Transcript: DevOps Decrypted Ep. 1 - Introducing DevOps Decrypted

Hello everyone, and welcome to DevOps Decrypted. This is our first episode. I'm your host Romy Greenfield. I'm a software engineer at Adaptavist. And joining me today are Jobin Kuruvilla. Jobin, what do you do?

Hey, I am the head of Solution Strategies at Adaptavist. So we take care of all things DevOps plus a lot more on the professional services area. It's all fun, it's all DevOps.

Awesome. We've also got Matt Saunders joining us.

Hello. Hi everyone. So yeah, I'm Matt. I do DevOps. Or, don't we all? No, really. So I guess I'm the head of Internal DevOps. It's to do things internally. DevOps, all of our stuff.

Lovely. And then we've also got Lisa Schaffer joining us.

Hi everyone. I am a managing consultant that looks after one of the DevOps teams and the Professional Services for Adaptavist.

Cool. So what is this show going to be all about? We're just going to discuss everything DevOps. We're going to have some guest speakers. We're going to talk about anything that interests us and any experiences that we've had. Guys, is there anything else you want to add to that, that people can expect to be in the show?

I think it's kind of a mix of DevOps for dummies plus all the deep, technical talks that we would love to have at some point. It will be around technologies, it will be around tools. It will be around people, process, a lot more.

Yeah. I guess I'm the dummy at the moment because I'm just kind of dipping my toe in the DevOps water.

We'll try and do that. Yeah, I think there's a lot to be said. Lots of people like talking about what DevOps is. I know I do. I think everyone does. Also, go into what it isn't. Mostly through, hopefully, a load of experiential stuff. So we'll go through what we've actually really done, what we've seen people doing, what we ourselves have done across people, process, technology, tools, all of that sort of stuff, I think is where we want to go.

Awesome. All the buzz words in there.

Oh yeah. Lovely buzz words.

Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam.

There is a lot more buzz words, trust me.

Yeah, wait for them.

I'm just going to ask you all to explain every single one in extreme detail. Is there anything else that you think is going to be helpful for our listeners or subscribers? Like, why are we having this show?

I think Adaptavist's had a great track record on a podcasts, but mostly around Atlassian and the ecosystem around it. Now that we have expanded out to different areas, the Atlassian ecosystems, and specifically, to DevOps and agile transformations, I think it's good for our listeners to go deep into DevOps. And learn what DevOps is, why we are doing it, what Adaptavist can do for them, and obviously, learn a bit more about DevOps technologies around.

I'd say maybe a little bit less technology as well because one of the issues we had before was that, obviously, Adaptavist is a very large Atlassian partner. That's what we were known for. The DevOps conversations, I found, always tended to drift towards those tools. So it's all about, yeah, so DevOps people will process, et cetera. But nevermind that. So Atlassian, Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, all these sort of things. Do they count as buzzwords? If so, then I need to put a few pennies in the jar. So having good conversations about technology and also having good conversations about not technology as well.

And so how did you guys get into the DevOps-y way of life?

I love these stories. I think I first encountered it at a conference called Velocity that O'Reilly put together. And there was this very well-dressed guy called Gene Kim, who was speaking very lucidly, not about technology, but about how people actually really get things done. So yes, we can do lots of great technology and use these tools. But actually, why are these people actually doing all this stuff? What's it all actually about?

And it turns out it's about flow and getting things done, reducing latencies within your organization. And yeah, a whole new world there. And then I realized, yeah actually, we're kind of been doing some of this before. And also, in doing some of these things, things like Dev and Ops people actually talking about putting together a real system, highlighting some of the real issues and the fact that, culturally and organizationally, a lot of companies aren't really set up for this. You get teams of developers who want to write code and product managers screaming at them to get more features down, and then them checking things over the wall to ops teams. And having worked on both sides of the fence there, I kind of observed that going on. So it was great to see a name put on to these sort of behaviors, the things that seem that they should be obvious within an organization. That must have been about a decade ago or so. That's how I first got into it. And yeah, once you start seeing the light, you don't really want to look back.

