Narrator: You're listening to the humans of DevOps podcast, a
podcast focused on advancing the humans of DevOps through skills,
knowledge, ideas and learning, or the SKIL framework.
Eveline Oehrlich: This is the Humans of DevOps Podcast, and
I'm your host Eveline Oehrlich. I set out to ask the most
interesting people in the world of DevOps, a couple of key
questions around DevOps, today and in the future. But before we
go there, and for those of you who know me as an industry
analyst, here are some data points in a 2021 Accelerate
State of DevOps. It shows that for the first time, high and
elite performers make up two thirds of respondents compared
to 2019 report where low and medium performers made up 56% of
respondents in 2022, according to our research at the DevOps
Institute, 58% have actually adopted DevOps in that year.
From a vertical perspective, 73% of healthcare companies have
adopted DevOps as of 2021. That's from Red Gate software.
451, Alliance said that 44% of respondents of their survey
indicated that they have either indicated or initiated the
adoption of DevOps practices at their organization as a result
of the COVID 19 outbreak. And in June 2022 Charles Betz noted
that implementing DevOps consistently reduces time to
market increases enterprise agility and makes businesses
more resilient. And that high performers in these topics are
much further along in the DevOps journey, compared to the
laggards. Not the bottom line, the adoption of DevOps keeps
rising. And the term DevOps means many things. And it's one
of our guests, which you can hear later mentions. The term
DevOps is actually used as an brela term today. Welcome again
to the DevOps human podcast. My guests this week are a variety
of thought leaders within the topic of DevOps. Let me tell you
who is on here. First, we're joined by Jayne Grohl CEO of
DevOps Institute, who has influenced and shaped DevOps
with a team and the work of the DevOps Institute itself. I'm
very fortunate to have known Jayne for many years, and under
her leadership, DevOps Institute has become a global learning
community focused exclusively on all things DevOps. Her mission
and data for team, including myself, is to empower the people
who power it. This includes not only improving typical skills
across best practices, technologies, methodologies,
processes, functional knowledge and more but also emphasizes to
human aspects and skills. It is with great pleasure to also
welcome Charles Betz, Vice President and research director
at Forrester Research. Charlie and I met a long time ago and I
was fortunate to work with him at Forrester Research. There,
Charlie leads forces Enterprise Architecture priority, providing
guidance to Enterprise Architect professionals worldwide, on
evolving relevant modern and valuable architectural practice.
He is deeply engaged in researching the transformation
of the it operating model, in particular the impact of agile
DevOps and product thinking. He has previously led forces DevOps
and enterprise service management coverage. Prior to
joining Forrester Charlie was the chief architect at att AT&T
signature client group where he was responsible for technical
strategy with Fortune 100 clients. Also excited to welcome
Helen Beal. She is an I would bet you the most connected
person within this industry. Helen is a DevOps coach and
strategic advisor. She is co chair of the Oasis value stream
management interoperability technical comedy committee, and
chief ambassador at the DevOps Institute, where I have the
pleasure to work with her quite a bit. She hosts the bright talk
day to day DevOps webinar series ism and is an info cute DevOps
editor. She is listed in tech beacons, DevOps top 100 lists
and one top DevOps evangelist in 2020. In the DevOps dozen
awards, outside of DevOps, she's ecologist and novelist. And last
but not least, Mark Hornbeek. A DevOps expert, Mark is CEO and
Principal Consultant at engineering, DevOps consulting,
and the author of the book engineering DevOps. He has been
advising and consulting organizations around the globe
on different aspects of DevOps chain, Charlie, Helen, Mark,
welcome, and thank you so much. for joining me today on humans
of DevOps podcast. With me now is Jane Grohl CEO of DevOps
Institute. Jane has influenced and shaped DevOps with her team
at DevOps Institute. I am very fortunate to know Jayne for many
years, and under her leadership, the DevOps Institute has become
a global learning community focused exclusively on all
things DevOps. It's been a pleasure working with and for
her over these years as well. Her mission and that of the
DevOps institute is to empower the people who power it. This
includes not only improving typical skills across best
practices, technologies, methodologies, processes and
functional knowledge, but also emphasizes the human aspects and
skills essential for the role in DevOps. As we know culture and
skills are a huge challenge for the above adoption of DevOps,
and many other related topics. The DevOps Institute has a large
professional network respected certification programs,
excellent virtual and in person events, partners, and it is the
place to go for IT professionals across all roles to shape and
manage the future of it. It Hello, Jayne, how are you?
