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.
Romano Roth: We have not yet progressed really into the
direction of DevOps, but many companies are doing is they say
we have that DevOps silo introduced or we have the DevOps
engineer, but that's not really doing DevOps.
Eveline Oehrlich: Welcome to humans of DevOps Podcast. I'm
Evelyn early Chief Research Officer at DevOps Institute. Our
podcast today titled today is a really, huh, I'm not saying it.
Let's wait. DevOps is dead. Question mark, exclamation mark.
You'll know why when we are finished. Today, we have with
us, Romano Ross, who is chief of DevOps at a service provider
software service provider. Hello, Romano. Hi, Evelyn. How
are you doing? I'm very well. All good. All good already to
roll up the sleeves and tell us more about a variety of things.
But before we go there, I want to just quickly introduce him
and Romano. If you have anything to add, please do so. So Romana
is a leader, Senior Consultant, architect and software
development expert. He has over 20 years of professional
experience in many different domains, including the financial
insurance, cybersecurity, medical aviation. What did I
leave out? Is there anything else you want to add or motto?
Romano Roth: No, I think that's it more or less. The only thing
I could add is, I'm also organizing the DevOps meetup
Zurich, which is monthly meetup we're doing it's free to join.
And I'm also the president of the DevOps days, Eric, which is
a two day conference, we are organizing, and there are all
over the place all over the world in all the big cities.
Therefore, these conferences,
Eveline Oehrlich: Excellent, great addition, I actually went
to the tourist one, and, of course, many of the other ones.
So that's great. I did not forget that, that. That was a
great experience. All right. Welcome, again to our podcast
today. So my first question is chief of DevOps. I love that
title. Chief of DevOps is fantastic title tell us what
does the chief of DevOps to?
Romano Roth: Yeah, it's an awesome title. So the chief of
DevOps is a thought leader. So, as a thought leader, you are
speaking, you do conference, speaking, you are doing videos
and doing a blog post. But when it comes to Chief of DevOps in a
company, you are the solid leader about DevOps in that
company, you define the strategy, and also the offering
that this company has, and what skills and capabilities are
needed to, to be on the market and to do all of these
offerings. And of course, you also define the education
program, and you also educate the people in terms of DevOps.
But the most important thing, what you need to do is you need
to work in projects. And only by working the real projects and
making your hands dirty, you can really be a thought leader and
the chief of DevOps.
Eveline Oehrlich: I agree with that. Of course, that's
fantastic. Now I was listening and watching a video you did,
which really is I'm referring to that video, in our title of the
podcast, DevOps is dead. And in that or DevOps is dead, kind of
like a surprise. You talked about business, the developers
wall of confusion. And what I am curious about, of course, you do
your work in dark, but I think you travel, as you said, across
Europe and globally. What I'm sorry, what I thought I would
ask you Well, I am going to ask you is have we not been through
this conversation of DevOps versus developer? You know, Dev
versus ops versus business in this wall of confusion and we
really progressed yet to a modern way of developing and
delivering custom products to customers and service and
clients or are our wish I was still asking, what is DevOps?
DevOps is dead. I mean, all of that. Give us your perspective
on all of that.
Romano Roth: So I would also say, yeah, there are also
people, which is say it, everything about DevOps has
already been set it, everything is clear, it's everything is
there, you just need to do it. But when I go into companies, I
nowadays still see the same picture of the business,
together with the customers, they have bright ideas. And
still, they write it down into Word documents and into into
JIRA tickets, and then they are thrown over the wall of
confusion to the development team. And the development team
then develops these bright ideas. And they just do it and
then they throw it over the wall of confusion to a QA team, which
is still there. And then they test something and then they
throw it over the wall of confusion to the operation team.
And still the operation team has difficulties to to operate this
software. So these were all of confusions, they are still
there. And what we can clearly see is they are still there,
because we still have silo organization, many companies
have not yet organized themselves across the value
stream. So that they really have product teams, still, the
companies are working in projects, they still have
project and the project always has a start and it has an end
and has a budget. And it all boils down to yearly budget
goals to KPIs that we that we still have, we have not yet
progressed really into the direction of DevOps, what many
companies are doing is they say, Yeah, we are doing DevOps, or we
have that DevOps silo introduced, or we have the
DevOps engineer, but that's not really doing DevOps.
