DevOps in the Enterprise

Matty: [00:00:07] Hey, it’s time again for Arrested DevOps. Welcome to episode 25, DevOps in the Enterprise. I’m your co-host, Matt Stratton, @MattStratton on Twitter.

Trevor: And I’m today’s number one, Trevor Hess, because we’re talking about the enterprise, @TrevorGHess on Twitter.

Matty: Kind of screws you up when you go off script, doesn’t it, Trevor? It always does. Ad-libbing doesn’t work very well anymore. I used to be pretty good at it.

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Matty: [00:01:13] This episode is also sponsored by Redgate Software. Redgate makes tools that bring the benefits of continuous delivery— safe releases, efficient deployment, and fast feedback— to your database. Find out more about database lifecycle management download free trials, and browse the Database Delivery Learning Program at arresteddevops.com/redgate.

Trevor: We’re also pleased to share some big news. Joining us tonight for her first appearance as official co-host is Bridget Kromhout. Bridget, can you tell our audience a bit about yourself and introduce our topic and panel?

Bridget: Hi, thanks Trevor. Trevor and Matt, I’m so happy to join Arrested DevOps. So yeah, my name is Bridget Kromhout and I’m an operations engineer at DramaFever. We’re a streaming video site for international content. We’re a small startup, though we’re hiring. Got to put that in there. But, but I have been a BOFH at places many hundreds of times this size. And it’s fascinating hearing, seeing the changes happening in our industry as large organizations start embracing DevOps. So I’m pretty excited to talk to our panel today about this topic. We have Michael Ducy of Chef, Ross Clanton of Target, and Steve Pereira of MyPlanet. We’ll start with Mike. Give us a bit of background on yourself and your thoughts on this whole DevOps, or shall we say enterprise DevOps business?

Michael: [00:02:42] Yeah, so I guess my thoughts on the whole enterprise DevOps business is that, you know, the foundational core of DevOps is the same. And no matter where you’re at, the principles apply of continuous improvement and trying to make your organization better. And then there are nuances in the enterprises just because there’s more— sometimes more political stuff, but that’s not always the case— in a large organization than there is in a small organization. And then those little nuances just make how you dance around those issues different. Right? And so that’s my kind of general idea, is that DevOps is DevOps is DevOps.

Bridget: Ross, can you give us a bit of your background and how you became exposed to DevOps?

Ross: I feel like I’ve heard this question before. So yes, I lead part of our ops function at Target, so I do management stuff. I’m really passionate about DevOps. You’ve probably heard my partner in crime, Heather Mickman, and I out talking in the public forum, as well as trying to get more people exposed to what Target’s doing in this space. I agree with Ducy in that DevOps is DevOps, whether you’re an enterprise, a startup, a unicorn, whatever. We do have a lot of challenges with, you know, the technology debt that we’ve built over the years at a large enterprise like Target, and just going through that shift and that mindset shift across a large organization is an interesting, unique challenge, I think, that is fun and it’s rewarding, it’s frustrating, it’s all kinds of things, but it really kind of keeps me motivated day in and day out to drive some of the changes that I think need to be driven. Awesome.

Matty: [00:04:25] Thanks, Ross. So, Steve, why don’t you tell us a bit about your DevOps?

Steve: I’m not going to claim to have any DevOps personally. My DevOps is all DevOps. All DevOps is me. I’ve been in IT for about 14 years. I live and work in Toronto for a company called MyPlanet, and I basically help big companies get started with DevOps and Agile and automation and fun stuff like that. I run the DevOps meetup in Toronto and the OpenStack meetup in Toronto, and I’m organizing DevOps Days Toronto again for 2015 in May.

Bridget: And I’m glad you brought that up because I was so excited to be here, I did forget to mention that I also help organize DevOps Days Minneapolis along with some of these fine folks. Can you tell us a little bit, Steve, about your perspective? Because I think you’ve been to a number of DevOps Days now. Can you tell us a little bit about your perspective of how DevOps Days intersects with or informs some of what you’re doing in these large organizations?

Matty: [00:05:32] Yeah, absolutely.

Steve: I think DevOps Days is this magical camp where we all sort of get away from our jobs and hang out as as curious peers and interesting people who just want to have conversations about this very broad and controversial topic and discuss what we do and the problems we have and the solutions we have. And I find it totally fascinating and super engaging and really energizing to both attend and with my experience organizing. It was my first time being involved in a conference at all.

