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.
Adam Frank: You know, I've seen a lot of developer advocates,
within companies really kind of start to look internally. One
who is kind of walks in those shoes of a developer is
certainly going to have the best best foot forward.
Eveline Oehrlich: Welcome to humans of DevOps Podcast. I'm
Evelyn early Chief Research Officer at DevOps Institute. Our
podcast title today is cloud native observability developer
happiness. Yes, you can, or Oh, my, if that sounds a little bit
like the Dorsey at Kansas, it is for a reason, because I have
with me, a gentleman who has incredible knowledge across
many, many topics, and I wanted to talk to Him about everything.
But I know we only have about 2025 minutes. So today, we have
with us Adam Frank. He's a senior vice president for
product and marketing at armory. Hello, Adam.
Adam Frank: Thank you so much for having me on.
Eveline Oehrlich: Yes, excited. Like I said, I'm very excited.
So before we get started, I wanted to share with the
audience a little bit on your background. So Adam is
passionate about all things product and design, he creates
influences and greatly improves end to end or e to e, I just
heard somebody say that experiences, he is helping
armory expand and grow by building top shelf product
marketing and design teams that deliver a simple message with a
simple experience. He has over 15 years of product and
development experience, specializing, sorry for that
specializing in building products and strategies for
complex problems, problems that enable digital transformations,
and organizational change to ensure growth and scale for
businesses of the world. Now, Adam is also a DevOps Institute
ambassador, and I believe you are still advisor for financial
services and technology as part of a misery that IO, is that
correct? That is correct. Excellent. Well, welcome again.
And thank you for having the time or taking the time on your
end. I know you are very, very busy. So I really appreciate it.
And I know our listeners are appreciating it as well.
Adam Frank: Yeah, thanks for having me. That's quite the
intro there as well.
Eveline Oehrlich: Yes, of course. And I'm actually
surprised, you know, we haven't actually, I am an ambassador, of
course, as well. But I'm also Chief Research Officer, we
haven't really met in person. So congratulations on being an
ambassador, and thank you for all of your work. Hopefully, we
get to meet in person at some point, because now we can, we
will see. The first thing really, what is the take of
being an ambassador? And how has that helped you as kind of a
little bit of a want to get a little bit more insight on what
ambassadors do to our audience? Tell us a little bit about your
role.
Adam Frank: Sure, sure. So like you said, back in 2020, is
really where I was introduced to the DevOps Institute. Helen Bill
was the first person that I interacted with, and she is
absolutely lovely, she is full of energy. And she really
advocates for the community. So her energy just kind of spilled
onto me to advocate for the community as well. So it's
really about sharing the knowledge sharing the
experiences, the number of courses that the DevOps
Institute has been coming out with lately, and being able to
consult on those courses, provide inputs, ideas, even
right some of the courses, the modules, the chapters, wherever
they may be, and really collaborate with that community
to produce something that will hopefully help other members
that are very interested in the topic or trying to learn. I
think that's the impetus of all of this is that really sharing
knowledge to help others learn and grow within the vast, vast
community that we have in and around DevOps and it in in
general. So it's, it's, it's fantastic to be an ambassador. I
very much enjoyed it. And it's really helped me both from a
networking point of view and understand other people's
perspectives, but also help understand other problems and
things that people are facing as well to come up with and you
know, kind of ideate around solutions to those problems,
along with keeping up with trends and things of that
nature. It's been it's been a wonderful ride so far.
Eveline Oehrlich: Great. Well, thank you for sharing that. And
yes, shout out to Helen. She is absolutely wonderful. She has
Add that that Nick for getting people connected and excited. I
love working with her. So shout out to her super thanks for
sharing that. In terms of a topic, I really want to first
address one I have also researched and studied. So
you've been focusing and doing some work around observability
for a while. Why do you think observability is such a hot
topic today?
