Season 2 / Episode 4
DevOps
Season 2 / Episode 4
DevOps
Featuring
Jennifer Shannon, Meng Fu, Bianca Spazziani
Date published
June 20, 2019
Tags
DevOps
Also available on:
In our latest episode, host Jennifer Shannon chats with Meng Fu, Senior Cloud Solutions Architect at Rangle and Bianca Spazziani, Cloud Solutions Architect at Rangle to delve deep into what DevOps really means and how it can be beneficial for your organization, no matter the size or maturity.
In our latest episode, host Jennifer Shannon chats with Meng Fu, Senior Cloud Solutions Architect at Rangle and Bianca Spazziani, Cloud Solutions Architect at Rangle to delve deep into what DevOps really means and how it can be beneficial for your organization, no matter the size or maturity.
00:01
Jennifer: Welcome to What's Your (R)angle?, a podcast by Rangle that explores thoughts, ideas, and perspectives on the digital transformation space. Each episode, we'll provide you with some key considerations for mapping your digital first strategy, and our angle on how we look at challenges presented. Join the conversation by using the hashtag #AskRangle on Twitter, or by emailing us at podcast@rangle.io.
00:22
Hello, and welcome to What's Your (R)angle? I'm your host, Jennifer Shannon, and this season on the podcast, we're talking about the core components of digital transformation in the innovation space, and hoping to demystify some of these core pillars. On today's episode, we're looking at DevOps, which is a relatively new term, but not necessarily a new way of working. With me today are Bianca Spazziani and Meng Foo. Welcome. So happy to have you on the show.
00:48
Meng: Hello, thank you for having us.
00:49
Jennifer: Thank you. So I think the first thing that I'd like to start with is, there's a number of shared roles in the tech space. So, startups or enterprise companies have these shared roles. I'm not so sure that solution architect is one of those roles. So, maybe Bianca, we'll start with you. What is a solution architect? Why are you a solution architect, and what's your mandate here at Rangle?
01:09
Bianca: Well, I think a solution architect can get technologies, and tools, and solutions, and bring a product or a service to a client based on this knowledge, and experience, and everything he knows, or she knows. And I think that is connecting this strategy of the client or the company, and creating the best solution for the client, with those knowledge and everything else.
01:44
Jennifer: So, problem solver?
01:45
Bianca: Yes.
01:45
Jennifer: It's a pretty pivotal role, right? Yeah?
01:47
Bianca: Yeah.
01:47
Jennifer: Yeah, what about you, Meng?
01:49
Meng: Yeah, I guess my role is a solutions architect for DevOps and cloud. So that, I guess, focuses specifically around DevOps and being a DevOps advocate for our clients, understanding the constantly changing technical landscape, to be able to apply various different services to solve different problems. So, it's a very interesting ride and a good one, in that you don't get to work on the same thing all the time, and you got to be quick on your feet to be able to come up with a new idea, a new solution.
02:18
Jennifer: And because a lot of what you're doing is in fact that discovery process with clients, and trying to figure out, here's what they want to do, and here's the technology that exists, what is the best match, right? You're kind of matchmaking, in a way, which is really interesting.
02:32
So I think we should probably start at the beginning, which is, DevOps is short for development ops. Maybe Meng, you could just sort of start with what is DevOps. What is DevOps, and how does it work?
02:44
Meng: And that's a good question. I guess, depending on who you ask, you might get different answers. DevOps, I guess, may be seen by some as a culture, it could be a tool, or processes, a framework. But really, the way we see it, it's like a combination of all these things that enable agile. So that's really the key word, they enable agile.
03:03
So, it focuses around the lead time versus the process time, meaning that we look for ways to optimize the value stream, to have continuous delivery of usable features to the end user. So that's what I see DevOps as, and to your point, DevOps, the way you define it is, development and operations, and that was how teams used to be organized. They were siloed before DevOps came to be. So, back then, you would have development, who would be focused on just writing code and trying to release things quickly. You would have the operations team that would be monitoring the site and ensuring the availability and up time.
03:47
So, on the one hand, you have agility, the other side, you have reliability, a team that wants to ship code, a team that doesn't want any changes, really conflicting interests, and that's where you have this proverbial wall, let's say, where dev would finish the work, get stuff committed, throw that over the wall, dust their hands off, and here you go, ops team, you run with it.