Matty: Yeah, and one of the things I think, speaking of DevOps Days, I know, and I don’t have all the details on it, but kind of talking about where that connects into introducing DevOps into an enterprise or into a larger organization. I know, Juicy, you were involved with Target did an internal DevOps Days of some kind. Could you guys, you and Ross, maybe explain, like, what that is?

Michael: [00:06:39] Yeah, so I’ve actually been involved in 2. I’ve been involved in one at ING Bank in the Netherlands, and then I’ve also been involved with the DevOps Days Target as well. So what I find really interesting about it is it really breaks down the traditional kind of corporate walls, and it allows you— and DevOps Days as well also kind of breaks down the traditional conference walls that you have, and it allows you to kind of communicate on a level You often feel like you maybe aren’t allowed to, either in a conference or in a large organization. So getting everybody together to do an open space and to communicate and share and that whole spirit of collaboration really kind of, I think, opens things up and changes the norm. Ross, what are your thoughts, and why did you bring DevOpsDays Target to bear?

Ross: Yeah, actually, I would totally agree. So we, almost a year ago now, Heather and I kind of decided that we wanted to do this whole DevOps Days at Target internal conference, and we’ve done them quarterly now. We’ve done 3 of them. We’ve got our annual one coming up here in February. And Ducy’s absolutely right, that the intent is really to kind of get people across functions or across silos to connect and to make it an inclusive thing where people are coming because they choose— they want to— they choose to be there. And we actually have a tagline we’ve used for our internal DevOps days called Connect, Share, Learn, and it really is about that. It’s about getting people across our organization to connect, people to share that, and get them connected with others so they can see what’s happening. And that kind of leads to the last part, learn. By doing that sharing, by bringing in external folks as well as internal folks that are focused on this, people are able to learn and see from experts and people in the industry around what’s happening, and people internally in the company. So, yeah, Ducy was actually part of our first DevOps Days. We had him and Rob Cummings from Nordstrom as our 2 external speakers, and it was awesome. You know, we didn’t know 50 people. We had about 160, 170 people for the first DevOps Days. It was a really good turnout, and we’ve incremented even, you know, more every one since then, so it’s continued to gain momentum. I think Ducy still has one of the top-rated talks, The Goat in the Silo, that we had in our first one. That’s still discussed by a lot of our engineers internally all the time.

Bridget: [00:09:05] Well, he is the goat father, so— or is he self-styling himself goatologist at this point?

Michael: The other thing that’s interesting is that what a lot of corporations don’t realize, or what enterprises don’t realize, is they have short— like enormous tech communities within them themselves. And for a number of years, they haven’t leveraged those tech communities very well to kind of build those communities and share in it. And I think as you begin to open up the door and let’s have our own little internal conference and let’s talk about things, you realize how much more is going on in the organization, right? And what other people are working on that’s awesome, right? And I think leveraging that tech community is really important in building those kind of internal communities. There’s something that has been missing.

Bridget: As well as, Ducy, you were also instrumental in actually getting Ross and Heather to come talk at DevOps Days Minneapolis, because I suppose because you knew them from your association with Target through Chef?

Michael: Yeah, exactly. But the other thing is, is, you know, Target is a, you know, a large, well-known organization, and for good or bad, you know, Target’s not always had the best reputation as the most awesome place to work at. But if you get Ross and Heather up there talking about the transformation that’s actually taking place, it changes everybody’s mind that maybe, you know, the assumptions that we had in the past of Target are no longer true, right? And I think Target is beginning to kind of prove to people that they are changing and they are changing for the better, and that it is possible to change in a large enterprise.

Matty: [00:10:38] So we talk about CAMs, right? And it sounds like a lot of the people, a lot of the folks, or a lot of the belief is that Well, if you’re going to do— the way that I interpret enterprise DevOps is AAMs, right? Well, we don’t need the hippie-dippy culture shit, right? We just need some fucking good automation and some good stats, because that’s the thing that we can do, and we don’t need all this huggy bullshit. And the thing that is, I think, the downside of that is that you can’t cherry-pick, right? I mean, the things go together, but there’s a perception that comes out that within the belief of what’s quote-unquote traditional DevOps is that it’s very— within the quote-unquote DevOps— and by the way, I get like paid a dollar apparently every time I say quote-unquote, so that’s what I’m saying a lot— within the sort of traditional DevOps community, some of these are things we’ve sort of already figured out. Like, we already know automation is awesome. We already know you need that. We already know that we’ve kind of maybe feel like we’ve addressed some of this, so that’s why lately We might be all like, hey, let’s talk about empathy all the time, because that’s our hot thing to talk about in 2014. That’s our magic word. And I’m not dismissing it at all, but we’re talking about it a lot. And this is the time when that crossover is happening, when now we’ve got, you know, the Chases of the world and the Wells Fargos of the world, and I’m not picking on them, I’m just saying big old companies, right, are coming in and they’re like, let’s look at this. And I’m like, oh, all these DevOps days, all they talk about is like empathy and shit, and they don’t talk about automation. So maybe there’s kind of— because the traditional DevOps community is ahead of the curve in some ways, we’re focusing on one thing. I don’t know.