Jayne Groll: Hello, Eveline. So nice to be here. Thank you for
having me.
Eveline Oehrlich: Yes, thanks for taking time out. From your
busy schedule, I know your schedule is always busy, because
it's always really difficult to get a date with you. So I think
there is no better person to start out this topic on DevOps
now and in the future than with us as CEO. So my first question
to you, Jane is what is DevOps today in 2022? If you kind of
step back, and think about where are we today?
Jayne Groll: So you know, it's very interesting, because I've
had the privilege of kind of watching DevOps grow up, I'm not
one of the original founders or part of the original team. But I
did get to see DevOps in 2012, when it still was in its very,
very early stages, and was really mostly with technology
companies. And if the time there were really kind of two spirits
to DevOps, one was the three ways from the Phoenix Project.
And of course, I think that helped shape a lot of the
culture and the principles around DevOps. And then the
other was continuous integration and continuous delivery. And
everybody was looking at how do we build these pipelines so that
we can start integrating using more agile practices,
integrating code that came out of the agile teams, and then
downstream trying to expedite some of the activities that
happen downstream, before deployment into production. And
now fast forward, what 10 years for me, and you see, the DevOps
has become an umbrella or recipe that is grafted a lot of other
practices. So certainly CI CD is is still at the heart of of
DevOps, you know, building the pipelines optimizing open
source, really looking at how do we accelerate or shift left a
lot of the activities that happen from development into up
to deployment. But now we've got other practices like Site
Reliability Engineering, which is in part of DevOps, right, but
got grafted into it as kind of the third piece of the continuum
agile DevOps, and now operations in the form of sre. And then we
look at other practices that grew up organically, like chaos
engineering, like observability, right, that were in power, they
weren't written in the Phoenix Project, they weren't part of
kind of the original spirit of DevOps. But DevOps then kind of
became this umbrella of practices and principles, that
welcomed other practices into the fold, so that the entire
supply chain, the software delivery lifecycle became faster
and more frequent, higher quality, and that people
individuals started to really innovate in terms of how they
can improve that, that experience for themselves and
for the consumers of their, their product. So you know, from
the early days CI CD and now you know, there's a wealth of other
practices that weren't written in a book, they didn't, you
know, they weren't part of a body of knowledge. They just
sort of happened. And, and, and now we could call them DevOps,
if you want to, right, we could call it development and
operations, and really kind of look at this end to end value
stream. Instead of just kind of pigeon holing it into a set of
practice. It's really been fantastic to watch.
Eveline Oehrlich: Beautiful I love your analogy of or the word
you said the umbrella, never become an umbrella. That is a
great term and I always love your energy on this topic. I can
feel it when you when you speak about it. So given what you
said, Let's go look into the crystal ball. If we all we all
have one, right? Tell me what you're thinking in where DevOps
will be in the future crystal balls, let's say two years,
maybe three years, because five years, I think it's a little too
far away, but maybe two to three years from now, where do you
think DevOps will be then?
Jayne Groll: So my biggest concern about DevOps is that it
falls into the category of frameworks. Because, you know,
as you know, in DevOps, we have kind of trends, patterns,
fashions that we like, you know, it's been a total it's been
agile, it's, you know, pick a framework, right, we, we've kind
of embraced and adopted it, I would love to see DevOps, which
some people talk about talk to somebody yesterday, they said,
Well, we have a team doing DevOps, right. And that scares
me because it becomes something that the developers do Agile,
and there's a team doing DevOps, and there's a team doing sre.
