Category Archives: enterprise IT

Exploring Mapping and Enterprise Inertia – The Goat Farm – S2E2

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In this episode of The Goat Farm we are in wonderful Copenhagen, Denmark for Kubecon/CloudNativeCon EU 2018 where we sat down with three guests to talk about organizational inertia and overcoming that inertia.

First we talk to Simon Wardley. Simon has long been a prominent figure in the world of Cloud computing, and spends much of his time talking about mapping. We chat with Simon about what mapping is, and he introduces concepts regarding forces at play when technology adoption evolves.

Next we talk to Kris Nova of Heptio. Kris is a long time contributor to projects such as Kubernetes and Go, and has recently been researching moving stateful applications to Cloud Native platforms. Kris gives us some good insights into the adoption of technology in enterprises.

Finally we catch up with Sebastien Goasguen. Over the years, Sebastien has been involved in many open source projects, and currently maintains Kubeless, an open source project that enables FaaS on top of Kubernetes. Sebastien touches on why platforms such as Kubernetes are so powerful for overcoming inertia, and how they help increase organizational velocity.

Music: “Marty, Ladies and Gentlemen!” by Doctor Turtle

Show notes:

simon

Simon Wardley – LinkedIn – Twitter

Simon Wardley is a Researcher for Leading Edge Forum, a global research and thought leadership programme dedicated to helping large organizations reimagine their organizations and leadership for a technology-driven future. Simon is also lead practitioner for LEFs Wardley Maps Advisory service which helps client anticipate market and ecosystem developments so they know where to go and why.
Simon’s focus is on strategic play both at an industrial and global level. He is the author of multiple reports including Clash of the Titans: Can China Dethrone Silicon Valley?, a pioneer in the use of topographical intelligence within business, a former executive and an advisory board member for several successful start-ups. He has twice been voted as one of the UK’s top 50 most influential people in technology. Simon has spent the last 20 years defining future strategies for companies in the FMCG, Retail and Technology industries. He is a passionate advocate in the fields of strategic play, organizational structure, open source and leadership and is a regular presenter at conferences worldwide.

kris2

 

Kris Nova – LinkedIn – Twitter

Kris Nova is a Senior Developer Advocate for Heptio. She is a Kubernetes maintainer and contributor. She wrote the book on cloud native infrastructure. She spends her free time climbing mountains.


seb

Sebastien Goasguen – LinkedIn – Twitter

Seb has been working on Kubernetes since June 2014, he is the author/co-author of the O’Reilly Docker cookbook and the Kubernetes cookbook. With many years of experience teaching computer science he stills enjoys teaching people Kubernetes and getting them off the ground and on their container journey. Currently he works at Bitnami where he oversees all things Kubernetes, he prototyped Kubeless, the Kubernetes native serverless framework and other community tools like kompose and Cabin. In 2008 he was selected for the first round of Astronaut selection by ESA but sadly is still stuck on earth.

 

DevOps in a Cloud Native & Serverless World – The Goat Farm – S2E1

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The Goat Farm is back with what we’re dubbing “Season 2”. In Season 2 we are going to focus on the challenges of inertia in organizations, how organizations are adopting the practices of Cloud Native and Serverless, and the intersection of DevOps and Cloud Native.

We start this episode off with a conversation with Joe Beda of Heptio. This conversation was originally recorded in December of 2017 at The Lodge Sports Grille in downtown Seattle.  Joe talks about the concept of organizational fit, and how the patterns and practices of DevOps in the past had a hard time mapping to an organization. He also talks about the concept of API first infrastructure, and how that impacts how we think about operations.

We also catch up with Rob Cummings of Slalom and Tom McLaughlin of ServerlessOps at DevOpsDays Seattle 2018. Both guests tell us about the impact of Serverless on the transformation of the organization, and the current trends their seeing with adoption of Cloud Native and Serverless.

Download MP3 – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS

Music: C’est sur toi que ça va le mieux by Monplaisir

Show Notes:

joebedaJoe Beda – Twitter – LinkedIn

Joe Beda is CTO of Heptio, a startup focused on unleashing the technology driven enterprise. We aim to realize the full potential of Kubernetes and transform IT into a business accelerator. Prior to Heptio, Joe was at Google for over 10 years. While there, Joe started Google Compute Engine and co-founded the Kubernetes project. In a previous life, Joe started his career at Microsoft working on Internet Explorer. Joe is slowly becoming a Seattle native with his wife, a physician, and two kids.

opsrob

Rob Cummings – Twitter – LinkedIn

Rob has been involved in IT operations for the past 20 years. This includes systems engineering work at Bose, EMC Corporation, and Nordstrom. Today, Rob is a Solution Principal at Slalom Consulting where he helps companies solve problems and build for the future. He focuses his passion on pushing the boundaries of both how we implement technology and set up organizational structures for success. Rob is also a co-organizer for the DevOpsDays Seattle conference.

tom-mclaughlinTom McLaughlin – Twitter – LinkedIn

Tom is the founder of ServerlessOps and an experienced operations engineer. He is actively engaged in promoting serverless infrastructure and engaging with the community to make operations people successful through what he sees as a disruption to his profession. When not at work he is a proud cat dad to two calicoes and enjoys spending his time drag racing and sailing. He is also an amateur thinkfluencer on Twitter.