Michael: [00:12:16] So Ross, you went to DOES 14, didn’t you? And what did you see as far as talks there?

Ross: Yeah, so, you know, actually responding to Matt briefly, and then I’ll tie it into the DOES response.

Matty: I—

Ross: to me, culture is the most critical part of DevOps, and it’s probably the part that Heather and I focused on, have continued to focus on the most as we’ve been trying to drive it at Target. And the reason I say that is culture largely equates to mindsets, and mindsets are how you orient people around how they should work and how they should do things. And if you start— if they start doing things and they haven’t focused on the mindset, then it’s really hard for people to embrace and adopt a different way of working. And I think the other things come kind of naturally as an outcome to that. Culture is also a really, really hard thing to focus on. It’s not tangible, it’s squishy, it’s fluffy. People joke with me internally a lot that it’s fluffy stuff when we’re talking about it, but it is super, super important. The Enterprise DevOps Summit, I felt like there was a lot of themes there, and I think one was clearly culture. I think in a lot of the talks you heard people focusing on what they were doing to drive culture change. I heard a lot of different approaches. I heard some folks were doing it tops-down, some were bottoms-up, some where I feel like even where Target’s at, it’s been a bit of a blend where, you know, they’ve got a bottoms-up movement, which I think is really important, tying back to the kind of community aspect of this. A lot of momentum on that without the right tops-down focus as well. But there are other themes as well. I think One theme that I saw that’s really resonated with me for large enterprises that have been around a while, that have accumulated technology debt over a number of years, have been through multiple types of architectures, and they all still exist in their environment— you know, you get kind of a spaghetti architecture over time— this idea that enterprises are shifting, everyone is shifting, that we need to optimize for speed. And I think the unicorns, the Web 2.0 companies, I think they got this a while ago. If anything, they’ve helped trigger this change because they can move so fast, and that is a competitive advantage in many cases. But I think that the rest of the industry is shifting too, and that was— I saw that across everyone. That was a very clear theme to me, and that’s a change. That’s a big driver that needs to drive a change in how you operate as an organization. And that’s actually, I think, a big driver that kind of has put DevOps in the forefront.

Steve: [00:15:00] I got a lot of the same impressions from the Enterprise Summit. I thought it was really actually fascinating that so many of these huge companies have come so far. And being, you know, far being a very important word. A lot of these big enterprises, their transformation process was 3 to 6 years, and that kind of adds perspective, you know, when we think about the difference between changing culture and changing the way that a business operates. All the other operations, the automation, measurement, and sharing happen sort of within the ship, and the culture is the part that sort of addresses the steering of the giant tanker or the Titanic, and that’s a lot harder to influence, right? It was also really interesting to hear that there’s a lot of stories about just absolute mess, we can’t do anything, and we have to change just because we have no other options. And hopefully, you know, that’s not a continuing trend. I hope that was a pioneer thing with the big companies rather than you know, the cost of adopting change, or the only motivation for change. But that was really interesting to hear.

Bridget: [00:16:20] So Steve, do you think that what you were hearing is that trying to change brought them a mess, or that they hit rock bottom and decided to change because they had a mess?

Steve: I think it was definitely the latter. I think it was just, you know, they came to realize that they were not hitting time to market the same way that their competition was, or there was something that was stopping them from performing the way that they could, and maybe that’s the constraint that they realized. And, you know, when you’re in a situation like that, you sort of look around for whatever is available, and if DevOps is the new possibility That could be why they sort of set off in that direction, because otherwise I can’t see large organizations making that decision lightly, right? They don’t just attack what’s new. They don’t attack things that aren’t tried and true and proven. So I think in many cases it was a last resort, but I don’t see that trend continuing in the future because You know, coming out of DevOps Enterprise, there’s this huge body of data now that says, you know, all these huge companies took the plunge, made it work, and they’ve got numbers to prove it. And that’s going to motivate companies to steer in the right direction before, you know, they’re headed towards an iceberg.

