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Show Notes

• Cloud Foundry – a container of containers. “You need a ruby guy, for sure.”
• What is a PaaS exactly?
• A Lou Gerstner interlude
• Coté’s favorite Asymco.com chart, again.
• John uses Spot Cloud – and lives to tell!
• How many levels of wonder does Amazon have?
• DevOps workshops – what people really want is to go right to the cool stuff, e.g., “let’s go install something! Let’s go install Jenkins!”
• The Viking Ethos of Business: Party tonight, for tomorrow we may die!

Transcript

As usual with these un-sponsored episodes, I haven’t spent time to clean up the transcript. If you see us saying something crazy, check the original audio first. There are time-codes where there were transcription problems.

Michael Coté: Well, hello everybody. It’s the IT Management & Cloud Podcast episode, I’m not really sure, we’re in ‘80s or something like that. And as always this is one of your co-hosts, Michael Coté, available at redmonk.com/cote and I’m joined by the other co-host.

John Willis: John Willis at johnmwillis.com, or more recently at dtosolutions.com.

Michael Coté: And you’ve been keeping busy over there I understand, like doing stuff.

John Willis: Yeah, that stuff-stuff is hard man.

Michael Coté: So, last week we were supposed to record and then as always happens on a Friday afternoon I got busy and I had to reschedule. But you were telling me that you were actually like getting your hands dirty with like Cloud Foundry or something like that, a Platform as a Service.

John Willis: Yeah, so it was kind of not on the top of my – one of those things that like we all have is lists of things that we want to do and things we have to do.

So, the Cloud Foundry was just kind of in the middle of somewhere. I thought like cool idea to play with, write a little bit of that when it came out. But we were working with a client two weeks ago who wants to actually build it kind of strategically into their cloud which is an interesting approach, but so I had to dig in on it and it’s pretty interesting.

I actually — I wasn’t sure about it at first. I think on this podcast we’ve had a lot of discussions about PaaSs and I think I at least on a few occasions expressed my opinion that I’m not a big believer in PaaSs in general. Primarily the — clearly the public PaaS I think are — I say they are the primrose PaaS if you will, but yuk, yuk, yuk, but the — I thought that was funny.

Michael Coté: It was quite hilarious and if anything it had alliteration in it.

John Willis: Yeah, there you go. So but the thing is, is that I will say that it’s not a good idea today to outsource your core competency and I’m not sure at this stage of the game running infrastructure for most companies whether that isn’t the core competency, I believe it is and so I think when you go to a pure behind the black curtain or the black wall of a PaaS, a public PaaS now then I think you give up a lot of opportunities to be strategic.

And I’ve said this before too, I’m also — I’ve gotten to the age where I’m like 50 — I think I’m 51, I can’t remember, but 51 or 52, I have to check that, put in the show notes. But the thing is I’m not apologetic any more about like everything looks like are now, you know what I mean?

Michael Coté: Yeah.

John Willis: At some point you just say, “You know, hey” and I truly believe that — I’ve always believed that, I’ve taken the long way to get here but I believe that why I’m such a big believer in Chef. I mean I worked there and now I don’t work there, but I still — and Puppet to a certain extent. But that the right combination to get the farthest along to a PaaS is in my opinion infrastructure as a service with infrastructure as code with something like Chef and Puppet and there you have more control. Now I’m sure this could create a great debate for a lot of people.

But the thing I like first right out of the gate about Cloud Foundry is it’s an open source PaaS. So that’s the first, as far as I know the first open source PaaS and they nearly did a good job on not just making it like, like they do have a public PaaS for Cloud Foundry, cloudfoundry.com you can run it at basically somewhat similar to say what Heroku or Engine Yard would be, although I’m sure you can make the argument that the architecture is a little more interesting. I’ll get into that in a second.

But the fact that they really did a reasonable job on a first cut product for supplying the infrastructure to build this in a pretty bulletproof way on your own infrastructure and so that is exciting. And then but I still had the concern of like, okay do I get really good at something like Chef and have only flexibility knowing that I’m going to use Chef or do I have to bring in a guy now who is a Cloud Foundry expert? Because having it open source doesn’t mean crap, right?

[0:04:54.1]

I mean it’s — you’re still — when you have that strategic opportunity meaning there is some technology you would like to use integrated with your infrastructure and some outsource provider is going to be gaining factor, whereas I mean knowing how to tweak the open-source source code could be a gaining factor as well.

But point is though the debate I had with Alex, Alex Honor who I work with, he is the architect at DTO. We spend a couple of hours debating this and the thing is, is that Cloud Foundry and I’m coming around, I’m still in the middle. Cloud Foundry offers an awful lot.

Michael Coté: And that’s part of what I wanted to ask you I mean now that you’ve messed around with it for a little bit. Like I think we all kind of know what it is on paper but what’s your description of what it is after actually using it for a little?

John Willis: Yeah, and I’ll blatantly say that I’m stealing this right from Alex. It’s just a container of containers and they’ve done a really, really, good job of isolating the infrastructure. I mean Engine Yard and Heroku do an excellent job of isolating infrastructure and giving you your application.

But what these guys have done is really build — it’s a second go around I guess, they got some of the SpringSource guys, you got some of the guys from whatever that acquisition that SpringSource made early on in cloud, it was that cloud PaaS company they bought before they bought –

Michael Coté: Oh yeah, sure.

John Willis: Remember those guys, I don’t remember who those guys were, but then — and you had the guy who was the original founder of Engine Yard, that Ezra guy.

So, you had all these guys on the team, I mean that you got them — and all these guys getting a second chance at this and the way they’ve architected Cloud Foundry is really I mean I think pretty much close to brilliant. They’ve got — I mean they have this cloud controller and it’s another interesting, they wrote like a cloud controller all in Rails.

And it was like first kind of to me — well I mean I shouldn’t say that because I don’t know enough, but a really serious enterprise grade architecture written with no Java, no — I mean at least the cloud controller, no java and no Erlang, all the things they say you have to have to be enterprise grade.

Even Chef, right, Chef is lot of Ruby but it’s a Rails app and it runs — it’s a Rails app that’s a cloud provider. It’s pretty clever and then it has kind of the built-in, again a load balancer but not just a load balancer, a loud balancer is that’s intelligent to know what container to work with. So, now you have like a no JS container, you have a Java container, you have a Ruby container and then they have isolation of the apps which is obviously, then they have Health Manager.

I mean that’s cool too. It’s got the heart beating and checking. But the other thing I think that is really, really, clever about it as well is they have like a service layer. I don’t know if it’s called container, but it’s another service which is the service layer, where now you can start. Now, all these different containers now can have these different services and now they supply like MySQL, Mongo, Redis, I’ve seen probably there’s plug-ins for everything now.

But the idea that you can actually — it really is that kind of promise that we always wanted, which is like all these different services being available to us in the cloud. So I got a lot more to learn, I’ve got — I mean actually to be perfectly honest with you I got my first app finally up but I’ve been trying to build the Chef cookbook with it and it uses — it just the classic Ubuntu, RubyGems and then they’ve got RVM which is Ruby Virtual Manager or whatever which is great for your desktop, but it’s kind of — I’m struggling trying to get — one can clean install all the way through repeatable that’s automated. But I’m –

Michael Coté: So, I mean you kind of mentioned a little bit of this but like what are the languages you say you need to know or be adapting to use it. Like there’s obviously a lot of Ruby running around in there, right?

John Willis: Well it’s going to fall into — and this is probably the way I think the industry is going anyway. So I mean like if you’re somebody who believes that Chef and Puppet are the way of the future for configuration management and then you look at this. So, from a system administrator’s point you need a Ruby guy for sure, RubyGems, and I think you’re in a good shape because the whole — most of the architecture is written in Ruby.

[0:09:52.1]

So and then — but the thing is — all right, so the guy who is the administrator, he has just got to be your classic Chef or Puppet sys admin, and the guy who knows a little about Ruby apps or Ruby on Rails apps and/or has dealt with that from a system administrator’s standpoint. But then from the developers and this is other thing Alex says and I agree is brain dead for the developers, drop your WAR file here, bang.

Michael Coté: So really, I mean the whole deploy cycle for development does seem pretty I guess drop WAR simple as if you will.

John Willis: Yeah, and you think like could the enterprise like this, yeah, hell yeah. I mean when I was with Conoco, I mean I’ve told this story before. You’d go to customers and talk about a cloud and that the development guys, the Java, the Enterprise Java guys would be like cloud 00:10:43. Give me a way to drop a WAR file into development, QA and production environment, without me having to do anything other than test my application. That’s what I want and –

Michael Coté: Then so also along those lines, oh man what was — oh I know what I was going to ask, so and then also like widening to — since you — I mean you’ve been at DTO for awhile and before in Opscode and everything, like I’m curious so when you’re looking at like Cloud Foundry, like what kind of — what kind of like hardware are you think people would – do you think people would run this on like, is it totally irrelevant what you run it on or is it sort of like — does there seem to be a certain profile of machine and networking gear and stuff that would go well with it?

John Willis: Yeah I don’t — I probably would start with saying, I’m probably not qualified to answer that question but that’s never stopped me before. Now so –

Michael Coté: That’s why I always ask you these questions.

John Willis: No, I mean as far as I can tell I don’t — I mean I think that’s the part of the beauty of it, it is truly abstracted that, that I mean right now it is kind of shift. I mean this is like early days of this. It’s shift with as installable, a store that installs everything on the same system.

So now you get yourself – I’ve been — what I’ve been doing is when I’m doing some serious testing I’ll just grab a big, you know one of the X large, the Amazon Extra Larges and pop it on there and it’s I think you can have a reasonable amount of effect and work with it.

I mean I think it would be fun to run, like well — I mean I wanted to talk about our DevOps workshop but I think it would be fun to run a full kind of service stack with everything, with Puppet and well the Chef or and 00:12:38 your apps, all within this container, this Cloud Foundry container. I think that — I mean the one thing I think about is imagine this is like the ultimate like clients, right?

Michael Coté: Yeah, like, and it’s not a virtual appliance necessarily but a soft appliance.

John Willis: Yeah, but it should be easily installable particularly with Chef Cookbooks, as a pop bang, now you have yourself a freaking running data center really. But back to your question, as far as I can tell it doesn’t matter and it looks like their — the drive that they’ve built this for is, I mean their motive, right, their drive as in motive is that it really does – shouldn’t matter, right? You run it on — you actually run it on your laptop. In fact supposedly there is a new release, it’s going to come out at some point, probably not in too far distance it’s going to have a micro version which is going to be very much like a Vagrant implementation. And so –

Michael Coté: Do you want to tell people what Vagrant is exactly in this context?

John Willis: Yeah, so Vagrant basically is, it’s being used — it’s pretty hot right now. It’s — largely you basically to — I think it was originally written with Chef in mind. So it’s basically — it basically sets up the — boy, my mind was just blank on the –

Michael Coté: Well, last I checked in with it. The Cool Kids or the Lunatic as it was called.

John Willis: Oh –

Michael Coté: It’s a way of using Chef to make — to do build around VirtualBox. So, it makes a big image.

John Willis: Yeah, the thing I was having a mind block on is VirtualBox, so basically it’s kind of an abstract layer around Sun’s or Oracle’s VirtualBox.

Michael Coté: And I was asking someone why it was that and I think the answer I got was that it was just the most open virtualization technology to build around, and so to –

John Willis: So, yes, so that’s the thing I was farting around trying to remember was the VirtualBox, but as you don’t — once you set it up, you don’t even really play with VirtualBox and it’s a config file. It was originally set-up with Chef where basically you define find the kind of image that you want and you basically define — and what you — originally you use Chef Solo which is standalone Chef you can’t — it’s no Chef server.

[0:14:58.8]

You basically point you point at the cookbooks and the actual role that you want to start and it would just fire up on your box the application. So, perfect for testing because again getting the developer even out of the Chef game and VirtualBox and the networking, you basically, you set up this config file and you just say Vagrant up and bang the thing comes up, right?

Michael Coté: Yeah.

John Willis: Well it sounds like — it sounds like the next release of Cloud Foundry is either — I don’t know if it’s going to use Vagrant or it’s going to have their own or whatever, but it’s going to be a way that you can basically run Cloud Foundry in a micro kind of instance. So, it’s like a virtualized environment that yes, probably not going to need VirtualBox, not that I think about it. Then it’s going to bring up Cloud Foundry, so the beauty is you run your Cloud Foundry on your laptop, you run your Cloud Foundry on some cloud, maybe Rackspace Amazon, you run your Cloud Foundry on VMware, you know what I mean?

Michael Coté: Right.

John Willis: So, you could take it from crawl to run in the application lifecycle and from the developers’ perspective everything is almost exactly the same. And that’s — so yeah, so back to your question I think that — I think that the design and then the architecture is such that it should be agnostic to wherever it winds up. So there — yeah no it’s — I’m pretty excited about it so using that quite a bit. I was also just kind of — just circle back on the whole — we had really — we talk about Amazon in a while really in general. Early on that’s all we ever talked about.

Michael Coté: Oh, yeah, there is so much other stuff going on now but they still send out their newsletter like once a week or month or something with — which I forget if I talked about it on this podcast, but there is a — every now and then there is a — so here is something, speaking of PaaS like, I think this was back at like structure or something. I’ve noticed that there is this idea that people are floating including the Werner Vogels or whatever. And that is that there is a blurring of the line between Platform as a Service and Infrastructure as a Service.

And — or at least that’s the idea that’s being tried out and I guess you sort of encounter this and from various people — for various legitimate and illegitimate, illegitimate is the wrong word, but not to credible reasons. And on the one hand when we’re just talking about it with kind of — like dipping into it with kind of the Vagrant thing. On the one hand there’s a lot of people who sort of build their own Platform as a Service using things like Chef and Puppet and other stuff to kind of wire together what they would have.

And they end up with kind of like a platform but it’s not really as a service, it’s as a customized platform. And then there is some other folks, kind of like Amazon is a good example who increasingly have sort of everything and I think to them there is the idea of having a Platform as a Service ultimately a Platform as a Service kind of makes Infrastructure as a Service not so important.

So if you’re not a PaaS guy, then you want to kind of like blow out the candle of PaaS stuffs so that your infrastructure stuff works out well.

John Willis: Well and that would be the Chef argument too, not that they make that. I make that more than they do really probably. But here is the thing, so I remember interviewing Michael Crandell on my old Cloud Café, it was a couple of years ago. And I asked him, I said, “You’re a PaaS RightScale,” right? And he kind of gave like a half-a-second delay and said, “Yeah, we are.” And then I realized, when I thought about that after some like, there’s a pretty long range of what can be considered a PaaS, right?

Michael Coté: Right.

John Willis: So, as you think about it, it’s like everything else, it’s kind of — I mean it’s great that we have a taxonomy that is SaaS, PaaS and Infrastructure as a Service, but the truth of the matter is like where does a PaaS start, where does it end, you know what I mean. I mean Heroku is probably as clear of a PaaS as you can get. I mean it’s on a PaaS that — and then something like using Chef with these — where they have their application deploy cookbooks. That’s — or RightScale even, those are like, are they really PaaSs, are they really, really mature applications on an Infrastructure as a Service?

But I will say that the army of people that — and I’ve been in this camp for the longest time which is build yourself or get yourself a good set of IISs, one or more, whether it’s a in-house public, private cloud or it’s a combination of RightScale and Amazon or it’s just Amazon, whatever floats your boats or floats your cloud.

[0:19:57.4]

But then, and then I’ve always been find a strategy to get — to go up the food chain as far as you can to be your own PaaS, and things like Puppet and maybe RightScale, whatever. Again, I think Cloud Foundry is more in the camp of what you would say this has got all the checkmarks of what you would want to call a clear PaaS. I mean Amazon has got a lot of great tools, they got Cloud Foundry, they got Beanstalk, they got the ELB, the Elastic Load Balancing, they’ve got the RDS, the Relational Database Service.

I mean, but still putting all that — in fact CloudFormation is a good first cut at — if you want to put on the table right now, I would put on the table RightScale, enStratus. If you look at what you might call Opscode’s application deploy, their QuickStart examples, they got Java, in fact I’m playing with that a lot today, their Java, their PHP, those are basically what they call their Application Cookbooks.

I would put the — again RightScale, enStratus, Application Cookbooks and CloudFormation all in that kind of same bucket of tools or products that take an Infrastructure as a Service pretty close or just over the PaaS line. Whereas clearly beyond the PaaS line is Cloud Foundry. And then going up the stream you could look at Engine Yard or Heroku, but again there is — some of the concerns that are losing control. I believe that you must — Cloud Foundry is where I get off the bus. Anything beyond that I’m not a fan, because I –

Michael Coté: Because you think it’s too specific I guess like 00:21:58 specific –

John Willis: I think having operational — I’ve had this arguing with people in discussion. I think that the thing that I say in my DevOps presentation is Tim O’Reilly in 2006 wrote an article said that operations is the elephant in the room and Jesse Robbins CEO, CTO then wrote an article a year later about operation is the secret sauce, using operations as a strategic weapon.

