome um and you know one of the things i love about my 52 00:05:22,080 --> 00:05:28,480 role is i don't have to to go sell one of the best things i honestly get to turn up ask what 53 00:05:28,480 --> 00:05:34,480 problems they're having and if i don't think i can help i i just saunter off and go go see the next 54 00:05:34,480 --> 00:05:42,480 next person right but i think the secret is that many big organizations small organizations ones that 55 00:05:42,480 --> 00:05:49,280 are moving quickly ones that are moving slowly all seem to suffer the same problem in that they are 56 00:05:50,880 --> 00:05:56,000 i think suffering a little bit of a hangover of the last couple of years of rapid investment and 57 00:05:56,000 --> 00:06:02,720 development so i think back over the last three to four years there was a massive boom in spending and 58 00:06:02,720 --> 00:06:09,040 around it there was a huge amount of optimism because you know awful things happen in the world but as a result 59 00:06:09,040 --> 00:06:15,600 we ended up doing lots more remote lots more online digital experience all of a sudden became the top 60 00:06:15,600 --> 00:06:22,480 priority for everybody so you know it was it was the heyday some in some ways for it but now you know 61 00:06:22,480 --> 00:06:28,720 there's the world has changed again financial downturn we have various things happening abroad we've got 62 00:06:28,720 --> 00:06:34,720 supply chain problems you name it and i think that we're now beginning to look at some of those technology 63 00:06:34,720 --> 00:06:41,120 choices and ask ourselves what did we really get from this um you wrote a great thing on your cotie 64 00:06:41,120 --> 00:06:49,920 newsletter um around paas and kubernetes and whether that was a seven-year distraction and i think that's 65 00:06:49,920 --> 00:06:54,240 that's kind of what i'm seeing in organizations now is that they're beginning to look at things like 66 00:06:54,240 --> 00:06:59,520 that kubernetes strategy or that public cloud vendor strategy and think about how they're going to 67 00:06:59,520 --> 00:07:04,480 deliver some business value out of it because they're really getting squeezed for it yeah that's 68 00:07:04,480 --> 00:07:06,800 an interesting take on it because it like like it does 69 00:07:09,520 --> 00:07:15,120 it it it does kind of fit like one of my one of my fanciful notions of i mean as you were kind 70 00:07:15,120 --> 00:07:21,440 of alluding to that uh for whatever reason like we've built out a bunch of infrastructure and and now 71 00:07:21,440 --> 00:07:27,760 we need uh we need to worry about what it's being used for and it's it's such a big as as 72 00:07:27,760 --> 00:07:34,240 people still say a big lift it's such a complicated big piece of effort to build out a 73 00:07:34,240 --> 00:07:41,040 cloud essentially or or you know assemble the way you're going to use uh a cloud or clouds that like 74 00:07:41,040 --> 00:07:46,480 you've got to prioritize and maybe worrying about your developer experiences like it kind of makes 75 00:07:46,480 --> 00:07:52,160 sense that you would do that after you build the infrastructure right and so like even in the most 76 00:07:52,160 --> 00:07:56,880 optimistic case like now is the time after a couple of years of building stuff out that like 77 00:07:56,880 --> 00:08:01,440 oh now we need to do developer stuff right which which then also i think you know 78 00:08:03,520 --> 00:08:07,520 i don't know it's hard it's hard to know how much of this is just me making up stuff but 79 00:08:07,520 --> 00:08:12,960 but it it it would make sense as as you're kind of saying that now there's there's a need to like 80 00:08:12,960 --> 00:08:19,600 show value for it and uh you're not really going to show value by just having like infrastructure 81 00:08:19,600 --> 00:08:25,280 like it needs to do something and yeah and the the the the best way to do something with it well not 82 00:08:25,280 --> 00:08:30,160 the best way but you know you can either i guess the things you can do with infrastructure tell me 83 00:08:30,160 --> 00:08:35,360 what you think there's at least three things one you can do less of it to save money which is always 84 00:08:35,360 --> 00:08:41,440 appreciated people like saving money but that can be difficult you know i'm no accountant but the way 85 00:08:41,440 --> 00:08:45,760 that accounting works i mean you know you're on three five year amortization plans and the costs 86 00:08:45,760 --> 00:08:51,280 are accounted for so like just shutting something down might actually not make any sense because the 87 00:08:51,280 --> 00:08:58,720 costs are already sunk i don't really know what i'm talking about but but you you can always decide 88 00:08:58,720 --> 00:09:05,520 to do something less with infrastructure to maybe save money or you could like run like other 89 00:09:05,520 --> 00:09:11,120 applications off the shelf applications right like in particular maybe you could do like some 90 00:09:11,120 --> 00:09:19,120 data processing if you wanted to just use that roar roar raw horsepower to uh do analytics and things 91 00:09:19,120 --> 00:09:26,480 like that or you could like make your software your own applications better somehow right and that that 92 00:09:26,480 --> 00:09:31,520 that kind of becomes a bit of a to use an overused silly metaphor a bit of a fractal thing where like 93 00:09:31,520 --> 00:09:36,080 the way you make your applications better might be to make them cheaper right so you could consolidate 94 00:09:36,080 --> 00:09:40,800 applications or make them cheaper or you could actually do your software so that your uh 95 00:09:41,680 --> 00:09:48,080 somehow making your business run better which could also be cost savings or you're actually 96 00:09:48,800 --> 00:09:52,480 uh i guess you could be retaining your customers better so you could be preventing churn 97 00:09:52,480 --> 00:09:59,520 or loss and then so you got negative one reducing costs zero maintaining costs the same or you get one 98 00:09:59,520 --> 00:10:06,560 which is like you grow your business somehow by by making your software better so like it seems like the the 99 00:10:06,560 --> 00:10:14,000 the logical conclusion is like you need to do software or analytics or do less infrastructure i i guess maybe 100 00:10:14,000 --> 00:10:20,720 seem like the three levers you have to uh show value to show that your stuff is worthwhile i don't know 101 00:10:20,720 --> 00:10:27,440 well what's up with my grand tour there did uh is that anything yeah well look i think that's that's kind of 102 00:10:27,440 --> 00:10:32,880 what i was saying that the we've we've come from a period of massive growth 103 00:10:32,880 --> 00:10:38,320 where immediately the digital experience around the business became one of the most important 104 00:10:38,320 --> 00:10:43,920 things whereas a business might have had an online shop before they still saw themselves having 105 00:10:43,920 --> 00:10:49,520 physical entities where people would do the most of the business whereas you know the the global 106 00:10:49,520 --> 00:10:56,000 pandemic brought us to position where all businesses had to have an online experience and more still that 107 00:10:56,000 --> 00:11:02,880 online experience had to be competitive whereas before it just kind of had to exist i think the 108 00:11:02,880 --> 00:11:07,360 change in finances though means that we are now looking at that saying well this growth is still 109 00:11:07,360 --> 00:11:12,000 definitely great that's how we're going to grow our business that's where we think the next stream of 110 00:11:12,000 --> 00:11:20,560 revenue is coming from but we need to balance the the books at the end of the day um so without doubt 111 00:11:20,560 --> 00:11:28,240 i think with my customers i'm still seeing that complete dedication to building a digital experience 112 00:11:28,240 --> 00:11:34,080 for customers and making sure that's the best it can be yeah i think largely as well like the the kids 113 00:11:34,080 --> 00:11:40,080 today uh you know they're all going to want online transactions that's now the norm so i don't think 114 00:11:40,080 --> 00:11:46,240 that's going to change dramatically for the next couple of years so more and more online transactions