Michael: [00:17:53] Yeah, I don’t, I don’t totally agree with you there. So one, I feel like the body of knowledge was there. I think DOES, the nice thing is, is that it’s put it in one kind of commonplace. So, but if you hunted for it, you could find it. And then the other thing is that the changes will still, will only still be driven by a, oh my God, I have to. Right? Because you don’t make real genuine change, and even if you think about change in your personal life, unless you absolutely have to because you’ve hit rock bottom, right? And I think, I think there’s going to be a lot more bloodshed before we kind of see this is just the way that we operate, in my opinion.

Bridget: But so, Ducy, do you think that there’s a possibility that there could be a large company that feels like they’re operating well, but sees the numbers and results coming out of large companies that are using, adopting DevOps practices, and tries to make that change without feeling like their current business practices are a problem for them? Or do you think that it’s like they would say, hey, our current practices work well until they don’t?

Michael: [00:19:05] I think generally just people are, they might see that there’s an improvement to be made, and they might make the shift. I can see that happening. Yeah, that’s a good point.

Bridget: I mean, if there’s profit to be gained, right?

Michael: Yeah, but I, you know, everyone says, you know, it takes, it takes like— so Ross, what was your kind of watershed event of why you guys have decided that you need to change?

Ross: Well, I think we’re big, so everyone throughout our leadership ranks and within our teams has to have that moment. And it happens at different points, I think, for different people. For me, I had kind of rotated around IT in the company, so I played different roles, and I essentially felt like I’d lived like the characters of The Phoenix Project. So when I read the book, it just totally resonated with me right away, and I was coming back into ops after— that was kind of where I started. So, I was kind of going into where my domain expertise was, but I had kind of a newfound perspective around where the problems were, and it was around the siloing and the inability to move quickly because of just how we kind of structured over time. And then, you know, I just started researching, and as you do that, you gain perspective. And I started talking to folks like Ducy, and we started doing DevOps Days, and the more— one thing that is challenging about DevOps, and I think maybe shifting my response here a little bit. One thing that I think makes it so hard to drive this within a large enterprise is one, you know, people are very segmented in large enterprises. They have a role, they have a function they focus on, they’re very busy on that thing. And, you know, just like I’m sure most jobs, they have very demanding jobs, and so they don’t have the time often to research and inform type of perspective on their own. You start digging into DevOps, you just keep digging, because it brings you into all these concepts all over the place. Go to an enterprise that hasn’t heard about these concepts and start talking about infrastructure as code, and even in the early days, start talking about continuous delivery and promise theory and get even deeper and deeper, and you’re over people’s heads at a certain point, and they’ll start to tune you out. It’s hard, and you’ve got to figure out how to make it resonate with folks and don’t inundate them with all the concepts, all the language around DevOps, and figure out how to make it stick and make it meaningful for them. One thing I think we’ve even evolved to, because you kind of want to create these aha moments for everyone individually. Is figure out what their pain points are, helps them get past that. And that’s a very kind of localized approach. It’s a very, you know, it’s a time-consuming approach, but that’s what it takes from what I’ve seen internally.

Bridget: [00:22:05] You know, it’s interesting that you bring up, Ross, that topic of pain points, because I actually, I don’t, like I said, I don’t work in large companies currently. But I hadn’t— I got an interesting email from a gentleman who said it’s fine for me to mention that he emailed me from Thomson Reuters, who was actually at DevOps Days Ghent. We met at our local taproom. We ended up talking for hours. I brought Joe, audiovisual guy extraordinaire, and they bought Joe beer and listen to me talk, basically. And the main thing it turns out they wanted to hear about was team chat, because apparently the huge pain point that they have is when dealing with incidents, everyone sits on a conference bridge, and every few minutes someone joins, and then they have to summarize what’s been going on for the person who joined, and they have to hear that like 14 times in a row, and it’s really frustrating. And I was like, let me show you Slack.

Steve: That’s awesome. That’s such a simple pain point.

