DevOps Shorts
By Ant Weiss
DevOps ShortsDec 06, 2020
Peter Guagenti - The AI is an Iron Man Suite for the Mind
Today's episode is a bit of a departure from my regular format. And it's symbolic. The evolution of GenAI is definitely changing how we work in IT. The change may still not be very evident but we all know it's coming. And we still need to understand what changes. Beside the StackOVerflow drop in popularity that is.
That's why my guest this time is Peter Guagenti - the President and CMO at Tabnine- the AI coding assistant. Peter has worked at Nginx, CockroachDB and SingleStore, so he has a deep understanding of platform tooling and open source. And today he's bringing the message of AI-assisted coding. And together we're trying to understand how that changes platform and Devops work.
Listen to the episode to learn:-
- Why AI changes everything about how we work (in DevOps too)
- Where AI extends beyond code completion/generation
- What's the role of context awareness
- How it changes our creativity
Abby Bangser - Platforms is How You Scale DevOps Teams
Abby is a Principal Engineer at Syntasso building [Kratix] and is also the Platforms Working Group Lead at CNCF. So she's definitely the person I wanted to talk to about platforms.
Listen to the episode to learn:
- Why transition from QA to Plaftorm Engineering makes a lot of sense.
- Why cross-functional teams don't scale well
- What is becoming our main concerns as we build better platforms
Omkar Kadam - DevOps are the Platform Superheroes
Omkar Kadam is a Lead DevOps Engineer at Cactus Communications and an AWS Community Builder
It's always great to get the firsthand insights from practitioners.
Listen to the episode to learn:
- How DevOps is making developers fearless
- How Platform teams and DevOps teams interact IRL
- What AI can offer to help us get more sleep
Turja Chaudhuri - Enterprise IT is a Mess Without a Platform
Turjah Chaudhuri is an Associate Director of Cloud Practice at EY. Previous to his current role he's served as a Cloud Solution Architect at Accenture. And he also delivered Big Data and Cloud Computing training as a visiting professor at the FLAME University in Pune.
Turjah has a very clear view of why enterprise delivery platforms are a necessity and how they should evolve.
Listen to the episode to learn:
- Where to start your Platform Engineering journey (aka: a Wiki is all it takes)
- Where DevOps and Platform intersect
- What's the role of GenAI in the future of enterprise IT Platforms
Henrik Høegh - Playing with LEGO
Henrik Høegh is the Digital Platform Owner at Velux. He's been doing system administration and cloud native platforms since 2008 and is one of the organizers of the recent, wildly successful Kubernetes Community Days (KCD) conference in Kopenhagen.
Listen to the episode to learn:
- How internal delivery platform are like Lego.
- What's there to hate about Terraform (yes OpenToFu too).
- What it takes to build a great internal platform.
Hila Fish - Helping Business Evolve
Hila Fish is a Senior DevOps Engineer at Wix, a singer, and DevOpsDaysTLV co-organizer.
She's also an acclaimed international speaker on the topics of both DevOps culture and technology.
Listen to the episode to learn:
- What's more important - pople, business or computers?
- Why you should think twice before updating a Jira server.
- Why DevOps will never be perfect without a magic wand.
This was recorded before AllDayDevOps where we both spoke.
I was originally planning to upload the episode before it starts, but life happened.
Anyway - here's the link to the conference : https://www.alldaydevops.com/
It looks like the videos are still not publicly available.
Natan Yellin - Fixing Kubernetes and the Success of AI
Natan Yellin is the CEO of Robusta - the company building an open-source platform for multi-cluster Kubernetes monitoring, troubleshooting, and automation.
Listen to the episode to learn:
- How to get high on solving technical problems
- How a phone call in the middle of a family dinner can lead to DevOps innovation
- All the wonderful things one can do with the help of AI even today
- What is the role of Kubernetes in the future of IT
Boaz Ziniman - The Serverless 5G Future
Boaz Ziniman is a Principal Developer Advocate at AWS and one of first proponents of cloud computing in Israel. Prior to working at AWS he's spent a decade at Zend - the PHP company - also leading the cloudification of Zend services.
Boaz has a great YouTube channel in Hebrew called מעונן חלקית (Partly Cloudy). Check it out here.
Find Boaz on twitter and his own website
Listen to the episode to learn:
- If we find the career or if it's the career that finds us.