um 115 00:11:47,840 --> 00:11:53,840 but i think again we need to make sure we're doing this sensibly um and a lot of this is really basic 116 00:11:53,840 --> 00:11:58,960 right i think the it's very similar to the chat we had at the beginning of the year and i'll keep 117 00:11:58,960 --> 00:12:03,760 ranting about it until something changes in the world but whatever we do we need to be able to answer 118 00:12:03,760 --> 00:12:10,800 the why really easily and quickly so you know i've gone to many customers and said right great you're 119 00:12:10,800 --> 00:12:15,680 doing kubernetes why why are we doing this what what part of the business is going to be improved 120 00:12:16,400 --> 00:12:21,200 or even more now i'm going to people that say well we've got a platform engineering team and they're 121 00:12:21,200 --> 00:12:28,800 doing great work and they are but when they say they're customer focused and i ask them which languages 122 00:12:28,800 --> 00:12:35,600 their developers are using or what their ide is or what are their pains that developers feel every day 123 00:12:36,480 --> 00:12:41,280 that the faces go a little blank right so the running joke that i've got just now with a friend 124 00:12:41,280 --> 00:12:46,000 of mine is that you know if someone says they're customer focused it likely means they spoke to one 125 00:12:46,000 --> 00:12:52,560 developer one time or maybe someone even used to do development a decade ago but we are still very 126 00:12:52,560 --> 00:12:59,440 much in the habit in it of building things that we think others will find useful and that's not the 127 00:12:59,440 --> 00:13:05,680 way to run a business you need to um you need to go out there and do your market research and build 128 00:13:05,680 --> 00:13:10,640 things that are going to be useful demonstratably every day and for me i think that's getting into 129 00:13:10,640 --> 00:13:18,640 trenches and saying what really irks you on a tuesday and then fix that problem and that might not be a huge 130 00:13:19,440 --> 00:13:26,640 golden path that might actually be one really specific thing like i struggle to get api documentation from 131 00:13:26,640 --> 00:13:32,480 other teams right let's go solve that problem right little problems solve them iteratively and then build 132 00:13:32,480 --> 00:13:37,440 it into that pipeline if you do that then i think there's more chance developers will find what you're 133 00:13:37,440 --> 00:13:42,000 doing is useful and then the more they're going to use it and the more that you can then demonstrate 134 00:13:42,000 --> 00:13:45,680 that this thing that you've built is actually worthwhile that it has some value 135 00:13:46,320 --> 00:13:52,720 so so let's let's pull at a lot of these notions here and and like so we started off uh with the 136 00:13:52,720 --> 00:13:59,520 premise that like what's what's new about a golden path right and which which which you know is a good 137 00:13:59,520 --> 00:14:04,560 question and then we have uh so you build up all this kubernetes infrastructure and and and what's it 138 00:14:04,560 --> 00:14:13,760 useful for and then we have like the idea of um uh you know a business most organizations to to make it 139 00:14:13,760 --> 00:14:23,200 profit and non-profit most organizations like uh are operating with software as a core component if 140 00:14:23,200 --> 00:14:28,480 they didn't have their own software they wouldn't be able to operate as they are today and they probably 141 00:14:29,120 --> 00:14:34,160 wouldn't be able to like make their their business or their organization run better 142 00:14:34,880 --> 00:14:38,960 you know i mean obviously in each industry there are things apart from software that make their business 143 00:14:38,960 --> 00:14:44,480 better like in in in one of your former roles like if you have content that's actually entertaining 144 00:14:44,480 --> 00:14:48,560 that's cool right like you could have all the cool software in the world but if your content's not 145 00:14:48,560 --> 00:14:55,120 good doesn't matter if if you're in the entertainment industry so forth and so on uh so like there's 146 00:14:55,120 --> 00:14:59,680 something something that we're talking about at the the the middle of a lot of this which is like 147 00:14:59,680 --> 00:15:05,520 making it matter to the business and the the term of art the jargon for this in our trade is business value 148 00:15:05,520 --> 00:15:14,160 which you know is is basically a concise way of saying what you're doing is useful for whatever it is 149 00:15:14,160 --> 00:15:21,760 the organization wants right like like it's you know something that is not a business value might be 150 00:15:21,760 --> 00:15:29,040 like when we when we talk about the stirring straws for the cafeteria for the tea or coffee should they be 151 00:15:29,040 --> 00:15:35,600 green or should they be off white right like anytime you spend doing that unless you're maybe in the 152 00:15:35,600 --> 00:15:40,880 fashion industry and one of those colors is core to your identity again there's always exceptions but 153 00:15:40,880 --> 00:15:48,080 in general there's no business value to that technology the stirring stick that you use there um and you 154 00:15:48,080 --> 00:15:52,800 could argue that like there's not much business value you know you you require a stirring stick otherwise 155 00:15:52,800 --> 00:15:57,600 you can't mix the coffee but it doesn't matter what kind of stirring stick you have kind of sort of 156 00:15:57,600 --> 00:16:02,400 like a file system like you know you need a file system but it's not really worth debating which one 157 00:16:02,400 --> 00:16:07,840 to use unless you're doing something very exotic just like a green stirring stick and i need to cut 158 00:16:07,840 --> 00:16:13,760 myself off here before i get lost in this stirring stick thing but like like so so like you know given 159 00:16:13,760 --> 00:16:22,880 this like cloud native stack like how how do you think about like a very not detailed but kind of 160 00:16:22,880 --> 00:16:30,400 like a a nicely causality linked way of thinking about business value like how do you go from like 161 00:16:30,400 --> 00:16:36,960 a golden path helping developers out to like saying ah this is clear business value right something that we 162 00:16:36,960 --> 00:16:46,080 can kind of kind of like track and know not just like trust that it's connected that's a really interesting 163 00:16:46,080 --> 00:17:01,040 point um so i think that business value begins with a mindset of serving others because i think 164 00:17:01,040 --> 00:17:06,640 fundamentally what you were saying there about um stutters not to get too deep in that but 165 00:17:06,640 --> 00:17:11,200 it's it's around what is commodity right so i in my head as you were talking i had kind of 166 00:17:11,200 --> 00:17:16,480 worldly maps popping up in my head around what's important to a business and what's not where should 167 00:17:16,480 --> 00:17:21,200 you tie spend your time and where should you outsource for example and i think it's maybe similar so 168 00:17:21,200 --> 00:17:27,200 computers by themselves don't really do much right they're fairly dull but what we can do with them 169 00:17:27,200 --> 00:17:36,320 when we turn them to something that's unique to that business it's a bit more interesting so as people in it the 170 00:17:36,320 --> 00:17:42,720 closest we have to that i think is twofold number one is talking to finance to reduce those numbers 171 00:17:42,720 --> 00:17:47,200 whatever the spend is let's make that lower if we're spending lots of money in one area maybe we 172 00:17:47,200 --> 00:17:52,000 can consolidate and you know vmware made a very successful business out of that consolidation play 173 00:17:52,720 --> 00:18:03,040 um i think the second is being able to help grow the business um so the metrics around there is how 174 00:18:03,040 --> 00:18:13,120 quickly can we get new ideas to market um and that is that's how quickly can we deploy software 175 00:18:13,120 --> 00:18:18,720 but more importantly how quickly can we change software i think that's largely where enterprises are struggling 176 00:18:18,720 --> 00:18:24,640 sometimes they can get something new launched in public cloud that has bypassed