Bridget: [00:23:07] Yeah, and 2 of the gentlemen— it was 3 gentlemen from Thomson Reuters— and 2 of them downloaded the Slack app while we were sitting there at the Fulton Taproom. So I have a feeling that they might be experiencing some change coming up soon that could make some other people very happy.

Ross: Yeah, we’ve had— we’ve been doing a similar thing with HipChat and Slack, I think, in some groups internally, and that’s been great. That’s created a lot of aha moments for a lot of folks, that idea of persistent chat and that stuff staying there is great, and that will make people’s lives way better when they don’t have to keep going through that.

Trevor: When then we go to use HipChat and HipChat just works. Don’t have to worry about it not doing any something.

Matty: So another thing I want to think about when we kind of talk about these— this sort of idea of— and there’s all this conversation about, you know, unicorns and horses and blah blah blah and everything, and I know Damon Edwards has said before, and I believe this to be very true, is that the large enterprises are the people that need the DevOps the most, right? Like, the startups don’t need it because they’re either A, they’re already doing it by definition, or they have DevOps because they have one person and that person is Dev and Ops, right? Like, it’s— I remember being at a puppet camp a few years ago and I was talking to someone there and I was just starting to get into DevOps and I was talking to the guy and he was like, yeah, He’s like, we do DevOps. I’m DevOps for this company. I’m the dev and I’m the ops. There are no silos there, unless he’s going to fight with himself. You don’t have these problems. One of the things that I thought was true, I was thinking back to a couple of years ago when there was this sort of thought like, hey, DevOps is definitely this thing for these internet magic companies and everything. I think that was a lot of perception because who was talking about what they were doing, right? This plays a little bit into DOES, right? A couple of years ago, the only people that were talking about doing DevOps were Netflix and Facebook and, you know, Etsy and blah, blah, blah. But I don’t think that meant that the larger companies weren’t doing it. They just were not in a place— and Ross, you might be able to talk about this a little bit— there wasn’t this culture around sharing to the community, right? And I know there were places I was working where it was like, okay, well, we’re doing this, but damn it, you better not tell anybody because this is our secret. Of how we do our magic, and even though we know it’s not. And that’s what I think is cool about Boozt, right, is it was like, okay, hey, okay, by the way, here’s how we do it so you don’t have to guess. And I think that’s the problem with a lot of this assumption of what enterprise DevOps is, is frankly it’s guessing. It’s saying, well, this is how I’m used to an enterprise working, so therefore it must be this way, even though I haven’t bothered to actually talk to any of the people who want to instrument the change. You know, or kind of doing the discovery around that.

Ross: [00:25:57] I’ll take— I’ll respond to it more broadly representing, I think, a traditional enterprise. I don’t get into all the Target specifics on it, but I think most enterprises are coming from a world where they don’t necessarily fully embrace open source. Using open source even can be a challenge, let alone contributing to open source. And so that’s one challenge, and we talk about, you know, Talking externally, you know, it’s rare that enterprises are okay with their folks presenting externally, talking externally, public blogs, tech blogs. Those are things you see a lot in the tech community. Those are things you see with startups. Those are things you see with the unicorn companies, and I would say enterprises have typically been slower to adopt those things. I will say I’m excited, you know, looking at where Target’s at right now. We’re doing all those things right now, and we’ve obviously had to evolve to that, and that’s been a journey, but we’re, you know, we are now at a point where we’re starting to embrace open source, where we’re actually starting to contribute in some cases. We have our externally facing tech blog, and that’s only been out maybe 3 or 4 months, but that’s starting, you know, we’re really starting to leverage that to share what we’re doing. I don’t think Target’s alone in that right now. I think there’s more companies making that shift, but it’s indicative, I think, of the shift that’s happening in the industry. And I think we will see more enterprises start to shift towards that, but it’s going to be a slog. It’s not going to happen overnight, and it’s going to be the typical change adoption curve that you see. I do feel like Target’s on the early end of some of that change, which has been super exciting to be part of.

Steve: [00:27:42] To touch on the whole idea that larger companies are more hesitant to embrace sort of external connections and external influences like open source and stuff, that’s definitely what I see as well. And I thought a really interesting thread in the DevOps Enterprise Summit was about, like, audit and compliance, right? Because I think that’s been a major source of fear and reluctance to sort of jump onto the bandwagon or even, you know, look at DevOps seriously because there’s this idea that it just makes devs run wild on production, right? And to hear the sessions where they addressed specifically with you know, with auditors on the panel, how working together with an auditor within the ideas and principles of DevOps will actually benefit a company rather than hinder them or put them in danger was amazing to hear. That was one of the coolest parts of it for me. It was, you know, this long-held belief that you sort of automate things and make people more empowered in your organization and that somehow will destroy a company.