Michael Coté: Because we know that once you boil an elephant down to juice, it’s secret sauce.

John Willis: It may not taste well but by golly it sure is –

Michael Coté: It’s a secret because you don’t want to tell anyone you boiled an elephant.

John Willis: And then you get in all sorts of trouble.

Michael Coté: And then there is also that metaphor you don’t want to have to boil an elephant, you just want to do a little part. So therefore you hire a bunch of blind men to cut up the elephant –

John Willis: And then what’s the other metaphor, where they got the little guy riding the elephant and trying to make him go left, the elephant wants to go right.

Michael Coté: Yes, and then finally for — you can make the elephant dance and then you retire.

John Willis: And then the — yes, and then there’s to turn it completely around to a great discussion that I always love to talk about is Louis Gerstner. You can’t teach an elephant to dance.

Michael Coté: That’s right.

John Willis: Saved IBM, so there you go. No I think the –

Michael Coté: I read about him while we’re on the elephant topic. For some reason I didn’t realize that he used to be — he was like the CEO of Nabisco right or RJR Nabisco.

John Willis: Well he probably was one of those — he was — he is one of those McKinsey guys, so those McKinsey guys, that’s a whole — like they bake those. Those are like — McKinsey guys are Disney kids. They have the whole thing lined up man. They come out of Harvard, they go to McKinsey, they get their first job trying to help some failing horrible company that’s broken down and they put the guy in to be the quasi CEO. Then he gets his next job as a real CEO and the next thing he’s ruling the world.

Michael Coté: He also worked at AmEx which is –

John Willis: Yeah, in that book he talks about — we said this one — the great story, it’s worth saying again for just — in that book he talks about, his book that he wrote like you can’t teach an elephant dances, he was from AmEx and he wasn’t an IT guy. He was CEO, pure CEO.

And so he takes over the job of being a CEO at IBM and within the first couple of weeks he got to go down to to a shareholder’s meeting and they beat the shit out of him. What are you going to do with this? What 00:24:32 is going to do? How we’re going to do?” You know all this IT shit, he didn’t know nothing about, right?

And so he’s flying back up to Armonk or wherever they were going and he is in the corporate jet and he asked the flight attendant and he says, “Hey, can I get a scotch and water or something like that,” and she says, “Oh, there is no alcohol served on IBM jets and airplanes or whatever.” And he goes “Who do you got to ask to — who we got to talk to change that?” And she looked him and said, “I guess you.” He said, “Stop at Atlanta.”

[0:25:04.1]

Michael Coté: That’s fantastic. Good times.

John Willis: Well let me, I wanted to get back to the Amazon.

Michael Coté: Yeah, so much for Gerstner.

John Willis: No so, I think the thing — I don’t know if you saw recently the Amazon Jeff Barr put out there, they had like 449 billion objects in S3 in Q2 2011? And he has a chart, and so I was just looking at the chart and it’s like in Q4 2009 it was a 102 billion objects, in Q4 2010 there was 262, and here now in Q2 2011 it’s 449. That’s exponential growth. All these naysayer clouderowdies who keep saying, “Well, that’s ain’t going to last Amazon. They are going to be the standard and you just wait a couple of more years.”

Michael Coté: Well, let’s have a brief pause there. Who are these people saying that?

John Willis: Well there are people that say this?

Michael Coté: And would you say this is a frequent thing nowadays to –

John Willis: Well, it’s been going on for years. I think it’s some of the — it’s all like you said what were the — the kind of word — the magic words you were coming out trying to say that the Werner Vogels don’t want that — you know the way they want to position what a PaaS is?

Michael Coté: Oh right.

John Willis: The people — well you think of a good word to use for that while I finish this. It’s the people who I think have a lot of faith in private cloud. Agenda, there we go, they have their kind of own agenda, you know what I mean?

Michael Coté: Yeah.

John Willis: Like they want to push the idea that Amazon won’t be this unbelievable 900 pound Gorilla and Amazon just like just keeps chugging along. I mean in the truth that matters almost every enterprise in the world right now is doing something with Amazon. And the fact that they’re just the indicator of their growth of S3 objects is just showing it. This is — so I mean betting — I don’t think anybody bets against Amazon. Again I think there is people who have agendas that would like not to see this growth or put in the argument.

Michael Coté: Well you know what would — maybe someone has done numbers like this before but it’s always interesting to take like just take S3 or something, like take that total number of storage and then compare it to estimates for total storage overall. To get a sense of what’s going on there and to chart growth like — and to use an example, I’ve mentioned this on most every podcast and forum I’ve been on the in the past two weeks, but there is this really great chart by Horace 00:27:38 over at Asymco 00:27:40 which I’ll try to put a show note in the links too.

He basically did a chart. He tracks mobile numbers a lot and he did a chart where he took the total number of PCs in the world and again these are all estimates, so don’t you dear listener get your panties in a bunch about how you come up with these numbers, it’s not really important to that point.

John Willis: Well that — last name of 00:28:01, I mean I don’t think he got much credibility.

Michael Coté: Exactly. So you get the total number of PCs in the world over the past I don’t know three years and then you chart the growth of like Android and iOS devices and you kind of like put those up against the chart and obviously the number of PCs still dominates, but there is this in the past year or so there is this like really rapid growth at the top of the chart of iOS and Android devices eating into it.

And that kind of — those kind of charts are always nice and for example like seeing how many thing — how many megs or whatever is — whatever you want to measure it by are stored in S3, it would be handy to see it just — how many megs of storage there are globally. And you might want to throw out consumer desktops or maybe you don’t because there’s a lot of consumer stuff stored in there as well. But it would be curious to see what total — how many gigabytes of storage there are globally at any given time and then compare it to how many gigs are being stored on S3 or something like that.

John Willis: Well, I mean this is an area that probably I shouldn’t even step into because I don’t really have interest in it and I’m not — I don’t even know what I’m talking about but again that’s got to stop. I’ve notice that a couple of my son’s friends are getting Windows phones.

What’s interesting is that this is the problem I have with the Ubuntu 00:29:23. Every time I kind of jump up and say, “I’m tired of these Windows being all around, how can I get everything Ubuntu,” I mean they basically they tie me up like one of those TV shows, wrap me around with rope around my chair and don’t let me move and because they can’t — the guys, kids can’t run any your games — all the games

Michael Coté: On the Ubuntu?

John Willis: The real cool games that they love right now and this is the ages from 8 to about 13 or 12 are all on Windows. And they try to get on the work on even a virtual machine and just forget about it, just not worth the effort.

[0:30:00.0]
And I’m telling you and they’re all, like these Wizard101 and Roblox and these games that are just every kid in the planet is using right now. And I wonder if that’s going to have an effect over the next three to five years.

Michael Coté: Yeah, who knows man Windows Phone 7 is a — it’s dark course, in all the good and all the bad ways in the sense.

John Willis: Yeah, but all these kids that are like my son’s age now, they’re all going to their teens and they’re all like — all their games basically.

Michael Coté: Oh yeah, like their Penguin Palace and whatever.

John Willis: Yeah, I’m just saying all their games –

Michael Coté: This is an area where I don’t know what I’m talking about when it comes to the games and not the kids as in the people who have the –

John Willis: Yeah, I know that because my torture for having fun for just being a single crazy guy for like 25 or 30 years is now I’ve got to play these games every once in a while as my –

Michael Coté: Yeah, you know what, I like the — as I’ve said before, I think the Windows Phone 7 is actually a really good operating system, on phones.

John Willis: Well, I’m sorry.

Michael Coté: I’ll make my case briefly, not my cases that what I want to convince people but just what my thoughts are, so iOS and Android basically the same thing.

Now if you compare it sort of Android has much deeper features. I always like to think of Android and iOS as kind of like the ‘90s for Windows. Like do you remember like Windows used to always be more feature-full than like Mac and yet at some point in the ‘90s it crossed the line of it being too feature-full, there is just like too much things going on.

And at the moment Android is at that point where it hasn’t crossed line of being too feature-full. It’s just a much more open platform and it’s got more stuff and it’s more flexible and if they’re not careful pretty soon it’s just going to be another crapped up OS and iOS will keep it’s purity, which — that’s always been Apple’s thing is like, no, you don’t want that feature, trust me. And if you don’t trust me you still don’t want it.

And anyways whereas Windows Phone 7 is like — it’s not really to be — speak hyperbolically it’s not really anything like those two operating systems. It’s like genuinely different in the way it goes about doing things, and it still has apps and all that stuff but it is a lot — it’s different than those two things and that’s part of why I like it and also the little Samsung Focus I got I think is a fantastic piece of hardware and if I may go a little more consumer, I’ve used like three Samsung devices over the past like three months and those guys they’re doing pretty well like they make good hardware.

Like I’ve got a Galaxy Tab and a Samsung laptop and that phone and the trackpad though on this laptop that I have atrocious, terrible and I also have a Chromebook which is a Samsung, trackpad terrible. Like and it probably– actually it’s probably got nothing to do with the trackpad. It’s like I don’t know how to use those trackpads, they don’t have a button.

Like I have a MacBook Air but it’s the last one that has a button and I don’t understand buttonless. Like I don’t understand how to click and drag to select text, it drives me crazy. So, we’ll get out of that rat-hole.

John Willis: Well speaking of Amazon — no the one other thing I want to talk about are Spot Instances. For the first time I actually started using Spot Instances.

Michael Coté: This is the one where there is like a marketplace for –

John Willis: Yeah.

Michael Coté: Over time if you will.

John Willis: For like testing and development stuff it’s freaking awesome, you know what –

Michael Coté: It’s like they build them all for cloud.

John Willis: And it makes your life a little more exciting, like you’re going to just fire up like four instances, ah 00:33:37. Oh man, let me go and see what the highest price is right now, and like this adds a little of fun gambling if you will.

Michael Coté: Daring.

John Willis: Daring yeah so but it does — it saves money and what I found also is – I’ve always looked at it and said, “Ah, you know it’s going to be a pain in the ass.” But I mean if you willing to pay — yeah the nice thing is you go in and you look at the instance that you want and — or instances and it tells you what the going price is. And then you look — the little thing you just select and it’ll actually show you over a week or a month or just a day. And you can look — but usually just if I’m in a hurry I’ll just make it like — if it’s $0.24 is that the highest point in the last couple of weeks then I’ll just make it $0.25. And never wait more than about three or four minutes.

And you save, I mean it’s ridiculous like the — I mean like on the — like for example installing Cloud Foundry. If I install Cloud Foundry on a Small Instances Amazon it takes sometimes about 100 minutes, maybe even longer. I’ve actually — I can’t remember it was on one of the things on Micros or a small but I think one of the first couple of times I installed it took almost two hours. And well on average, well even when you look it will say beware when you start install process could take up to two hours.

[0:35:02.5]

I started up an m1.xlarge and basically the normal price is like $0.68 an hour. Again which isn’t a lot, but if you’re going to run it for a few hours and start using them over time. It’s probably worth doing the Spot Instance. It’s like Spot Instance is $0.24, and so I put up for $0.25 I wait like two-and-a-half minutes it comes up, like I get it started, two or three of them that I’m going to use and then literally the amount of time it takes to install like 20 minutes versus like a 100 minutes, or 110 minutes.

And I could have got up to $0.68 and 00:35:43 but I mean on a habit now I just anytime starting up a development or test systems that I’m only going to use for like a half a day or a day, or — and then if I forget to take them down, it’s going to be half the amount of money that I wasted, right so.

Michael Coté: It’s like a price line for cloud.

John Willis: Yeah, it’s not bad, it’s you know — and again if anything it adds a little more excitement in what you’re doing if you’re playing with this stuff. But I could see like if you got serious about it and I know companies do. I mean these companies will — they’ll build queues of servers and they’ll generate pools that can be available.

Michael Coté: So, now what’s the mechanics behind that? Like who is the supplier? Is Amazon supplying it or is it –

John Willis: Yeah, Amazon is the standard cloud supplier. I think Reuven Cohen has this — has some type of abstraction for multiple clouds but I don’t know I haven’t gotten — I’ll probably –

Michael Coté: So, correct me where I’m wrong here, but basically so there is idle cloud running around and at some point they make a decision all right we’re going to sell this Amazon being there — Amazon makes a decision we’re going to sell this top of the line cloud instance for a lot cheaper than list price just because no one is buying it at the moment. So, it’s typical like sales stuff right, like better to make some money than no money off of it. And do you — have you gotten a sense of like when they — how that the mechanics of that work out, like when do they decide they’re going to cut prices essentially?

John Willis: Well I think its available capacity. I think it goes — I think they take the highest bidder. I don’t know the exact mechanics, but I think they take the high — if they’ve got available capacity, they’ll look at what’s waiting. So when you go to start a Spot Instance it immediately goes into this Spot Queue and it’ll just say open, it’ll just sit there. And I think what will happen is they’ve got probably — they’ve got some engine.

Michael Coté: And then how much time do they give you on it?

John Willis: I don’t know. I played around the other night just to see like — I had a, it was like one of the small instances, so I had — I figured what the small instances was typically like — oh no the micro, I don’t know, maybe the small. So, typically like $0.03. They run $0.08 normally and you can get them for like $0.03 an hour. So, I played games where I put in $0.02; I put one in for a $0.03; I put one in for $0.05 and the one for $0.02 just, I just left it in the queue for like –

Michael Coté: But then do they give it to you for — do they guarantee an hour’s worth of time or like I mean can you reserve?

John Willis: I’m not still — I’ve heard stories that you could lose them so –

Michael Coté: Because that would be — I mean there’s got to be some sort of safety, you got to be like, I’m going to buy 200 hours at $0.02 an hour, right?

John Willis: I think they take them away. I think they take them away. I think when that reserve pricing or whatever that pricing — in other words if they get — I’m sure if they get to a capacity as to where they got people who are willing to pay the whole price, they probably, and they’ve got nothing left, they probably start yanking it, because I heard people have said that you can get on the yanked.

Michael Coté: So, the way you would want to use a Spot Cloud is mostly for sort of like processing and serving up things and you would want to be — you would want to be saving your data somewhere else because your Spot Cloud could just disappear, so it has to become obviously completely like stateless, right?

John Willis: Yeah, but I mean I use the — one thing I do a lot, which is cool is I use the EBS volumes and so the EBS boot volumes and so that it’s not a 00:39:25 storage. So everything you write on it, if you go ahead in Snapshot or if you create an image from it, then it basically saves it as your own image. So I’ll get like everything I need. So, I have like a bunch of set images for different environments that I’m testing and I’ll fire those up and then all I have to do is like copy my keys over or something like that and then I’m good to go.

[0:39:52.5]

Michael Coté: So let me ask you this question as I like to say. In your travels up until now, so now if you just take, only taking Amazon as a cloud, like there is a lot of things going on. We just went over like various strategies you would use for a Spot Cloud versus having your EBS and this, that and the other. Like how many levels of sophistication do you think there are for learning how to like deal with Amazon. And I don’t mean that in the bad way but like sort of the most naïve things is like I just sort of like get a server and some storage that I host, right?

John Willis: It’s actually a pretty high is that — there is a lot of bandwidth there and it goes. For example, I mean take for example that outage a couple of months ago, right?

Michael Coté: Yeah.

John Willis: I mean the people — I mean there was — that there’s levels of — all right, so there’s levels of like knowing how to use the APIs and all that and being able to basically manage, starting, stopping instances, the stuff I’m talking about It’s like 101, right?

Michael Coté: Yeah.

John Willis: And 102 is how do you start using the more advanced features like ELB, the RDS, the SNS, the queue if you’re going to use that. And then understanding whether you should be using them or not, and then you got CloudFormation and all that. And then I think that’s like 102, Amazon 102 and then you got kind of Amazon 103 is understanding the implications of how you use it, and that’s where all these people got in trouble.

And then I think that like it goes back to the whole thing you don’t just get into cloud and think, oh cloud, everything is done. I mean even if you learn everything about that cloud you still have to be a data center operations, you know what I mean? You still have to have your data center operations job, to know in what cases best to use.

But then beyond that then there is kind of folklore and people who have been doing it for a couple of years. In that outage only a few company survive. And the ones that survive are the ones that basically either — that either spent a lot of money to bring in a lot of people who had been doing it for many years. With Amazon at a large scale which is like for example Netflix. Netflix is like VMware, now they’re hiring like all the brightest guys out there.