Adam Frank: I think we could probably sum it up in in four or
five words. And that would be customer experience and product
lead growth, bring that down to five letters UX and plg. I think
with the complexity and scale of infrastructure and application,
in today's day and age, and the reach from globalization, it's
it's that coupled with the speed of innovation that we are
seeing, one really needs to understand what that customer
experience is, what is that customer experiencing with the
end to end solution that you are providing, as a software
provider as a product service. So being able to not only
understand the system, and how they are interacting and
behaving, but what that customer is feeling what that customer is
doing, that's going to really enable you to make informed
decisions to iterate quickly. To increase your uptime, the way
that we really look at the world is agility, stability, and
security are going to provide the best customer experience out
there. But in order to provide the agility, you need to know
where you're pivoting what you're iterating on. And being
able to do that quickly. In order to provide the stability,
you need to understand the systems and the application and
how they're all interacting to make sure that it is up and
available and ready to go for that customer wherever they may
be. And of course, security, security is top of mind always,
but there's also the other side of it. And that's the cost
savings. So being able to see different areas of the
application that can be tuned, the infrastructure that can be
tuned to also bring cost savings forward is going to be very,
very beneficial for any any, any product in any company that is
that is delivering the services.
Eveline Oehrlich: That it's really a balancing effort. And
an outside in perspective, right. As you said, from a
customer experience, perspective, we're rolling out,
we're coming in from that perspective, making sure we have
the velocity, we have the stability, and we have the
security because my that's essential. But at the same time,
we know budgets aren't that big this year, according to Gartner,
I think there's a 5.3% rising in IT budget. So that's not a lot
in terms of spending. So having that balance is where
observability fits right in. That's a great, I love that that
could be actually a nice, a nice graphic. All right. Now, of
course, this has to do with the digital pace, right, the pace of
transformation, no matter if it is in healthcare in industries,
verticals, governments, whatever they are, we see that pace
continues as CEOs have that on their, on their sleeve as a
strategic initiative continuing, particularly after pandemic. And
that causes. But while we have a pace of fast and agile and
stable and secure, there's also a significant challenge around
the taking of debt that creates, we also have skill gaps, and we
have not enough talents. And that makes everything a little
bit more complicated. But really what I want to get to is the
technology stack is, as you mentioned, I think you said that
is becoming more and more complex. And it's becoming more
and more complicated. And I'm assuming you're seeing that with
your clients. So when I step back and think about our focus
on the on the in the listening mode, maybe we have some leaders
and of course, we have individual contributors who need
to rethink their technology stack. How should they? So this
is a two part question first, how should they rethink their
tech stack today? Where and what can they do to consolidate the
tech stack? What are your thoughts on that?
Adam Frank: Great, great question. Yes, every day, we
every day both as a company ourselves and with our
customers. We see this every day. The pace of change is the
fastest that it's ever been. And it is not slowing down. I don't
see we don't see it slowing down anytime soon. So yes, every day.
I think some of the first things that leaders can start to do is
really Staying close to the trends and the best practices
that are out there. But one also needs to not just make a
decision, because it's the new shiny object, it's the new shiny
toy. But is there any return on investment with updating their
tech stack, they'll begin to think five years, 10 years out
down the road, but also in that short term, and is there
actually going to be returned to do this not everything needs to
be promoted to a cloud native piece of software. Sometimes
things just can't, the way that they were written, you know, we
talked to I talked to a customer not too long ago, and they're,
you know, 42 year old software company with millions of lines
of code, supporting over 20 different languages at this
point. And by the time that they rewrote this, they may be 42
years in the future, and they will just have to rewrite it all
again. So it doesn't necessarily make sense to replace everything
within the tech stack. I had a great conversation with Kelsey
Hightower a couple of weeks ago. And you know, he and I both
firmly believe that Kubernetes is here. Kubernetes is certainly
here for a while. And, you know, with that, and the promise of
cloud native is always been cheaper, faster, more stable. So
I think one thing that leaders can can definitely do is embrace
the declarative nature of Kubernetes and future oriented
solutions that are really embracing the declarative
nature. No, that's also offering simple experiences for people.