And so it falls into the same bucket of practices that, you
know, had their day in the sunshine, and then eventually
faded away. I like to think of DevOps as an umbrella or even a
recipe, right, so that when we look at it in the future, your
recipe and my recipe, we may both make the same food, but
your proportion of ingredients or your your quality of
ingredients may be different than mine. And your outcome may
be different than mine, but at the end of the day was still
trying to bake a cake. Right, so So I would like to think that
the term DevOps kind of, you know, grows up into something,
well, sort of, like, you know, generally accepted it
principles, my husband's a CPA, and they've got generally
accepted accounting principles, I would love that future, to be
this, this kind of ecosystem of not only agile and DevOps and
SRE, but other things that come along, that just makes sense.
And that as an organization from a scale perspective, because I
think that's the challenge today is, you know, organizations have
experimented with this thing called DevOps or agile or
Essary. But scale is a really, really big issue. And I think if
we kind of look at this as an umbrella or a recipe or
generally accepted it principles, then I think that it
has a longer ability to deliver value, and that it isn't just
today's fashion trend. And tomorrow, some new framework
comes out that somebody defines and, you know, we throw out this
and we bring something else. And I think DevOps has a lot of
sustainability. If we really look at it as kind of supply
chain management, or generally accepted it principles or
something along those ways. That may be wishful thinking,
truthfully, you know, it, we love our frameworks. But I do
think there's one other thing, I think that's very important, you
know, Evelyn, where you and I sit, it feels like the
organizations we talk to have maturity, and they've been doing
stuff in there moving forward, I think there's a lot of
organizations that are either at the gate, or just opening the
gate to start experimenting with this thing we call DevOps. So I
also think the next three to five years, those that have
started down the journey are struggling with scale. But I
also think we have to be very sensitive to the fact that not
everybody is there, right? There were those that are still like,
I know, we need to do something helped me. So I think more
education, I think more training, I think more
commonality between the different teams, I think an
understanding of what they're doing and why they're doing it,
humans need that. I think for those organizations that are
just kind of getting started, we have to recognize them, we have
to nurture them, we have to support them, but with
continuous opportunities to learn and not not fatigue them
because those organizations are fatigued, which is probably why
they haven't crossed the gate yet. You know, they they've done
things in the past. They've spent a lot of money in the
past. And now we're telling them do something different. So I
think the next three to five years, hopefully we see those
organizations move as well.
Eveline Oehrlich: Great vision. I like it. I absolutely agree.
Super, thank you again, for your time. This has been very
insightful. Happy to have you on. I will let you go back to
your day job. And again, we heard from Jayne Groll, CEO of
the DevOps Institute. Thank you again, Jayne. Thanks, Eveline.
I'm also today with Charlie Betz or Charles Betz. At four star
I'll let Charlie introduce himself. But a quick little
highlight Charlie and I actually met way before for so I want to
say what year was that? Charlie? Was that in?
Charles Betz: It could have been as early as 2007 or eight. Yeah.
Eveline Oehrlich: That sounds about right. I think you were at
a particular financial institution. And I was already
forced or and I think we talked about and of course architecture
so quickly. Tell us what are you doing today, Charlie?
Charles Betz: Well, currently, I'm the vice president and
research director for Enterprise Architecture at at Forrester. So
I've kind of come full circle after going through a number of
interests and roles, including enterprise service management
and DevOps. I've come back to my roots.
Eveline Oehrlich: Excellent. excited to have you here. And
the question really, I have for you today, where do you think
DevOps is today in 2022? Give us your thoughts.
Charles Betz: Well, a lot of the basic technical issues have been
solved, you know, in terms of in terms of the market, you know,
for, for example, enabling technology. You know, we had a
great run of innovation, they're solving problems, like
continuous integration, continuous delivery. And for the
most part, these problems are now settled. The, of course,
DevOps has never just been about the technology, it's also about
culture process, ways of working. And there things are
still very interesting to me. And my coverage, and kind of my
call is, you know, at Forrester, we're, you know, we're we are
encouraged to make the call is really that DevOps has evolved
into a conversation around the product centric operating model.