It’s amazing, every other day I’ll see a guy like, that guy is going to Netflix, holy shit. But to have these guys that had been doing large scale cloud operations on Amazon for a couple of years that know where the bodies are buried. I mean that crap doesn’t come easy. And you listen to this — the guy who used to — there is another really, really sharp guy that gives presentations all the time and he — Jeremy and I can’t think of his last name right now, Reddit, he was the sys op at Reddit.

He gives a great presentation about crap that — Edberg, Jeremy Edberg, he used to be at Reddit. He just went to work for Netflix. And he has a great presentation, he was about like, oh all the bodies are buried and how a lot of people are switching away from EBS back to the 00:43:06 storage. So yeah, now there is a lot of layers for that onion to peel. I mean –

Michael Coté: I am always curious about the cloud complexity if you will, which with great complexity comes great power as they say.

John Willis: No I think Amazon — and yeah and with Amazon that complexity creates great opportunities, but again knowing how to — I think I might have said this once before in this podcast. If I hadn’t, I talked to a lot of people after that big outage and a lot of that outage was about like if you follow all the rules as Amazon laid them out you shouldn’t have been in trouble. Like you’ve used availability zones and you were supposedly in good shape if you spread like your database server and you had — you’ve done between zones, and then it turns out there was — I forgot what it was but it was some API that wasn’t available for EBS that wound up, 00:44:12 all those rules.

And the guys that survived were, they had actually multi-region DR set up, you know what I mean? And or — so that like the guys like Netflix, they were all, hey, we didn’t have any problems. Well I don’t — they brought in probably the best architects. They probably paid Amazon architects out and design it. I mean and yeah they were able to handle that outage without a blip, but then there was a lot of small guys that I talked to like oh, we know exactly what would happen if that happened but we never had a time to — you know who has the money and time to design multi-region DR.

[0:44:49.2]

Michael Coté: Yeah, that’s why we’re doing this cloud stuff.

John Willis: Yeah, that’s right. But and then I think one last point is, the other thing when I talk to people and this is again why I’m a strong believer of Infrastructure as Code, there were a lot of people that survived that to a certain extent where their outage might have been like eight hours and it was cut down to two or three hours because they had their whole infrastructure extracted through Chef or Puppet.

Because you still got the data movement problem and where to get that and your backups and all that but the point is that there were people that were able to like go into another region and pop and blow their infrastructure out. And there were other people that knew that and just said I’ve never gotten around to finish my whole infrastructure with Chef or Puppet.

This is why I tell people when we talk about DevOps, I mean, like it is another thing that’s driving me nuts these days, is I’m going to all these big companies and do these DevOps workshops. Get up, yeah I love it, come on get in here, tell us about it. And you do this; I do a first day kind of theory which I’m not going to do anymore. I’m tried of doing it because everybody is like yeah we already know that, yeah get on, move to the next thing, and then — so and the second day is hands-on. So, it’s almost hilarious how, it’s like everybody is like, yeah, we want DevOps but we can’t do that, that and that right now, we’re way too much in a hurry.

That is the core of the ideas, like get all this stuff right, let’s abstract all the infrastructure, let’s figure out the behavior definitions, let’s figure out all these things that are probably going to — they’re going to make you successful or more importantly the things that companies like ESTI and Wealthfront and those guys have done to be successful. Let’s do those things, oh no, we don’t have time for that. Let’s just get the CI server up.

And I’m like I want to pull my hair. It’s like, no, there is — you know I’m sorry, it’s painful, it’s a lot of work and it’s a lot of crap you have to do upfront.

Michael Coté: Well they used to call that cargo culting and I’m sure they still do. It’s like you don’t want to waste your time putting racing stripes on your car, you really need to put a new engine in it, like that’s — just because you have like — you’re doing continuous integration like it doesn’t mean you’re going to have anything. It’s just going to –

John Willis: You got that culture and you’ve got a bad foundation and bad plumbing, I mean this so — I mean so — but yeah I mean that’s the people that sit down and say, okay, there is a guy here in Atlanta. I met him recently and it took him a long time to get up on Chef and I finally met him. I met him at DevOps workshop we did in Atlanta a few months ago and he said, I said, he said, “Hey, I finally got everything up on Chef,” and I’m like that’s great and so what was – why did it take you so long?”

And he was like, “Well actually what we really wanted to do is we wanted to get it right so we did a kind of service modeling exercise where we modeled all our services in an abstract definition and then we use that as input, the drive shaft.” Like, Yeah, God, from your mouth to God’s ears. I mean you build your infrastructure like that you can move a data center in weeks.

Michael Coté: You got to drain swamps before you can build Disney World, that’s the problem.

John Willis: That’s — I love that. There you go — or else that castle will be floating.

Michael Coté: So you were mentioning you were doing DevOps workshops and so there is two things that I find interesting here. One, that there is enough demand to do DevOps workshops. So like — I mean DevOps has been — it’s been a pretty fast cycle of main streaming I guess. I mean it’s probably even about it a year-and-a-half maybe. I mean I know people talked about it for –

John Willis: Yeah, and I think it will be two years, I think this summer it’s about from when the first DevOps days.

Michael Coté: But it’s pretty quick, I mean the last thing we had was cloud which took a long time but not that DevOps is really on the magnitude of cloud. It’s more like a subset if you will but that’s a fast forward session. And so you think that you’re more or less you don’t have to do the definitional stuff, everyone is past that, that kind of thing you’re talking about.

John Willis: Well they’re not even passed it, it’s like — I think there is a couple of forums of either people are in denial and they’re like, oh no, no, we know that, that we got. It’s that whole like whenever I used to explain DevOps in the early podcast we were doing here and I talk about culture and you’re like, “Yeah, but not a bunch of crap?”

Michael Coté: Yeah, that’s my line, isn’t that a bunch of crap?

John Willis: Yeah, and now like you start talking about why it’s so important to understand behavior and why this works really well in some companies. People like will say, I already know that. You know what, we know that too, you can move on, move on, like it. And then you’ll go to the workshop day and they’ll — it will be like, well you kind of missed that whole point, like what’s — I know there are some fundamental things that I think are really important to understand.

And I think people — everybody is in such a God damn hurry that they just don’t want to hear that stuff. They just want to hit the pavement and run and so to them, to most people — so I’ve done a couple — I’ve done about – I’ve done four DevOps workshops. I’ve done two for pay and two freebies.

[0:50:08.4]

The freebies you get by pretty well because who is going to moan and groan about that. And the people are passion enough to go to a thing, they will listen it, but the pay for ones are being very painful because they tell you that, yeah, we want DevOps and We want to just be like ESTI and we want to be like — and then you go in there and start talking about the way why ESTI is what they — they is — why ETSI is the way they are.

Michael Coté: And they is what they is.

John Willis: Yeah, they is what they is, there brother, but they — and they don’t want to hear that. And first they are all like, oh we want to be like them, yeah we want to drink that Kool-Aid. Oh my God it’s going to be great, and then you start going into more than an hour of it, and they’re like, can we get on to the workshop stuff? And what people really want is — particularly the enterprises what they really want is they want to just go right to the cool stuff.

Let’s go install something, let’s install Jenkins and see how that works. Can we do that continuous delivery thing? Like yeah, we can but you want to talk about how that might change your developers and how things might work, and yeah, we’ll get it, we’ll do that later.

And it’s rather frustrating, in fact in some ways, this will be a bold, bold statement but I think the enterprise and — put it this way, I think cloud alone is doomed — cloud with DevOps you have a prayer, enterprise with cloud and DevOps the only way they’re going to get through this cleanly. I think is you’re going to have to go out and hire like 10 or 15 people that are completely from without any of the baggage of the organization and do the project.

Michael Coté: Sure, I think that’s one of your more successful change — like large organizational change strategies.

It’s you have to start out with a small groups that like is not encumbered by the current success with the organization and they have to build such a huge amount of success on their own that everyone else takes them seriously that and then this is the other, the final element that once the greater organization stumbles in a terrible way they get desperate enough and they look around and they see this small group of people has a good way of doing stuff.

And in failure is a certain amount of time enough to revisit core principles and I think it’s just — I mean part of what it is being an enterprise is it’s too risky to ensure your future because you’re making so much money in the present that you don’t really muck around with it and until there is sort of catastrophic failure, I mean and I’m not even putting this in a cynical way. Until there is catastrophic failure there is not much reason to change and now the longer view is that well sure — part of your job is to ensure the longevity of being able to produce revenue.

I’m speaking of very high terms now but — that’s just not how business runs. Like it’s very rare that a business especially when it gets to something that IT is involved in, that they really care that much about their long term future. I mean it’s more like — I guess this is what it is, it’s like the Viking School of Business. It’s like what’s the saying like party today, for tomorrow we may die and that’s the way a lot of it goes.

John Willis: But I mean one of the things I think that the cloud is a compelling event. So it’s compelling events that actually allow you to make these massive changes. But you can look and take stock of everything and say, oh, my God, like you have a massive catastrophic failure or I think again cloud is another — I think somebody said to me recently Wall Street is looking at that DevOps is really kicking into Wall Street.

And this was some — actually Simon Crosby, the guy –the Citrix who — this then Citrix guy who is now in a startup. He was saying that Wall Street is got kind of two mindsets now. There is the kind of legacy and there is the DevOps way, like a lot, really, yeah no and so there is this kind of I think cloud is the enabler or the compelling event that has long been, so you know what, since we’re doing this thing and we understand that there is a lot of changes, let’s do it.

I think the mistake that some companies make and this is a general statement, I mean some people can get away with it, some people may not, I think more people won’t get away with it, is to then cherry-pick all these guys from the legacy. Particularly a legacy that is primarily broken. We know, we’ve been, I’ve been and you’ve been in large companies, oh my God you say that place is so broken, and to thing that you’re just going to pick like 10 or 20 or 30 people from different teams and throw them in this new team and everything is going to work out all new and different, right?

[0:55:02.5]

Michael Coté: Sure.

John Willis: That again I think that, more often that not is going to be, like you’re saying it just going to be repeating failure, you’re just taking the same ideas, the same boundaries, the same limitations, the same way of thinking as opposed to let’s just go hire ten startup guys. Let’s find these guys out there and just like cherry-pick them and put them on this team and see where they get and then start bringing people in from — all the organizations to fit in, but –

Michael Coté: Yeah, I think that’s pretty much true. I mean the — I think Wall Street is always a — they tend to be a leader in anything that involves rapidly delivering technology.

I think for several reasons. One, they have a lot of money, and two, if — I get the sense that there is other industries that are like this, but the world of finance and Wall Street in particular sort of investing, not retail banking is — it’s a lot, not that it’s easy but compared to other industries it’s a lot easier to directly correlate IT work with making money versus I don’t know at a hospital, it’s probably more difficult to correlate IT with like making more money.

I mean I guess anyways, always people are fraught with problems but — and then I think the — I don’t know if there really is a third reason but it’s just — and also like a lot of the stuff that goes in finance now is about — it’s all about having something — information or something that someone else doesn’t have. Technology as IT being Information Technology is great at that kind of thing, like, you can actually use — if you — all you care about is information and being able to like do something based on an information, that’s kind of the whole point of IT, so –

John Willis: Yeah, and I think the thing about DevOps is the people who get with at the core DevOps is — unfortunately some people don’t get that it isn’t a button or it’s going to be a little painful to get there. You’re not going to do it with the rest of this year’s budget or you know what I mean, there’s got to be some changes made, but at the core DevOps is — the people who are getting it like Wall Street is the ability to innovate fast.

I mean — and that’s a loaded term, that’s been around forever but when we look at the way companies are the poster childs of DevOps right now, they are — the developers are pushing 30 to 50 times a day. They’re able to get things from the business people out to customers in hours.

Michael Coté: That’s like several months ago I wrote a thing on Cloud Marketing that cloud is just about speed, which is great oversimplification, but I mean that’s what — I think that’s the explanation that works with everyone. It’s like, look we’ll get you a bunch of jibber-jabber and fancy words and whatever in a little bit but basically we just want to speed up your delivery cycle and just make it so you can deploy stuff faster.

And but then the important thing for that is like as we’re going on a bit earlier is like if you don’t think — if you don’t like the speed of what you’re doing things now and the way you’re things is not working and you can’t do things that way so you need a new way of doing things and like so we can’t just install Jenkins and be done, like your whole thing is screwed.

And like you’re going to have to change things around, like you can’t win the Tour de France by eating like Rice Krispies snacks all day, you got to like change a lot of fundamentals about the way you run your life if you want to compete at that level. And I think it’s similar to whether you’re adapting Agile or DevOps or whatever, like you’re not going to be able to do things the same way.

John Willis: Yeah, change. No I mean, it was funny, whenever we were at Interop. I was on a panel with George Reese, and Shlomo Swidler. And it was a cloud operations thing and we were having a pretty good dialogue with the audience. And one women was talking about how — she didn’t see how her organization could ever get Agile to do deployments like multiple times a day and so at some point somebody asked her, well, why not? And she said well, “I mean we — you know our main application it used to be that we would deploy it every three months. Now, we have to deploy it every six months. So there is no way.”

And as she was answering that I’m like, God, I don’t want to ask her the next question, because it’s going to make her look like an idiot. And so finally everybody is kind of bouncing around, even the audience is trying to help her and then somebody else finally says, “Well, have you ever thought about breaking up the application and decomposing it?” Like “ah-ha”, yeah, but it’ll probably be a year from now, and year from now it will be a year to deploy. I mean so like yeah, no, yeah you 00:59:54. If the answer is I can’t do a DevOps or continuous deployment because it takes six months to deploy an application today, then like okay.

[1:00:04.5]

Michael Coté: No I think that’s there is our friend Israel Gat does a lot of stuff around technical debt and I think that’s like the –
John Willis: Ta-ta-da-da, every time I hear technical debt I want to say ta-ta-da-da.

Michael Coté: That’s right good old technical debt. I mean it really is like, that’s a fantastic metric to track because — and I like to think of it as just like the — you’re tracking when you ask development to do something and they’re like oh we can’t just add that feel, that’s going to take a few weeks, like there you go, you got some technical debt right there and –

John Willis: Ta-ta-da-da, so it’s like Monty Python I just have to say that.

Michael Coté: The problem with technical debt.

John Willis: Ta-ta-da, stop this.

Michael Coté: Is that you can only measure it once you’re in it, like no one appreciates it until they’re negatively affected by it. So it is a — and what I mean by that is you have to have enough experience and trust in your own experience to intuitively avoid it like –

John Willis: Yeah, but here is the thing right so –

Michael Coté: It’s not like a credit card where you’re like, well, I’m going to go $5,000 in debt, like you know what that means.

John Willis: So, I’m at — actually at DTO we’re working with some really large clouds right now, some massively large clouds.

So, we’re getting in the ground floor from on the kind of DevOps angle, and the thing is like as you go through this and go through these workshops and walkthrough what’s got to be done, you start realizing and you don’t have to Israel Gat who is an expert on this as opposed to me who is not, but you don’t have to be Israel Gat to understand all the branches that you start talking about that become obvious technical debt.

If you’re building a new cloud and you’re talking about well we’re going to use some things for CentOS and some things on Ubuntu, I’m like, Wooh-wooh, why do we care about operating system. This is a grand new — brand new scenario, like do we really give a crap what the operating — I mean if we care let’s pick one.

So, because immediately once you start talking about running — these are things that everybody else is battling like, when you talk to people like, yeah we’ve got another six months before we can get everything on one platform, we’re still working on that so we won’t be able to get to this until we done — like okay. Like, we know that now, you’re starting a cloud, let’s make the operating system as innocuous, I mean it just doesn’t really matter.

Then like I was talking about the guy from Silverpop, let’s service model, every service day one. All along the way we are like just chunking off potential technical debt, because the technical debt of installing everything manually and having multiple operating systems, multiple frameworks for operating systems. The developer will say, well it has to be that way. No, freaking we write you code, this the new cloud, this is the new infrastructure, because those are the positions when you have to move a data center or when CentOS version whatever is now really just way too old, it’s not just old, old, it’s old, old, old, old.

And now I got a — I mean it’s pretty easy on the ground floor. I think it’s much harder for what guys like Israel Gat and those guys do to go into large organizations and help them understand with all the legacy crap that’s lying around. But if you’re starting from a greenfield, I mean you can look down the field and say, holy crap man. What we probably want to do is put a big old fence around this thing is the first thing.

I would say it is like if you’re going to start a car company today. I’ve probably said this on this podcast before. If you’re going to start a car company today what’s the first thing you do? The first thing you do is not go start assembling your first car. The first thing you do is you build an assembly line, a factory. It’s going to get cars. Like you pretty much know that like you don’t want to get down to like the six months going, hey, you know what, this whole like manually building a car at a time is you know — and I guess something to say there fancy cars out there that they do it that way, but let’s just say you are going into that commodity car market, you would build.