a lot of their 177 00:18:24,640 --> 00:18:29,920 internal processes but then when it comes to scale or when it comes to making a change or making it more 178 00:18:29,920 --> 00:18:35,360 secure or auditing it all of a sudden changes have to be made and everything kind of slows to it to a 179 00:18:35,360 --> 00:18:41,120 grind halt yeah so i think for me i think looking at values thinking about what the impact is you have on 180 00:18:41,120 --> 00:18:48,640 other teams so developers are our primary stakeholders so how can we improve their day i think that can be 181 00:18:50,000 --> 00:18:57,200 largely removing toil from their day um and i think we spend a lot of time thinking about productivity 182 00:18:57,200 --> 00:19:01,920 right like getting 10 minutes back per developer multiply that out that's pretty big but i think there's 183 00:19:01,920 --> 00:19:07,440 a bigger play as well which is if you can make developers happier in the role so they're spending less 184 00:19:07,440 --> 00:19:12,560 time doing this plumbing that they didn't really want to do in the first place well in actual fact 185 00:19:12,560 --> 00:19:16,560 you'll end up with happier developers which means they're going to hang around in the business for 186 00:19:16,560 --> 00:19:21,440 longer which means you're not going to have to hire new developers as quickly and finding new talent 187 00:19:21,440 --> 00:19:26,640 is actually pretty difficult now right um especially at the kind of price point you want so there's an 188 00:19:26,640 --> 00:19:31,920 hr part there around you're adding value around engagement for for people at the end of the day 189 00:19:31,920 --> 00:19:37,040 developers are human they just want to make an impact if they want to change that stirring stick 190 00:19:37,040 --> 00:19:42,080 from green to off-white they want to be able to make a simple change like that overnight 191 00:19:43,680 --> 00:19:49,040 in many of the businesses i'm working with that's not possible and i've seen more than one developer 192 00:19:49,040 --> 00:19:54,640 friend of mine join a new business and leave within three months because they just couldn't get anything 193 00:19:54,640 --> 00:20:00,800 done and i think that uh part of the work we can do with helping developers is really just focusing on 194 00:20:00,800 --> 00:20:09,200 how we reduce the time they spend doing non-value work because for a developer their value is when 195 00:20:09,200 --> 00:20:16,320 their application does something that it didn't do before it's a new feature it stops crashing that's 196 00:20:16,320 --> 00:20:22,880 that's value yeah you know so there's a we'll see if i remember all these things to follow up on in 197 00:20:22,880 --> 00:20:28,080 there because because there's a lot of interesting stuff there and well first of all i mean if i were 198 00:20:28,080 --> 00:20:37,280 to summarize use a phrase to to to summer phrase eyes uh the business value result or connection you're 199 00:20:37,280 --> 00:20:43,120 talking about there it's like time to market right and so if we work back from the time to market thing 200 00:20:43,120 --> 00:20:50,000 which as you're saying like uh the way that often manifests itself in the it space in the software 201 00:20:50,000 --> 00:20:59,600 delivery space all the way down to the infrastructure is uh removing wait time and let's say friction from 202 00:20:59,600 --> 00:21:06,320 the process right speeding up the time it takes to go from idea to like a user using some software right 203 00:21:07,200 --> 00:21:19,600 and um so first of all like the thing that i've struggled with over the years is knowing knowing 204 00:21:19,600 --> 00:21:30,240 when an organization actually cares about time to market beyond this kind of like fear driven we don't 205 00:21:30,240 --> 00:21:36,800 want to be blockbuster mentality right like you know that that kind of like which which is totally cool 206 00:21:36,800 --> 00:21:43,520 if that's the milieu of like the world and everyone kind of like has this like uh this need to do 207 00:21:43,520 --> 00:21:49,520 things and i suppose you know i i've i've done a lot of uh discussion here in in tonsuland and webinars 208 00:21:49,520 --> 00:21:56,480 with uh your your co-worker darren rice about like this urgency in the financial sector right and to some 209 00:21:56,480 --> 00:22:03,360 extent well it does exist there that there's this notion of like at least in well i'll say 210 00:22:03,360 --> 00:22:08,800 at least in retail banking i i can see how this urgency would exist in other you know trading and 211 00:22:08,800 --> 00:22:16,960 other stuff but like that we need to have software that isn't terrible right that that that people like 212 00:22:16,960 --> 00:22:22,480 you and me use for our day-to-day life and uh as things come along like being able to pay with your 213 00:22:22,480 --> 00:22:30,000 phone we should do we should deliver that quickly right and like so there's that case and then on the 214 00:22:30,000 --> 00:22:34,880 ux the other end like i think an area where time to market the one that i've encountered the most recently 215 00:22:34,880 --> 00:22:44,080 is very well understood and i feel like the organization like has actual time to market urgency is like 216 00:22:44,080 --> 00:22:48,960 when you when you hear like militaries talking about their need to use software they're basically like 217 00:22:48,960 --> 00:22:55,920 we need to be able to change our software really quickly because it's how we run what we do and what 218 00:22:55,920 --> 00:23:03,840 we do is very important it's it's literally mission crit like mission mission critical right uh and so 219 00:23:04,560 --> 00:23:08,960 like that urgency and and you've seen this over the past i've seen over the past 10 years that like 220 00:23:08,960 --> 00:23:15,920 you know in in various various countries militaries have really like they've been like oh right we're 221 00:23:15,920 --> 00:23:19,760 not good at software we don't even have that capability so we need to build it up because 222 00:23:19,760 --> 00:23:25,760 we need to have like programmers in the field doing that stuff so like that's kind of the ultimate urgency 223 00:23:26,640 --> 00:23:32,800 uh in companies but like but like what i struggle with is like unless i'm talking with someone 224 00:23:33,600 --> 00:23:38,720 an organization and they already are just like we want all the time to market possible whatever it is 225 00:23:38,720 --> 00:23:43,600 we want to speed up like it's almost like you don't have to talk to them about a path to production or 226 00:23:43,600 --> 00:23:48,160 a golden path they're like i want to remove i want to speed this up as much as possible so unless they 227 00:23:48,160 --> 00:23:56,240 have that like finding out what their time to market is like ferreting it out and then connecting it down to 228 00:23:56,240 --> 00:24:07,120 uh you know you should install kubernetes right like or or you know out of our infrastructure area a very 229 00:24:07,120 --> 00:24:13,360 stereotypical cliche thing for a developer to complain about saying why you should get a 230 00:24:14,720 --> 00:24:21,520 laptop that's three to four times more expensive than the standard issue laptop right like like kind of 231 00:24:22,720 --> 00:24:30,400 convincing then whoever is control of the it budget and like the authorities that like one time to market 232 00:24:30,400 --> 00:24:35,520 matters to you and one of the ways you're going to achieve time to market is by doing just as you 233 00:24:35,520 --> 00:24:43,760 were saying like removing all the waste from the developer from the path the golden path and then 234 00:24:43,760 --> 00:24:49,200 and then like even more foreign of a difficulty is like the thing that you're alluding to is like yeah 235 00:24:49,200 --> 00:24:58,000 like happy people do better work and so like if they want a green stir straw we should get them green 236 00:24:58,000 --> 00:25:02,960 stir straws right right like you know kind of like that that kind of stuff so i don't know there's a 237 00:25:02,960 --> 00:25:07,920 question in there somewhere but it's sort of like detail more of that like if you're talking to someone 238 00:25:07,920 --> 00:25:12,960 and like they don't