- What happens when you embed a frontend dev in an Ops team.
- What's next for cloud computing.
- What does 5G have to do with all of this?
Shauli Rozen - The Next Level of DevSecOps
I first met Shauli when he and his co-founders were only planning to start ARMO
Fast-forward 3 years and he's now the CTO of one of the leading Kubernetes security startups.
ARMO is also the company behind Kubescape - the great open-source tool for Kubernetes security scanning in production.
Listen to the episode to learn:
- Why building developer tooling feels so great
- Is CISO a curse word now
- How one junior with an agenda can start a revolution
- What AlienOps is
- Who the next shift-left candidates are
And there's also an unanswered question:
- What's the next level for cloud native ecosystem?
Got an answer? Leave a comment and maybe - be my guest at the next DOS episode to share your thoughts.
Steve Pereira - DevOps is a MacGuffin
Steve Pereira calls himself a Value Stream Guy.
Today he is the founder of https://visible.is where he is helping teams define and optimize their value streams.
Before that he's been a startup CTO, an agency consultant, a systems and release engineer, a finance IT manager, a tech support phone jockey, and a pizza maker.
All focused on the flow of value, all the time.
Find him on twitter - and on his website
Listen to the episode to learn:
- What it's like being a Value Stream Guy
- Do we know less or do we know more as time passes
- Why DevOps is not important
- What a MacGuffin is
- And finally why understanding your value stream is so important
Jonathan Hall - Big Ideas for the Little Teams
Johnathan Hall (aka TinyDevOps) is a DevOps coach and consultant based in Netherlands. Jonathan has almost 3 decades experience in the IT industry out of which 2 decades were spent in leadership roles. Jonathan is focused on **helping small teams do amazing DevOps**.
Listen to the episode to learn:
- How love of IT is still about making tech do our bidding.
- Why DevOps is about fixing systemic problems
- What is still missing for small teams to be able to do great DevOps
Heidi Waterhouse - Future is Just Another Feature
Heidi Waterhouse is a prominent figure on the DevOps landscape. And she's also special at that - because her background is neither Dev nor Ops. For the whole of her career she's been a technical writer, a documentation specialist. And I find this wonderfully exciting - because first of all - DevOps has never been the sole concern of Devs and Ops only. And secondly - good documentation is such an important part of knowledge sharing that we all know lies at the very core of the DevOps movement.
Today Heidi is the Developer Advocate at LaunchDarkly - the company that allows smart feature management in production. She knows that adding or removing a feature is as easy as just flipping a toggle.
Listen to the episode to learn:
- How sewing is similar to IT, and also how it's different
- Why DevOps gives us a historical perspective
- Are we maybe running in circles?
- Why the future is just another feature
Tracy Miranda - Fixing Real-World Problems is not as Easy as You Think
Continuous Delivery is the practice underlying the DevOps principles. That’s why for this episode of DevOps Shorts I’m incredibly excited to interview Tracy Miranda - the executive director of the Continuous Delivery Foundation.
Listen to the episode to learn:
- How contributing to open-source can help you love your job
- How easy it was to set up sane release practices for Jenkins
- What are the plans of Continuous Delivery Foundation going forward
- What democratizing software delivery looks like
Viktor Farcic - Defying the Rigid Org Structure
Today I'm very happy to have Viktor Farcic as my guest. Viktor is the author of the DevOps Toolkit Series, the host of the DevOps Paradox podcast and now also the Developer Advocate at Codefresh
Listen to the episode to learn:
- Why software engineers are a rare and lucky breed
- How lack of communication skills can make you fall in love with computers
- What can help you love IT again after you've been sick of it
- How impatience and frustration can bring on collaboration (isn't that the devops paradox?)
- Why Kohsuke Kawaguchi created Jenkins
- How to avoid becoming obsolete in the rapidly changing IT industry
J.Paul Reed - It's Humans All the Way Down
Resilience engineering is one of the most forward-looking fields to surface in our industry in the last 5 years.
That's why I'm so excited to have J.Paul Reed as my guest. Paul is one of the most passionate promoters of resilience engineering practices. He's a co-organizer of REDeploy, a frequent speaker on related topics and now also a senior applied resilience engineer at Netflix.
And he's also a great story-teller!