And so — and I think that’s — a lot of that, just thinking about all this DevOps and all the things you have to do, I mean a lot of this is thinking of IT very much the way Toyota thought about manufacturing. I know I’m not the first one by a longshot to say that but when we have a greenfield cloud we actually can — it’s a little bit different than saying we need to be lean in our organization and we’re a — 20,000 server, 200,000 people organization saying that we need to adopt lean principles, is a lot different than sitting down and looking at a greenfield and say, hey folks, wouldn’t this be a great time to adopt lean principles?

Michael Coté: Yeah, like start with the ideal way you want to do stuff.

John Willis: Right, so anyway.

[1:05:01.8]

Michael Coté: Well that seems like a good place to wrap up. Did you have anything else you wanted to go over?

John Willis: No, I think that’s it right now.

Michael Coté: Yeah. Well, thanks as always to everyone for listening. We always appreciate it. And I guess we’ll see everyone next time.

Back from Velocity, John and I catch up on things going on in the cloud and dev/ops space. We try to iron out what exactly the change and point of dev/ops is and how businesses could use it. The episode is capped of with a discussion about PaaSes, two possible types of them.

Download the episode directly right here, subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatcher to have episodes downloaded automatically, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

Show Notes

• What is dev/ops? workshops – at Atlanta, Portland – who comes to these things? Mostly web startup guys, but some enterprise people.
• What’s with the Microsoft interest? They sponsored the Atlanta workshop.
• On Microsoft and cloud dev - Concero, the VisualStudio pickling tool. Opalis is another interesting asset.
• The rising need for orchestration in dev/ops? Which brings in DTO Solutions’ Run Deck - John gives an overview.
• How about OSLC? Anyone know about that?
• VisibleOps stuff, researching IT management in practice.
• What are the metrics for success and failure in dev/ops? Lots of MTTR, expecting failure.
• In a failure-driven world: never mind that premature optimization is the devil’s root canal business.
• If you have to move from Amazon to Rackspace, how long would it take?
• A painful problem statement: you can’t be agile with current IT Management. Also: it’s not how much it costs you, it’s how much you make.
• DRW pairing developers and traders at a desk. Making it a little bluer. “They can get things in front of customers really fast.”
• Adaptive Business Plans, Evolutionary Transactions – The only reason a business wants to be your friend is to get your money.
• Find the moribund businesses, revitalize them with more agile IT.
• How was Velocity?
• Some PaaS talk – “bring your own PaaS,” etc. And John likes “the private PaaS.” Or is it “build your own PaaS”? Like, using a Chef cookbook to use RabbitMQ. And then “purpose driven cloud” from John.
• John at Build a Cloud day in Chicago this weekend.

Disclosure: see the RedMonk client list for clients mentioned.

You’ve probably heard that IBM launched two new, public cloud offerings recently, Enterprise and Enterprise+. These offerings are oriented around the requirements IBM is getting from larger companies – they’re hoping to match the feature sets to existing work-loads and application types.

While at the IBM Cloud Forum where IBM announced these offerings, I sat down with IBM’s Jan Jackman and CohesiveFT’s Craig Heimark to talk about these offerings. Jan tells us about the two Smart Clouds and the types of work-loads people are using cloud for; Craig goes over how CohesiveFT partners with IBM to secure these work-loads and help manage the stacks.

Transcript

Michael Coté: Well hello everybody, here we are in lovely San Franscisco at the IBM Cloud Forum, and I’ve got two guests with me to talk about something that IBM came out with today which is pretty exciting with all the cloud discussion that’s been going on. And that’s sort of two types of Smart Cloud, if you will. Do you guys want to introduce yourselves?

Jan Jackman: Sure, I’m Jan Jackman and I lead our global cloud services as part of IBM Global Technology Service division within IBM.

Michael Coté: And yourself?

Craig Heimark: And I’m Craig Heimark, I’m one of the Founders of CohesiveFT, we’re one of the cloud partners of IBM.

Michael Coté: Like I was saying, you guys came out with two Smart Cloud offerings today, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus, and I’m wondering if you could just give us an overview of what those offerings are?

Jan Jackman: Sure. What we see in the marketplace is that most of our Enterprise customers have a variety of workloads or applications that they need to run in the cloud environment and move to the cloud environment. And there are different characteristics that are required based on security, based on the type of workload whether it’s bursty type of workload that runs within days or weeks or if it’s a long running production application that may run months or years.

And so what we introduced today is the Enterprise platform which deals with the multi-tenant bursty type of workload, so workloads that would be like the development and test environment or even applications that may run for a short period of time, that could leverage as cloud and the associated service level agreements with that type of a workload.

The Enterprise Plus really looks at a fully managed environment. So as clients move from doing a development and test, and then they want to move the app into a production level environment that has higher security needs, higher SLA, higher isolation of different workloads, then we have the continuity of the platforms to be able to move from one environment to the other. So if you take Dev/Test as a use case and take Application Lifecycle Management, what you see is the need to be able move between different cloud environments.

So you may do development and test, development on a private cloud behind your firewall, you may want to for reasons of economics do performance testing or stimulations on cloud to take advantage of the burst capability of the infrastructure and then you may want to move it into a production environment. So what we see in order to implement these type of workloads with this example, it takes a number of a capabilities from IBM and also capabilities from our partners.

Michael Coté: One of the things that I am starting to like about the Enterprise and the Enterprise Plus offerings were, your guys just take on what the enterprising cloud is, if you will, it’s exactly that you’re getting into that different workloads or applications or different stuff to really abstract that, if you will, then your running on the cloud, sort of demands different handling in the cloud, and at some point you need to get above the level of — we’re achieving all this cloud goodiness with standardization and things like that. But above that there is still a sort of, we don’t want to all have the same application, I guess, or we don’t all have the same application that we could use.

Jan Jackman: Right, or the applications have different characteristics from a security or availablity –

Michael Coté: Right, right. And to that end, how is CohesiveFT helping manage all those different workloads in the cloud?

Craig Heimark: Well instead of the technical term stuff or even more specific workloads, we tend to use the word application topologies.

Michael Coté: Right.

Craig Heimark: Because, the real unit of work at the enterprise level is actually the application topology, so typically a cluster of three to ten servers working together that provide some business functionality. And from the get-go we were aimed at making these application topologies portable between different underlying virtualized infrastructures.

So we targeted virtualization as a platform, but knew there were going to be many different flavors of virtualization, so VMware, ESX behind the firewall. IBM’s KVM format and their public cloud, Amazon’s AMI format; and our technologies, what we do is we provide, we call it Secure Cloud Containers. And these containers abstract away, the differences between these different production platforms. And underlining those secure cloud containers are three technologies. There is one that deals with different image types, the different image types that are needed on the different platforms.

Another one which deals with the virtual networking, so the ability to maintain a consistent address space and a consistent network space, between your data center and IBM’s Cloud or Amazon’s Cloud or whomever.

Michael Coté: And is that your — the VPN stuff that you guys came out with?

Craig Heimark: Yeah, that’s called VPN Cubed. It was called VPN Cubed; it’s not a VPN alone, because that’s about securing the tunnel between your data center and the cloud. It’s actually a complete overlay network, so think about it as switches and routers, a complete networking infrastructure done in software. So you can run it on the top of hardware that you don’t own and is not dedicated to you. What that allows you to do is it allows you to treat IBM’s cloud as a node on hour LAN. And the third technology that underlies our Secure Cloud Containers, is called Context Cubed, and that is topology management, so portable topology management, to maintain those relationships between the servers and the clusters that you’re moving back and forth.

Michael Coté: Thinking about moving workloads around a lot, like what are the — in the hare and now what are the things that you are finding people having success with moving the workloads around, what are those bursty things that they are using?

Jan Jackman: So, typical web applications that you see — we will say there are commerce applications, that needs compute power over a period of time for a quick set of transactions that are happening. We’re seeing examples of these cases that are even more traditional legacy capability. We have an insurance company that’s doing a reinsurance application, has a set of analytics that they do, algorithms that they run in order to comply with the regulators and so they are able to run that one week a month, make sure that they comply to the risk levels of the regulators require in their industry and then it goes dormant for the next three weeks.

And so this is a workload that’s run for a period of time, goes down and so it’s very efficient to run in the Smart Cloud enterprise environment. And we start to look at Enterprise Plus and sort of needing to manage all the way up through the application. And so if you take certain processes, let’s take SAP as an example. There are certain processes that are repeated as you deploy and update in your SAP environment. These processes are perfectly suited for the cloud, but they typically will need to be run and managed in a fully managed environment.

Michael Coté: It makes me think of another area that I think both of you could address and that’s — there’s a whole lot of IT that’s existed before cloud. I know a lot of you know cloud forward people might not be happy about that or acknowledge it. So you’ve got that legacy IT and then you got all the new IT that’s going on and you described something very interesting there as far as I guess to use another technical term, kind of decomposing an SAP application into the various services that you have, and then figuring out, to use a highly technical term, how you can cloudize those different services or you can’t. And I wonder, between the two enterprise clouds, how much of that decomposing of the existing IT you guys are finding useful for people to do?

Jan Jackman: I’d say we’re at the beginning of this journey, so we’re learning, and seeing the use cases that are applicable for both. As we go and we look at our client environments and look at what they’re running today, what we’re finding is that probably 15%, 20% of what they run today, that is applicable to move to cloud and get the benefits of cloud. So it’s not going to solve for highly customized enterprise apps, you’re not going to be able to move those and get the benefit of cloud.

But as we talked about with the SAP, there are certain processes that are very applicable to cloud. And so what we see is that as SOA applications are being written, as mobility, as the driver to be able to have more service oriented architectures, to be able to deploy on these new device and mobility attributes, that there are going to be more and more workloads that are very relevant for our cloud environment.

So while you can start today, the growth of what we see that would apply in these two scenarios is going to continue to be a larger more important part of the enterprise. And most of our clouds are there from a cost perspective, where can I take cost out and apply this with some of the applications that I’m running, because if I lower my cost I can do more new things as I migrate forward in a new IT environment.

Michael Coté: You can free up resources.

Jan Jackman: Right, and so what essentially — you know cloud is a new way to deliver and consume IT. It’s not new technology. It’s really a new delivery methodology, and using the economics of scale, which is important, it allows you to leverage infrastructure in new ways to get much higher utilization.

But more importantly, as you think about new business value, you’re able to create new businesses that were not possible before, because you didn’t have instant access to the IT to be able launch new services quickly.

Michael Coté: I think CohesiveFT, you know, since — not necessarily all of it, a lot what you guys do is securing parts of the applications that are moving on or providing the scaffolding needed, if you will. Like how would you answer that same question of the types of applications, whether they are legacy or new that you guys are seeing moving into the cloud?

Craig Heimark: The short answer is the cloud really is the new platform for production. So over time as the tools and things develop, I think what we’ll do is see most of the kinds of use cases moving to the cloud. Your earlier question about, well what use cases are there that can only be done in the cloud, are the kinds of very bursty types of applications and the cyclicality of seasonality or for example the parallelization that is needed to do massive Monte Carlo simulations or something like that.

So, those kinds of things really, practically can’t be done any place except the cloud today. But I think we got to look at the cloud as the next generation IT platform. We’re seeing compelling evidence about the cost savings that get realized by moving to the cloud. I think more important than any of that actually is the speed and the agility that the cloud enables. And what we see is a typical corporate takes 90 days to requisition stage and deploy a visible circuit. Using our Elastic Server Coud, you can do the same thing in 15 minutes virtually. And I actually, I’m a former business guy that moved over to IT, because IT was a constraint, and I think what you’ll see is that over time the cloud infrastructure and the types of tools that go on it are going to eliminate that as de-constraint to changing your business process. So enterprises that don’t move in this direction are going to be at the risk of having much longer cycle time in changing their business processes.

Michael Coté: The conversation of cloud giving you agility, or I’ve enjoyed that recently because agility has been a word of something that we all want in IT forever. And I feel like, it’s sort of hasn’t been well defined with a credible technological basis, whereas when — in the cloud you can say well agility means doing things faster and therefore being able to do them more, so you’re not sort of stuck into an old plan if you will, and I think a lot of cloud technologies have demonstrated that, you can actually achieve that.

It’s not just sort of like an aspirational promise that we all want to get towards, but it’s something that has been demonstrated to actually work. So people are interested in this stuff, you know, for as many tangible benefits as the Smart Cloud and other clouds seem to offer, where do they go to start getting it, like what’s the — like where can they go get this off the shelf?

Jan Jackman: Right. Well, if you look at our Smart Cloud enterprise, you can go on the web today, you can sign up for it and test it out, right, it’s available on the web. You can access it, provision servers, and go and be able to test out these tools. Now, most of the enterprise customers really are looking for help for a roadmap, how do I apply it correctly, because if you just jump into this, you might be thinking workloads to your get in a value.

So we have a set of consulting services and capabilities that really help enterprise customers take a look at the application environments they have, look at the workloads that are relevant for cloud, and help them build a roadmap to be enabled to leverage and start simple, to get familiar with the cloud, over concerns with security differences or where the management, the overall management of their data, sits, and then be able to progress down the roadmap.

Craig Heimark: If you’re using the cloud for a test environment, it’s unlikely that the particular image type of that cloud is actually identical to the stuff you’re running behind your firewall, so you described this as a burgeoning technology — that’s exactly right. So do your scalable testing in the cloud, and then if you want to run it yet behind your firewall using our technology you can import it back and then overrun, translate it automatically instead of doing another manual migration.

Michael Coté: I appreciate you guys taking all this time to go over this, it’s fun to see IBM having more cloud stuff, for as much cloud conversation as IBM and also CohesiveFT gets involved in it. it’s always good to see the equivalent of SKUs out there, actual, uh, products. With that great, simple name.

Jan Jackman: It’s always exciting when we see customers benefit from it.

Michael Coté: Oh sure.

Jan Jackman: So, certainly our goal is to make sure that there is business value for our clients.

Michael Coté: Absolutely. Well, thanks again.

Jan Jackman: All right, thank you.

Craig Heimark: Thank you.

Disclosure: IBM is a client and sponsored this podcast.

Going full-tilt on cloud is a lot different than just installing some cloud products and stacks. That’s the take-away from reviewing a conversation I had recently with Cloudscaling’s Randy Bias, the full transcript is in the above PDF (or go to the original IT Management & Cloud podcast show-notes for the plain-text transcript).

Here are some highlights from that conversation (all from Randy):

On “Enterprise Clouds”

I have had this kind of like rant about the enterprise cloud lately is because, I really figured out lately that this whole approach to building sort of these “enterprise clouds” is fundamentally broken from the ROI point of view.

I mean, you have sort of got this weird disconnect or you have got the larger service providers, I don’t want to name anybody’s name, they are pretty obvious when you go out there and look at them, they have got these big enterprise spaces and they are saying, “hey, enterprises don’t want what Amazon has got, they want something different, they need to support all these legacy applications.”

So they are trying to build these very complex, very expensive clouds that are not going to be anywhere near cross-competitor with Amazon. And at the same time you look at the centralized IT department and they are making a decision. They are like, “well, are we going to outsource all these legacy apps and our jobs go away, or do we just build our own internal private cloud?” Most of them are choosing to go down building that internal private cloud route.

So you have got centralized IT going to the enterprise vendors to build an infrastructure that looks exactly the way these external public enterprise clouds look, same people, same technology, same management processes. And I don’t understand how there’s — I don’t see success in the future for either of those paths, and they are inherently competing with each other as well, and Amazon has kind of run away.

On security

Security is sort of a nonstarter. You can build a cloud to be as secure as you want, doesn’t matter what techniques you use. I just pretty much ignore that.

On what cloud operations looks like

Any kind of infrastructure cloud is basically going to look a lot like Amazon. Your CAPEX costs are going to be reduced by something like 75%. Your operational costs are going to be reduced similarly, at least for the infrastructure side. And you will probably see a change of a factor of 10 or a 100x in the number of infrastructure people you need to run a successful private cloud.

…

Any kind of IT that provides simply basic services to the business probably shouldn’t be run by the internal IT department. The internal IT department should be focused on those parts of the business that are fundamentally differentiating and that should be what your private cloud is focused on.

On the need to be transformative, not just install things

[T]he things there that people are still looking at this as sort of a product problem instead of a transformation problem, and I have literally had senior enterprise people say to me, “wow, we are buying this new automation software, we are going to put it in our data center and we are going to turn our data center into a cloud,” and I just tragically fell off my chair laughing it was like, there is no software you can buy to automate your data center and turn it into a cloud, if there was somebody would have been successful with all the attempts that have happened over the past 30 years to automate data centers. I mean, that’s not what’s happening.

…people look at it as sort of being solved by products, and I don’t think it can be solved by products, it has to be solved by a combination of products, architecture, and cultural change.