04:10
So, DevOps was coined back in about 2009, I believe, as a means to sort of break down this wall, to eliminate silos, so the teams can work together to deliver software quickly but confidently.
04:25
Jennifer: Bianca, how do you see this happening with you? Like, in terms of if the client's asking you what is DevOps. How are you explaining that in sort of their everyday terms, in the way that they understand it?
04:35
Bianca: I think it's about breaking walls, like how to bring the development team closer to the operations team, how can they know each other's problem, how can they solve it together. So, it's not about a new tool. Oh, let's use a new tool here. It can look like a very technical term, right? When you think, oh, DevOps. But no, it's not. It's more like a cultural thing. How can we put those people talking together, working together in a collaborative way. So, how can we do this? With tools, with processes, with-
05:21
Jennifer: Collaboration, yeah.
05:22
Bianca: Collaboration, and enabling collaboration. And so, when you go to a company, oh, let's implement DevOps, how can you do this? How can you change your culture here, so we can bring those teams together and deliver faster and better software quality?
05:39
Jennifer: And I love that notion of it being a cultural shift, because it is that idea that you're not sort of saving everything up to put it out there, and get feedback, and iterate. It's put a little something out, like sometimes multiple times a day, which is put it out there in its smaller sort of MVP form, get some feedback, and then iterate it and put it out there. And that does represent a fundamental shift.
06:04
Are you seeing that pain point from clients, where they're like, okay, we get DevOps, but it's that shift, that hurdle of going from, we're six weeks to our release, and now it's sort of the, well, why wouldn't we just release 10% of that every single day? Is that something you've seen?
06:19
Meng: Definitely. I've seen that, a few client projects I've been on, and definitely, I'm sure it's pervasive everywhere. If you look at the State of DevOps Report at least a few years back, it says that organizations are getting faster at automation, building out the CIC pipelines, getting code from commit out to staging, but they falter on sort of the last mile. So, they can't get past the staging into production.
06:43
So, when they try to go to production, they're either holding back because they want to be cautious, and worry about taking down the site, or they've tried it, and faltered, and run into issues, and had to roll back. So that's been sort of the main drawback from really implementing DevOps the correct way.
07:02
Jennifer: So when you've got a client, Bianca, that's feeling a little hesitant about moving forward, what is that tipping point that you can explain to them that DevOps allows you to ... What is that thing that makes them go, "Oh no, I get it"?
07:14
Bianca: Yeah. I think you have different approaches of DevOps to different clients. So, one is clients starting. It's a startup that wants to deliver something, an MVP fast. So, yeah, you should definitely think about DevOps. And when a company wants to grow from a small project to a big project, that's what DevOps is made for, you create something that is small, and you monitor this growth of your project or your solution.
07:56
So, smaller companies benefit better, but bigger companies also can benefit, but the cultural shift is harder for them, because to change the culture of a big company, it's hard. For a small company, it's easy, because they are beginning, or there are a few people. But for bigger companies, it's hard to change the culture. And what I would say to them is to start small, with small wins. So, when you start with a project and show the other teams that, what are the benefits that you've got from DevOps.
08:38
Jennifer: So there's an interesting theme that's recurring here. So, if I was someone who was an innovation or digital transformation champion in a big bank, or a big fintech company, or an enterprise company, my ears would be perking up right now, because basically what you're saying to me is, DevOps allows you to take something small, a small portion of project or whatever, create something, put it out there right away for feedback from your customer, get information, iterate, and actually share the success of that small focus group on getting buy in across the organization. Is that what's happening?
09:13
Meng: That's absolutely, and as Bianca mentioned, culture is the foundation to DevOps. That's underlying for everything, and most organization ... Well, anywhere, I would say. Big organizations, it's hard to sort of change that culture, to have that mindset of collaboration, and sharing, and continuous learning.
09:31
Jennifer: It's risky, right? Yeah.
09:31
Meng: Absolutely, yeah, yeah. And, so, as mentioned, a little bit earlier we talked about the automation and having that in place. That's one of the pillars to DevOps. Some of the other pillars that organizations may be missing is around the feedback, like you mentioned, the monitoring and the measurements. That's a second pillar.
09:49
So, these pillars stem from The DevOps Handbook, which talks about the three ways. So, we talked about the automation, the flow-
09:57
Jennifer: Automation, yeah.
09:58
Meng: The feedback-
09:58
Jennifer: Feedback.