This episode is also slightly longer than usual because in the end Paul goes into what I considered too important to stop him - the distinction between reliability and resilience.
Listen to the episode to learn:
- Why release engineers are the air traffic controllers of IT
- Why it's important to treat humans as humans
- What names Paul considers important mentioning when talking DevOps ;)
- What happens if a reliability engineer and a resilience engineer pick a fight
Ohad Maislish - The Revolution of Codified Infrastructure
Ohad Maislish is the CEO at Env0 - the self-service cloud environments company.
Listen to the episode to learn:
- How to become the youngest employee at Microsoft
- How the magic of the cloud unfolded
- If Ohad prefers Pulumi over Terraform
- What's next for cloud infrastructure
Patrick Debois - DevOps as a Life-Changing Methodology
Is this the peak of my career as a DevOps show host?!?!
I'm so excited about this - I succeeded to land an interview with the man who invented the **DevOps** word itself!
With the original DevOpsDays orgainzer - the one and only Patrick Debois!
Beside being one of the most prominent DevOps thought leaders of our times, Patrick is now also the DevOps Relations director at Snyk
Listen to the episode to learn:
- Why not to quit even when there's no happy end to your IT movie.
- What really leads to a DevOps A-HA.
- How DevOps changes people's lives
- Why user interfaces need to evolve in order for DevOps to evolve
Philipp Krenn - Build, Play, Automate
Philipp Krenn is a technologist, meetup organizer, conference speaker and developer advocate at Elastic.
He is very good at explaining and demoing exciting new technologies and he's now in the very epicenter of the observability movement - bringing the Elastic stack to eningeers all over the virtual world.
Listen to the episode to learn:
- What's the role of playfulness in IT
- Why you would want to be a developer advocate
- How automating your infastructure makes everything better - even education
- Why [Strigo](https://strigo.io) is so great that we both use it
- Is AIOps a real thing or just a BS hype
Mark Burgess - Digging Away at Human-Machine Systems
I'm so thrilled! My guest for tonight is Mark Burgess - a "technologist, scientist and author, specializing in the physics of Information Systems" (quoted from Mark's website).
Mark is probably best known to the IT crowd as the man who defined the ideas behind **desired-state configuration management** and the creator of the CFEngine CM tool that predated Puppet, Chef and Ansible and is still in use at quite a number of companies.
But for me Mark is first and foremost the mind behind Promise Theory which provides a new outlook on how effective collaboration between free agents occurs in complex systems.
I was thrilled and humbled to have Mark as my guest because his ideas and thier implications are omnipresent in the systems we build and those we're part of.
Listen to the episode to learn:
- What's the connection between physics and information
- Why IT moves so slowly
- If playing with Kubernetes can make society a better place
If you find Mark's ideas as fascinating as I do - make sure to check out his latest book Smart SpaceTime and a documentary series "Bigger, Faster, Smarter" on Youtube.
And if you really want to benefit from Mark's deep understanding of complexity - he's also providing consultancy to large IT organizations looking to adapt their systems and processes to the changing reality of our tumultuous world.
------
This episode is once again made possible by Otomato Software Ltd. - providers of Cloud-Native DevOps Knowledge and Services.
Get in touch for:
- Developer Advocacy and Product Strategy
- Cloud Native Infrastructure Services and Training
- DevOps Acceleration
Adi Shacham-Shavit - Quality is Still Too Hard
And our guest for tonight is Adi Shacham-Shavit - previously R&D manager at such companies as AppsFlyer and Lemonade, now EVP Engineering at an early stage startup called Clear.
Adi hates wasting time and making the same mistake twice.
First of all - it makes me happy that Adi is a woman - I feel like my show was lacking in diversity - I only got to interview white men until now. :(
And - Adi is both a seasoned manager and an ever-learning practitioner - which makes her point of view especially valuable.
Listen to the episode to learn:
- What is really so exciting about software and IT
- The pain a manager feels when DevOps is not working
- What to do when you feel the urge to leave tech
- What is still lacking in today's delivery processes
John Willis - Towards the 5 Elements of IT
This episode of DevOps Shorts is probably the most exciting one I've recorded until now.
This time I was honoured to host none other but the great John Willis himself - the man who brought DevOpsDays to US, the originator of the CA(L)MS acronym, one of the authors of "The DevOps Handbook" and now - a senior director at RedHat Global Transformation Office.