Bridget: [00:29:12] You know, I think it’s interesting, Steve, that you’re mentioning this stuff, and I’m kind of sitting here thinking that I’ve heard people talk about, you know, oh, the importance of processes. And I know those Thomson Reuters folks were talking about how they’ve been stuck in this ITIL place and they want to try something different. And I’m wondering, from the DevOps Enterprise perspective, did you get a lot of feel for— do you hear people, like both you and Ross, who were at the DO Summit, do you hear people talking about the culture inside their organizations as much as they talked about the processes? Like, what kind of perspective do either of you have on that?

Steve: Yeah, I heard it a lot in conversations. You know, that’s still kind of the one aspect that everyone is finding definitely the most challenging and also the most intimidating and scary and the most foreign to them. You know, when you talk about steering an organization, it’s kind of something that people look to the leadership for, for sure, and there’s this thought that you know, being on the ground or being at a level other than the top of the company, you can’t really have that much influence. And I really think that that’s where, you know, sharing is part of the most important aspects of DevOps, because I really think that’s how you sort of get the conversation started and sort of get answers from the top of the company about You know, what are the plans around this? Like, have you guys heard of this? Is this something you think about? Are we doing anything in this direction?

Bridget: [00:30:58] And I’m going to pick on you for a second, Ducy, because I know this is the kind of stuff that you addressed with— and we didn’t even get to talking about the stuff Steve talked about in his Ignite at Ghent, which was fantastic. The whole idea that DevOps is a MacGuffin. It’s just this thing And we’re going to do all this stuff around it, but it’s just there as a plot device. Okay. And then Ducy also showed us this idea of an overly process-driven dystopia, and this idea that if we look at even, say, CAMS and we adhere too rigidly to it, like if we’re going to take whatever it is that we’re working on in this space and we adhere too rigidly to it, then that just becomes dogmatic too. Can you address that at all, Ducy, in terms of how do we keep this a living thing?

Michael: Yeah, so I kind of had this thought earlier in the podcast. One thing that I’ve always kind of preached on is this idea that the tools are easy and the technology is easy. We’re all really good and you can find really good people to do the technology. It’s the culture, and even processes are easy, right? I can come up with a new process and this is how we make widgets and everybody go make widgets. Way, right? Now, if everybody makes widgets that way, they probably won’t make widgets that way. They’ll probably make widgets the way they want to make the widgets, and if we just boil it down to just, like, process and order and tools, we lose way too much of what it really means, right? Because the organizational management issues are the real challenge, right, and it’s an area that nobody has been able to get right. Fairly well. But so I was having this thought as well as we were talking here, and one other thing that kind of came out and spoke to me was that there seems to— there needs to be this, you know, the DOES Summit where we were able to consolidate all of this information about enterprises in one area, and that being very helpful for other enterprises. It’s almost like we need an enterprise DevOps podcast. As well. So, who’s with me on starting an Enterprise DevOps podcast?

Matty: [00:33:12] Anyone?

Ross: I’m game.

Michael: Let’s do it.

Ross: We should do it.

Matty: You guys are welcome to it.

Ross: Hey, we can’t call it Arrested DevOps.

Michael: We should call it Arrested Enterprise DevOps.

Bridget: I look forward to listening to this podcast from a safe distance.

Matty: Yeah, I mean, this is certainly helping us not have to do follow-up episodes about enterprise DevOps, so thank you for that. It’s not that bad. No, no, not at all. I just— similar to our compatriots at the Food Fight Show, we often promise to have follow-up episodes that we never do. And actually, not to say that Food Fight Show never does. They actually do that sometimes. But there’s always plenty to talk about, and having that focused area, that’s awesome. And I want more podcasts to listen to, so I endorse this, and you heard it here first. What is your one piece of advice for someone who’s looking to address the challenge of DevOps in a quote-unquote enterprise?

Michael: [00:34:24] So I guess the one piece of advice is that it’s probably going to piss a lot of people off. And you have to be able to kind of be of the mindset to kind of push through that, right? And find your allies that will help you in the organization make change.

Ross: Be very patient.

Michael: Yeah, very patient. Steve? Is that on to me now? Okay.