they're not quite on this time to market thing let alone connecting it to optimizing 239 00:25:12,960 --> 00:25:17,120 developers like how does that conversation go how did it when do you see the light turn off where 240 00:25:17,120 --> 00:25:22,480 they're like oh right we should spend three thousand dollars on a developer laptop every 12 months 241 00:25:23,040 --> 00:25:31,680 not every not spend like 200 not 200 not spend like you know 400 or 400 pounds or 400 euros every 242 00:25:32,320 --> 00:25:38,000 three years right or or you know we should buy into this infrastructure that's like better blah blah 243 00:25:38,000 --> 00:25:45,120 blah right like it seems like that's a that's an issue so we've mentioned path to production a couple of 244 00:25:45,120 --> 00:25:52,160 times um those are without doubt my favorite workshops that we do and i think it's largely 245 00:25:52,160 --> 00:25:57,920 because it's not all technology focused and for anyone that's not done one before it's exactly as it 246 00:25:57,920 --> 00:26:04,240 sounds we we get as many people from across the business in different parts of the business 247 00:26:04,240 --> 00:26:12,320 to talk about how a company goes from having an idea either something brand new or just a simple change 248 00:26:12,320 --> 00:26:17,440 they want to make all the way through the approval processes the financial planning 249 00:26:18,160 --> 00:26:25,360 through to development hosting testing deployment scale and then then into a steady state 250 00:26:25,360 --> 00:26:35,440 um it's usually during those exercises that we discover where productivity gains really lie um 251 00:26:36,160 --> 00:26:43,520 sometimes it'll be really obvious where you can see there's huge breakdowns perhaps you have a 252 00:26:43,520 --> 00:26:49,760 complicated it process where we've worked out what we want to do we know exactly what we need to to have 253 00:26:50,720 --> 00:26:57,200 but it involves sending tickets to seven eight ten different it teams and you have this ping pong 254 00:26:57,200 --> 00:27:02,560 of request tickets going back and forward until eventually a golden nugget drops out the end of the machine 255 00:27:03,200 --> 00:27:08,880 um i've seen that far too many times and it's the individual steps aren't usually the problem it's 256 00:27:08,880 --> 00:27:15,760 the wait time between those tickets right right right i always joke that the uh uh it's not the arrows i mean 257 00:27:15,760 --> 00:27:20,640 it's not that i messed up the joke it's not the boxes that matter it's the arrows that matter the handoffs 258 00:27:20,640 --> 00:27:27,600 between between the every these things 100 um so a lot of times again it makes me unpopular perhaps 259 00:27:27,600 --> 00:27:32,160 in the sales capacity because it's about looking at the saying well i don't think we need to optimize 260 00:27:32,160 --> 00:27:39,280 the it here we need to think about optimizing the path then we can talk about how we're going 261 00:27:39,280 --> 00:27:45,200 to optimize the path and i think technology is an enabler it shouldn't be the destination and i think 262 00:27:45,200 --> 00:27:50,080 again this is a mistake people run out and build a kubernetes platform on the assumption it's going 263 00:27:50,080 --> 00:27:56,000 to make them faster more agile and all of those things but in reality when you look at that path 264 00:27:56,000 --> 00:28:01,200 to prod there are months and months of effort involved and even getting to the stage before 265 00:28:01,200 --> 00:28:07,600 you get to talk about the platform so how can we get further down that path to try and help out there 266 00:28:07,600 --> 00:28:13,440 instead again coming back this idea of what does a developer struggle with day to day 267 00:28:14,880 --> 00:28:22,240 i can think of many organizations where they have a brilliant brilliant cit pipeline just ready and 268 00:28:22,240 --> 00:28:27,280 waiting to go as soon as you have your container image ready they can have that hosted in different 269 00:28:27,280 --> 00:28:34,160 countries various data centers auto scale with monitoring it's fantastic that doesn't help a 270 00:28:34,160 --> 00:28:40,080 developer develop most developers when they're beginning to develop have a couple of really 271 00:28:40,080 --> 00:28:46,320 basic problems the first one is they write some code they then want to run it to see if it works 272 00:28:46,320 --> 00:28:52,960 or how it looks and then they change it and they run it again and this like iterative hamster loop needs to 273 00:28:52,960 --> 00:28:59,200 be really really quick and in terms of getting their feedback if they have to wait two three five ten 274 00:28:59,200 --> 00:29:05,600 minutes to see the output of their work it would be a nightmare right it'd be like if you're using a 275 00:29:05,600 --> 00:29:10,880 word processor and you type a sentence and then you need to wait 30 seconds until that sentence appears 276 00:29:10,880 --> 00:29:15,840 on screen that's the type of pain that some developers are seeing just now because they 277 00:29:15,840 --> 00:29:23,360 can't deploy their development code immediately on the cloud infrastructure so they build something 278 00:29:23,360 --> 00:29:27,840 locally perhaps on a little machine under their desk we've all been there or perhaps they've got 279 00:29:27,840 --> 00:29:32,480 some docker containers running on their local machine that they built themselves and has nothing to do with 280 00:29:32,480 --> 00:29:37,600 it then you've got that mismatch between what their development environment looks like versus 281 00:29:37,600 --> 00:29:43,360 the real development environments right so how do we help there right and uh you know i won't sell 282 00:29:43,360 --> 00:29:48,320 too much but turns out tanzu does have a couple of solutions there and i go out and talk about these 283 00:29:48,320 --> 00:29:53,280 five best-kept secrets tanzu because the parts that most people don't really paying attention to 284 00:29:53,280 --> 00:29:59,680 but i think they're the most valuable and one of them is it's just a work of art it's a plug-in 285 00:29:59,680 --> 00:30:07,760 for intellij and for visual studio code that allows developers to write their code hit a goal button 286 00:30:08,400 --> 00:30:14,720 and then see the output running on a kubernetes platform that is centralized they don't have to 287 00:30:14,720 --> 00:30:19,280 build the container they don't have to think about the kubernetes infrastructure existing they just have 288 00:30:19,280 --> 00:30:25,360 their code in one window and the output in another and they can set break points and test their code and 289 00:30:25,360 --> 00:30:34,080 do development things that's how we can make technology a lever for increasing productivity 290 00:30:34,080 --> 00:30:38,400 not the fact that there was a kubernetes platform there but the fact you're able to use it without 291 00:30:38,400 --> 00:30:42,960 really seeing it but it means they're not having to waste time building their own development environment 292 00:30:42,960 --> 00:30:48,320 or fixing it every thursday or friday because they've broken it or tidying it up or trying to work 293 00:30:48,320 --> 00:30:52,400 out the mismatches and the differences between their development environment the production one 294 00:30:52,400 --> 00:30:57,040 i think that's that's really getting down to speaking to people about their daily challenges 295 00:30:57,040 --> 00:31:05,600 and helping solve them using technology but yeah dot dot technology in itself yeah you know it's making me 296 00:31:05,600 --> 00:31:10,560 think you know i always like to reduce things down to quippy little whatever's but like or or 297 00:31:12,480 --> 00:31:19,600 painfully not quippy quips but like like a part of what you're describing there is that 298 00:31:21,600 --> 00:31:31,440 a lot of the infrastructure that exists exists to run your software in production but it doesn't really 299 00:31:31,440 --> 00:31:40,160 exist to be very useful for the developers writing that software and so like you were saying a lot of what 300 00:31:40,160 --> 00:31:47,200 happens the the you know an interesting experiment there is to say how different are your development 301 00:31:47,200 --> 