On standardization, simplifying IT

How has Amazon got 400 engineers and data center techs basically running 80,000 plus physical servers? I mean, it’s because they are doing things very differently [than traditional IT]….

And part of the economies of scale is like very homogenous environments. Like Google is reputed to have five hardware configurations across one to two million servers, whereas in a typical enterprise environment I have seen hundreds of hardware configurations across a much smaller footprint.

If you liked the above, check out the full episode, it’s chock-full of nice cloud commentary.

Many companies are being sold cloud-washed stacks of IT that will end up failing to deliver cloud pricing and agility. That’s one of the main ideas Cloudscaling‘s Randy Bias has been putting out recently (check out his concise CloudConnect talk on the topic, for example, and this recent interview as well). While there’s plenty of “real” cloud work going on, there’s a lot of “other cloud” work, or “enterprise cloud” as Randy likes to call it. The issue is that benefiting from cloud computing takes a lot more change (technology, process, and cultural) than most people are promising now. Randy has been one of the few, credible voicing saying this of late, so it was a pleasure to get to speak with him on this topic.

In addition to clicking play above, you can download the episode directly or subscribe to the IT Management & Cloud feed (in iTunes or wherever) to have this episode automatically downloaded for your listening pleasure.

Show Notes

• Cloudscaling background.
• How they sorted out the cloud market.
• What are the business cases for cloud? See Randy’s 2008 blog post – speed, leverage, batch processing, reach use case, 99 designs.
• Centralized IT vs. rouge IT.
• Enterprise cloud vs. private cloud.
• What drives people to build “enterprise clouds”? Each application runs on it’s own cloud, so to speak; the 3 FUDs: security, available, and performance.
• How does cost come into play? Is it like a “Starve the beast” strategy to drive efficiency?]
• What does the “real cloud” look like. What can you buy that’s the right cloud-in-a-box?
• The near trough of disillusionment in enterprise cloud.
• Dealing with the new legacy software: pretty much everything that exists in the enterprise.
• What do “real” cloud looks like?

Transcript

Michael Coté: Well, hello everybody! It’s a special edition of the IT Management & Cloud Podcast. This week it’s just me, Michael Coté, at RedMonk and I have got a guest on to kind of just go over some exciting sort of real cloud stuff. I guess you could call it the real cloud on the ground kind of business, not just the theoretic stuff up in the sky.

So with that, you want to introduce yourself guest?

Randy Bias: Hi! I am Randy Bias, the CTO and Co-Founder of Cloudscaling.

Michael Coté: And if I remember recently you were the CEO for quite some time. And so I imagine — I always — I have been covering tech business long enough that when I see a Founder move from CEO, it’s usually a tremendous relief. You can sort of — you can focus on the more technical things and sort of operational stuff rather than running around unclogging toilets and stuff that startup CEOs are always doing.

Randy Bias: It certainly was for me. I think I was a great Founding CEO, but I was quickly getting to the point where I was not really doing any of my CEO duties and there was a clear gap. And so I was happy to stop doing that 10% of the times — a 10% CEO is almost worse than no CEO.

Michael Coté: Exactly, yeah, sort of things pile up at the best case and at worst you start to just damage things. So it’s always a nice sign of maturity like I was saying.

So for people who don’t know Cloudscaling and haven’t heard of you guys, you want to give us an overview of what it is you guys do?

Randy Bias: So Cloudscaling is a bunch of veterans who worked on Amazon Web Services, GoGrid, Engine Yard, and several other either platform or infrastructure clouds, who got together and we see ourselves as the real deal implementers for clouds at scale. So we have got several engagements that are well publicized, including bringing up both private and public clouds for Korea Telecom and then also bringing the first OpenStack storage cloud to market after the Rackspace Cloud Files.

Michael Coté: So how long have you guys been around for?

Randy Bias: Cloudscaling in this instantiation has really been around for about a year. So the current business model and team has been around for about a year, and in that time there is really just the two Co-Founders almost a year ago, and now we are 25, going on 30, and we will probably double again by the end of the year. So we have been under very rapid growth.

Michael Coté: And would you characterize yourself as a services organization largely or is there a product that you have?

Randy Bias: So we are getting to the area where like I have to be careful about what I share. I will simply say this. We are currently a services organization. We have a new CEO who is not a services person. He has a history and track record of building product. And if I were looking at the organization from the outside I would think that, that was a clear signal. But it’s for other people to decide.

Michael Coté: That’s right. Everyone can cut open the bird and read the guts for the future on their own, right? They can do that on their own. The old osprey if I remember.

Yeah. So I mean, you guys have like — I have been kind of knowing a few, like Andrew Shafer who is, if I recall, the VP of Engineering, like having spoken with him while he has been working there. I mean, you guys have — as a sort of credit to your name, rapidly scaled up staffing wise. I mean, there has been kind of phenomenal growth that you guys have been through.

Randy Bias: Yeah. We have been — we have still been tremendously lucky. We have got a lot of A players like Andrew Shafer who have come on board, who have got a ton of domain knowledge to help us out.

We also recently acquired a gentleman by the name of Zed Shaw, who is rather infamous in both the Ruby and Python communities. He is awesome, absolutely awesome.

We have got a bunch of the backend engineers from GoGrid who are really great. We just had one Amazon Web Services Product Manager start with us.

We have got a really all-star cast of folks who have just got a ton of experience in this area. Like I said, our forte has really been on the implementation side. We think of ourselves as cloud builders and operators who have practical experience. And sort of when you look out there in the ecosystem of folks who are offering product or services today, there is actually very few people who can make that claim, so pretty proud of that.

Michael Coté: So when you guys — when you and sort of the other initial clutch of people started out and you were kind of looking at the cloud opportunity, how did you end up kind of dividing it into kind of who was ready to do cloud stuff, if you will? I mean, you kind of had to do sort of a market study, if you will, and kind of figure out, okay, these are the people who actually can build like full scale, and I am putting this in air quote, real clouds. And I am curious like how you kind of sorted that out initially and how that’s been evolving over time?

Randy Bias: Man, that’s a really good question actually. So the history of the business is funny, because it really — I have been working on this cloud stuff in one way or another since sort of late 2006 when I did my first kind of cloud startup, which didn’t go anywhere, but was sort of a competitor to RightScale sort of a Cloud Application Management Framework for originally both Amazon Web Services and then eventually GoGrid, and that was one of the first cloud management platforms I had seen. In fact, RightScale wasn’t even launched at the time that I started working on it.

And during that whole time, from late 2006 till now, I have been blogging about this and thinking about it and I spent some time at GoGrid as a VP, Technology Strategy, where I was trying to help them with product direction and vision.

And when I left there and I formed Cloudscaling in the current incarnation, a couple of things were interesting for me. The first was, that blog had really attracted a lot of readers. And the second was that I felt that I had a chance to step back from kind of what people were talking about and try to assess what I felt was happening from a big picture point of view and then try to build a business model towards that, which is a little bit different than most folks who I think have a product or a service that they are offering already and then they are trying to see how it can fit into cloud computing.

Michael Coté: Yeah, the so-called cloud washing, if you will, in the worst case.

Randy Bias: Right. So I started doing consulting and strategy and architecture engagements with like large enterprise companies. I worked with VMware on the vCloud API, and I worked with Kaiser Permanente on some of their internal private cloud stuff and a handful of other large enterprises.

It seemed to me like the enterprises were missing something, and I kept coming back and noticing that what Amazon, and to some degree Google, and some of the large Internet properties was doing was just building a fundamentally different kind of information technology.

And then sometime along though I just had this epiphany and part of it was that I read Clayton Christensen’s ‘The Innovator’s Dilemma’, which is a must read on disruption in the technology business, and then the second was I read Nick Carr’s ‘Does IT Matter?’ And my aha moment was like, hey, what Amazon has really done is they have cracked the nut on this new way of doing information technology, and it’s more of a way — it’s sort of — the way I like to highlight it is it’s the difference between building robotics factories for automobile manufacturing versus kind of having an assembly line for automobile manufacturing. It’s a fundamental transformation of the way that you actually build IT systems.

And when I figured that out I realized that a lot of folks were just really trying to take the assembly line model for it and call it cloud.

Michael Coté: Yeah, and that’s something that in a funny way has become unique about your voice in a lot of cloud discussion is, you are still very focused on, I am overstating it to some extent, but everything is fundamentally different. That like it’s not sort of just like some little things that you can tack on here and there, but to really get the full benefit and to make doing cloud in whatever sense worth it. There is a lot of things that you have to change and a lot of dramatic change to it.

Whereas, originally a lot of cloud computing, like the Nicholas Carr’s other famous book ‘The Big Switch’ is sort of like equally dramatic, in that there is one mega cloud in the sky that all this utility computing comes from.

Then at some point, I think especially to be both fair and a little cynical, I think when a lot of existing vendors came into the market, they couldn’t just wholesale throw out everything that they had so they wanted to adapt what they had, and there is a bit of a moderation of this cloud stuff. But you are still very much so one of the people who kind of goes out and says no, no, no, stuff is very, very different.

And more importantly, the point that you have been making recently is that, if you don’t change as close to the floor, so to speak, as possible, then you are really not going to get all the benefits of doing cloud stuff.

And kind of my thing to tack onto that is like, with any sort of technological change if you are not getting the full benefit, it’s probably not worth your time to some extent. And I don’t know, it’s interesting to see you speaking to trying to push people over the edge even further than they want to go, so to speak.

Randy Bias: Yeah. I mean, I have realized that people get really uncomfortable when I am talking about some of this stuff. But the thing is, is that I want to try to understand if this had happened before and I kind of looked back and I sort of saw that there was this fairly large transition from mainframe computing to what I call enterprise computing, and that transition took 20-30 years.

I mean, mainframe computing was dominant in the 1960s moving into the 1970s, and then the 1980s we sort of had this revolution where suddenly it wasn’t this big huge box in the corner that only a few people knew how to use and controlled access to, now there is greater and wider access to both the servers and the clients, and that really changed the whole model for how we think about computing. And I think we are in the midst of that same kind of change today.

And my thinking isn’t exactly along Nick Carr’s line. The thing I love about Nick Carr the most is that he has got these historical examples of how other business infrastructure, like power systems, electrical power systems, telecommunications, railways, air transportation, have followed these same kind of commoditized move towards utility models, and that’s what I really find valuable about his writing.

But then when I look at sort of this transition from enterprise computing to cloud computing, you can kind of see it happening, right? It’s that — we are just moving further along that same trajectory from mainframe, which is that, now you have got all these mobile devices that are — you are hyperconnected all the time. You have got something with the power in your pocket today, an iPhone or Android, that is significantly more powerful than anything we had in the 80s, and you can connect it to a data center full of thousands or tens of thousands of servers to do processing on in little and no time at all.

I think that, that changes the whole dynamics of pretty much everything, both how we build the applications, how we consume them, how the infrastructure underneath them that powers the applications, I mean it’s just shifting everything around.

Michael Coté: Yeah. I want to — I usually skirt away from sort of definitional things, but I want to ask you in a little while about like what this fundamental shift is that you have to go through, like what the changed IT is, if you will.

But you just brought us something that I also kind of kick around in my head quite a bit. I was watching I think, I forget if it was your Cloudscaling talk or the one you did at in Seoul at the Korea Cloud Foundations thing.

Randy Bias: Cloud Frontiers?

Michael Coté: Yeah, there you go. And you mentioned people having mobile devices and this constant connectivity, and so I am kind of curious in the work, whether it’s kind of looking out at things theoretically or the work you are doing for clients. Like what are sort of like the business drivers that are pushing people towards cloud computing and beyond sort of like, as you would put it, beyond kind of like bottom line growth, if you will, kind of cutting cost and saving money, but what are these new lines of businesses or business models that companies are wanting to do or being enabled to do with cloud computing?

And the reason I am kind of infamous for asking long questions with a bunch of statements, so if you will pardon me. And the reason I ask this is, a lot of the examples that you and other cloud people use are — I divide them into two types, they are either external facing things like Netflix, which makes perfect sense, right? You have got thousands and thousands of people accessing your IT essentially and you need to scale it. Or they are kind of batch jobs, like something Eli Lilly might do, or maybe kind of Animoto is in the two of these, where they just seem to do a lot of processing all at once.

And so I am curious like beyond those two types of, if you will pardon the old phrase, workloads, like are there other kind of business models or drivers that you are seeing businesses really lust after cloud computing for?

Randy Bias: Yeah. I mean, so the simple answer, my oversimplification is basically, you just have to ask yourself, what can you do differently if you can get 10,000 servers for an hour for $100? I mean, that’s sort of my litmus test.

Michael Coté: Yeah. That’s a very concise way of putting it.

Randy Bias: And then, actually I have this blog posting I think from 2008, I have to go back and search for it, but basically at that time I said, hey, here is the big use cases; one is speed, sort of time to market. So can I get something up and running now, and you actually see that in AWS, you see a lot of media companies, they don’t really have elastic workloads, so to speak, they have their need to be able to bring something up for a period of time very quickly and then tear it down.

The second big use case I had was leverage, and this is sort of the equalizing effect. It means that any small startup now can actually get enough compute power to be able to compete with the larger business.

So the barriers to entry for a lot of use cases, batch processing or processing a market data are pretty much going away or are much smaller than they used to be.

The third was sort of that classic elasticity use case, which I think it more applies to that batch processing or sort of the Animoto use cases.

And then a fourth, which I think we are going to see — which we are starting to see now, but hasn’t quite got there, is what I call sort of the reach use case, which is that, you see a lot of — as there gets to be more and more clouds globally, you see a lot of use cases that are about being able to put your infrastructure in another country or your application in another country with very little friction. So that really changes the dynamics.

The two examples I like to give are Friendster, which I don’t know how many of your listeners know the history about it. Friendster was one of the first social networking sites and it was based in the U.S., but then was run over by Facebook and MySpace, and it wound up that the vast majority of their users were in the Philippines, but they were servicing them from the U.S., and they had no way to pivot and go move their application to the Philippines, and if they had, it might have made a difference for their longevity.

And then the next use case is, I love 99designs. They are a small Australian outfit that puts their production servers on Amazon in the U.S. to sell to U.S. customers’ logos and graphic designs that are contributed by people from second and third world countries.

So you have got a guy in Latvia with the laptop contributing an entry. And so you have got folks in Australia basically bringing up application on demand in the United States and then servicing the global market.

I just see that those dynamics really — all four of those use cases are sort of the big buckets I kind of put all those cloud use cases in.

Michael Coté: Yeah, it’s kind of like the last case, reach, that I feel like I have been — I have this kind of hope, where I have kind of been searching mentally in my head for like — if I were to go to any given medium to large size business and tell them like, here is why you should do cloud and why it’s generative beyond like you will just be able to do stuff better, right?

Because I am always trying to avoid like, well, it just lets you do things better, because that’s kind of what IT has done since the dawning of time, since probably the stone wheel I guess.

And it’s almost like to some extent every business would like to increase its reach and interaction with its customers or whoever is sort of moving the money primarily as that comes in and out of the business. And I sort of feel like that kind of brings in all of the aspects you were just talking about.

Like one, you want to be able to spin up different pieces of IT or applications to do different little business models here and there in a cheap way so that — it’s almost like you are lowering the bar for how IT can help with the business. Like with the more traditional IT, enterprise sort of applications, if you will, or enterprise IT, there is sort of like this minimum buy-in, like, well, anything we do is going to cost like $2 million.

So to some extent it better be like a big business if you are going to do — a moderately sized new business. Whereas with the speed that you can do and the certain amount of leverage and everything, essentially a business of any size, including businesses and smaller ones, can start to use IT in ways that were just very cost prohibitive to do in the past.

And more importantly, to the speed that you were talking to, it’s not necessarily all about the money side of cost, but also just the time and opportunity.

And so I think that’s a lot of the more interesting things that I am starting to see recently of people using cloud is that, it may not be sort of like a traditional or legacy type of IT application, but it’s a business figuring out something new that they can do with IT, which I think is somewhat — I mean, that’s another thing that you get into quite a bit is the idea that a lot of what you see people using cloud for is not necessarily like legacy app migration or something like that.

Randy Bias: Right. I mean, if you go and you look at it right now, most larger enterprises are sort of split into two kind of what I will call adoption groups. So adoption group number one are sort of the app developers and the folks in line of business who are trying to get things done in order to help the business succeed. Mostly what they are looking at is top line revenue generation opportunities.

Adoption group number two is really a centralized IT department which is looking at ways that they can reduce cost and get bottom line efficiencies, and mostly they are looking at preexisting legacy applications. They are saying, well, I have got a bunch of virtualization deployed, I am going to automate it, and then I have got a cloud and things are going to be rosy and sunny.