But when it comes down to a really careful planning, not
over analyzing, and making informed decisions quickly, to
be able to fail fast on which aspects of your tech stack you
are replacing, don't try and do it all at once. Nobody ever
wants to do that just target specific areas. And that
portion, start with that portion that really enables you to move
quicker. And we definitely advocate when people are looking
at different parts of their tech stack. What's What's your CI CD
pipeline looking like? What's that process look like? Can that
be one of the first things that you target that will then enable
you to move much quicker with the rest of your stack. And of
course, don't force anything down on your developers make
sure that they are part of the process, they are making part of
the decisions with you. Because they are going to be the ones
that are going to have to benefit and use all of this. At
the end of the day.
Eveline Oehrlich: That gets me to my next question. Great. What
is it called a hook into my next question, developer experience.
We have heard about this. And I have to admit, Adam, I am an
infrastructure and operations. I wouldn't say geek, because I'm
kind of an old an old guys or a geezer I guess that's the way to
say it. But I started out and I you know, and developers to me,
were always kind of a strange animal. This is like 1994, that
dates me, right. But anyway, just a little bit on that. And
but that's not why we're here, I wanted to ask you, we hear a lot
about developer experience keeping developers happy. And as
I said, I'm an IMO myself, but I also covered developer and
infrastructure operations. As an analyst. We have made really
great progress with DevOps and SRE and many other press best
practices and developers, we know they don't want to do
operations. So how do we keep these developers happy? You
already mentioned some ideas there relative to C, ICD. We'll
get there in a little bit later. But what are some things our
folks can do? Even if their developers keep themselves
happy, right, Heather, and others to keep the developers
happy?
Adam Frank: Yeah, I think, in two words, empowerment and
transparency, with more emphasis on the empowerment side of
things, developers really want to focus they want to create,
they want to innovate, they want to solve complex problems, and
then want to see the benefits that those complex problems, the
solutions to those complex problems are providing for their
their users. So they need a platform, they need a tool base,
that's going to really provide them the confidence and make
their lives easier. They don't want to be stuck in those loops
of maintaining different pieces of infrastructure or figuring
out how to get their software delivered to production. You
know, why things are failing, all that kind of stuff. So
they're going to be happiest when they're coding when they're
solving complex problems, when their code is being shipped out
to production in a nice, easy and simple fashion that they can
fully control with that transparency that I had
mentioned, ops, ops also wants to focus, create, innovate, but
also has to enable and obfuscate the complexities that come along
with some of this. And really instrument for visibility and
stability. I mean, coupling all of that together. And having
close relationships with developers. That's really
started to really start to see things and that velocity take
off, you really start to see things come to fruition and, and
make the lives of developers much happier. Some of the things
that I've seen people do to really bring us together is
start a dedicated UX program, sorry, a dedicated developer
experience DX program went in there, that has a very strong
emphasis on improving that developer experience. So they're
evaluating tools or evaluating processes, they're including the
developers in all of the decisions, all of the
evaluation. So they can all make informed decisions together, and
really drive that experience to where they want it to be. And at
the end, when you do have happy developers, you're going to have
higher retention, your velocity is going to be higher your time
to market all that kind of great stuff. So it's a really, really
great area of focus and improve on within your company.
Narrator: Skill updates and skill powders are the perfect
way to stay on top of the latest DevOps trends, and improve your
skills from the comfort of your own home or office. Our virtual
micro conferences and webinars focused on DevOps and the tech
industry and feature expert speakers from both the DevOps
world and top it companies. At our skillup days, you will get
everything you'd expect at traditional conference,
including virtual sponsor booths, competitions, and
networking opportunities with other attendees and speakers,
don't miss out, check out our lineup of upcoming events on
DevOps institute.com, and register now.