You know, there's a lot that is kind of bound up in that one
might say, in terms of the ways of working the expectations for
collaboration, the need for well defined and automated services.
And the interesting thing to me is that I think, you know, the
industry is engaged in this tremendous amount of
experimentation. And yet, we still are, in many ways, many
people call me and they say, what are the best practices? I'm
saying, we don't even have good practices, we have
experimentation and emerging practices right now, in terms of
how organizations actually can an optimally organize in a ways
that that reflect the DevOps values.
Eveline Oehrlich: So to us, then, what I hear you say is,
there's still plenty of work to do, right. Yeah. So things for
the enterprises across all different verticals, to tackle
this, these different things, let's call them practices. I
just read a blog where there was this discussion about, is there
something like a best practice, but we'll save that for another
podcast? Yeah, let's go forward in maybe 2, 3, 4 years,
sometimes people say, you know, what's happening in four years?
What can we even predict? We don't know. Right? And we still
here we don't know. But in your crystal ball at Forrester. And
when you think of your customers and your clients, what do you
think, where are we with DevOps in three to four years from
today?
Charles Betz: Well, the I think the big challenge right now is
getting infrastructure teams up to speed. The product centric
conversation has taken root in business and customer facing
teams. And this is not just DevOps, you know, this is kind
of a convergence of DevOps with Agile. And we see a lot of, I
think, fairly effective use of agile and DevOps, when the
problem is creating software for business and or customer facing
purposes. And by the way, I don't like the term business
versus it but you know, we're kind of stuck with it. What is
the big challenge right now is that the infrastructure, the
classic infrastructure and operations organizations, the
specialists and what we used to call it forester most
maintenance and operations, etc. They're still struggling. And
the challenge is that, in less unless the infrastructure teams
get up to speed. Organizations are at risk of losing
developers. Developers are no longer patient. With
infrastructure teams and services teams that take too
long or bureaucratic are heavy handed. They want automation,
they want better customer focus, better customer service, and
speaking as internal customers in this sense. And that's the
challenge for the infrastructure teams around the world and we
know of organizations like nationwide on the record, I can
talk about them because they presented at the DevOps
enterprise summit about their transformation of their
infrastructure team, but there are certain unsolved parts
problems that I would predict in four years, we start to see
actual, again emerging or at least good practices, defensible
practices, maybe not best. And those are going to revolve
around the fact that infrastructure teams, there's a
reason that they're bureaucratic and slow. The reason that we're
starting to really put our finger on and I had a webinar
with Nick Kiersten, where we went very deep into this is that
the infrastructure teams have been overly single threaded. And
they've had one person responsible for Personnel
Management, their product vision, the engineering
problems, and demand and execution management. And if you
look analytically, at what a successful Agile transformation
does, at the customer facing or business facing layer, they
split all those responsibilities out into what we call the X in a
box model. But translating the X and A box model to the
infrastructure world, is a very hard problem. And to do it
correctly, requires having conversations with your
infrastructure team and your CFO that guess what, we now need
additional people additional skills in the infrastructure
world in order for infrastructure to keep up with
the application world that is moving so fast. So that was a
bit of a deep dive there.
Eveline Oehrlich: Absolutely good. So the way I look at it,
it's the train and the front end, or maybe it's a it's not a
train, maybe it's it's a different vehicle, but the for
the for the forward place where the customers are touching and
where there is agility is moving faster than the back. And so
yes, those folks, right, so so for those who are listening in,
who are in infrastructure, keep working, keep doing what you're
doing, but do it in an improved way. Do it in a DevOps way. I
think that's what I heard you say?