00:31:54,320 environments than your production environments right and the maybe not so uncommon extreme version 302 00:31:54,320 --> 00:32:01,120 is that the developer environments are completely different because the developers have felt the need 303 00:32:01,120 --> 00:32:08,080 to build their own infrastructure that is barely matches right they run it on their laptop so they have 304 00:32:08,080 --> 00:32:13,840 the the the desk under the desk data centers as you were alluding to right and it's just there's so much 305 00:32:13,840 --> 00:32:22,720 friction and maybe also just so little not existing as far as a concern or a thing that happens that 306 00:32:23,280 --> 00:32:28,160 the people in charge of the infrastructure just don't really care about what the developers are doing 307 00:32:28,160 --> 00:32:35,920 right like about and and they more uh are thinking they say like write your software to run in this kind of 308 00:32:35,920 --> 00:32:40,720 environment and give it to us and we'll work out the kinks between the two of us right and so 309 00:32:41,760 --> 00:32:46,720 this this creates like the ultimate not the ultimate but it creates a good example of the arrows mattering 310 00:32:46,720 --> 00:32:52,800 more than the boxes right to use a a fancy term because you have local optimization at that point like 311 00:32:52,800 --> 00:32:58,240 each of the the development phase can be very quick and they can be moving fast and doing everything 312 00:32:58,240 --> 00:33:04,480 great and it can be locally optimized but then once the you hit that arrow and you go to like even qa 313 00:33:04,480 --> 00:33:10,000 right like qa is going to have to stand this up and then even when you go to i mean the only reason 314 00:33:10,000 --> 00:33:15,920 well not the only reason but a reason that something like staging exists is to make sure it works in 315 00:33:15,920 --> 00:33:23,200 in a production environment versus whatever else so you each of these arrows you hop through if you're not running like 316 00:33:23,200 --> 00:33:29,040 like more or less the identical infrastructure that the software was developed on it's not cool 317 00:33:30,480 --> 00:33:36,880 right like it's it's just more and more friction and i think the mentality is is because like that 318 00:33:36,880 --> 00:33:42,640 infrastructure was built to run the applications and not like be not also be usable by the developers 319 00:33:43,200 --> 00:33:48,240 which i think is i was talking with with with uh jennifer riggins who writes for the new stack and 320 00:33:48,240 --> 00:33:52,320 you know she's been studying platform engineering for a while and we are discussing this morning like 321 00:33:52,320 --> 00:33:57,280 what is the difference between devops and platform engineering and she kind of as as you several 322 00:33:57,280 --> 00:34:04,640 times she brought up the the the uh the like i this is my rewording of what she was what she was saying 323 00:34:04,640 --> 00:34:10,800 but it's sort of like i think in platform engineering you talk with the developers now that again that's my 324 00:34:10,800 --> 00:34:17,040 rephrasing of it but like it does seem like that's the jump that that platform engineering people are 325 00:34:17,040 --> 00:34:22,560 trying to make and that we in pivotal tonsu land made a long time ago with our platform as a product 326 00:34:22,560 --> 00:34:28,160 and with uh pivotal cloud foundry now known as the tonsu application service like that's that was all 327 00:34:28,160 --> 00:34:32,480 built around that if you remember i always thought these were a little yeah i thought these were a little 328 00:34:32,480 --> 00:34:39,360 goofy at the time but uh our our head of engineering ansi like had these these uh these presentations that 329 00:34:39,360 --> 00:34:45,120 were a bunch of emojis and he would he would start to describe developing infrastructure based on 330 00:34:45,840 --> 00:34:53,360 understanding the application developer process right and like with they were good presentations 331 00:34:53,360 --> 00:34:58,080 but they were they're also this is before i accepted that emojis were a way that mature adults could uh 332 00:34:58,080 --> 00:35:05,040 conduct business but it was it does it does kind of like define a different approach of like 333 00:35:06,160 --> 00:35:11,520 we start at the top with the developer and focus on what it takes to get their software and we build 334 00:35:11,520 --> 00:35:17,520 the infrastructure out uh according to what's needed there uh which which i think is a good a good 335 00:35:18,320 --> 00:35:26,160 turning of the priorities towards not just the developer but towards the software right and and this 336 00:35:26,160 --> 00:35:33,840 is the connection i'm always trying to make is like now you are uh you're doing it on behalf of the 337 00:35:33,840 --> 00:35:39,440 software and if we think that the software is the way that you implement how the business runs that 338 00:35:39,440 --> 00:35:45,120 means you're directly doing it for the business right like you're finally building infrastructure and 339 00:35:45,680 --> 00:35:50,640 all of the tools and you have that really is focused on how do we run the business better not just 340 00:35:50,640 --> 00:35:56,880 how do we run it better and i think you're absolutely right and it's really interesting 341 00:35:56,880 --> 00:36:02,400 when you think about devops and platform engineering because again we everything is news old um 342 00:36:04,320 --> 00:36:10,160 devops for me was brilliant we started talking more about helping developers and operators getting 343 00:36:10,160 --> 00:36:16,480 closer which was great there was a huge number of new tools that were built out of that time which was 344 00:36:16,480 --> 00:36:24,240 fantastic i think the downside though was that it was locally optimized so we were able to get 345 00:36:24,240 --> 00:36:30,320 individual teams using cid pipelines and a whole bunch of tooling which was great and we added value 346 00:36:30,880 --> 00:36:37,840 in that little silo but the problem is we really struggled to scale that in enterprise because you 347 00:36:37,840 --> 00:36:47,520 needed to have qa and developers and operators all in each team so you had massive duplication of people 348 00:36:47,520 --> 00:36:53,280 in terms of resource cost but i think as well your duplication of ideas and the struggle was trying to 349 00:36:53,280 --> 00:37:00,160 have the guilds or chapters and various different mechanisms of trying to say but we need to operate 350 00:37:00,160 --> 00:37:06,800 in a central way too for me platform engineering is trying to take in the lessons learned from devops 351 00:37:06,800 --> 00:37:15,280 and some of the tooling it's about taking um the service orientation from paas and the lessons learned 352 00:37:15,280 --> 00:37:21,680 all the way back from cloud foundry and also mixing that with things like platform as a product 353 00:37:21,680 --> 00:37:26,880 which is relatively new where we're thinking about not just building out this platform but really going 354 00:37:26,880 --> 00:37:33,200 out there and proactively marketing it all of this still points to one big core part and that is 355 00:37:33,200 --> 00:37:40,240 as you said we need to talk to the users of our platform and we have to build what is going to make 356 00:37:40,240 --> 00:37:45,840 our technology useful we should not and never should build something that we think is going to be useful 357 00:37:47,840 --> 00:37:54,000 right you want that validation uh so you have to build that into you have to build validating the 358 00:37:54,000 --> 00:37:59,280 service you've delivered and and what you think you should you've got to anyways you need to validate 359 00:37:59,280 --> 00:38:03,440 that it's useful no matter what no matter what you thought or what you signed up for six months ago 360 00:38:05,200 --> 00:38:09,760 yeah so you know if you're if your goal is to try and get software delivered faster 361 00:38:11,200 --> 00:38:14,960 sure you could build a kubernetes platform and make it really quick to deploy that 362 00:38:15,600 --> 00:38:19,920 but by speaking developers you might find out their challenges are making that container image in the 363 00:38:19,920 --> 