Eveline Oehrlich: A little side, turn down the Dorothy's past,
you said developer experience program. So what kind of skills
does somebody like that need to have?
Adam Frank: You know, I've seen a lot of developer advocates,
within companies really kind of start to look internally, to
bring these programs to date, they definitely need the skills
to understand the life and the day of a developer, what a
developer is experiencing, they definitely need the tools to
understand or the experiences to understand what some of these
tools are, what some of these processes look like, having
somebody come in off the street without any development
experience whatsoever, it would be a very tough job for them to
improve that developer experience. So one who is kind
of walks in those shoes of a developer is certainly going to
have the best best foot forward.
Eveline Oehrlich: Great idea, I'm actually going to add that
to my upskilling report. As a potential idea in the area of
start WM process, it's not really in tech, federally, and
in total, just kind of all override. Excellent idea. I love
that skill building. That's the next topic I want to explore
with you. So we talked a little bit about it already. But I'm a
little biased, maybe because of where I come from, but I won't
tell you which bias I have until you answered the question. So
what do you what do you think is the most is the must have skill
building category? Is it around people or humans? Is it around
technology? Is it around best practice models and frameworks?
Is it leadership? Or is there anything else?
Adam Frank: Yeah, I mean, given the the title of this podcast, I
can probably guess, where were you lean in this? My guess is
correct, I would lean the same way. I think a good mix is
always a sound strategy, you'll always need a level of
leadership that can believe in what you're doing, they can
inspire others and they can, they can downright execute
against your strategy and your plan. But the right people can
learn tech, so I always believe that starting with the humans
starting with the people, and the rest kind of comes together.
When you have people that are have a willingness to learn,
they have have the ability to foster great relationships with
people collaboration, communication, all that kind of
good stuff. A lot of that stuff is is a lot more difficult to
teach in people than the actual tech is and the best practices
the best practices will come from learning what the new tech
is and and having those people that are very capable and very
willing so I always believe starting with people is the
right choice
Eveline Oehrlich: you know music to my ears, but you will be some
you will be surprised as I have been for the last five years in
doing this research that organizations particularly IT
teams are hiring for technology skills. That's to me right maybe
it is it maybe it's a it's a it's a muscle they have trained
for many many years where they where they think that they need
to bring and hire for technology skills. To me sometimes shakes
shake my head because Absolutely I agree with you. It has to be
Around to humans and the empathy and the collaboration and the
problem solving the communication. Because without
that, it makes it very difficult. But as I said, in, in
the research, that's not what it's saying, I've been beating
the drums on that. And maybe this is the year where we can
maybe make a little bit more, you know, an inroad on that.
Anyway, I have another two part question. This is now into, of
course, your favorite topic of continuous integration versus
continuous deployment. Give us your thoughts on these two very
important topics. And relative to each other, I hear sometimes
there are folks talking it interchangeably. And I remember,
you know, having conversations with they said the same, it's
not the same, it's different. And here's why. So what are your
thoughts on those things, and then I have another part, but
I'll hold that until we're done with that.
Adam Frank: Excellent, definitely not the same thing.
However, hand in hand, it's very, very difficult to have one
without the other, you know, almost impossible, continuous
integration and continuous deployment. They're like peanut
butter and jelly. I mean, these two are just absolutely made for
each other a match that is like no other. But they are very,
very different. Continuous Integration is really about
producing the highest quality artifacts as quickly as you can.
Continuous Deployment is about getting that artifact out to
production, and to your users as safely and as soundly as
possible. So to two very different things. However, they
do work hand in hand, when we look at continuous integration,
this is really where most people start. And this typically been
around a little bit longer, taking in a lot of the build and
test automation to produce that artifact. And I think it's
really only been the last couple of years, that continuous
deployment is starting to catch on more and more, giving people
that competitive advantage to iterate quickly, to understand
that a user is more accelerate the time to market, all of that
kind of really great stuff. So that's absolutely needed. And to
have a sound strategy back to the agility, the stability and
the security. That's really where continuous deployment
comes in, giving you the ability to get that code out to your
users quickly, but to be able to do it safely and soundly. So you
can control the blast radius, no, look at 5% of your user
base, you can start to shift traffic between different users.