Charles Betz: That's well, but let me let me, let me, let me
let me refine that a little bit. It's not enough to tell the
infrastructure people just work smarter, work harder, work
faster, they've been told that their whole life. And speaking
as somebody who's worked a lot with infrastructure teams, it's
in some ways, not fair. The problem is that, let me just put
Eveline Oehrlich: It'd be interesting to look at the job
a real fine, a real basic point on it. We don't give
infrastructure teams, product managers. The infrastructure
team leader is typically a functional specialist, like a
DBA, or a network specialist or a cloud specialist, they rise up
through the ranks, they know their domain, but they don't
know the first thing about product management. They don't
think in customer centric terms. And the thing is, is you cannot
load all that work onto one person. Yep, you have to you
have to break apart the people management, the engineering
management, the product vision for that platform. And these now
need to be different responsibilities. And the
infrastructure augment starts to need to mirror its application
customers. But this Eveline, this is not going to be easy,
because you're going to the CFO and saying, these infrastructure
descriptions of those folks. Right. So what we're saying also
teams composed of specialists led by a specialist who's rose
is, I guess that's what I hear you say it's a significant
up through the ranks, they now need an a more diverse set of
characters, leading the team so that they can be more responsive
to the application teams. And of course, the CFO is just going to
see, you know, dollar signs or euro signs, depending on your
continent. And it's not gonna be an easy conversation.
redefinition of what the infrastructure engineer needs,
needs to be doing. Excellent. This is great role
Charles Betz: is getting a lot of discussion. Yeah, the role
that's getting a lot of discussion is technical product
manager.
Eveline Oehrlich: Ah, interesting. Okay. Maybe just
something technical product manager will be doing a lot of
work around at the DevOps Institute, as you might know, a
relative to skills and skill development and role definitions
and things like that. So that is certainly something I have to
have on my to do list. This has been a great conversation,
Charlie, thank you so much. My pleasure. Yes. Stay in touch be
well, you too. Don't worry about us. You're the DevOps Institute.
Thank you so much. And hopefully I get to see you. Next time. I
come to Minnesota my daughter actually moved. She moved to
from St. Paul, Minnesota. We went to the Japanese restaurant
remember where you and your wife and then was with us? We went
there the first time since then she loves it and she seems to go
there all the time. So when I come there next time you go
Charles Betz: Yeah, we'll go to box drop away. And we will we
will go to Zambia. Yeah.
Eveline Oehrlich: And it's my treat. I think you tweeted last
time. So next time will be my tweet,
Charles Betz: Remember, but of course, all right.
Eveline Oehrlich: Thank you so much. Take care. Thanks,
everyone. Bye. Bye.
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Eveline Oehrlich: And now, we are actually with Helen Beal,
who is one of the thought leaders of DevOps, and many,
many other topics. Helen has covered DevOps, I think,
forever, ever since I joined the topic, DevOps Helen has been in
it. So great to have you on our podcast today, Helen, Hello, how
you doing?
Helen Beal: Hello, I am fantastic, thank you, and
delighted to be here and chatting with you again, as
always,
Eveline Oehrlich: Likewise, and it was great just recently
seeing you in person, that was a bit. So that was really fun.
The, as you've been in the space for quite a long time, and as I
mentioned, disorderly during this, I really, really want to
know where if you think about the journey we've been through,
right, starting in 2008, or some people live, you think earlier,
where are we in this topic of DevOps today? In 2022? What
would you say?
Helen Beal: Yeah, sort of 13 or so years in, I'd say DevOps is
definitely mainstream, I'd say there probably isn't an
enterprise in the world that doesn't know about DevOps and
isn't trying to do DevOps at some level. But I'd also look to
puppet state of DevOps report from last year 2021, which talks
about the middle layer, and the fact that lots of organizations
are stuck in that middle level of performance in terms of
adoption, and capability. So whilst it's really well
established now, and I think most people think it is the the
way of working that we use, if we want to operate in a digital
economy, we still have some ways to go to fully adopt all of the
practices, and really benefit from the promise it's made to us
in terms of speed of delivery, quality of delivery, and super
happy customers, because they're just having such great
experiences.
Eveline Oehrlich: Do you see any regional differences? Or do you
see, is that a global thing when you say it's mainstream? Or do
you see anything different in in a particular region?