Eveline Oehrlich: So really, what I hear you say, is that,
even if we say DevOps, without starting at the higher level, in
the organization, where there is that common thinking in terms of
product, or as you said, value stream, it is going to be a
challenge to truly live DevOps or whatever ops, whatever dev x
Ops is, right? We'll get to that. Without having that
perspective. Is that what you're saying?
Romano Roth: Yes, absolutely. Because also, when you look at
DevOps at the definition of DevOps, and of course, there are
1000s of definition. But as I always say, DevOps is a mindset
and the culture and the set of technical practices. I think,
when it comes to technical practices, we are more or less
okay with with that you know them, but then changing the
culture or the mindset is a difficult thing. And it can
always only come from the top management. And this is
something that all of the companies nowadays are lacking
that cultural change, and that mindset change, which my opinion
needs to come from top down.
Eveline Oehrlich: Yeah, so from a pessimistic perspective, which
I usually don't take, but I wanted to just point it out.
Some of those DevOps teams are fighting against windmills,
because if there is not the top down support on changing the
culture, and as a product team, it makes it a challenge.
However, we know that they are, as you said, on the technology
side on the processes within the DevOps that have been ordered
within DevOps to have been a lot of advancements. And those
organizations are bubbling up the outcomes and the results of
their great work. And hopefully, more and more of that will go up
to those executive leaders to see that it's an overall
cultural change. Now, I want to stay on that theme, quickly
relative to one DevOps versus multiple DevOps, right? Kind of,
so if I have multiple, if I have one DevOps team, small company,
blah, blah, blah, might pass be possible, but most of our
listeners, excuse me, are in enterprise organizations. So
what is a model going forward? Well, what's the model when
there are multiple DevOps teams in an organization?
Romano Roth: So this is exactly one of the topics I'm talking
quite a lot nowadays. And as you pointed out, when you are a
small company, or just building one product, then it's quite
easy to do DevOps more or less, but scaling that up is is
difficult. And when we look at that, then what usually happens
is that companies tend to do a little bit of DevOps. They build
the DevOps silo between Dev and Ops, which is just again a silo
until you don't really get the efficiency that you wanted to
see, then when you look at how DevOps really should be is that
Dev and Ops are moving together, all of the people are coming
together across the value stream, and they are building a
cross functional team, then you really are doing DevOps. And now
when you think about that, and you have multiple of these value
streams, or product teams, then you can clearly see that, out of
that, you will have a lot of inefficiencies, because many of
these teams are reinventing the wheel, they are doing their own
stuff, which is of course good, but they are not really reusing
things. So the this this aspect is, is quite critical. Because
it you also have a quite a lot of cognitive load in these
teams, they need to really care about building the product,
operating the product and maintaining the product. This
also means that they need to know quite a lot of tools. And
this is difficult. And the new kid around the corner, or the
new kid in the block is this platform engineering that that
we are seeing coming up, where you have a platform team, which
builds the platform, and also the API's and everything so that
the product teams can build, maintain and operate the product
and do DevOps.
Eveline Oehrlich: So we have seen that platform engineering
team, what is a skill I need, if I want to become a platform
engineer? What would you say?
Romano Roth: You need to be a software engineer. A platform is
nothing else than also a product. So when it comes to
skills, in my opinion, it's really that software engineering
skill, because also building that platform requires you to to
build a product, the platform, which has a user interface, a
self service portal, a marketplace so that you can
enable the other teams. So you need to know how to program a
user interface, you need to know how to program API's, you need
to know how to program databases. And but you also need
to have is the, of course DevOps mindset, DevOps skills. And you
need to know a lot about how software is built. So what kind
of tools are good to use, so that you can build up this
platform so that the teams can most efficient work with these
technologies, which means nowadays, you need to know a lot
about the cloud technologies, cloud native technologies.