I think part of the problem, part of the disconnect here is that, there is a certain amount of the app developers line of businesses going around centralized IT to adopt a certain amount of flight and it looks very similar to — the drivers and motivators look very similar to the ones that are around sort of the Salesforce.com use case, which is, I could go to centralized IT and I could try to get their help, but the red tape, the length of time it will take me to get service, the responses, all of that is sort of problematic. So instead I am just going to put my credit card online and get going, because I am trying to get something done for the business in time.

Michael Coté: Yeah. I mean, it’s kind of like — you could call up a company’s customer service line and go through their IVR system, their Interactive Voice Prompt or talk to a person or you could just go to Google and like search for it. It’s like so often the case that the services set up by a company are the last place you actually want to go to get help with that company.

Randy Bias: Yeah, and to be fair to the centralized IT teams, I mean to some degree they have been set up for failure. I mean, what’s happened is that they have been sort of in an inherent monopoly, whether intentionally or not, over the past 30 years and they are on the hook for the service levels that they provide internally, and so they have gotten more and more risk averse.

And this really comes out when you look at buying decisions, because I sort of see this like very dysfunctional relationship between the centralized IT department and typical enterprise vendors.

So what tends to happen is that — that’s an old saw of, nobody ever got fired for buying IBM or Cisco or whatever. And part of what that deal is, is there’s a somewhat inherent deal that whenever there is any large infrastructure undertaking, centralized IT will go at their strategic enterprise suppliers, and if there’s a failure or a problem, those suppliers will fall on their sword and kind of save that person.

So I think there’s a lot more motivation for typical centralized IT folks to focus on what I call CYA decisions, Cover Your Ass. And if you go and you look at a service provider whose very lifeblood is on the line, I mean whatever they are providing in terms of information technology services to their customer base directly impacts the liability of the business that they have to make ROI decisions all the time. They can’t make CYA decisions. If they make a CYA decision, the business dies.

Whereas, the large financial institution might be, hey, 10% of our revenue just goes right into the IT budget, it’s cost of doing business, we don’t know what happens to it. We have to get value.

Michael Coté: That’s funny. I was just reading like a review of a book about the history of hedge funds and they kind of made exactly that same point about hedge funds versus institutional investors, like big banks, that people at large banks, it’s sort of like, I don’t know, they are not — their success and their wealth, actually in this case, is not really directly tied to the performance of the work that they are doing in the same way that hedge funds investors are. It’s very similar to a service provider. A service provider needs something that works, not just something that looked good on paper, therefore it’s not their fault when it breaks.

Randy Bias: Right, which is why — it’s part of why I have had this kind of like rant about the enterprise cloud lately is because, I really figured out lately that this whole approach to building sort of these “enterprise clouds” is fundamentally broken from the ROI point of view.

I mean, you have sort of got this weird disconnect or you have got the larger service providers, I don’t want to name anybody’s name, they are pretty obvious when you go out there and look at them, they have got these big enterprise spaces and they are saying, hey, enterprises don’t want what Amazon has got, they want something different, they need to support all these legacy applications.

So they are trying to build these very complex, very expensive clouds that are not going to be anywhere near cross-competitor with Amazon. And at the same time you look at the centralized IT department and they are making a decision. They are like, well, are we going to outsource all these legacy apps and our jobs go away, or do we just build our own internal private cloud? Most of them are choosing to go down building that internal private cloud route.

So you have got centralized IT going to the enterprise vendors to build an infrastructure that looks exactly the way these external public enterprise clouds look, same people, same technology, same management processes. And I don’t understand how there’s — I don’t see success in the future for either of those paths, and they are inherently competing with each other as well, and Amazon has kind of run away.

Michael Coté: If we can construct a strawman, as it were, like what are the arguments people are using to build their own private cloud, if you will, or enterprise cloud, like what’s motivating, beyond the losing their job like what are the other — what’s the checklist of things that don’t work out for them?

Randy Bias: Well, I just want to draw a distinction because it’s not as clear in some of their presentation, it’s like there is a difference between an enterprise cloud and a private cloud in my mind. The enterprise cloud is using enterprise computing techniques to build a cloud whereas a private cloud is a cloud for a single tenant. So you could use enterprise cloud to build a private cloud or you could use commodity cloud to build a private cloud, either one. So you can build your cloud like AWS or you can build it like how Cisco and EMC built it, and those are very different.

Michael Coté: Right, that makes sense.

Randy Bias: Yeah. Sorry.

Michael Coté: Oh, mo, no, no, it’s good to — I always joke that there is about 50 different words you can stick in front of cloud nowadays, so it’s always good to define what — that’s right, what the combinations are.

So what do you see is motivating people to use enterprise techniques to build their own cloud? I imagine there’s something they are fearing or they think is lacking from just running it on Amazon or something.

Randy Bias: Right. So the key driver I think is when you look at a lot of the legacy applications, they have some needs that to be honest are not met by Amazon Web Services.

The best way to think about this, and Lew Tucker had a great presentation on Cloud Connect right before mine, is what the history — how we got here is that everybody kind of came in and they said, okay, I have got a new application that’s going to go in the data center, and these are the requirements for my application in terms of compute, storage, and networking, and then those requirements were fulfilled.

So when you look inside of a typical enterprise data center, you have silos all over, every single application has its own stack. So you might have the Exchange Server running on top of EMC and then you might have some databases running on top of NetApp Storage, and it’s different everywhere.

Michael Coté: It’s almost as if each application has its own cloud that it’s running on.

Randy Bias: Exactly. The way that I recently have been sort of talking about this is, imagine that you were sitting at a desk and you have got ten different appliances in front of you, and one takes like 8 volts DC, another takes 12 volts DC, one takes 120 volts AC single phase, and then another one takes 220 volts three phase. Now, if you go to the power company and you say, I want you to deliver the power that each of my appliances needs exactly as it needs it, no transformation. The power company’s cost jump up 5-10x.

Now, if instead each appliance has its own transformer and then the power comes in as a single type of power and then it’s changed, then you get — now everybody who builds an appliance takes on the responsibility of having to transform the power to their needs. But on the other hand, the power itself can be very reliable, it can be very cheap, and it can be the same everywhere.

So I think that’s part of what we are looking at, and part of what makes it that hard to swallow for a lot of the legacy apps is that they are preexisting appliances that don’t have those power transformers in them. I mean, you have to make a decision, are you going to refactor them so that they are cloud ready? Are you going to migrate off of them to some other new Software-as-a-Service based application or rewrite them from scratch? I mean, how do you handle that?

I think most people are trying to figure out a way to get the value that Amazon brings while taking legacy apps as they are and putting them on top of it. And while I think that’s possible, it’s not going to be done through building very expensive 10x, 8-10x more expensive clouds.

Michael Coté: Yeah. I mean, it’s kind of — it’s almost impossible to sort of quantify what it would take to modernize all those applications out there. I mean, I think — I guess like the only touch point I can think of is like the Y2K scare where everyone was sort of forced to go make this very small change, or relatively small change to every application that was out there, because they thought it was going to be Mad Max the next day or whatever. As I recall, that was not cheap.

So like changing the nature of an application that it can run on a different platform is, there will be things that like will work out, but it’s quite an onerous process.

Randy Bias: The thing here is that Moore’s Law is basically our friend, and if you go and look at a bunch of the capabilities that Amazon has added over the past couple of years like virtual private cloud, the dedicated instances now, the new networking features in the virtual private cloud, I mean, you can see that they are slowing eating away at a lot of the core use cases that legacy apps require. And I think what we are going to see is a combination of features added on top of commodity clouds like Amazon Web Services, plus just the hardware gets that much better.

We have a big — our big client in Korea was in the process of doing their P2V and they got concerned because they had some databases running on some Pentium IIIs from 2000 on Windows. And I said, look, as soon as you virtualize those, they are going to be blazing fast. Because the hardware under the cloud is just so much better than those Pentium IIIs that the overheard just doesn’t matter, and there will be tons and tons of that stuff that over the next three to five years it will be easier and easier going to cloud, because the impedance mismatch will lessen.

Michael Coté: Yeah. I mean, they are going to need one of those turbo buttons from the old 386, where you had to slow the computer down so you use old software without it going crazy.

Randy Bias: I still play those old games.

Michael Coté: That’s right, little Lode Runner here and there or whatever…

Randy Bias: I have a soft spot for Ultima actually.

Michael Coté: Oh, yeah, yeah, and there was always plenty of editions of that to rest on. Being in Austin, Ultima was a very popular thing around here since –

Randy Bias: Oh yeah, of course.

Michael Coté: Yeah. In fact, while we are ratholing here on games, like Richard Garriott, like he is renowned for his Halloween party every year, because as you can imagine being the Ultima guy, he has like a castle somewhere around here.

Randy Bias: Awesome!

Michael Coté: And there is like 20 secret doors and all sorts of things like that, so he invites some people out every Halloween to like go to the Richard Garriott Haunted House Castle thing. I have never been, but it’s supposed to be pretty awesome.

So yeah, anyhow, getting out of that rathole, going through a secret door back to our main conversation. I mean, I am curious, like you were saying you can see Amazon eating away at these enterprise concerns like — not that I want you to detail like a list of 50 things, but like what’s kind of like the handful of top things that are like enterprise concerns? What do you see those requirements being, whether they are good requirements or not that enterprises are coming out with?

Randy Bias: So I mean, there are three that people like to trot out regularly as sort of the high level bullet points, which I don’t necessarily agree with, but there is security, availability, and performance, those are the three that get trotted out.

Security is sort of a nonstarter. You can build a cloud to be as secure as you want, doesn’t matter what techniques you use. I just pretty much ignore that.

And performance, that’s more related to the underlying hardware than anything else. So again, I would pretty much ignore it, because I think it’s very easy to build a commodity cloud that’s got significantly better performance characteristics or at least on par with any kind of enterprise cloud, no matter how much it is spent.

And then the third availability. There is something here that kind of gets to a little bit of the heart of the matter, which is that there is an assumption that legacy applications need the infrastructure to be fairly robust because they aren’t. So there is a need to have a lot more HA and redundancy all throughout the infrastructure. So when Amazon says, hey, just assume that these virtual machines can disappear at any time, for most legacy apps that’s a nonstarter.

And one way to get around that is to make the cloud ready to refactor them or rebuild them. Another way is to adopt somebody else’s service and just deprecate your old application.

But I think we are going to see probably some things out of the AWS pipeline and other commodity cloud’s pipelines that deal with sort of that persistency and availability issue without necessarily adding in all of the HA and redundancy that a lot of the enterprises want.

Michael Coté: Yeah, yeah. No, that reminds me — I mean, perhaps as one specific thing like I remember back when I first got into working at an enterprise software ISV. I was sort of shocked to discover how often like shared network drives were like a fundamental part of the way a lot of enterprise applications ran. It was kind to what you are saying, is like — I mean, shared network drives are kind of none of those three things.

Like they are very unreliable, they are very unsecure, and their performance is always questionable, and there is always stuff happening. Yet, it’s kind of like that’s a huge successful anti-pattern, so to speak, of enterprise application design. So like I said, it’s kind of an example of, if you have an application that’s depending on that, it’s not really going to work out extremely well in a cloud situation.

I mean, you can kind of rewrite it to be the equivalent of doing something like that, but there is all these sorts of networking things that don’t really work out very well. And also like you are saying, dedicated nodes in your cluster, so to speak, are not — there is a certain amount of redundancy that you need.

Randy Bias: And the thing about redundancy that I am not sure that people get is, when you go and you look at typical redundancy in an enterprise data center, and this is what I sort of call sort of the design for failover model as opposed to the design for failure model. But you see all throughout the enterprise data center this kind of pairing. So it’s HA pairs everywhere, you have got pairs of load balancers, pairs of switches, pairs of file servers, and it kind of turtles all the way down, it’s just pairs everywhere.

And the thing is, is like by pairing everything you increase the cost 2x right off the bat, almost all the time. And some people will make an argument, well, you can run them active-active, but most people don’t run them active-active, because — or if they do, they get bigger boxes, because they want in their failure condition not to lose any capacity. So even if you are running active-active, you are trying to run both those boxes at 50%, so you overbuild them both, so that when you failover, you can run one 100%.

So the pattern — I mean, you go and you look at sort of the cost of rebuilding a new application, a greenfield application that you — or building a greenfield application versus adopting sort of that design for failure methodology where you actually build and assume that any of the virtual machines or instances can go in anytime, and you move away from the HA. When you do that and you look at the price differential, suddenly that 2x doesn’t look very good for the greenfield applications. I think that that’s going to drive a lot of change.

Michael Coté: Yeah. There is another interesting sub-point that you raise up, and to ask a question around it, how important do you see the role of comparing cost of doing something one way versus the other? How important does that become at every level of thinking about using cloud? Like is it something that like architects think about or is it only the manager who thinks about it? Because the sense that I get is, if you are not thinking about the cost as something that drives possibilities, if you pay less for something you can do more stuff I guess, then you are kind of also missing out on some of the advantages of cloud stuff you are doing.

Randy Bias: So I think that if you — sort of the way that utility providers arise, going back to Nick Carr’s ‘Does IT Matter?’, and the utility providers arise because there is an opportunity in the marketplace for somebody to specialize in a particular kind of business infrastructure, whether it’s power or telecommunications or something else.

What that means is that by doing only that one thing and making it a core competency, you can be extremely successful at it. And if we look at Amazon and Google, in many ways they backed into being some of the largest information technology infrastructures in the world that have provided as a service.

When you are up against that, and they are ruthlessly cutting out the cost of everything, their data center and power cooling, the cost of their server hardware, the cost of their software, their development cost, as they are ripping all that out, I mean if you are not thinking about that, you wind up trying to compete against somebody who is continually dropping their cost and passing that on in their pricing.

We have done several blog posts on this in the past and if you go and you look at it, Amazon just keeps reducing their prices, I mean, it’s relentless. I mean, they know the game they are in and they are playing it to win from the get-go and so one of the things that I find humorous here is that, I don’t think a lot of the enterprise cloud guys are actually baking this in, they are not baking in the price drops into their model.

Michael Coté: Yeah. It’s always easy to be sort of two-faced or talk out of both corners of your mouth about cost and cloud. Because on the one hand, like you are exactly right, like if — and as I was saying at the beginning, like if you are not concerned — if you are not driving down the cost, then you might kind of be wasting time essentially, or if you are not paying attention to that, things will get overrun. Then on the other hand, you also want to have that not be the only thing that you are focusing on.

So what I have kind of discovered is, it seems like good advice for people is, not that you only pay attention to cost but make sure you are at least paying attention to that as one of the criteria for doing cloud stuff. And it’s just sort of like — it sounds kind of ridiculous because it’s dealing with money, which is always supposed to be very important and precise, but it’s almost as if like thinking about cost is a good rule of thumb to judge if you are doing the right thing.

Just like you are saying, if you are paying a lot more than you would just be getting for off the shelf cloud stuff, so to speak, then you are probably doing something a little wonky. So it is — I don’t know, it does seem like it plays a pretty important role.

And it’s funny when you were going through that I was thinking it’s kind of analogous to the — in the realm of U.S. politics to this theory of starve the beast. The way you are going to make any bureaucracy efficient is basically to deny it money and then figure out.

Because in any sort of organization or organism, if you will, including a bureaucracy, wants to save itself, so even if they don’t have money, they will figure out something in order to not die I guess. But that’s perhaps a little Draconian for what IT people want to hear.

Randy Bias: Well, I mean, I really want IT folks to be successful, but I mean there is a big transition happening and people need to think about what that means. I don’t think the IT that we see today is going to be the same as the IT of tomorrow. I think the IT of tomorrow is going to be a lot more application focused and a lot less infrastructure focused.

I am not sure people really want to accept that, because in many ways it’s easy to let things remain as a status quo, but I mean, the disruption is so industry wide and you can — I mean, Amazon has gone — basically Amazon Web Services has turned into a billion dollar business in about five year’s time, and I mean that’s a huge wake up call. I mean, you don’t see those levels of growth very often. So something very fundamental is happening here.

Michael Coté: Yeah. I mean, one of the things you use and that other people mention a lot — I am surprised more people don’t mention it but that comes up is that, the Bechtel CIO is like study of storage cost and other things when it comes to cloud and that kind of shocking moment. I mean, I forget what the multiplier is, but that kind of shocking moment where there is a huge difference between their most optimal way to do storage and what Amazon charges for it.

And if you get over the sort of like the trinity of FUD, like security, availability, and performance, you start to wonder like why am I paying so damn much for storage. And it just gets to that point that you keep butting up against is that, there is just this kind of fundamentally different way of operating your IT that you get to, where things change quite a bit and the cost go down dramatically.