Helen Beal: Yeah, I mean, I don't know the data on that. But
that there's a feeling that I get from my ambassadors, which I
think is quite interesting. So as you know, DevOps Institute in
that Chief Ambassador role I have, we have about coming up to
250 Ambassadors across six continents. I think I'm in
sixth, I mean, all the continents except Antarctica,
which is obviously mostly populated by penguins, and
researchers. So we're not really anticipating having any
ambassadors from there. But we do have ambassadors from nearly
every country. And some countries have surprised me when
we've received applications. So for example, Nepal was one and
you wouldn't naturally think, oh, Nepal, we know their big
business doing like laser tech, but it's it really has to, as
far as I can tell, reached everywhere, I think, you know,
there are nations and markets that have led and for that we'd
probably look to, obviously North America, and Europe and
parts of Asia, particularly India, and Singapore is kind of
Intertek leaders and China. And Japan has big tech leaders as
well. But I don't know what about you, you. You've probably
seen more data than I have on this. What do you think?
Eveline Oehrlich: Yeah, I would agree. I think I think you hit
it on the nail, I think. I love your comment on the Antarctica.
So if there is anybody out there listening to us, from the
Antarctica, and you are in DevOps, you should connect with
Helen, she's looking for an ambassador, it's great
government. Now pull out your crystal ball and think down the
road. Maybe sometimes people say strategic is two or three years
depends on I don't know, if, in our crazy life and crazy world
if two or three years is even possible, right? But pull out
your crystal ball and share with us what do you think where this
is in maybe two to three years from today? So 2025 2026,
something like that. Where do you think that DevOps will be
done?
Helen Beal: So I mentioned the data from the puppet state of
DevOps report 2021. And this kind of frozen, middle, bit
confusing using that word, that terminology because we often use
it to talk about management layers, but the idea that we've
got a lot of enterprises that are kind of stuck in their
DevOps adoption and are yet to realize the promises that DevOps
has made them It won't surprise you at all, I've learned to hear
that I'm going to say that I think there's a key to unlocking
this problem. And that key is value stream management. So
value stream management very much emerging in a kind of new
renascence. Obviously, it's been around since the 1950s. Or
earlier, you know, if you can go all the way back to materials
and information planning in the Venice Arsenal in the 1400s. So
we could go back that far. But that issue management is very
much having a renaissance right now, that was kind of triggered
by some work done by Forrester in around 2018, so around four
years ago. And the reason it's new and different now to what
it's been before, is because of what we've done in DevOps. So we
have spent the last 13 years or so learning about how to build
DevOps tool chains. And those DevOps tool chains are giving us
access to data about value streams, digital value streams,
in a way that we just haven't been able to. And even at the
advent of DevOps, you know, back in the day, we were only just
starting really to do things like automated builds, and
automated testing and continuous delivery. So it's all relatively
new. So in 2025, my hope would be that we would see
organizations embracing value stream management, which
sometimes I call the next evolution of DevOps. Sometimes I
say that DevOps is like the toolkit that delivers on what
VSM is trying to achieve. So the the outcomes that it's looking
for are enabled by DevOps practices. But either way, I'd
like to see, I'd like to see that middle layer of
organization and capability improving. And I think the
adoption of VSM is the thing that is going to make that
shift. And if we look at that data, it's four years so far
consecutively, that it's not really changed. So we could go
another four years with it not really changing. If we don't do
something new. And I think that's something new is VSM.
Eveline Oehrlich: Is there a specific place people can learn
more about VSM? What, where would you want them to?
Helen Beal: So I would point them at the value stream
management Consortium, which is at VSM consortium.org. Just
yesterday, we released our state of VSM report 2022. So are
second in that annual series. And of course, Evelyn and I were
lead researchers on that report. So we hope if you get a chance
to read it, that you'll enjoy it.
Eveline Oehrlich: Great. Well, thanks, Helen. This was great.