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Eveline Oehrlich: Okay, great. I would certainly not qualify for
a DevOps engineer, as a platform engineer, but I probably would
be going down the SRE path Site Reliability Engineering, because
I have an infrastructure and operations background. But I
have another question. There was always this, you know, when we
do research on DevOps and read in whatever magazines or
whatever events we go to there is or whatever vendor I talk to,
because I do speak to quite a few vendors, as I'm also having
an industry analyst position. There are these different terms
def sec, ops, Biz Ops, dev x ops DevOps, there's more and more
coming out of the closet. So I, and then of course, there's
value stream management, right? VSM. And all of them are related
SRE and keep going, all of them are related, but it seems to me
and I know you you had this argument with yourself as well.
I was listening to your video, it seems to me when we sometimes
when we use the word DevOps people or individuals or whoever
thinks that this is just as movement lol level somewhere in
the development and operations team, but it is bigger. So is
DevOps, the term itself not really serving our purpose?
Should we call it DevOps? Or Should this be called something
else? What's your thought on that?
Romano Roth: Yeah. So let's, let's be, quite frankly, when we
look at the term DevOps, then this term, DevOps is not very
good. The term DevOps says development and operation. And
back in that time, it was okay ish. I think it was around 2008.
When this term came up, it was occasioned as he pointed out,
more and more of these terms are coming up like dev SEC ops,
which is development, security and operation or biz dev ops,
business, development and operation. And but as I pointed
out, DevOps is about bringing all the people together, where
you would need sort of a term like def beats our QA, ops, and
I'm pretty sure I have forgotten someone. You can also call it
ethics ops, or Deathstar ops. For me, DevOps is really about
bringing all the people all the technology and all the process
together to continuously deliver value. It's really about how we
can continuously deliver a product or service to our
customers. That's the important thing. Now, of course, we can
now argue what could be a better term. In my opinion, this is
secondary. As long as we have a good understanding of what
DevOps is, and what what it what it is all about, then this term
is okay. I also don't believe belief that we really can find a
very good term to describe that.
Eveline Oehrlich: So what you're saying is stop talking about
what it is just go on, do follow the paths, try to adopt the
practices and change the culture on the way, expanding it from a
pilot, expanding it into something more good executive
buy in, and so on. And so, as we have different maturity levels,
I don't know if that is even the right term, I'm questioning
myself when I say maturity, because as we know, we're never
done with it, right? We, we move into the next technology, we are
adopting whatever Mehta or AR VR rpa, different server lists,
blah, blah, blah, all of that wonderful stuff, wonderful
stuff, our environment keeps getting more complex, our
demands for services and products are tied to customer
experience, etc, etc. So we will never be done. But it's it's a
two part question. The first one is, when I am somewhere in a
kind of good DevOps, journey, high performing, and I am
somewhere a DevOps Chief Chief of DevOps. What can I in this
case, you know, you are the chief of DevOps, what would you
recommend to those folks to actually scale it further among
that maybe high performing team? What are some of the things they
should be doing to expand their their journey in their culture
in towards the bigger foot print of DevOps? And I don't mean it
from a sorry to clarify, I don't mean it from a technology
perspective, I mean, or from maybe not a process perspective,
but really from a people from a culture perspective.
Romano Roth: So, what, what do you need to do is you need to
organize across the value stream, I think this is really
the magic you need to do you need to identify the value
streams in your in your company, how you generate value, what
kind of steps are needed and what people are in there, and
then organize these people in these value streams. You can
also call it product teams. Of course, a value stream can also
have multiple products, but it is very important to organize
around that value stream. And secondly, what is also important
important is to empower the people and so empower this value
stream give this value stream budget. So that's the value
stream itself can decide what is necessary to do to make a great
product or multiple great products for For the customers,
and now you can also see we are shifting away from from projects
from, we need to have these 10 features to a point where the
customer is in the center, and we want to have happy customers,
but also of course happy employees. So that we really are
focusing on the on the customer and building absolutely great
products with building and quality. So that will be my
recommendation to organize across the value stream, bring
the customer into the center half KPIs, according to to the
customer. And also employees as satisfaction and giving really
empower the people in this value stream give it giving them the
budget and the power to decide.