00:38:26,560 first place so maybe it's time to focus some effort there um i feel as well actually we've probably 364 00:38:26,560 --> 00:38:32,560 ragged on kubernetes quite a lot which for you know a company that mostly sells kubernetes tools and 365 00:38:32,560 --> 00:38:37,600 things that's that feels difficult just to balance it out i think the thing here is that talking about 366 00:38:37,600 --> 00:38:44,400 usefulness kubernetes in my humble opinion shouldn't be thought of as a platform it should be thought of as a 367 00:38:44,400 --> 00:38:50,720 language because that's the value that we've got from kubernetes this idea that a developer can 368 00:38:50,720 --> 00:38:57,360 build an image on their workstation and it should run in your private cloud your public clouds your 369 00:38:57,360 --> 00:39:02,960 sovereign cloud or wherever else maybe on the edge right so i think kubernetes as a language has been 370 00:39:02,960 --> 00:39:08,720 really useful because that lets us talk about requirements and capabilities separate to 371 00:39:09,680 --> 00:39:17,120 the technology that implements them um and so i think kubernetes plays a massive part in some of that 372 00:39:17,920 --> 00:39:22,960 modeling that we're doing so developers can come to us with requirements now because we've got this 373 00:39:22,960 --> 00:39:27,200 common language we can use to describe what they are and we can build a platform around them as well 374 00:39:27,840 --> 00:39:35,360 um there's a lot in there i think for for companies to work with though because again none of this is 375 00:39:35,360 --> 00:39:41,040 technology as we know it's not building out large chunks of infrastructure reducing cost necessarily 376 00:39:41,040 --> 00:39:45,680 it's about trying to twist some technologies together and bind them in the way that's going 377 00:39:45,680 --> 00:39:50,640 to be useful to people much like you if you're building a product somewhere else you take raw materials and 378 00:39:50,640 --> 00:39:55,600 you you have a new spin on it and i think that's what businesses need to do they take all these tools in 379 00:39:56,240 --> 00:40:02,480 and spin them into a tool that's going to be useful for their business so you know you're so you're 380 00:40:02,480 --> 00:40:06,640 you're bringing us back to something i i wanted to come back to as well right so at some point uh 381 00:40:06,640 --> 00:40:12,400 when we were talking here you were you're bringing up so you know you have a you have an ide 382 00:40:12,400 --> 00:40:17,040 integration for the developers that like make fits into this and makes building containers better and 383 00:40:17,040 --> 00:40:22,960 eventually you get down to the infrastructure right and i think i think one of one of the things 384 00:40:22,960 --> 00:40:29,760 you're making me think is that as you were saying a lot of what we don't well i think that a lot of 385 00:40:29,760 --> 00:40:34,960 what we as a whole community of doing this stuff don't think about very well is that what are you 386 00:40:34,960 --> 00:40:42,320 saying that that twisty tie stack right like this notion that we have each of these components in a stack 387 00:40:43,040 --> 00:40:51,760 and how how they integrate and fit together basically to do to make your your time to market your ability 388 00:40:51,760 --> 00:40:58,320 to deliver software faster to have tight tighter to deliver let's say every week maybe every two 389 00:40:58,320 --> 00:41:04,800 weeks right like just to pick a not so arbitrary period right like i think i think if you can deliver 390 00:41:05,440 --> 00:41:10,080 new versions of your software new features every week or every two weeks you're doing pretty good 391 00:41:10,080 --> 00:41:15,120 and you'll really be able to like use software as a core way that not only you run your business as it 392 00:41:15,120 --> 00:41:22,400 exists but you'll be able to like innovate in your business right and so if you can twisty tie a 393 00:41:22,400 --> 00:41:27,840 bunch of stuff together that delivers that then i think that's kind of like the combination of your 394 00:41:27,840 --> 00:41:33,600 platform and your golden path and your path to production all of this stuff right and and i feel like 395 00:41:34,960 --> 00:41:44,080 one of the things that's often missing is one understanding regardless of the technology what 396 00:41:44,880 --> 00:41:49,840 the components of that stack are and how they're supposed to fit together right and this gets to 397 00:41:49,840 --> 00:41:55,120 the old like you know a bit of the distraction thing is like i think everyone's like you know myself 398 00:41:55,120 --> 00:42:00,000 included early on when i heard all these these big claims about like what kubernetes could do and 399 00:42:00,000 --> 00:42:04,400 like things like that like they sort of thought like once you went through the kubernetes the 400 00:42:04,400 --> 00:42:09,120 hard way installation you were done right like you would have all this ability and like you would 401 00:42:09,120 --> 00:42:14,400 basically just have a heroku finally for the enterprise that that people would want but like 402 00:42:14,400 --> 00:42:20,640 we all found out that was not the case and blah blah blah right by design right like which is totally fine 403 00:42:20,640 --> 00:42:25,360 but like you're making me think what the conversation i think i would like to have with people is 404 00:42:27,200 --> 00:42:35,440 so what is that twisty tie stack right and now let's go box by box and talk about what the best 405 00:42:35,440 --> 00:42:41,680 fit is for that now you can also like you know this that's a bottoms up best for breed thing best of 406 00:42:41,680 --> 00:42:47,360 breed thing and then that also leads to a discussion of like you know what we do we have a twisty tie stack 407 00:42:47,360 --> 00:42:52,560 right everyone has a twisty size stack and then if you can kind of understand what the components are 408 00:42:52,560 --> 00:42:58,800 and how they fit together well then i think you can have a more informed conversation about all those 409 00:42:58,800 --> 00:43:05,200 various stacks and the parts of them right whereas now it's like at least to my mind it's very foggy like 410 00:43:05,200 --> 00:43:11,920 how uh a build tool integrates with like the way you're doing a kubernetes thing versus integrates 411 00:43:11,920 --> 00:43:16,800 with this thing that then like all the way up to like and then i don't know there's a ui framework 412 00:43:18,080 --> 00:43:22,800 and like it's it's like a bold claim from people like ourselves and others to be like 413 00:43:22,800 --> 00:43:27,280 our platform is the best all the way up to spring and it all integrates together and it's super cool 414 00:43:27,280 --> 00:43:33,440 right without like like we almost get trapped in something that i think we did in the in the past era 415 00:43:33,440 --> 00:43:41,120 back uh in the in the 2000s where we're basically just like hey here's a platform trust us it's just 416 00:43:41,120 --> 00:43:45,040 a it's it's a you can't look inside the box and how it fits together but it's totally cool 417 00:43:46,400 --> 00:43:52,160 where it's hard it's like we almost need to have a new conversation where we talk about what these 418 00:43:52,160 --> 00:43:57,680 boxes are and i think this is this is an area where like i think there's good parts of kubernetes is 419 00:43:57,680 --> 00:44:04,880 it's trying to establish a common as you say language or uh as i would think about it just 420 00:44:04,880 --> 00:44:11,600 like a common api and a data standard so that you can kind of like you don't have to have all these 421 00:44:11,600 --> 00:44:16,400 custom ways of having the boxes integrate and how they run but i don't know i mean that's like it's 422 00:44:16,400 --> 00:44:23,680 i'm always searching for that little rosetta stone i don't know i don't know the metaphor for for what that 423 00:44:23,680 --> 00:44:31,040 is and i think kubernetes comes a long way to answering that um like having that common language 424 00:44:31,040 --> 00:44:39,520 that common api has enabled so many things and i think this is the value of it it's not kubernetes 425 00:44:39,520 --> 00:44:48,320 it's what can we use kubernetes for so we