The Goat Farm

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

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

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

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

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

Show notes:

Simon Wardley – LinkedIn – Twitter

Simon Wardley is a Researcher for Leading Edge Forum, a global research and thought leadership programme dedicated to helping large organizations reimagine their organizations and leadership for a technology-driven future. Simon is also lead practitioner for LEFs Wardley Maps Advisory service which helps client anticipate market and ecosystem developments so they know where to go and why.

Kris Nova – LinkedIn – Twitter

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

Sebastien Goasguen – LinkedIn – Twitter

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

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

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

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

Download MP3 – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS

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

Show Notes:

Joe Beda – Twitter – LinkedIn

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

Rob Cummings – Twitter – LinkedIn

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

Tom McLaughlin – Twitter – LinkedIn

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

We all think DevOps is a better way to work, but how can you begin to measure aspects of your DevOps transformation. In this episode we talk to Adam Auerbach and Topo Pal of Capital One, and learn more about the work they are doing. We discuss how their DevOps journey started, how it’s now a CIO mandated journey, and how they build some open source tooling to help them measure the speed at which they are moving.

Download MP3 – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS

Show Notes:

Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)

Capital One DevOps Dashboard – Hygiea

15 principles of CD (mostly binary, used to create heatmap of maturity for Capital One platforms)

Adam Auerbach – Twitter – LinkedIn

Adam Auerbach is the Sr Technology Director for Advanced Testing and Release services for Capital One Financial Corporation.  Adam is responsible for Capital One’s enterprise performance and automated testing departments as well as enterprise release management. Since joining Capital One, he has provided leadership for the agile transformation of their quality assurance group and led the enterprise adoption of DevOps and ATDD. Before joining Capital One, Adam was with Chase and other financial and insurance companies, in various leadership positions focusing on quality and agile practices.

Tapabrata Pal (Topo) – Twitter – LinkedIn

Tapabrata Pal has 20 years of IT experience in various technology roles (developer, operations engineer, and architect) in the retail, healthcare, and finance industries. Over the last five years, Tapabrata has served as director of Capital One’s Enterprise Architecture group, and led the company’s DevOpsSec initiatives. He is currently director and individual contributor focusing on next-generation infrastructure. Tapabrata is also the community manager and a core committer of an Open Source project “Hygieia” that won “Open Source Rookie of the Year” for 2015.

In this episode we talk to Andy Domeier of SPS Commerce. As startups grow into larger companies, they face the same scaling challenges that larger enterprises tend to encounter. Andy gives us his 11 years of experience of watching SPS Commerce grow from a startup to an enterprise, and how they’ve handled these challenges. We also focus on some of the technology SPS using to help scale the people, and scale their technology capabilities.

Download MP3 – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS

Show notes:

Andy Domeier – LinkedIn – Twitter

Andy has been in Technology Operations leadership with SPS Commerce for the past 11 years.  SPS grows very aggressively creating an environment of persistent growth challenges.  Andy’s focuses within the organization include:  monitoring and operating complex changing systems, priority organization and alignment, and the organization of Knowledge.

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

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

Download MP3 – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS

Show notes:

Jon Klein – Twitter – LinkedIn

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