Randy Bias: Yeah. And that’s what I am really seeing right now across the board. We focus on service providers and telcos because we think they have the DNA to be the next generation service providers, but even still now talking to certain enterprises… they are either trying to figure out how to reproduce that internally or they are trying to figure out how to get a media leverage from it and get competitive advantage from today, and then looking at their long-term roadmaps.

So it’s going to be a longer term shift, there is no doubt about it, but it’s hard not to see it taking place today. And it’s a little confusing to me when you get some of the fear, uncertainty, and doubt coming from big enterprise vendors, and there is a certain need they seem to have to try to protect the existing infrastructure, IT infrastructure spend from large enterprises without regard for what those large enterprises actually mean, and I think a lot of times they need to just use a proper cloud, not necessarily build their own.

Michael Coté: Yeah. Well, let’s kind of close out with that thing I kind of earmarked at the beginning which was, for us talking about how dramatically things shift and with the changes and everything, I mean can you give us a sense of what it does look like if you are running sort of a legit cloud? I mean, we have talked a little bit about needing to change applications to run on that kind of infrastructure, but in the work that you have been doing, what is the end result of this shift that people go through so that they can actually have, I don’t know, to use a cheesy phrase, better cloud economics and get those advantages of doing cloud without kind of getting stuck in the enterprise cloud cul-de-sac, if you will?

Randy Bias: Any kind of infrastructure cloud is basically going to look a lot like Amazon. Your CAPEX costs are going to be reduced by something like 75%. Your operational costs are going to be reduced similarly, at least for the infrastructure side. And you will probably see a change of a factor of 10 or a 100x in the number of infrastructure people you need to run a successful private cloud.

I think that one of the other key things is that they will be a lot more focus on what do we actually need to run on it versus what needs to go outside and be run on somebody else’s.

So what I mean by that is, if you are running Microsoft Exchange today, rather than putting your email through somebody else’s on-demand service, whether it’s Microsoft or Gmail, that just doesn’t really make any sense, because the reality is, is that, that provides you no competitive differentiation, there is no business advantage. I mean, it’s IT that is just there, it just provides some basic service to the business.

Any kind of IT that provides simply basic services to the business probably shouldn’t be run by the internal IT department. The internal IT department should be focused on those parts of the business that are fundamentally differentiating and that should be what your private cloud is focused on.

Michael Coté: Right, right. Like you said, this transition takes several years or some long time, but how — at this point, with the people that you are seeing doing this, how are people gearing up for it? I mean, are they really charting out like multiyear projects, or did they start with small things? I mean, you are kind of laying out a pretty dramatic goal, if you will, as far as like different from the here and now. I mean, how are people taking on that challenge? And part of what you said, MSPs are a lot more likely to get it than enterprises I guess.

Randy Bias: So what most enterprises are doing right now is they are buying very expensive solutions from their strategic enterprise vendors, they are slapping a little bit of automation on top of virtualization, and they are declaring a win. So what we are going to see is, what we think of as sort of fail forward, which is that as those victories are declared and then they fail to deliver business value, there is going to be more retrenchments to figure out how to get it done properly.

A few things are going to happen, either CIOs and CTOs are going to figure it out and they are going to go to the next generation suppliers and move away from the enterprise suppliers and actually get something done inside the business that makes sense, or heads are going to roll and people are going to be brought in that will more broadly adopt public cloud services or some combination.

Michael Coté: Yeah, to use another fantastic model next to the disruptive one, that’s the Trough of Disillusionment, if I remember from the Hype Cycle, which is always an exciting time. I think that’s one of my favorite points of any model that’s existed for a while. I mean, you never really come across disillusionment in the model.

So like you are saying, people now are buying these expensive solutions, if you will, or systems to be all inclusive of the hardware and the software and everything, and I guess what I have been wondering recently is what are the alternatives, is there like the cloud hardware and stack that you can buy or acquire nowadays? I mean, I guess I am kind of unclear, if I wanted to do cloud the right way, what would I assemble together to do it the right way or is it sort of like a one-off each time?

Randy Bias: It’s very challenging, because there are a few different dimensions here that have to be conquered. The first is capital efficiency parts. Second is the operational efficiency parts. And then the third is sort of the cultural change.

And there is really nothing today that addresses all three of those things, but there might be in the future, wink-wink, nudge-nudge.

But I think that people are still looking at this as sort of a product problem instead of a transformation problem, and I have literally had senior enterprise people say to me, wow, we are buying this new automation software, we are going to put it in our data center and we are going to turn our data center into a cloud, and I just tragically fell off my chair laughing it was like, there is no software you can buy to automate your data center and turn it into a cloud, if there was somebody would have been successful with all the attempts that have happened over the past 30 years to automate data centers. I mean, that’s not what’s happening.

So I think it’s a holistic problem, it’s a systems level problem, it’s like sort of turn the data center into like a gigantic IT service, but people look at it as sort of being solved by products, and I don’t think it can be solved by products, it has to be solved by a combination of products, architecture, and cultural change. And products will get us part of the way but they won’t get us all the way there, and it certainly won’t be any of the old products.

Michael Coté: Right. Let me ask you another question along those lines, because I have been in thinking about this recently I have been wondering if there is a certain, I don’t know what to call it, so I will just come up with something, a certain line of scale, where if you are not past this line then building your own sort of private cloud is not really going to be worth it.

Like it’s almost as if to do the capital layout and to go through the cultural change and to do all this stuff, it’s kind of ironically like I was describing enterprise software earlier, that it’s going to be a multimillion dollar thing, if you will, so whatever it is you end up with, you better generate a lot more revenue than that. And if you are not past this line, then you should just use public cloud, if you will. But I don’t know, like I said, that’s just some wacky theory on my part.

I wonder if you are seeing that there is a certain scale of business you have to be in order to sort of justify caring about having your own private cloud.

Randy Bias: I mean, I certainly think there is. I think people get confused though because they think it’s about buying power, and it’s actually not that hard to get enough buying power to get things like servers inexpensive, that’s not really the challenge.

The scale problem is around, if you look at just taking the Adobe as an example, I mean they are reducing prices every year while increasing features. I mean, if you can’t do that, and that’s a significant change, then you shouldn’t be in the game. And I think to do that you are looking at an investment between $10 million and $100 million and it’s going to be very difficult for you to find the kind of talent, and there is going to be a lot of failures to get you there.

Now, I am not saying people shouldn’t go do that when it makes sense for their business, it’s just, if you are not ready to put that kind of new investment into being a successful cloud based business with those core technology, then I don’t think it makes any sense to build your own private cloud.

Michael Coté: Yeah, yeah. It’s interesting that — I guess they call it economies of scale, if you will, which is one of the motivators to be a big company – that, you can drive down your operating cost per whatever unit you measure, if you will.

And I guess to some extent, aside from negotiating enterprise agreements and stuff, I don’t know if that’s always applied in IT as much as it has been, for example, with Walmart and their vendor relationships. Walmart can make things really cheap because they just buy so much, whereas the cliché mom and pop store can’t necessarily get cheap stuff from their suppliers. So there is that certain — I don’t know, if you can operate with those economies of scale the way you are deploying your own IT then it would make sense. Otherwise you want to go with the utility, as you keep saying.

Randy Bias: Yeah. I mean, the economies of scale argument — an important thing to remember is just that, it’s not purely about buying power. Getting buying power is not very difficult, there are other economies of scale. I mean, how has Amazon got 400 engineers and data center techs basically running 80,000 plus physical servers? I mean, it’s because they are doing things very differently.

Michael Coté: And that’s the cultural stuff you are talking about essentially.

Randy Bias: Right. And part of the economies of scale is like very homogenous environments. Like Google is reputed to have five hardware configurations across one to two million servers, whereas in a typical enterprise environment I have seen hundreds of hardware configurations across a much smaller footprint.

So it’s not — that’s part of that whole transformation, that completely new way of doing things that is fundamental. It’s software development and automation, that’s one piece. It’s homogenization, commoditization, and standardization, that’s another piece. It’s service based delivery models. So I think the part of the focus of an Amazon or a Google is 24×7 service delivery that in many cases, many enterprise use cases, doesn’t really exist.

And the fourth is what I call sort of more the layered service architecture. So if you look at Google, I have got these data centers that are designed for certain efficiencies around power and cooling. And then I put in very inexpensive hardware. And then I put in software like Google FS which turns a bunch of that hardware into storage. And then I layer BigTable on top of that which gives me a columnar database, which leverages Google Storage, Google FS. And then I put MapReduce on top of BigTable, which leverages the columnar database to do data processing. And so then I put my applications on top of that.

So I have got Gmail and I have got Search and I have got Google Apps and all of those things share that same stack of software and hardware. Every single one of them uses Google FS. Every single one of them uses BigTable and MapReduce. And you just don’t — they are getting a certain amount of efficiency, both at the hardware and at the capital and the operational side by doing that, and that’s very, very difficult for an enterprise which is used to having very specific bespoke requirements for every single application that gets deployed in the data center.

Michael Coté: Yeah. that’s interesting because that makes me think that one of the things that cloud computing has done is, it has introduced the next generation of legacy software, if you will. I mean, I used to think of legacy software as sort of like AS/400 stuff and things on mainframes and kind of like that weird gray area between mainframe and enterprise computing before Windows came around.

But to some extent, like drawing from what you were just saying, there is sort of this new class — there is a ton of legacy software out there now that most people don’t think of as legacy software, assuming this cloud thing has legs, if you will, which — it’s kind of instructive to think of it that way, because people like IBM and other people have figured out how to keep legacy software alive, if you will.

And it’s kind of — I mean, it’s not cheap necessarily, but it’s sort of possible. But I think what’s interesting is to apply those same strategies to the bulk of software that we have now and start thinking about what — if you believe in all this cloud stuff – you would need to do to get to those greenfield things? Because that does seem to be a lot of the painfulness of cloud transitions that I hear about, that essentially all that software that you have, it’s not really going to work in this new way of doing things.

And it’s almost like it is what it is and the cost structures are only going to be improved a little bit by — you can virtualize something and do some things here and there, but there is a certain ceiling you are going to hit that you are not — or a floor I guess, that you are not really going to get much past unless you do a lot of serious rewriting.

Randy Bias: Right. Again, I like to go back in history, and if you look at some of the transition from mainframe computing to enterprise computing, people made a lot of these same kinds of decisions there as well.

One of the examples I like to give is Kaiser Permanente. I mean, their electronic healthcare record system is still running 100% on mainframes. They have spent 10 or 100x, but it’s the core competitive differentiation as a business, and it works, and they are happy. So maybe they will never move it off a mainframe, and that’s totally okay.

And then you have got some other businesses, like there is a financial company in Korea that we spent some time with, and they started out on mainframes but now everything runs on risk UNIX boxes, but it’s all COBOL. They use a mainframe emulation technology called Mainframe Rehosting. So Mainframe Rehosting basically allowed them to deprecate all those mainframes and to adopt and mask without changing their business process or their applications, which don’t run like they are on the mainframe.

And I think we are going to see all of that and we are also going to see sort of that same kind of Salesforce.com adoption model, which is, I have got us AP deployed and I can keep spending millions to maintain it to map it to my business process, or I can just go outside the firewall and use somebody else’s service, because it’s CRM, I just need my sales guys to be effective.

So I think we are going to see everything between, it’s never moving, to it’s moving with some kind of enabling technology. Like the current example of this is CloudSwitch, which allows you to take sort of that legacy application and just wrap it in a bubble and stick it out there unchanged, to I am going to adopt something new and I am just going to migrate away from my current application usage. And it’s going to be either a new service I rebuild internally that’s cloudy or somebody else’s service outside.

Michael Coté: Yeah, yeah. I have been using the phrase recently, if ain’t broke, don’t cloud it, which is sort of like a legacy modernization term. To exactly your point, there are plenty of people, not a lot, but there are plenty of people running stuff on mainframes and it works perfectly fine so why would you screw with it? Assuming that the costs are fine and all that kind of business, but if there is not something fundamentally wrong with some piece of technology or something wrong with it, including the cost, then it’s better to kind of look at other stuff that you would move along the technology spectrum, if you will, or modernize it seems.

Anyhow, well, I think we have kind of filled up an hour, so that was very exciting. I knew we would have a lot of fun stuff to talk to. We’ve gone through all sort of exciting scheduling carousel to finally find a time that works for both Randy and I. So, I am glad we found the time to set aside just kind of a chatter about the stuff you see in the cloud area.

Randy Bias: Yeah, that was awesome Coté. Thanks.

Michael Coté: Yeah, and we’ll see everyone next time

Disclosure: Cloudscaling is a client and sponsored this episode. See the RedMonk client list for other clients mentioned.

The missing “craft” of operations, what’s up with PaaS-hype, and some updates from conferences like SXSW and the Microsoft Management Summit – that’s what’s going on in this episode. Oh, and John has a new job!

In addition to clicking play above, you can download the episode directly or subscribe to the IT Management & Cloud feed (in iTunes or wherever) to have this episode automatically downloaded for your listening pleasure.

Show Notes

• Cloudy Awards, SXSW dev/ops inside cloudcamp. Later, I ask John to evaluate the worth of going to SXSW for cloud/infrastructure and dev/ops people.
• VisibleOps overview from John, as one of the VisibleOps dudes was there.
• The idea of getting rid of operations as a cumbersome barrier to development needs to be smoothed out.
• OpsCraft: Spiceworks Exchange thread as an example of ops craft.
• PaaS hype – Is this just a PaaSing interest?
• What I want is to be flexible in my business decisions.
• What’s this NoOps business?
• Advanced Virtual Deployment Software from IBM; Dell OpenStack Installer, Project Crowbar.
• MMS 2011 overview.
• John has a new job!
• The dto solutions paper Coté likes.
• Virtualization post over at Spiceworks.
• “It it ain’t broke, don’t cloud it” vs. “When in doubt, cloud it out!” vs. “Cloud ‘em all, and let ops sort it out.”

Transcript

Michael Coté: Well, hello everybody! This is 28th of March, 2011. This is the IT Management & Cloud Podcast #86, if I have the number right, which I just looked up the number, John, and all of a sudden I am having doubts that it’s actually #86. I don’t know why I feel like these extreme doubts, can you explain it?

John Willis: Well, I think it should be more than 86, right?

Michael Coté: Yeah? It is 86, because we recorded like three episodes last time.

John Willis: Yeah, we have been slackers for quite a while now.

Michael Coté: That’s right. That’s right. Well, did you have a safe trip back from South by Southwest?

John Willis: I did, yes. It was good.

Michael Coté: I have to admit, I played a little of the disappearing Houdini act there several times. I didn’t hang out as much as I could have with the family in town, but why don’t — how did the Cloudy Awards end up?

John Willis: It was fun. I mean, I guess for anybody who was paying attention — they had to change the venue a couple of times. Originally the venue was going to be at this house. Did you hear this story? It’s hilarious, right?

Michael Coté: No.

John Willis: The Dyn Inc. guys were ready to house — they are just a fun bunch. I mean, if buying software because you like people is a good enough reason, then buy all their Dyn Inc. and all the DynDNS stuff they have, because they are just fun, awesome dudes.

Anyway, so they rented a house for the week, party animals. So they were going to have the Cloudy Award there. So they had like 700 people registered, figuring that maybe only like 300 would show up. But about a week-and-a-half before, the lady who owns the house looks up online, she calls them and says, you know, if you guys have more than 60 people there, I am calling the cops.

Michael Coté: Nice!

John Willis: So then, they go ahead and rent like an used warehouse floor on Congress or something, I don’t know, downtown, and then the day of, the Fire Marshal shows up and says they can’t have an event there.

Michael Coté: That happened to a lot of people I heard at South by Southwest this year.

John Willis: Really? Yeah.

Michael Coté: I mean, I am all for preventing people from being burned alive.

John Willis: Hey, I am glad, I always prefer not to. Well, and then the place they found was — do you remember the name of that place? It was beautiful.

Michael Coté: It was Serranos; it’s Symphony Square they call it.

John Willis: Yeah.

Michael Coté: It’s a Tex-Mex restaurant that’s been there for a while and they have — they are sort of this grotto, I guess is the technical term, that’s all done out. So there is a little stage with the moat along the stage. So there is kind of a theater sort of thing going on.

It’s a very nice setting. It’s kind of well-hidden, if you will, metaphorically and literally from the kind of downtown scene, so there is not a lot of — it’s kind of a surprise when people find it, if they don’t know about it already.

John Willis: Yeah, it was a brilliant venue, because here, again, the Dyn Inc. guys had planned on having bands all afternoon. And I guess one of the guys, Kyle York, he is Head of Sales there at Dyn Inc., he is also somehow in the music business, not really sure how, but they had these bands from like Minnesota and different — there were like bands that came in from different parts of the country and they would play like a couple of set and then we would announce some Cloudy Award and then they would play another set. It was just a blast. They had free drinks and great venue. It was more fun than you should be able to have and get paid to be there.

