John welcomes guests from The New Stack – Alex Williams, founder and editor in chief, and Libby Clark, editorial and marketing director – to discuss their perspectives on DevOps trends and greater digital landscape on our latest podcast. 

We’ll explore:

• The essence of DevOps
• What the outlook in the next year is
• How IT functions like a nervous system
• Why Alex knows so much about thread count
• Why Libby sees a connection between science writing and DevOps writing

The New Stack provides a model for how to run a publication with a high degree of journalistic integrity and unique perspectives. And not just any type of journalism, but useful longitudinal analysis that is useful to decision-makers.

"Monitoring has traditionally been about what has happened. Now we’re moving into this age of observability. We’re looking at what’s happening at the moment.” 

Alex Williams, Editor-in-Chief, The New Stack 

As the conversation turns to what trends are emerging, Alex points to declarative infrastructure being a key influencer to how operations are changing. He states, “It’s about reaching that desired state. It’s not something you can do from point A to point B. You’re really needing to iteratively do that.” He recognizes that Humio supports the iterative DevOps process by providing instant feedback and he references the insights provided by Humio’s CEO Geeta Schmidt in our first podcast. 

Our guests next address the nature of the current tech landscape and the implications of digital transformation. They recognize the importance of technology and note that the most successful businesses have the most up-to-date technology in place before market conditions start exerting pressure.

“The companies that modernized, the companies that are already distributed, they’re already in the cloud, they’re using Kubernetes – those companies have been able to scale rapidly to meet the demand that customers are placing on them. And the companies really falling behind were not modernized. They’re now trying rapidly and desperately to do that.”

Libby Clark, Editorial and Marketing Director, The New Stack

Libby continues to explore not only the infrastructure side on the pandemic response, but also the customer side of the response. She sees operations teams emerging as a vital component that connects the two, ensuring people get connected with the goods and care they vitally need.

“Lately we’ve been talking about operations as first-responders – the people who are on the front lines of maintaining our networks and making sure that our hospitals are up and running. The people that are maintaining those networks are in effect allowing us to be at home, and to shelter. 

Libby Clark, Editorial and Marketing Director, The New Stack

The interview concludes with Libby and Alex sharing their outlook on what changes they expect to see in the next 12 months. Libby shares how she sees digital events continuing to take over for physical events, and having a positive influence on attendees.

“We’ve seen really good things come from just a few tech events that were organized by the community – people sharing ideas connecting with partners and adapting together to make changes. If you try to do it in isolation, if you try to come up with the best solution – going back to open source – you can’t keep up.”

Libby Clark, Editorial and Marketing Director, The New Stack