Derek Weeks - It's All in the Feedback Loops
Our guest for tonight is Derek Weeks - the Vice-president at Sonatype and the co-founder of AllDayDevOps. The man who started doing global virtual conferences before they became cool.
Listen to the episode to learn :
- Why continuous learning is such great thing
- How visualizing feedback loops makes DevOps easier to grasp
- What DevSecOps looks like in real world
Short notes:
Manuel Pais - Exploring the Team Topologies
I was so happy when Manuel Pais agreed to be my guest on this episode of DevOps shorts.
Manuel is a Lisbon-born, Madrid-based DevOps consultant and trainer - but most importantly - a charismatic and inteligent human being.
Listen to the episode to learn :
- How one workshop with great trainers can change your vision
- Was Gene Kim hiding in Manuel's office?
- How IT orgs need to change in order to survive in the fully remote world we're heading to
## Short Notes:
Mike Druzhinin - Testing in Production and the Serverless Edge
Mike Druzhinin - Testing in Production and the Serverless Edge
Our guest for tonight is Mike Druzhinin - Software Development Manager at Amazon.com and a Program Committee Member of the great DevOops conference.
Mike took a short break from keeping Amazon up and running through the COVID-19 online shopping craze to talk to us about love, DevOps A-HA and the future.
Mike talks about the how playfulness makes IT so loveable. And how the best place to play with IT is the production environment.
We then peek into the future and there's a lot of excitement and some paranoia lurking on the edge of the cloud.
Listen to the episode to learn :
- Where kids in Soviet Russia learned about computers from
- Why testing in production is the best thing since sliced bread
- What dangers and opportunities lie at the serverless edge
## Short Notes:
- Professor Fortran's Encyclopaedia - the legendary Soviet computer book for kids
- Testing in Production - the Hard Parts (a great post by Cindy Sridharan)
Carlos Leon - Hacking the Human Side of IT
Our guest for tonight is Carlos Leon - an independent cloud native and automation consultant based in Netherlands.
Carlos is the link between your business and your technical people - because he understands and speaks both languages.
Short Notes:
- Microsoft FrontPage - was a WYSIWYG web page editor from Microsoft - now discontinued.
Damien Ryan - Working Sanely to Deliver Small Bits of Value
For the third episode of DevOps Shorts I was happy to zoom with Damien Ryan!
Damien has spent 22 years working in tech, going from applied science through all kinds of build and release engineering roles to his current position - the Director of Engineering at Featurespace - a company that builds Adaptive Behavioral Analytics technology for fraud and financial crime management.
Damien talks about how crazy things used to be in IT and how XP has revolutionized his approach to software delivery.
In Damien's eyes - DevOps is sanity and we just need it to be more evenly distributed.
Short Notes:
- Damien is referencing Kent Beck's work - here's Extreme Programming Explained : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/67833.Extreme_Programming_Explained
- And here's a nice overview of Lennon-McCartney collaboration that Damien mentions when talking about great managers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lennon%E2%80%93McCartney
Baruch Sadogursky - Let Machines Do What They Are Good At.
Our guest for tonight is Baruch Sadogursky - the Head of DevOps Advocacy or the Chief Sticker Officer at JFrog - the Universal Artifact Management Company.
Tune in to learn:
- Where the actual DevOps AHA! moment took place
- What industries are gonna be impacted next
- Who will get automated out of their jobs
- Why banging on a keyboard with AC on is better than sweating outside
Short notes:
- This will be mentioned time after time on the show, I'm sure - but still:
The Phoenix Project : https://itrevolution.com/book/the-phoenix-project/
- Westworld - the show every IT professional should watch: https://www.hbo.com/westworld
Tobias Kunze - Nurture over Nature
Our guest for tonight is Tobias Kunze. Tobias was the tech founder of the company that became what we now know as OpenShift. Today he’s the founder and CEO of Glasnostic - a startup that’s building a novel technology for operators to provide their applications with instant resilience so developers can deploy more and the business stays up.
Tobias talks about the ever-growing importance of Operations in IT. If developers were the kingmakers, will the operations become the king slayers?
Short notes:
The Nature vs. Nurture debate (whereas Development is Nature and Operations is Nurture)
"THE NEW KINGMAKERS" - the book by @sogrady that Tobias refers to.