09:59
Meng: Which is the monitoring. And the continuous learning, so being able to deploy with maybe blue-green type of deployment, canary deployment. And I would say, I would even include a fourth pillar, which is sort of sharing, which wraps all that together. Having small collaborative teams that can sort of learn together, being able to share not only your successes, but the failures, so that you can carry on to other projects and not make those mistakes.
10:26
Jennifer: With minimal risk.
10:26
Meng: That's right, absolutely. And then, having those advocates, or those people on those teams, at least if you are a small organization or you're just trying to start out with DevOps to see how this would work, you have that core team work through this model, see how it operates, learn and gain from DevOps. And then, you take these people, make them advocates. And then, when you take on new projects, have them sort of lead and guide the ways of DevOps in these other projects.
10:53
Jennifer: And they're fueled by board members or C-suite's favorite thing, which is data. Right? I mean, you've actually put something out there, and you said, "No, no, we asked our customers, and this is exactly what they said back." You said something really interesting earlier, which was canary deployment. Talk to me what that means.
11:07
Like, if we're talking about the same reference, which is canary in a coal mine, which is, they used to put a canary down there, and if something happened to the canary, poor little canary, we knew that there was gas leaking in the mine, as an example. Is that what we're talking about here, sort of as putting something out there and making sure that things are okay?
11:25
Meng: That's absolutely, that's where the term came from, with the canary and the coal mine. Because it's so much smaller of a creature, it would be the first to go, and it would be an indicator of some problem. So when you think of a canary type deployment, when you roll it into production, it really is just a smaller subset of your production cluster.
11:46
It enables you to then be able to direct traffic to this canary environment that would have your new code, and have that sort of tested up with a subset of your live users, say 10%, monitor that, see how it behaves, compare that to some baseline metrics. Once things are stable, then maybe you up it to 25%, 50, and eventually 100% to roll out in a much safer fashion.
12:13
Jennifer: And every single time, it's getting better, and better, and better, and better, because you're taking the data, iterating, changing, and making improvements. Right?
12:21
Meng: That's right.
12:22
Bianca: And you have Facebook example. Facebook is one of the early adopters of DevOps. They started in 2011 when they released a lot of features at once, and it was a mess for infrastructure performance. And they didn't know the feedback from the users, what feature was it about. So it was a mess, and they started to think, wow, we can't do this anymore. We can't release a lot of features at once. What should we do? And so, they started to adopt DevOps.
13:02
And they kind of created some things we know now, because Facebook is huge. They have a lot of developers and a lot of teams. So, they started to deliver those small parts of features to a part of users, so, not for every user. And these features, they would have the feedback, and they would not have the problems with performance. Or they could manage this, and know how it was using their infrastructure. So, they learnt with this problem, and they used DevOps. They are one of the top companies using DevOps now.
13:48
Jennifer: And one can argue Facebook made DevOps cool. And what I mean by that is, all of a sudden it became, "Oh, I hate the new Facebook," or, "I hate the new Instagram." And people not downloading the new release or whatever. But now it became, "Oh, are you one of the small group of people that this is being tested on?" Right? So, when people see that, they know that that in fact is DevOps in practice, which is, let's throw it out to some of our top folks or people that are on the other end of the spectrum and see, are they able to use it? Do they like it? Is it solving a pain point that previously users had, right?
14:21
Meng: Right, and to add to that, when I think about organizations doing DevOps well, Netflix is another example to follow.
14:28
Jennifer: Ah, come on, yeah.
14:29
Meng: If you ask the people at Netflix how they're doing DevOps, they'll tell you, "We're not doing DevOps. It's culture." Which may come as a shocker, but really, it is DevOps, but they have a strong culture that supports this framework, that they do it so well.
14:44
So, the way they do things, they don't believe in building systems that say no to their developers or engineers. They don't say no production access, but they give their engineers the freedom to do things, but with the caveat that there's going to be a set of responsibilities attached to it, and accountability. They don't believe in no production downtime, like uptime at all costs. But instead, focus more on the velocity of innovation.
15:12
They don't have things like processes and policies, but they have high trust and enabling in their people. That's why they ... Their success model is to hire people they can trust, and to hire top talent that can get things done. So really, they have no silos. They build systems that they ultimately own, so they have shared ownership.