DevOps at Asurion – The Goat Farm – S1E11

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Asurion is definitely one of those companies that you didn’t know existed until you needed to use them. Like that time you dropped your phone in the toilet by accident. In this episode, we speak to Jon Klein of Asurion to hear how they’ve started adopting DevOps principles in their work at Asurion.

Jon shares with us how they got started, how they are continuing their success, and how they’ve even gotten the attention of their CIO. Jon gives a good picture of what it takes for Operations teams to refine their work internally, to make them more effective for their internal customers.

Download MP3 – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS

Show notes:

 

jonkleinJon Klein – Twitter – LinkedIn

Jon started his career as “the” IT guy at his family’s construction supply and equipment dealership back in 2002, handling everything from desktop support to network administration. He fell in love with Open Source, playing with Linux in a friend’s basement and freelancing on the side. He eventually took a job with a contracting firm as a Linux Admin for ServiceBench, Inc in 2006. Now nearly a decade and 2 acquisitions later, Jon works for the parent company, Asurion and has been on the forefront of the DevOps movement, building cross-functional teams and breaking down org silos. He currently runs a cross-functional team of infrastructure engineers and developers dedicated to the rapid delivery of platforms and infrastructure.

DevOps at IBM – The Goat Farm – S1E9

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How does IBM manage to run web sites for some the World’s largest sporting and television events? With the practices of DevOps of course! In this episode, Ross and Michael talk to Brian O’Connell of IBM.

Brian tells us of his journey to DevOps practices through stumbling onto the ideas of Chef and Infrastructure as Code. We talk about the cultural shift required when it comes to who owns delivery of changes and ownership of those changes. Brian also tells us how they leverage the “build, measure, learn” product development loop.

The sites Brian and team help run are some of the more high profile, and highly visited sites in the world. Brian talks about the challenges when trying to introduce DevOps to such high profile sites, and mistakes that were made along the way. We also talk about some of the tooling Brian and team use, and how they effectively deploy enterprise software packages.

Download MP3 – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS

Show notes:

Brian O’Connell – Twitter – LinkedInBrian O'Connell

Brian O’Connell is a Senior Technical Staff Member at IBM that leads a team focused on DevOps, predictive analytics, big data, and cloud technologies.

Brian joined IBM in 2001, starting as a software engineer. He built many software systems to support the continuous availability and events infrastructure.  His expertise includes architecting and developing scalable server applications, concurrency, advanced visualizations, and big data.

From 2007 until 2011 Brian was the lead infrastructure technology advocate and designer for the World Wide Sponsorship Marketing (WWSM) client. His role included strategic technical direction, evaluating technology pilots and the end to end delivery of highly visible web events. In that role, he successfully delivered all IBM sponsorship web sites including The Masters, Wimbledon, Roland Garros (French Open), US Open Tennis, US Open Golf, Australian Open, and The Tony Awards. Brian designed systems to manage the infrastructure and applications used by the client including a focus on defining plans, strategies and architectures for the installation, operation, migration and management of complex information systems.
Brian has had more than 250 patents issued, is an IBM designated Master Inventor and a Franz Edelman laureate.

Adrian Cockcroft of Battery Ventures – The Goat Farm – S1E8

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In this episode we talk to the famous (or infamous) Adrian Cockcroft of Battery Ventures. Adrian is known for his work at Netflix and his work to migrate them to a Cloud first strategy, then before that for his book on Sun performance tuning.

Adrian has been doing a lot of work talking to CIOs of large enterprises and helping them understand where ideas such as DevOps, microservices, Cloud are taking the industry. He allows tells us how he is helping CIOs realize how their IT organizations must transform to adopt these new ideas. This episode is all about how the horses are growing horns to become the unicorns.

(Editor’s note: We are really sorry about the audio on this episode. Adrian was in Portland, Michael was in Amsterdam, and Ross was in Minneapolis. While we could have cut a bunch of the bad audio, the content was so good we didn’t want to drop anything. Apologies.)

Download MP3 – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS

Show Notes

Adrian Cockcroft – LinkedIn – Twitter

Adrian Cockcroft has had a long career working at the leading edge of technology. He’s always been fascinated by what comes next, and he writes and speaks extensively on a range of subjects. At Battery, he advises the firm and its portfolio companies about technology issues and also assists with deal sourcing and due diligence.

Before joining Battery, Adrian helped lead Netflix’s migration to a large scale, highly available public-cloud architecture and the open sourcing of the cloud-native NetflixOSS platform. Prior to that at Netflix he managed a team working on personalization algorithms and service-oriented refactoring.

Adrian was a founding member of eBay Research Labs, developing advanced mobile applications and even building his own homebrew phone, years before iPhone and Android launched. As a distinguished engineer at Sun Microsystems he wrote the best-selling “Sun Performance and Tuning” book and was chief architect for High Performance Technical Computing.