talked about um packaging code that has been a problem since 426 00:44:48,320 --> 00:44:53,200 time began it's one of the reasons why heroku did really well in the early days um it's why cloud 427 00:44:53,200 --> 00:45:00,320 foundry was great as well you had your php app your pearl app your java app cf push and the platform 428 00:45:00,320 --> 00:45:05,760 would work out what kind of runtime you need based on the code language you're using and host that for 429 00:45:05,760 --> 00:45:10,640 you which was pretty phenomenal and it's taken us a little while almost to get back to that point 430 00:45:10,640 --> 00:45:15,360 with kubernetes with cloud native build packs we can now do that too so that's great now we can have a 431 00:45:16,160 --> 00:45:20,720 developers don't need to build their own java environment for their container we can have a 432 00:45:20,720 --> 00:45:25,760 centralized one and we can put all of our good corporate tools in there and that's fantastic and 433 00:45:25,760 --> 00:45:31,040 we're making the developers like easier in the process we're not asking to do anything else or anything 434 00:45:31,040 --> 00:45:36,960 more in fact we're asking to do less so that's kind of cool i think as well when containers first 435 00:45:37,680 --> 00:45:43,040 got on the scene like i'm old enough to remember jails and solaris and all that kind of stuff but 436 00:45:43,040 --> 00:45:48,320 i think with containers what i saw being a guy who was running a big virtualization platform at the 437 00:45:48,320 --> 00:45:57,040 time was introspection being the critical part and i immediately jumped forward five years in my 438 00:45:57,040 --> 00:46:04,080 thinking which was if i can see what's running on my platform that i'm hosting i could deliver a whole 439 00:46:04,080 --> 00:46:10,080 bunch of new value back to the business right i wasn't thinking about smaller or faster i was thinking about 440 00:46:10,880 --> 00:46:16,880 i could make containers way more secure than anything else because i can answer challenges 441 00:46:16,880 --> 00:46:23,680 that i've had in the past like we've got a big security vulnerability that's come out how vulnerable 442 00:46:23,680 --> 00:46:30,240 are we you're running a platform there with 50 000 vms which of those 50 000 vms is vulnerable to this 443 00:46:30,240 --> 00:46:36,560 attack and as a platform owner i mostly had to shrug my shoulders because i didn't have visibility into 444 00:46:36,560 --> 00:46:43,040 the what's running in each virtual machine with containers and kubernetes we have that i think as 445 00:46:43,040 --> 00:46:51,120 well we can do so much with that as well so we've got things like um being able to look at the network 446 00:46:51,120 --> 00:46:57,440 connections between containers looking at the api that is set up between one application and the other 447 00:46:57,440 --> 00:47:03,280 and if we can detect apis with like open api then we can build dashboards if we can build dashboards 448 00:47:03,280 --> 00:47:08,800 of apis that are already there and running well we could do some cool stuff there right that would be 449 00:47:08,800 --> 00:47:15,920 things like helping developers understand if someone in a different team has already written a piece of code 450 00:47:15,920 --> 00:47:22,640 to solve that problem you're having and this goes back to the problems we're having 20 years ago it's 451 00:47:22,640 --> 00:47:27,760 developing code is something that's definitely doable but how do you know whether you should 452 00:47:27,760 --> 00:47:32,480 develop this piece of code or not maybe someone's done it already in fact your business probably has 453 00:47:32,480 --> 00:47:37,760 three or four ways of doing that same thing and it's just because steve didn't know that sarah's 454 00:47:37,760 --> 00:47:44,160 already written a better version no i can think back to it's always steve from right um i can think back 455 00:47:44,160 --> 00:47:51,280 to a business where you know there were brand new products launched and one of the core components 456 00:47:51,280 --> 00:47:58,640 of that new product called back to an ancient deprecated system and it's just because one of the 457 00:47:58,640 --> 00:48:04,800 developers that's how they did it on some other project they worked on so they called this old api 458 00:48:04,800 --> 00:48:09,520 rather than new version and there was lots of scrabbling around to get that function swapped 459 00:48:09,520 --> 00:48:15,760 out but that was a you know that's a brand new product launched to millions of customers and we'd 460 00:48:15,760 --> 00:48:23,120 inadvertently pinned it to deprecated infrastructure that wasn't reliable wasn't easy to change and all 461 00:48:23,120 --> 00:48:29,360 of those other problems so you know i think with kubernetes we've got this ability to see more what 462 00:48:29,360 --> 00:48:34,720 we're doing we've got this language or this api that we can use to describe things better 463 00:48:34,720 --> 00:48:40,000 and make it run elsewhere i think my big challenge to the business is well you've got all these tools 464 00:48:40,000 --> 00:48:46,800 now what are you going to do with them that helps someone else and then what right you to build value 465 00:48:46,800 --> 00:48:52,320 over that yeah and i and i think i think you're arriving at an interesting point there as as we try 466 00:48:52,320 --> 00:48:59,760 to quest out let's say what is the business value of like a cloud native stack which nowadays basically 467 00:48:59,760 --> 00:49:08,800 means kubernetes right and i think you know it's it's it's easy for me and and you know maybe all of us in 468 00:49:08,800 --> 00:49:15,280 in in this kind of like uh frenzied this stuff is important thought leadership area to get caught up 469 00:49:15,280 --> 00:49:20,800 in which is like you know the complexity of things and the difficulty of it and then and then also on 470 00:49:20,800 --> 00:49:28,640 the other on on the other hand kind of like keynotey stories about how like things are awesome right like 471 00:49:28,640 --> 00:49:34,080 we installed this we put this in place and now we can deliver multiple times a week or like now now we 472 00:49:34,080 --> 00:49:40,480 can do that and i think something in the middle that you were getting to is is well and then there's also 473 00:49:40,480 --> 00:49:46,800 the the the fear-based preventing mistakes and and and cost controls and like you know stuff like that 474 00:49:46,800 --> 00:49:52,320 like like you know we need sovereign cloud right like there's there's these kind of like i forget when 475 00:49:52,320 --> 00:49:56,800 i was talking with with with uh darren about this what we categorize these as but they're just sort of 476 00:49:56,800 --> 00:50:02,560 like things you have to do that you would rather not do like regulations and and you know there's that 477 00:50:02,560 --> 00:50:07,200 kind of stuff and security like of course you don't want the bad things to happen but if the bad things 478 00:50:07,200 --> 00:50:12,880 weren't happening you wouldn't do them because they were fun right like um but i think there's something 479 00:50:12,880 --> 00:50:19,120 else that like is even more important is to when it comes to business value is to think about so when 480 00:50:19,120 --> 00:50:26,160 we introduce this new way of working or this new technology when it comes to software what we need to 481 00:50:26,160 --> 00:50:32,480 focus on is what new capabilities we're going to gain that make things better right so so you started 482 00:50:32,480 --> 00:50:38,160 off it's still still a very technical thing well very relatively technical thing of like so i when i was 483 00:50:38,160 --> 00:50:45,920 doing uh you know vms and and early containers and stuff i gained this new capability of being able 484 00:50:45,920 --> 00:50:51,120 to know what's running of kind of being able to diagnose and introspect things so that was a valuable 485 00:50:51,120 --> 00:50:57,760 new capability because the ultimate thing you want your it to do is to run and not fail that that's always 486 00:50:57,760 --> 00:51:05,440 great and so like if that is a problem then it is of extreme business value just to keep the stuff up and 487 00:51:05,440 --> 00:51:11,440 