That is right, yeah. And recently, I think we were doing a presentation for our top customers, the Customer Services team were doing it. And there was a simple question that came up. Why DevOps, why are we doing this? And I think we started talking about a chocolate factory, where we talked about, you know, the word agile means a lot to many people now. We are actually developing faster now. Developers have an agile process where they iterate really fast and produce a lot of quality software really fast. But how do we get it to the customer? It's like the chocolate factory where they're working on that process to create chocolates first. But the delivery system is probably not that smooth, which means it's taking a lot of time for them to deliver these chocolates to the real consumers. [inaudible 00:06:25] Boys are waiting for the chocolates to come to their home. That's where DevOps come in. It is creating that agility in delivery, so you're delivering faster now to the customers. People are getting the chocolates faster, on time. So that's where DevOps comes in.

Delicious.

That's why DevOps, yeah.

Yes, deliver me my chocolates faster, please.

If I can just add to that, I've spent a lot of time in large companies going through digital transformation. And I've always been an advocate for reducing waste and automating as much as you can so that you're not just a monkey on a keyboard, churning out the same thing over and over again. And it's all about that working smarter, not harder. And this is what we really want to embed in these conversations around DevOps.

Great. Thanks guys. So what are the common problems in the industry that you think DevOps addresses?

Well, I can start on that. I think things like leaving boxes of chocolates in non air conditioned rooms to spoil. Or maybe, getting those boxes of chocolates and ended up with them in Romy's house, but all squashed.

I'd still eat them.

Yeah, I would too. I think we probably share a passion for chocolate.

So, you mean the reduce the wastage, Matt?

Exactly that. Thank you for bringing us back on topic, Jobin. Yes. Reducing wastage. And you always find, especially in bigger companies in the industry, you find that there is waste. And it's all very accidental. It's not like there are people who are looking around warehouses and seeing pallets of chocolates that are about to go off and need to get shipped out. We probably could use a vaccine analogy here, actually, but nevermind.

People have had enough of that.

Yeah, please. Let's just stick with the chocolates, guys.

Yeah, it's very, very true. Yeah, let's stick with the chocolates. That's more wholesome than COVID vaccines. Anyway, so a lot of the issues come down to visibility of things. You get companies who are growing and accidentally end up building themselves silos. We talk a lot about silos in the DevOps world. And you don't really see them coming. It could be especially bad given that we're all remote. We don't really know exactly what everyone else is up to. We can't necessarily see things flowing through an organization or even what that happy path should be. And so we've almost been encouraged to work like that. If you look at going back to when I was at university a very, very, very long time ago, we were taught to go off and do things, and specialize in things, and become experts. So you get all these big teams of experts who are really, really good at doing the things that they're good at. Maybe it's coding in Groovy, or maybe it's building infrastructure in Amazon Web Services, or whatever it is. And the common problems we see in industry is just not being able to join those things up to actually deliver value. So the company exists for some reason. Maybe it's to produce chocolates, maybe it's to produce software, or whatever it is. Actually seeing the value there can be very, very difficult. Jobin?

I was the saying vaccines.

Oh, vaccines. Yes.

But yeah, I mean, if you want to put a buzzword around it, that's value stream management for you. You try to reduce the wastage, look at where the value is. And that's not just it. You mentioned about collaborating better. So that's another aspect of DevOps. Better traceability, looking at the problems from a different way. Be it monitoring or the integration between different tools, you get better traceability into what's happening all the way from development to delivery. I think we only talk about the time to market for chocolates. So that's another buzz word around that. It's the time to market that we are improving here, the cycle time, by doing automation that Lisa was talking about. You are now doing continuous integration, continuous delivery. So the cycle time for taking a particular feature into that particular environment, be it staging or production, it's now coming down. So that's another important aspect of DevOps. So I think, I mean, it's fair to say that there are a lot of problems that DevOps addresses, right?

Definitely. And I've seen a lot of problems without having DevOps practices in place at a few companies that I've worked at previously. So I'm glad that DevOps is becoming more spoken about and more widely used. So that's all good. What are the common misconceptions around DevOps that you think people have?