But ultimately getting that code out there. And really empowering
back to empowering and making developers have a great
experience, empowering them to deploy on commit, and having
that confidence to be able to do that. And having that
transparency to watch that code go through Dev through staging,
you know, on to production.
Eveline Oehrlich: Well, just something on the side. For those
who don't know, peanut butter and jelly for us, Europeans, it
is red wine and chocolate. Right? Just FYI. But so armory
provides products and solutions in that space. Tell us a little
bit about what you guys have to offer in that area.
Adam Frank: Yeah, absolutely. So we specialize in continuous
deployment. And in particular, we have a declarative model,
we're deploying out to Kubernetes. And in fact, we were
the first and still the only that I'm aware of that has a
declarative model that actually orchestrates that deployment
across all of your Kubernetes clusters and environments. No
matter how many you have. It's really at any scale. So you
know, hooking up to continuous integration like GitHub using
GitHub actions. So empower developers to be able to deploy
on commit, and orchestrate that deployment. Throughout dev
tests. We integrate with things like security scanning,
integrate with logging solutions, observability
solutions to be able to run automated Canary analysis. So
you understand, is this change affecting my user base? How is
it affecting my user base? Is it close to the baseline baseline
is the same, all that kind of really good stuff, to really
help our customers accelerate their time to market? You know,
move quicker, have that agility that they need to understand
their users and their user base, iterate quickly. But do it in a
nice, safe, sound and reliable way? Wow,
Eveline Oehrlich: great. You are really wicked smart about all
these topics. I love it. This is great. We could continue. But I
have been looking at the clock and it's amazing how quickly 25
minutes pass. So I have a closing question has nothing To
Do With CI CD, or maybe a little bit with peanut butter and jelly
or red wine and chocolate, but what do you do for fun if you
don't do what you do at your teams as an ambassador or
otherwise? What do you do for fun, Adam?
Adam Frank: Yes, sir. Certainly closer to the red wine and
jelly. Having grown up in Canada, you really need to do
something throughout the winter months. So since it is the very
beginning of March, the sun is starting to shine. But there's
still snow on the ground here. I very much enjoy snowboarding.
I've played hockey for a lot of my life and playing sports. But
most importantly, I have a beautiful daughter who has
almost a year and a half, and a fantastic wife and partner. So I
very much enjoy spending a lot of my time with them. And just
watching her grow right now is one of the funniest things that
that I could possibly do with my dad.
Eveline Oehrlich: Oh, fantastic. That is fantastic. Embrace it,
because they grow up fast. I have two daughters myself, and
they are 25 and 27. And oh, well. I love them. But they're,
they're their own. This has been fantastic conversation. Thank
you so much for talking to us and sharing your wealth of
knowledge, your excitement and your I can hear the passion. And
I could hear the little accent there. There's another thing we
have in common. I used to live in Colorado, I love to ski and I
have an accent because I'm from Germany. And um, this has been
great. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for the pleasure. We
have been talking to Adam Frank, Senior Vice President, product
and marketing at armory. Adam again, wonderful. Enjoy.
Hopefully the upcoming weekend soon have some fun with your
daughter. And here is again humans of the ops podcast is
produced by DevOps Institute. Our audio production team
includes Julia pape, and Brendan Lee. I am humans of DevOps
podcast, executive producer evolutionarily. If you would
like to join us on the podcast, please contact us at humans of
DevOps podcast at DevOps institute.com. I cannot imagine
a longer email address and that anyway, I'm Evelyn, I'll talk to
you soon.
Narrator: Thanks for listening to this episode of the humans of
DevOps podcast. Don't forget to join our global community to get
access to even more great resources like this. Until next
time, remember, you are part of something bigger than yourself.
You belong