running right to to just be alive so the ability to diagnose things faster and know what's going on is 488 00:51:11,440 --> 00:51:19,680 very much so of business value so it seems like uh the question with building out whether you're you're 489 00:51:19,680 --> 00:51:25,600 spending the time to build out a golden path or uh build up some like multi-cloud strategy or build up a 490 00:51:25,600 --> 00:51:30,560 kubernetes cluster with the platform on top like it's almost like what you want to start with is this 491 00:51:30,560 --> 00:51:37,040 kind of imagining scenario of like all right so once we get this stuff in place like what new capabilities 492 00:51:37,040 --> 00:51:43,120 are we going to have and then also as you were saying like is anyone going to use them right like 493 00:51:43,120 --> 00:51:47,040 so like it's a two-part thing of like what new capability well there's three parts what new capabilities 494 00:51:47,040 --> 00:51:54,080 are we going to get right how will we get people to actually use them right like because if they don't use 495 00:51:54,080 --> 00:51:58,720 them then it doesn't matter and then three you've got to do this almost and this is kind of what a 496 00:51:58,720 --> 00:52:04,320 business case kind of sort of is but it's hard to reduce it to numbers it's like and is the are the 497 00:52:04,320 --> 00:52:12,400 cost the effort the time and the risk that it takes to migrate over to this new thing going to be so 498 00:52:12,400 --> 00:52:18,240 much better than doing nothing right like because chances are if you're considering this and the type of 499 00:52:18,240 --> 00:52:23,040 large organizations we talk with like you already have a lot of everything like you're already functioning and 500 00:52:23,040 --> 00:52:29,120 running and so you've really got to go get over this hurdle of like or we could do nothing and the 501 00:52:29,120 --> 00:52:37,040 business still operates right so like so like the capabilities we gain have to be like way good like 502 00:52:37,040 --> 00:52:40,960 way better than what we're currently doing or you need that big existential thing of like well what 503 00:52:40,960 --> 00:52:46,400 what we're currently doing just does not work so anything would be better that that that we would 504 00:52:46,400 --> 00:52:51,840 be doing so i've had a number of comments we mentioned um cloud foundry and tanzo application 505 00:52:51,840 --> 00:53:01,040 service um earlier that's been really interesting for me talking to big enterprises and i i speak to 506 00:53:01,040 --> 00:53:06,560 them and we say well we've got cloud foundry running with through we had pcf originally and now we've got 507 00:53:06,560 --> 00:53:11,200 taz in there it's been running but it's it's a decade old so we want to replace that with kubernetes 508 00:53:12,160 --> 00:53:18,160 and i have that unfortunate job of asking the why which was what value are you going to get by moving 509 00:53:18,160 --> 00:53:25,360 to kubernetes and if you've already adopted a paas platform well an actual fact that the improvements 510 00:53:25,360 --> 00:53:32,880 can potentially be marginal because you maybe already have a really good centralized platform that enables 511 00:53:32,880 --> 00:53:39,360 developers to push code in a centralized way to secure images and that you can scale and that you can 512 00:53:39,360 --> 00:53:47,760 monitor like in a in a sense it is a container platform in its own right you know um and so as you 513 00:53:47,760 --> 00:53:53,200 say is it is it worth making the leap what is it that you're going to get from a business perspective 514 00:53:53,200 --> 00:53:59,920 that is going to make all that effort worthwhile and as it people we always have this assumption that 515 00:53:59,920 --> 00:54:06,640 just because something is old the new version must be better and that's not always going to be the case 516 00:54:06,640 --> 00:54:11,280 and i think it's really important that we we pause and really think about the impact what we're going 517 00:54:11,280 --> 00:54:17,680 to do the flip side by the way is also true i've working with some businesses just now doing very cool 518 00:54:17,680 --> 00:54:27,440 trendy edge stuff in reality what it is it's things like they've got factories or they have um in case of 519 00:54:27,440 --> 00:54:33,440 retail they'll have stores and these places generally don't have a data center themselves they've got 520 00:54:33,440 --> 00:54:38,800 computers stacked up in a corner somewhere and the broadband connection maybe isn't great well that's 521 00:54:38,800 --> 00:54:44,240 one of the areas where actually deploying kubernetes could really help much like the virtualization space 522 00:54:44,240 --> 00:54:49,840 it gives you the ability to run more than one computer on a physical piece of tin kubernetes gives you 523 00:54:49,840 --> 00:54:56,560 an ability to operate those remote sites similarly to how you do on your your on-prem stuff or your public 524 00:54:56,560 --> 00:55:02,000 cloud stuff um and it's really interesting because some of that's really low weight you like you don't 525 00:55:02,000 --> 00:55:07,440 want a big huge heavy environment you want something relatively lightweight but that enables you then if 526 00:55:07,440 --> 00:55:13,840 you've got that compute power that is flexible well now you could deploy new applications into your factories or stores 527 00:55:13,840 --> 00:55:20,240 and what could you do with that that could be things like computer vision it could be things like 5g in 528 00:55:20,240 --> 00:55:26,960 factories for tracking where things are you know the the end the world is endless there so i think it's 529 00:55:26,960 --> 00:55:32,080 about working out where how the technology is going to be made to be useful you're either going to make 530 00:55:32,080 --> 00:55:36,800 lives better for someone or there's going to be a new capability that you are you're now able to do that 531 00:55:36,800 --> 00:55:41,760 you weren't able to do before yeah well i think that's great that's a good place to arrive at is is 532 00:55:41,760 --> 00:55:47,920 is start with a conversation about what new capabilities am i going to is the organization 533 00:55:47,920 --> 00:55:54,160 going to gain and kind of like navigate your way through that and and you know that can go all sorts 534 00:55:54,160 --> 00:55:59,520 of directions but i think it's it's a starting spot that that uh i don't see a lot of people 535 00:56:00,880 --> 00:56:07,120 starting with that's a great sentence right there well uh thanks again for being on it's uh it's 536 00:56:07,120 --> 00:56:12,080 great if people want to uh uh well you know i'll recommend something you you're you do a pretty good 537 00:56:12,080 --> 00:56:17,360 job of of of one of the the good tricks of people whenever you show up in a video somewhere you download 538 00:56:17,360 --> 00:56:22,240 it and upload it to your own youtube channel so if you go to if you go to your youtube channel which 539 00:56:22,240 --> 00:56:26,560 you could also do with a playlist but i download all my videos and store them in case they disappear one 540 00:56:26,560 --> 00:56:32,560 day but uh you're you're uh what are you you're you're brian ross uk in youtube that's right and 541 00:56:32,560 --> 00:56:37,120 and uh you can see all of the uh the great appearances that you've had uh including you know 542 00:56:37,120 --> 00:56:43,120 you have your uh your shopping cart discussion from explore uh barcelona last year and a few other 543 00:56:43,120 --> 00:56:47,360 interviews here there that i think are uh worth checking out well thanks for being on i think i think 544 00:56:47,360 --> 00:56:55,840 you always bring a uh a good like what's the point of this like like angle and then also what's the 545 00:56:55,840 --> 00:57:01,360 point of this right now uh to it so if uh if you want to see that uh that youtube channel and other 546 00:57:01,360 --> 00:57:06,800 things of brian's uh if you go to tonsutalk.com you can find the show notes and then also uh you know 547 00:57:06,800 --> 00:57:13,520 if you're watching this in youtube or uh or linkedin uh i'll put some links there as well so with that 548 00:57:13,520 --> 00:57:15,680 we'll see everyone next time bye bye