So I have a funny story. I did some work for a client a few years ago. And they asked me, when is Atlassian going to bring out a button for DevOps in Jira? And I'm not kidding, that, that was the actual question from exec level people. They were saying, when is there going to be a DevOps module so that we can do this DevOps thing? And I think the biggest misconception about DevOps is that a person thinks that you can buy DevOps out of a box, or you can apply a couple processes and then you're DevOps. And it really isn't that. It's a cultural shift. It's the whole way an organization is structured and the mindset towards how they work to, like Jobin was saying earlier, to get to market quicker, to automate as much as you can, and to work collaboratively.

Yeah, that's an interesting point. You would see a lot of the companies or the customers that we work with, they think that they are doing DevOps. That's because they either have Jenkins, or they have GitLab, or maybe a combination of Bamboo, Bitbucket and Jira. And they think they are doing DevOps because they are automating some things, they have pipelines somewhere written. And they have a tool, and most people associate DevOps with that particular tool. You would actually even see that when we are hiring for it. So when we try to hire DevOps engineers, most people think they are DevOps engineers because they have experience with one particular tool. I guess, I have a Jenkins certification, so I'm a DevOps engineer, which probably may not be true.

Yeah.

Can you not just claim you're a little bit DevOps, then? Can you just say I'm 10% DevOps?

Certainly, yeah. I mean, it is definitely a value addition. I'm not discounting that. If you're not Jenkins, you're probably not more DevOps than a lot of other folks. So I'm not discounting that, but that's not just it.

You've tasted the DevOps chocolate.

You've just had one corner from the selection.

Exactly.

It's worth looking at where we've come from and what these used to be. Some people say, oh, good DevOps is just like, well, we used to do that back in the 1990s and we called it being a sysadmin. I was a proud sysadmin in the 1990s, looking after my servers and the things that ran on them. And one of the things I neglected to mention in the intro was that DevOps came about from this concept of, it was originally called like agile sysadmin. I'm not sure if that was the exact term, but it's something like that. And so it's quite interesting seeing the misconceptions around it. Being, sysadmin, just a load of tools, et cetera. And maybe the unique bit is this element of agility.

And that then plays itself out in all the things we do with our tools. Like the automation, for example. Again, misconception is that it's just about automation, just automate everything and you'll be able to go faster. But it's also mentioning the right things and going off and finding the things where putting the automation in gets you ahead significantly in terms of reducing manual error in things that you do 15 times a day. And you get your throughput up in that sense. And so yeah, when we talk about misconceptions, I often come back to this kind of standoff between the technical, which is all good, which is all absolutely things we should be doing, but if you're not rooting it in some way of being kind of agile in the way that you do this stuff, then yeah, you get into this position where companies think that they are doing DevOps. And they are, but they're kind of following along by rote, somewhat. If you can be agile with it and do the right things around it, then you're going to get a hell of a lot further.

It's actually interesting that you mentioned agility because I think a lot of misconception around DevOps is, a company will go from being a waterfall, or traditionally managed, should I say, and then decide, okay, we want to be DevOps. But it's a journey. You don't just become DevOps. There's your agile framework that you have to identify and agree on. You have to put down that framework, you have to put the correct roles into place, and then you have to grow. Becoming agile is not just a framework or a process that you put on. You don't just hire a Scrum Master and then new agile. It's a journey that a company, an organization will go on. And through that journey of becoming more mature within their agility, they will eventually become DevOps. But you can't just go from traditional to, okay, now we're DevOps because we're using CICB pipelines. It just, it doesn't work that way.

Yeah. I suppose they've got to get comfortable with the new way of working.

Yeah.

Because I know I've been in a team that wanted to do everything agile, and we were talking about SRE and DevOps, and had a DevOps team, and it was great but it was kind of the only small bit of this huge company that had anything to do with that. And as soon as the rest of the company got involved, it was like, whoa, no, we need to pare this back and stay waterfall, stay waterfall.