15:33
Jennifer: And from the recruitment perspective, can you imagine? Like, if you're a developer who is, they're essentially saying, "You're smart people with smart ideas. Let's take away the infrastructure that is blocking you from shipping the code, in quotes, and actually get you to start putting your ideas based on user data into production." Come on, how great is that?
15:53
Are you seeing clients adopting this, and getting that thrill of seeing things, like how this is changing their creativity at all levels of the organization? Have you seen that first hand?
16:04
Bianca: Yes, I've seen, mostly in small companies or in those bigger companies examples. And yes, this agility you get, it's amazing, and this sense of ownership that it brings. A lot of companies are talking about ownership, but how you deliver, or how can you achieve ownership of your ... It's not just by saying, "Oh, you have to be the owner of your code." It's giving this trust and giving this freedom to the developers to do what they can, and with the ownership, you can have less walls between everything, and you deliver your agility, that DevOps.
16:51
Jennifer: Because I can now see a world where, at the table, it's marketing, operations, C-suite, development, and everyone's sitting around the table. And marketing can say, "Well, here's sort of the, what we're seeing in the data. Here's some of the insights that we're getting." And all of a sudden, development becomes an integral part of that conversation in saying, "Well, what if we tried." And there's no handcuffs anymore. It's risky. Okay, great, we'll roll it out to 5%. That's pretty powerful.
17:22
Meng: It is, yeah.
17:22
Jennifer: It's pretty amazing, yeah, yeah.
17:25
Bianca: And nobody thinks that DevOps brings this to the company, right?
17:28
Jennifer: Right, yes.
17:30
Bianca: Everyone is thinking about automation and tools when they think about DevOps, but DevOps give you ...
17:38
Jennifer: But it's a way of thinking, just really, really powerful. Yeah. I want to work for a company that's implementing DevOps. Come on, right? I'm really glad I do.
17:47
Meng: Yeah, absolutely.
17:50
Jennifer: So I'm guessing that if you are out there and you're looking at the companies that are doing well, we talked about Netflix and we talked about Facebook. But sometimes, users wouldn't even know that DevOps is happening, but they're benefiting from DevOps being implemented. Talk to me about some of the companies that are doing it really, really well, and the ways that we can see that they're doing it well, and what it's doing for them. And maybe, Meng, we'll start with you.
18:12
Meng: Sure. Another one that comes to mind is Google, one of the biggest ones out there. I don't know anybody who doesn't know Google. But their methodology for doing DevOps is rather SRE, which is a new term for site reliability engineering. That's where I would say this sort of framework originated. And the way they see DevOps or the way they define it, they would say, if you ask them, they would say that, if DevOps was an interface, then site reliability engineering would be a class that implements that interface.
18:45
So they see DevOps as basically the glue for Agile, but SRE being the engine for continuous improvement. So, it's ultimately sort of the same thing, but they ... So they have like a shared ownership, they have blameless post mortems, they believe in automating everything, they have-
19:04
Jennifer: Let's go back to that real quick. Blameless post mortems. Talk to me about what that is.
19:09
Meng: Yeah, it sort of implies that if things break down, we don't point the finger at any one individual. Rather, you take that as an opportunity to learn, and iterate, and fix things, so that you basically be ... Sorry, I don't know what.
19:26
Bianca: It's like the same thing as a no blame culture.
19:30
Jennifer: Interesting.
19:31
Bianca: So it's a cultural thing. So, you don't point your finger to, oh, it was that guy.
19:36
Jennifer: Right, right. Instead, it's what did we learn, and it's courage to proceed. Right, so don't stop iterating, don't stop being brave. Let's have- [crosstalk 00:19:44]
19:44
Bianca: Yeah, and sometimes you learn, sometimes, no, every time you learn from your mistakes, not for what you did right, right?
19:51
Meng: Right, right.
19:52
Bianca: It's always about what did I do that was not good here, and how can I learn with this, and improve, and ...
20:00
Jennifer: And even more important, how do I take those learnings and spread them across the organization, which is so powerful?
20:05
Meng: Yeah, that was it. The thought that I was missing was just that you embrace failure. You don't treat that as an issue. You actually just learn that from it, you actually share, and you improve, and you prevent that in the future. But not, by not pointing or blaming anyone.
20:22
Jennifer: So you can see why, to your point earlier about smaller companies being able to leverage this much easier because there's no infrastructure or silos. You can see why disruption is easier, I should say easier. Because essentially, they're really smart about putting stuff out there and getting feedback real quick, and they can take a pain point and solve it in an afternoon, right?