Eveline Oehrlich: Excellent. I wanted to do a quick shout out
to a project I'm involved in with Helen Beal I believe, you
know, Helen, right? Maybe you don't know you don't you have to
meet her. She is basically besides her being a colleague of
mine at the DevOps Institute. She's also the chair of the
value stream Consortium, which is a, I think the first time
ever since I've been in this space, a variety of vendors are
getting together, and are researching and are applying
common thinking and thought leadership together on value
stream management, and one of the projects we're doing is the
second notice the third year we're doing research in the
state of value stream management. And just recently,
Helen did a fantastic it's called a pier scape with IDC.
And if you just type in anybody listening, if you type in pure
scape, IDC value stream management, you should be able
to see the video and the conversation around a value
stream management a fantastic ability to learn how to start
that journey. And one of the customers there actually was
Netflix, a product manager of Netflix, who has talked about
how they are doing value stream management in their company.
Excellent. All right, looking at the clock, why do fun
conversations always go by so fast? So pull out your crystal
ball. Besides the conversation on value stream management,
let's hope there is more and more interest and adoption of
that product thinking in the value stream management
thinking. But if we, if we go down the road, if we even can,
right? If we look maybe two years from now, what do you
think? What is the future of DevOps, then? Two years? What is
that that is 2025? When you and I will be sitting somewhere in
soulish to have a cup of coffee or cappuccino or an adult
beverage doesn't matter? What would we then see in DevOps.
Romano Roth: But we can clearly see at the moment is Alta Vista
was platform engineering, and they were all of the toolings
there is a lot of standardization coming in, you
can not clearly see that it's more under the hood. But we are
going to into an area where software development gets
standardized. And in my opinion, it gets industrialized, we are
going away, let's say from just always reinventing the wheel it
into a direction of where you are using different things
together. And they fit together because they are standardized.
In my opinion, what we will see is the build up of digital
factories, you can already see that together with the platform
engineering companies are building their own digital
factories, where in this digital factory, the teams are organized
across the value stream where they are producing digital
products or cyber physical products. And the platform
engineering team provides the convenient belt for these
digital factories in the companies. So my prediction is
we will see a lot of digital factories coming up.
Eveline Oehrlich: I would I would bet you but I am agreeing
with you. So I will buy the drink because I ordered a coffee
or a cup of tea. No, I agree with you. This is a great, great
conversation digital factories. That's something I'd love to
explore further. But not today. But really, really great
insight. I love that crystal ball vision you have there in
the future. For my No this was great. Now I have one more
question. It's a closing question. It has nothing to do
with digital factories, DevOps, or any of those terms. What do
you do for fun?
Romano Roth: Oh, I love to travel around the world. I love
to see new countries and in these countries, I do a lot of
photography. I also have my Instagram channel and I have a
second YouTube channel where I post also some videos at the
moment. I do a lot of 360 degree videos, which I love. And of
course, I love playing computer games and I also read a lot.
Eveline Oehrlich: Fantastic. Well, if you ever make it to my
region of as I'm only really an hour and a half north of you,
stop by give me a buzz. We'll go and travel my hometown together,
you can take 360 degree videos, I will check out the videos you
have done. Thank you so much. We have been talking to Romana
Ross, Chief of DevOps at SilkAir, which is a service
provider software consulting organization. He does a lot of
work and talk leading so check him out. Again, Amanda, thank
you so much for joining me today on humans of DevOps podcast.
Thank you for having me. Humans of DevOps podcast is produced by
DevOps Institute. Our audio production team includes Julia
pape, Daniel Newman, Schultz and Brendan Leigh. Shout out to my
wonderful colleagues. I'm humans of DevOps podcast, Executive
Producer, Evelyn early. If you would like to join us on a
podcast, please contact us at this very long email humans of
DevOps podcast at DevOps institute.com. I'm Evelyn early.
I'll talk to you soon.
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