Yeah, there's something more in there. Which is, picking up on what Lisa, what you said, and also what you just said, Romy, about the scope of these things. A lot of people underestimate, when they're going to an agile transformation, just how how wide it needs to be to actually be effective. And the reality is that, you can get some teams doing scrum and get them doing two weekly cadences to do releases relatively easily. But it's all for nothing if you can't actually get ideas from wherever they come from to being fully delivered. And the very last thing is, that getting all that stuff done in a large organization cuts across so many different teams that it is a massive undertaking. And that's where you see people suggesting things like using lighthouse projects or tracer bullets. So you want to change the way you do things through an agile transformation, through a DevOps transformation, find something that's small enough to get you through all those levels of the business, but it's also big enough that people stood up and take notice.

Yeah. And to the point Matt was making earlier about being a sysadmin and DevOps. I think there's a cultural issue there too, because a lot of the people think that, okay, once we embraced DevOps, it means that I'm losing my job. A lot of the sysadmins feel that, which is also a problem. Because once you have that resistance culture, it's really difficult to implement DevOps in an organized fashion. And that's a problem that we encounter when we work with customers quite a lot. What they don't realize is, once we embraced DevOps, it is actually making their lives easier, giving them time to actually work on the things that really matter. To improve efficiency, to look at the quality of the process, to improve the security of the software that you're developing, all those things that you have ignored for so long. Now you're getting the time to concentrate on those little things. So DevOps is not actually taking anybody's jobs, it's actually freeing you to do things better. Working smarter, as Romy was mentioning earlier.

Yeah, and a little bit of pain now, for a long-term benefits.

Yeah.

Exactly.

I think there's a lot of fear of change. I think it's natural for humans to not like new stuff.

Yeah, of course it is.

We don't want this change. I've been working this way for 20 years, why do I want to change now? So it is a bit of teething pains, but it's definitely worth it in the long run.

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Yeah. And it's not just working on different things. It's not like, one day you're doing things in a certain way and some consultants come in and say, tomorrow, you're going to do it in this way. It's much more fundamental than that in that, if you're envisaging things in the systems context, there's almost an expectation that people will kind of understand the whole of that context, from dev through to test, through to production and infrastructure. And for a lot of people who are used to specializing in these, well frankly, silos that they've been in, and now being asked to be a bit more generalist, it is a scary thing. It's not for everyone, but it does reflect the way that the industry is going.

So how did you guys become passionate about DevOps? Like Lisa, let's go to you first. What made you passionate about DevOps? What peaked your interest?

I think for me, I've always been an advocate of change and improving efficiencies, simplifying things. I like to approach problems with a simplistic breakdown of how it could be solved. And I feel like I've always loved technology. I really, really, really get excited about technology. A bit of the geek in me. And I just, I've always been, for a good 15 plus years, involved in agile transformation. I'm certified Scrum Master, et cetera. And I've loved to see how companies grow and change in their journey of becoming DevOps.

And as Matt was saying earlier, DevOps hasn't been around for a long time, but if you were one of those people that were kind of involved in agile transformation and you got a taste of the DevOps world, and just seeing how companies improve. I know this is a dumb example, but it's almost like buying a plant and watering it and feeding it, And over time, you just see it grow. And then maybe it'll bud a little flower or something like that. But it's going into a company and being a part of that journey, seeing all the pain that they were in in the beginning, walking alongside them in their journey and helping with improving things. And I'm always about improvement. I always feel like, even if you're really good at what you do, there's always room for improvement. And I feel like that's the same of companies. Whether you're a large organization or a small startup, there's always room for improvement. There's always ways to improve efficiencies and do things better. At the end of the day, you want to be a market leader, and DevOps helps you get there. And I really love it. I really love being a part of it and being involved in DevOps teams.

That was beautiful. I loved that comparison to a growing a plant. I can really feel that one because, whenever I watch my plants bud, I get so excited.

Exactly.

What about you, Jobin?