Steve: Mine would be— so it’s kind of been the subject of a couple of my talks. I really think that sharing is the way to actually get started. Talking to people, sharing your pain, sharing information, stuff that inspires you. Is definitely the way to sort of figure out and take the temperature of the organization.

Ross: Actually, I have a little bit more of a thought on that. One of our brilliant DevOps minds internally at Target, Jason Walker, who many folks I think on this show at least know, he’s actually realizing I think what it’s all about, because again, it’s hard to simplify a lot of this for a large enterprise. He actually draws, he whiteboards a lot. He does these chop talks and talks people through what a lot of these things are. And he whiteboards this Venn diagram, basically, with 3 circles with some overlapping in the middle. And the 3 circles are collaboration, empathy— our buzzword of the year— and experiential learning. And DevOps really is kind of the center of all 3 of those things. And so, when you’ve got that right, when you’ve got the group set so that they’re collaborating across the silos, when they have perspective on the pain that each other is feeling, the empathy part, and they’re willing to try things and learn and experiment and test and learn together, kind of at the center of the cultural fluffy stuff about this, that’s kind of where we’ve been positioning DevOps. Now, you can get way deeper than that, and you start getting into the technical aspects, too. That’s largely how we’ve been thinking about it internally.

Matty: [00:36:36] For me, the thing that I would focus on would be that you’re probably already doing a lot of this, calling it different words and different terms. You probably already have some of these core competencies, and also realize that in, you know, larger organizations, there are quite a few people that you know, have been through a lot of these amazing new transformations that are going to change the world and might not necessarily start with the most excited from the perspective of like when you’re doing an Agile transformation, do a pilot and stack the deck for result.

Trevor: So for me, I actually, I really need to agree with Steve. I’m all about advocating your problems. And making sure that everybody is expressing what hurts, because usually you find out when you talk about it that everybody kind of has the same or similar hurts, and you can work collectively to solve those hurts, like Lync being a terrible piece of software.

Michael: [00:37:44] Sorry, Microsoft.

Trevor: I love you, but Lync sucks.

Matty: Okay, Bridget.

Bridget: I guess the one piece of advice I would have for anyone at any size of company is that you can’t actually do all of the things simultaneously. So it’s OK to pick one or N of the things and just do those. If all you can manage is to get some ops coming to your scrums so that they have some idea of what’s going to be flung over the wall at them later, I mean, that’s a start. And it might not even require a huge amount of buy-in from, you know, many levels of departmental sign-off. You may not be able to, you know, get rid of your change advisory board immediately, but maybe you could add someone to it who actually knows what’s going on, right? Like, there are small things you could do to try to make improvements.

Matty: With that, we are getting ourselves up to the end, so it’s time for checkouts when our panel shares something awesome with you. And first, I think we will go to Ducy. What is your checkout for our audience?

Michael: [00:38:49] My checkout is going to be check out the new upcoming podcast the goat farm. You’ll be able to catch it at goatcan.com.

Matty: So, Ross, what do you have for us?

Ross: Well, I’ll say ditto to what Deucey had, but sticking with the enterprise theme, I would actually say check out the videos from the DOSE 14 Summit, so the Enterprise DevOps Summit, if you’re really interested to see what these other enterprise-type companies are doing in this space. It is— there’s some fascinating stuff there. There’s a lot of interesting videos, so spend some time, watch those, look at the ones that people are watching the most. Those are probably the ones you want to start with. And I would say just plug in Target a little bit. Look at our tech blog at target.github.io. There’s a lot of talking we’re doing around DevOps and some of the other stuff we’re doing internally, and you’ll be able to see a little bit more about what’s going on there. Cool.

Matty: Steve?

Steve: [00:39:49] Twitter has just released basically a public feed of all the tweets from ever, and they’re going to continue streaming them to the public. So everything since 2006 is now released, so you can go and data mine the brain of the internet for whatever you want. Which was kind of a privilege reserved previously for partners of Twitter. It’s kind of a, I don’t know, for better or for worse, get your hashtag search on.

Michael: In my case, probably worse.

Steve: Yeah, all the tweets are now public record forever.

Matty: So it’s out there.

Bridget: Also— wait, do you see, are you telling us you used to use even more hashtags, more extraneous hashtags than you do now?

Michael: Possibly.

Matty: Now you can find out.

Steve: My one last thing was DevOps Days Toronto is going to start forming up for the spring, so stay tuned for May.