Appreciate your thoughts. And again, for those out in the end
RTR if you have any interest in DevOps, but of course, everybody
else reach out. We're here to help and particularly, Thanks,
Helen, your thought leadership has brought this space and many
other spaces quite ahead. So thanks.
Helen Beal: Thank you. It's a very joyful experience. So thank
you.
Eveline Oehrlich: And now I'm here with Mark Hornbeek who is a
an expert in DevOps as well, Mark and I have done some work
together on a variety of chapters in our skill books. And
so great to have you also here with us, Mark. Hi, how are you
doing?
Mark Hornbeek: I'm good. More information for another day, but
I'm good today.
Eveline Oehrlich: That's great. So my question for you as well
is what is DevOps today in 2022, you've been in this space for
quite some time. So share with us your thoughts.
Mark Hornbeek: So I can only say that my you know, I can only
relate my own experiences. I'm immersed in DevOps, you know,
pretty much every day, and have been for many, many years. But
as kind of a practitioner mostly at the strategic level guiding
companies and other things of that level. So you know, what I
see happening today, mostly, with my clients, I have quite a
large number of active clients, and I, you know, in the context
of guiding their DevOps practices, so it's, when I talk
about think about DevOps today, I think about what they're
asking for and what they're doing. And so it's really
relaying actual day to day experience of what I see people
doing today versus in the past. So fundamentally, I see kind of
three channels of practices. So what we call DevOps, which is
really big D and little O, where companies are still really
trying to master and mature there are CI CD practices. And
even though those terms have been around a long time, I still
find that even the large enterprises are struggling to
really, you know, make an efficient CI, let alone CD
process so that that's still true. More and more are
maturing, but there's still a lot of maturing yet to do in
DevOps, see ICD, but those that have got to some better level of
maturity, are now engaging more with SRE practices to complement
their dev, big D. Little ops practices with product, what I
call production operations, being more smart about how they
couple their dev activities with their production activities. And
then dev SEC ops. And I started to list them in this order.
Again, I'm only relaying my own experiences. But I see, you
know, most of my clients that are big organizations, they then
attack all this security integrations with with DevOps
and sre. So really, I see a maturing happening along the
lines of those kind of three channels, DevOps with CIC, D,
SRE, and Dev SEC ops. But there's still somewhat separate
projects, they're not as integrated as you might think
they could be at this point, at least with the clients I'm
dealing with. How are they doing that? Again, from my own
experiences, directed roadmaps, a lot of training. foundational
level training is always a good thing place to start and
immersive learning, through projects and other you know,
activities like that. And those a lot of tools, consolidation
efforts, especially the big enterprises that have grown up
through acquisitions, or allowing their different teams
to experiment with DevOps. And they ended up with a plethora of
different types of tools. And now they're finding out that to
really get to the next level of maturity, they need to
consolidate to a more common tool base. Along with that,
there's a lot of migration to the cloud, the in embracing
infrastructures code to try to make their pipelines more
efficient. And at this stage, also, there's a lot of focus on
metrics. But they're really again, kind of focused areas
about metrics, different parts of the digital value streams
have different metrics. And people are still struggling to
understand, you know that there are different kinds of metrics
that need to be ultimately integrated together to provide
the big picture. There's, you know, people expert in certain
areas or the other. So, the dev side CI, the CD, the deployment,
which is different than delivery. And of course,
production is all of these things, have different types of
metrics, and I see organizations still struggling to understand
the breadth and depth of all of those metrics. And if you don't
have right metrics, then it's hard to really evolve to higher
levels of maturity, to try to understand what's really going
on at the big picture level, when you think about things as
an entire, you know, end to end system. So that's kind of DevOps
today, in my, in my world, you know, there's still a lot of
learning about CIC, D, a lot of good projects, probably, from
what I've seen, less than half, certainly less than half of the
organizations have achieved what I call, you know, high level of
CI, CD performance. And most of them are still kind of beginners
with CI or CD with sre. And dev SEC ops, the security
organizations are still highly siloed. For the most part,
they're focusing more on the production side of security, and
learning more about the dev side of security. So to me, that's
kind of the state of the practice. Okay, it's not the
state of the art. I mean, there are certainly lots of you know,
unicorns are doing a lot more than that. Right. But when I,
when I think about today, I think about the state of the
practice,
Eveline Oehrlich: At the enterprise level. So really
continuously evolving the journey, even after it was
introduced in 2008. So if I give you a crystal ball mark, and we
move fast forward, maybe three years, you know, strategic
thinking three years, maybe five years, depending on which of
course, industry vertical, where do you think these enterprises
will be three to five years out? Still, of course, maturing, but
will they will there ever be done is done? What's the next
what's the next stage for for those who are kind of in the
middle or more on the higher level of maturity?