Well for me, I'll be very honest here, I probably learned most of it while doing it. That's because I think a lot of the people like me, probably even Matt included, were doing DevOps even before the term was coined. People who know me know that I had been working with Atlassian products for quite long time now. I even wrote a book on Jira. But the thing is that I had been working on products like Bamboo, Bitbucket, all these different. Bitbucket when it was called Stash. And we were creating pipelines, we were defining Git branching workflows, all for our different customers years ago. And then obviously, DevOps became the fashion, the trend. And then we realized, oh my God, we are already doing DevOps. So why not, we actually do a little bit more marketing around it? Selling around it, reach out to our customers and say that, okay, we actually know this stuff, so we can do this for you.

And then we had spun it out of just the Atlassian products into the agile ecosystems. We had people who were experts on Jenkins, GitLab, all these different systems. And then, boom, we are doing DevOps. And to be frank, a lot of these tools, they work similar but they had different areas where they were concentrating all the tools they were concentrating on. So we had to pick up some of those things while we were doing the job. But once you get that process identified with you, once you know the basics of it, it's not hard. It's a process. It's not the tool that is fixing your problems.

Yeah.

And obviously, I loved every bit of it. Once you start doing it for our customers and once you can see the improvements it is making in their lives, that's what you are working for.

Yeah, you got addicted to DevOps.

Yep.

Oh, might as well face it, I'm addicted to DevOps. Sorry, it's the first episode and I'm already singing. This is not a good start.

No, this is a great start.

Actually, no, you're right, it is a great start. With chocolate, with terrible dad singing. Just need to see more dad jokes.

This is everything I ever wanted from this podcast.

Oh, fantastic. So passion for me from DevOps. This came to me through dating, would you believe?

That's a new one. Never heard of that.

This is great.

Wow. I'm interested to hear this, now.

I want the full story here.

Sorry, it's not quite as good as I'd hyped it up to be, to be honest. In 2009, I went to work for a startup that was doing a video dating site. So we're already doing a podcast, and we're recording, and we've all got HD definition cameras attached to our screens or our laptops or whatever. Way back then, this stuff was very much in its infancy. And some people in the US had an idea around taking dating from being a thing where you write your surveys, your likes, what books you like, and what you like doing at the weekend, and type it into a database, and some algorithm matches you. They decided, no, we've got webcams now. We're just going to change this. Have a minimum amount of stuff that you put into a form and then the system does match you, but then you go onto a webcam chat with somebody else. And this is the startup idea, which sounds really antiquated and old fashioned now, but was actually reasonably ahead of its time back then.

And I went from a relatively large enterprise, three or 400 people, I think, no, that's not relatively large. A medium size company to this startup, which was basically 15 people in a room in a very, very noisy office on Oxford Street. The CTO there at the time, great guy who I consider to be one of my biggest mentors and I haven't spoken for far too long, a guy called Nick Farrier, was basically all over everything. And he was doing things like encouraging developers to deploy to production. He was doing things like encouraging them to debug their own code and see what was going wrong with it when it, invariably, woke me up in the middle of the night, and getting developers involved in that. And basically, just being really free and open and honest about how we get stuff delivered and how devs can write good code that doesn't muck up things in production.

And yeah, went through doing this having a lovely time, thinking, yeah, this is quite cool, this is good. And then we realized that there is a movement around this stuff and it's called DevOps. And then I started looking back and thinking, some of the experiences I've had in the past which had really worked quite heavily against me. Things like jobs where there was a terrible guy who is doing the deployments. He used to smell terribly of cheap cologne and cigarette smoke and everyone was scared of him. And I thought back to things like that, and the attitude and the tribalism that we had between departments in previous jobs had done that just didn't exist in this world.

And that unlocked a lot of things for me, and eventually led to the thinking around how, actually, this level of openness, the cross-pollination of skills, the multifunctional teams, all helps you get products delivered. It was great. The reason I mentioned that it was all about dating is that that's something that everyone can understand. You can understand what you're doing here. And having a direct link between what I was doing to getting people on dates with other people who are likely to match with them, the direct link between those things makes just everything so much easier to deal with, so much more straightforward. And a lot of that is DevOps.