20:42
As opposed to, you might have an enterprise company that's like, oh no, we know it's a pain point, and it's been a pain point for five years now. We just don't know what to do about it, right? So, what if you solved it in one market, or you solved it in one store even, and then just took that feedback. I love the idea of that. It's pretty cool.
21:00
So, if I asked you about the role that DevOps is going to play in, because I think we're sort of at early adoption in these innovation frameworks, if I ask you the role that DevOps is likely to play, not just with our clients but sort of moving forward in the next sort of two years, what do you think the fundamental shift will be that this brings to mind? Will we lose the term DevOps and just adopt a DevOps framework or a DevOps approach? What do you think is going to happen there? Bianca, maybe we'll start with you.
21:28
Bianca: I think, like every technology it evolves, so, DevOps is evolving, and it's changing the way the companies, it's not just one framework that fits for everything, or a process. So you have to think about silos, about verticals on your company, and try to focus on what you want to deliver. And that's why there are some new terms like ExOps, or DevSecOps, or-
22:02
Jennifer: And what's ExOps?
22:03
Bianca: ExOps, it's the general-
22:06
Jennifer: Like the evolution of it.
22:09
Bianca: Yes.
22:09
Jennifer: Got you.
22:10
Bianca: I think Meng knows more about the ExOps. I know those specific ones, that it is for security. If you want to implement security in your software or deliver more secure software, you introduce security in your DevOps process.
22:30
Jennifer: Interesting.
22:30
Bianca: And so, you know that your security is in every step of your development and your-
22:39
Jennifer: Security and quality.
22:40
Bianca: Yes.
22:41
Jennifer: Which is something that I really love about this.
22:46
Bianca: Reliability. And so, there is DesignOps, that is bringing design thinking for your DevOps process. So, how design is going to be implement in my development and operations, how do I deliver a product with a better design here.
23:09
Jennifer: So completely removing the step by step.
23:11
Bianca: Focus. Yeah.
23:11
Jennifer: Right? It's just-
23:11
Bianca: Yeah, so focusing.
23:13
Jennifer: Right.
23:13
Bianca: It's like what you said, to bring those teams, so all right, my company's focused on marketing. So let's bring the developers, the operations guys to the marketing team. Let's talk. Let's put everyone together, and let's think about a process that could make the software be delivered faster, and focused on what I want, in this case, marketing. You know, so it's introducing those verticals into those processes.
23:45
Meng: I have to just add to that, with ExOps, because if there's anything to take away from this talk, it's that DevOps is really not a revolution anymore, it's an evolution. And what differentiates an organization from a high performing organization is one that is able to adjust quickly to the changing technological landscape.
24:07
So, when you mentioned ExOps, it's no longer just DevOps. It's DevSecOps, it's DataOps, it's MLOps, it's DesignOps. So being able to fuse DevOps into these other verticals to deliver software quickly is what will define the next successful organization.
24:25
Jennifer: You can either walk to work or you can ride a scooter. It's up to you, right? Thank you so much for joining us on What's Your (R)angle? We hope that you found some moments that made you think, taught you something new, or sparked a conversation in your organization. Follow us on iTunes, Spotify to get notifications for all future episodes, and you can now watch our podcast on YouTube, so be sure to like and subscribe.
24:48
We'd love to hear your thoughts on what we discuss each week and hear your point of view on the topic, so be sure to let us know what your angle is. You can use the hashtag #AskRangle on Twitter, or please feel free to email us at podcast@rangle.io. Thank you so much to my guests today, Bianca and Meng. I really appreciate you taking the time to share this with us today. Thank you.
25:05
Meng: No problem. Thank you.
25:06
Jennifer: Thank you for joining us. Have a fantastic day.
25:09
Thanks for listening to What's Your (R)angle? We hope you found some moments that made you think, taught you something new, or sparked a conversation. Follow us on iTunes and Spotify to get notifications for all future episodes. We'd love to hear your thoughts on what we discuss each week, and hear your point of view on the topics. So be sure to let us know what your angle is by using the hashtag #AskRangle on Twitter, or by emailing us at podcast@rangle.io.
Other Episodes in This Season
Episode 1
Episode 2
Episode 3
DevOps
Episode 4 • Now Playing
Episode 5
Episode 6
Episode 7