Mark Hornbeek: Well, you can look at the elite performers, as
Dora calls it or, you know, the, the unicorns to see what they're
doing is as an indicator of where a lot of these other
organizations want to get to, ultimately, I think it's more
about the future is more about integrated and, and practices.
So rather than having separate, you know, DevOps SRE dev SEC
ops, is, I think it's going to be far more integrated into end
continuous value stream orchestration and monitoring,
continuous Dev and prod ops. So, you know, SRE and DevOps being
more combined quality being looked at as more of a
continuous effort from, you know, planning all the way
through to production, and especially as you get more
mature than a lot of testing and quality analysis going on, even
post post release in into the production, deployment
environment, and security itself. You know, today, it's
very much kind of bifurcated. Dev SEC Ops is really about
vulnerability prevention. Up until prod, it's kind of like
DevOps, it doesn't really inform that much about what happens in
prod, but a certain great set of practices for preventing
vulnerabilities getting into prod, but you still have a whole
lot of separate security practices in prod, that the SRE
and the security folks tend to focus on the most I think moving
in the direction of continuous security, integrating the pre
prod and prod side of security. So that's what I see happening,
more of an integrated set of practices is more end to end,
where there's more collaboration that's more efficient, and how
that would be served up to I think value stream management
platforms are going to have a rise and importance because they
have that layer, what I see a lot of people doing is they're
trying to implement things at the CI CD level, but the CI CD
level is only one level above that you have value stream
management, and that's where it gets a little easier to
orchestrate things at an end to end level. So that layer,
whether you call a value stream management ever you want to call
it, I think it's going to become more important. continuous value
stream management as a service where you know, ultimately, to
be more efficient, you want these things to be available as
integrated systems, and served up as a service rather than
having to recreate them all the time for your different
pipelines and streams. And obviously, you know, there's the
rise of, I've seen more and more serious applications of, of AI
and machine learning, especially in the continuous observability
realm. I think that's going to become more prevalent. I've
almost I've kind of detected, there's a tipping point going on
there. Where before, there was a lot of trial trial projects, but
they're starting to become more serious with AI and ML
applications to things like DevOps, and SRE, especially in
the, you know, monitoring and observability area,
Eveline Oehrlich: We're seeing the same, we're seeing the same
thing. So you're saying, just to summarize quickly, you're saying
it is more of a holistic, I'll call it operating models, as
many things are starting to work together, and there is more
development and more continuation around this
integrated way of doing things. That's great. Super Well, I
appreciate your input. This was super, thanks so much. And
again, that was more corn geek, who has done a lot of work in
this space. Thanks, Mark.
Mark Hornbeek: Thank you for having me here. I appreciate it.
Eveline Oehrlich: This has been extremely educational. Thank you
all for sharing your thoughts and predictions. For our
listeners, look for an upcoming blog from the DevOps Institute
around predictions. Jane, Charlie, Helen and Mark, maybe
we can make this a yearly prediction podcast around
DevOps. I certainly would love to host you all again. Thank you
again. Humans of DevOps is produced by DevOps Institute.
Our audio production team includes Julia Papp and Brendan
Leigh. I am DevOps human podcast executive producer
evolutionarily. If you would like to join us on the podcast,
please contact us at podcast at DevOps institute.com. Thank you
again, and talk to you soon.
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