I can address just asking Matt, so do you think, since you were part of the startup, was it easy for you to pick up DevOps and implement it? Would it be the same if you're going into an enterprise and doing it?

Yeah, you're absolutely right there. It's not. A startup can do these things. A startup can change the way that it does things very, very quickly. It's also easy to see how those things would be a benefit in a startup because you think of the things that creep into larger companies, like the divisions, the silos, the poor communications, the excessive communication over ticketing buses, et cetera. You'd just be silly to do those sorts of things in a startup. And so yeah, I went eventually back to an enterprise that wasn't doing DevOps very, very well. And to be honest, I found it a pretty depressing experience. You can question very easily why these things have to be like that. And especially back then, so going back about five or six years ago, you go into an enterprise and things are just the way they are because they're the way they are.

Yep.

And you want to change things and you sound simplistic. And people are like, oh yeah, yeah. Well, you'll get used to the way things are here, really. No, you can't do any of that sort of stuff.

Mm-mm (negative).

And you know, that was difficult.

Yeah. I think it goes back to the point that we made multiple times already. It's not just about the tool, it's also the culture. The people and the process.

Yeah.

Yeah, definitely. And just on that point, I was lucky enough to work for a very large mobile banking platform company that I can't say the name. But the one head of product actually took a stance and said, I'm going to do this greenfield project. I want none of the legacy processes or people to be involved. He hired a whole bunch of new people, put down new processes. And that was in 2006 and that's kind of where I started to get involved in DevOps/ and you're right, Jobin, it's not just tooling. It's somebody in leadership that takes a stance and says, we're not going to do it like that anymore. We're going to do it this way. And we are going to fail fast, and we are going to learn new things, and we are going to be great.

Yeah.

And that is what it is exciting. But that was in a really large global company. But someone stood up and said, we're not going to do it like that anymore.

Yeah, you just need that one person that spearheads it.

Oh, exactly.

And then you've got one person, once they realized all the benefits, then it starts spreading. Like, back to the back to the virus.

Yeah. And Lisa, you mentioned about the learning. That is really important because I had the same experience for another customer, a big customer. An insurance corporation where they had, I think, 300 developers working on ClearCase. They started moving to Bitbucket, started using Git. And obviously, they wanted to start it as a new project. Everything's starting from scratch, new process, new workflows, everything. One thing they discounted or overlooked was that, the developers, they were experienced on ClearCase but they had no history with Git and they didn't know how to do Git. And that actually cost a lot of, lot of problems because that learning or the training was missing there. We had to do a lot of training afterwards. But looking back, if we had accounted for that earlier, that would have saved us a lot of time and effort.

So when people come to us to seek help and advice on DevOps, what are the typical challenges and issues that they face?

I think I'll go back to the point that we were making earlier. The backing from the executives. The C-level execs. If we don't have that, then we are still looking at an organization, [inaudible 00:33:57] some different groups. Some of the groups might be interested in implementing DevOps on certain processes, the others may not be as interested. But once you have that person holding the whip and telling everybody to fall in line, then it makes everything a lot easier. Otherwise, we are still working as different groups, following different processes, maybe even using different tools.

Yeah. You have to have that person in leadership that is passionate and strongly believes in doing things differently to spear head it.

And also can pick up the people who are going to help him or her do that. Yeah, you absolutely have to have the right leadership. But if you've got leaders who then bringing lots of people who are going to sit around and try and do things the old way, or are kind of used to doing it a certain way, and don't have that mindset we were talking about earlier around changing the way they do things, then again, you're destined to fail.

Yep.

Yeah.

Well, thanks guys. And thanks everyone listening for joining us to discuss everything DevOps on DevOps Decrypted. We hope you've enjoyed everything that you've heard so far. So please let us know on social media @Adaptavist. If you have, or if you haven't, if there's anything you want us to talk about and discuss. And we look forward to keeping that conversation going with you there. So it's thank you from Matt Saunders, and from Jobin Kuruvilla, and Lisa Schaffer. Thanks for listening. I'm Romy Greenfield and this has been your DevOps Decrypted podcast, which is part of the Adaptavist Live podcast network.