Matty: [00:40:53] Okay, Bridget, for your maiden voyage as a co-host, what was your checkouts?

Bridget: Alright, so I have 2 things I want you to check out. The first one is devopsdays.org. Because maybe you don’t work at a giant company that has done an internal DevOps Days yet, but you either want to get some inspiration as to the sort of talks people have had. And I’m expecting a pull request from Toronto shortly since I changed the front page so that you don’t actually have to have your specific dates in order to list your coming soon DevOps Days.

Steve: Awesome.

Bridget: And then the other thing that I think we, we didn’t even really touch on, but giant companies are not the only giant organizations that have massive internal IT problems. One of the great talks from DevOps Days Vancouver last week was from Stephanie, who worked on healthcare.gov rescue. We’ll have a link in the show notes. It’s great just to watch her talk about the kinds of ways you can approach solving what seem to be intractable problems.

Trevor: [00:42:00] This week there was an article I read about this thing called the worm robot. It’s called— from a group called OpenWorm, and they mapped the neural matrix of a thing or anything like that. They just mapped the net— they mirrored the network, the neural network of the worm onto the bot, and the bot started acting like the worm, which is really cool.

Bridget: I’m sorry, Trevor, you cut out a little bit. Could you please tell us what exactly did they map onto a bot?

Trevor: So they mapped the neural network of a worm onto a robot, and then the robot started behaving like the worm.

Bridget: Oh wow.

Matty: This is also similar to what happened with the Twitter account Pete Chessbot.

Trevor: Similar and not at all, but yes. Other cool things to check out: Big Hero 6 came out last weekend, and it is a lot of fun. I recommend watching it. There’s some fun tech things in there and some not fun tech things in there, but it was all around enjoyable. Something less enjoyable, unfortunately I didn’t get the— I lost the name. I had the tab open and I closed it, but apparently there was a Barbie book released recently.

Michael: [00:43:27] Oh my God, yeah, Barbie Explains DevOps.

Trevor: No, Barbie, I can be a software engineer, I believe is what it’s called, or a computer engineer. And essentially, it’s Barbie being anything but a computer engineer. That’s fun.

Bridget: Yeah, that was a really terrible, terrible book. But if you would like to read a much better version of it, both Space Cat Gal and Swift on Security have done fantastic reworkings of it.

Trevor: Great, that’s important. Matt, round us out here.

Matty: Okay, I’ll finish this up. So the first thing is, if you have seen the kind of cool Yak Shaving Expert stickers that have been floating around a couple conferences lately, there is a t-shirt that was on Teespring a while ago that was done by Dave David Shaw. And the cool thing is this— besides it being a hilarious shirt, he sent all the profits through to sending someone to Dev Bootcamp or something like that. And people have been trying to get it relaunched, so as of the time that I am looking right now, only 4 more pre-orders needed to relaunch it. There may be less by the time you’re listening to that. We’ll put a link to that in the show notes. Also, I don’t know if I’ve had this be a checkout before or not, but if I have, I don’t care because it’s awesome. I’m giving a shout-out checkout for the book Customizing Chef by John Cowie at Etsy, who is also on our episode 11 at arresteddevops.com/11. And also, I am putting in a checkout— there is a supercut on YouTube that is all of the times that Roy on The IT Crowd says, have you tried turning it on and off again? And we’ll put a link to that in the show notes. It is super fun. So, coming to an end. Remember, we have a newsletter. I don’t remember we have a newsletter, but eventually I will, and I will send it. You can subscribe to it at arresteddevops.com/bananastand. It is theoretically the best way to know about upcoming podcast episodes and cool news with DevOps.

Trevor: [00:45:37] Thanks to our sponsors, VictorOps and Red Gate, and to our loyal listeners. If you enjoy Arrested DevOps, we’d appreciate it if you would visit arresteddevops.com/itunes and leave us a review in the iTunes store. Thanks to Ducy, Ross, and Steve for joining us, and welcome Bridget to the show. Be sure to check us out at arresteddevops.com or @ArrestedDevOps on Twitter.

Bridget: We’re always happy to get your input, ideas, or feedback at shows@arresteddevops.com. I’m Bridget at @bridgetkromhout.

Matty: I’m Matt at Matt Stratton, and I’m Trevor at Trevor G Hess.

Bridget: We’re Arrested DevOps, and remember, there’s always DevOps in the banana stand.

Steve: Work.