Michael Coté: That’s right.

John Willis: That was very — and they had a local hero, Michael Coté won, he came up and accepted his award.

Michael Coté: Oh yeah, and then Josh Duncan from Zenoss was there too, right?

John Willis: That’s right. It was fun. Most of the people in the crowd like didn’t really care, but it was kind of fun. At one point, you probably missed it out, I pulled out my little flip camera and I said, hey everybody, my wife doesn’t think I really do anything important, can you all say, hi Vicky? And the whole crowd waved to her, so it was kind of cool.

Michael Coté: That’s right. And then how was the CloudCamp that you went to? I was only there for a little bit during a session that you had, as I recall, about famines and people wearing grass hats.

John Willis: Yeah, we kind of hijacked it, but Dave Nielsen let us run a DevOps — impromptu DevOps kind of meeting within the CloudCamp thing, and it was very cool. We went ahead and Gene Kim, ‘The Visible Ops’ author and Founder of Tripwire, he came in and gave a presentation, and Ernest Mueller, National Instruments, and myself and a couple of other people.

So it was really a nice little — it was fun. We kind of hijacked a nice little South by Southwest DevOps meet up.

(00:04:51)

Michael Coté: That’s right. And so while we are on this little tangent here, can you sort of go over what ‘The Visible Ops’ thing is? I mean, I saw that people were very obsessed with it recently, so I finally got the book and kind of read through it myself. And it has got some good stuff in it, but I am curious to hear another retelling outside of my own head of what the deal is?

John Willis: I mean, I have read it a couple of times around the years. It’s just a good playbook for operations. It’s commonsense, but they talk about why tracking change and incident is so important. It’s really not an ITIL push it down your throat, but it’s very much service management is very important, populations, and case studies of why.

And it really — I mean, anybody in operations should at least read it once because it’s — for me, when I first read it, I am like, big freaking deal. But it’s got — actually — it was kind of the same thing when I first saw ITIL. The first time I was introduced to ITIL, I was like, so yeah, so what?

Michael Coté: So we should have a process where people request us to do things and track us doing them.

John Willis: And track changes and –

Michael Coté: Think genius.

John Willis: Well, it’s funny, because later on, hopefully, we will talk a little bit about all this screaming and hollering about DevOps, but that’s actually what a lot of guys, I guess now to look at it from their perspective, they are saying, okay, DevOps, yeah. Tell me something I don’t already know, right?

Michael Coté: Yeah. As I recall, we had an episode a few ago where I was that guy complaining about that.

John Willis: Yeah. But yeah. So no, the thing — I kind of came back and respected it, but again, when I first read it I was like, big deal. But now what I realize is, very much like I thought, it’s a way to get everybody on the same playbook, and that’s a great thing, because we are all talking from a common perspective, we understand what’s important.

I think that actually to some of the naysayers of DevOps right now, I think that’s probably the reason why people say, well, DevOps, so what? Isn’t it just all commonsense? Why are you guys making such a big deal out of it, right? Well, yeah, it is commonsense, but let’s just get all on the same playbook, because not everybody else — there’s a lot of people that didn’t think incident and change was important, especially lot of web operations companies.

Michael Coté: Right. Yeah, I think how you open it up is — I mean, that is a good explanation from what I saw as sort of — I have come to appreciate when there is discipline and process and stuff involved. Like being able to distill it down into something less than like — it’s basically like an 80-page book. It’s actually — I think if you have ever sort of encountered ITIL or MOF or any of these big process things and they seem really overwhelming and expensive and sort of cumbersome, like it’s good just to like read that book because it kind of like — it gives you the lay of the land, if you will.

I mean, that’s — yeah, I mean, I think it’s a nice book. It’s a kind of book that you could kind of hand to someone and be like, this kind of tells you what the point of IT is. Not what the point is, but like what the day-to-day — it’s sort of one view of what the day-to-day operations of IT is going to be like and it’s not like the view and you need to modify and whatever, but it gives you — when I was a programmer at some point I had no idea what IT management was about and I had to learn that so I could program tools for it, and it would have been nice to have that book at the time, to just kind of lay out all the stuff that you could further build down into.

John Willis: Well, it’s funny, because I mean, I was talking before on our podcast is that, there is this whole thing about NoOps now. It shouldn’t be DevOps, it should be NoOps.

Like I agree but I disagree, and the part — I think we are not speaking the same language. So there almost needs to be this kind of handbook again of, let’s just all get on the same page before we start arguing. Like the idea of operation as being a cumbersome barrier for development to get things done, we need to eliminate, we need to move that out.

But the idea that we don’t need — it depends on what you mean by NoOps, is, do you mean that like you don’t care about all that knowledge and IP of people who fundamentally know how to run IT datacenters?

By the way, sports fans, just because you put it in the cloud doesn’t mean a lot of that secret sauce of running operations goes away. People think, oh, you just use Heroku or you just use Elastic Beanstalk and you are done. Hey! All right, good, good luck buddy, because there is a — there is a secret sauce to running an operations business. It isn’t just cloud and it isn’t just a tool, it’s a lot more. Again, it’s a process of cloud tools and it’s a know-how.

It’s like a great developer and architect understands it has a sense of how to develop great features in a way that makes sense. Well, a great operations guy has that kind of same black magic. You know what I mean?

Michael Coté: I think you are right. I think it’s always easier to find examples of sort of like developer culture, because they are a very chatty bunch, than it is operations culture, and it’s –

John Willis: We are a little chatty bunch. I mean, that’s our problem.

Michael Coté: Yeah, yeah, and so it’s — therefore that’s one of the reasons it’s easy to gloss over, there is actually a lot of craft, if you will, as the programmers would call it in operations.

Back, starting at the beginning of agile development and even before that with books like ‘Peopleware’ and some sort of like back in the Microsoft heyday of code as culture, if you will, there was — I think the development world kind of learned that being navel-gazing about your craft and the way you do stuff in your practice and things beyond the documented path, if you will, was very valuable for the overall community.

And I feel like to some extent there is sort of like Linux people and UNIX people and there is some craft and stuff in there, but it’s not quite at the same level of sharing — of useful sharing that I see in the development world as much.

There are little pockets here and there of people doing it again, but a little bit to your point, somewhat tangentially, but almost directly from it. A lot of the whatever Ops you want to call it that’s fascinating is a chance to kind of jump on that and for everyone to just discuss kind of the craft side of things.

John Willis: Yeah, I think that’s it, and I think there is like — it’s funny, because there is three types of people. There are the people that really don’t understand it and they are like, well, that’s so limited with the cloud, right? In their world operations is about rack and stack and hardware. Over, checkmark, don’t need it anymore.

And there are lots of idiots out there that will just say, well, why don’t we need anything with Ops, Ops has been solved, right? I am like, no, it has it. Go ask — go see how Amazon runs their operational infrastructure or eBay, like there is a lot of craft there.

Michael Coté: It’s like when FoxPro and Filemaker solved programming, you didn’t really need programmers after that.

John Willis: There you go, there you go. But then there is the guys that are in the trenches that are saying, well, you know this, why are you making a big deal out of it, right? The guys who were sysadmin guys. But that’s the point is, we don’t share our craft, we don’t talk about it. It’s the Bob’s, and Bob scripts and Bob directories that like they are in the trenches. They were like, we don’t want this DevOps thing, I have got work to do.

Whereas the guys in the middle, I think, which I like to include myself on is the guys who are really trying to expose the craft of how operations can play really well and is important.

Michael Coté: There you go. Yeah, we need to get the O’Reilly guys to come up with some — or maybe the pragmatic programmers. But see, that’s a thing that needs to exist in the IT world as equivalent of the pragmatic programmers, that’s another sort of code as craft thing, but someone should do some book that’s sort of like operations craft missive.

John Willis: I mean, web operations is definitely a good one, but that’s — it’s still kind of — it brushes over, it’s web operations.

Michael Coté: Yeah. This is a little bit of craft, but you know one of the — I don’t know, I think it kind of directly relates, I was reading, over in Spiceworks they have this community where their admins talk with each other; crazy idea. I am laughing at myself with that phrasing.

But anyways, there was one form post on, some guy was considering using hosted exchange versus on-premise, and it was just fun to read. He was asking what the pros and cons were, and it was fun to read all the admins from different sizes of companies kind of discussing like what the pros and cons were beyond like — I mean, obviously cost is one thing to figure out. Like there is a certain amount of — I don’t know, it’s one think to pay like whatever it is, $5 a user a month I think is what you get for the hosted exchange is kind of the going rate, it’s one thing to pay that for like 20 people.

And if you have like — it’s kind of crazy once you get into like thousands of people, of course your cost are much bigger. Now, that’s one aspect of it.

But then there was also the other aspect, the craft part, if you will, where it’s like, well, ultimately you are going to be responsible for that stuff being up. And there is various levels of support you get from people.

Like, for example, Google Apps is really great and it’s relatively cheap, but there is really no support from anyone. So like if you actually need support, the cost is not that good. There are all these interesting considerations to go over.

And then there was also this sub-thread going on about how, which I thought was funny; funny from an outsider, because I am sure all of them kind of don’t even realize the funniness of it. It was complaining about, or not complaining, but talking about how much disk quota or email quota and attachment quota they had.

I think all of them would say like, well, regular users get a 1 gig quota or whatever it was, but then executives get the 5 Gig quota. And it’s funny, like executives have this whole other quota level associated with their email, whereas everyone else does. And there is just — I mean, I think the variability of levels of service dependent on how high above the hierarchy the user is from you, that’s to put it in wonky terms, is a piece of craft to explore.

John Willis: No, yeah, and I think it’s funny just in general that whole — we run into — we could talk about — I mean literally, when you try to sell it as a service, particularly to systems administrators, there is that kind of — there is a lot to be said about the craft. The hosting thing gets a lot down to — I am kind of wandering all over the place, but it’s losing control.

Michael Coté: Yeah, there was a tremendous amount of it.

John Willis: Yeah. And it’s not even losing control, it’s that you are losing that kind of possibility for secret sauce that — well, and to get a little esoteric here, I mean, that’s what I worry about like Platform-as-a-Service is.

Like Platform-as-a-Service is, like they sound good, Parney thinks they are kind of a primrose path, because like you are going to go put your app there and everything looks good and all the things are handled, but now all of a sudden your company is faced with an opportunity, and there is some technology out there that you can’t use in this Platform-as-a-Service.

And that craft around how well you adapt as a business and all that, you might have given that up. You know what I mean? And I think that lies in the kind of — the people who really think about it think, it’s not just about the dollars, it’s not just about the, I don’t get — you running something for me at scale will probably be more efficient than me running it. It’s that like, there might be something I am not seeing that I will hit that roadblock and I don’t want to be in a position where I can’t take advantage of it.

Michael Coté: Yeah, yeah, you want maximum flexibility for maximum disaster.

John Willis: Yeah.

Michael Coté: You can draw one of those four quadrant things and do disaster level and flexibility and you always want the upper left or whatever. I guess it’s upper right.

John Willis: Upper right, yeah.

Michael Coté: I don’t know what I am talking about with charts; I am not that kind of analyst.

So let me ask you this, since you mentioned it, I have noticed this — let me compare some notes with you and the listeners. I have noticed this rise in people saying how PaaS is a big deal, the Platform-as-a-Service, and this Infrastructure-as-a-Service, that’s all fantastic, but the new thing is Platform-as-a-Service.

I don’t have anything beyond anecdotal sort of conversations here, but it seems like everyone, and let me put a little footnote there that I am going to get to on everyone is excited about PaaS stuff, and now the footnote is, most of the people I hear talking about PaaS stuff are like vendors who have a PaaS.

John Willis: Who sell PaaSs, right?

Michael Coté: Yeah. So I don’t know, I mean, I am a little — so my background is like, I don’t think there is anything necessarily wrong with a PaaS, if you go in — just like you were talking about and kind of evaluate, basically I think any piece of software you depend on instead of writing yourself, and this is a bit of an absurd statement, it’s just all about the time demarcated takes.

Like obviously you don’t want to write every piece of software, including an operating system, because that’s going to take you way too long, so you just keep piling up stuff that you are reusing, and at some point a PaaS is something that you don’t have to write and worry about.

But like you said, there could be limitations that you have, who knows, or maybe not, I don’t know. But what are you seeing out there with this — is this just a passing interest, Johnon?

John Willis: No. Well, I mean, certainly I am working against the tide because the — I mean, everybody is high on PaaS and PaaS is going to accelerate. My concern about a Platform-as-a-Service — the bigger picture is that, to try to put everything that we talk about in the cloud in three buckets is really pretty silly, really, when you think about it, right?

We tend to like say, well, that’s a SaaS and therefore it will do x and y and that’s a PaaS and therefore it’s going to be a, b, and c, and that’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service. Like, well, I mean, like it’s kind of silly to say, look at all the possible things that are associative of cloud computing and say, okay, it’s only in three categories and that’s it.

My point is that, by calling something a PaaS is like anywhere from — like people are even starting to say maybe Amazon’s new CloudFormation, Elastic Beanstalk, are kind of the starter set of a PaaS, and then you go all the way over to something like Force.com, which is on the complete other end, and so it’s hard to make generic statements about a PaaS, and say, well, PaaSs are bad or PaaSs are good.

Because again, I mean, the spectrum of what we are talking about is anywhere from a loosely coupled Infrastructure-as-a-Service that looks like a PaaS, to something like totally proprietary unused force — whatever the language is for Force.com, like that’s like as PaaSy as it’s going to get, right?

So I think the question is not whether I think PaaS is a good idea, I think abstraction of services or abstraction of solutions is like absolutely where we have to be.

I mean, APIs are the root of most of this. Like building a robust API set, or I have seen now people have started using the XaaS, which is Everything-as-a-service. That starts making the sense is like, I don’t care whether it’s IIS, what I want is the ability to be flexible in my business decisions. And so if you throw a technology at me that doesn’t allow me to be flexible on my business decisions, then I get worried.

And even something like Heroku or Force, where yeah, I mean, my time to market can be really quick, but if for tomorrow somebody lays out a solution that’s Cassandra based and they have this and this, and now I am already down, like my business is already in Heroku and they are going to tell me they don’t support it for another 18 months so it’s not even on their roadmap, I don’t want to be in that position.

I mean, if you look at the companies that are kind of following the Lean startup model, they are able to adapt and change very rapidly, and there is price you pay for that. The price about — like I don’t think it’s a smart idea to have a leading edge business idea or company and run it completely on something like Force or Heroku or Engine Yard, I will flat out say it.

Even though it’s easy to get to market, now, if there are pieces of your infrastructure, like the FlightCaster guy, that was a great example. They had the whole backend in Hadoop, with closure and all this stuff, and they credited their web front end on Heroku. That’s a brilliant idea, because they can move their web at front end anywhere. They could throw it up on their own.

But if you start thinking about the PaaS as the end all be all for your business, I think you are going to — you are possibly limiting yourself for opportunities, where your competitors are a little bit smart.

It’s about building composite infrastructure, so that you can kind of decouple things and move them around and become, what I call, bullet proof. So I think that in those cases the pure PaaSs could be dangerous.

Michael Coté: Yeah. No, I think it warrants some more investigation, because I mean, there is almost like two types of PaaSs you are talking about in there, and one of them is just the classic PaaS, or what I would consider a PaaS is just like, someone just has pre-selected some middleware for you and you just build stuff on top of that middleware, whereas there is another type of PaaS, which is kind of like the Force.com model, that’s more — you are really just writing a plug-in for an application, like it’s difficult to imagine a non-Salesforce type of thing you would do on top of Force.com.

Now, I know because people have shown me that you can do non-stuff like that, but it’s sort of like, it’s an application specific PaaS, which I know is another thing people advocate quite a lot.

But yeah, it’s the old cross-platform worrying that you do, like do you write only to Windows or do you write a web application or do you write to Mac or do you write to Solaris or do you write to whatever? You see that in the mobile space nowadays quite a bit where it’s sort of okay to write only for the Apple ecosystem, but increasingly people want to write for Apple, Android, and have a web thing.

So there is like — in my little group of programmer friends we have this — we kind of joke about this thing we called Whichard’s first principle of programming, and it goes back to this guy Brandon Whichard we know, who used to work on identity management stuff, but he also used to be the Product Manager of the group we worked at, at BMC.

And he said that one of the biggest anti-patterns that you always have with the programmers is they always implement a user and a writes management system. Like they never, ever, and I am obviously overstating it, sort of reuse some user management system.

And it’s just funny, because you end up spending all this time writing a user and their permissions and orchestrating all of that stuff, when there is like tons of them available out there.

And because you have this proliferation of user and rights management, which is sort of like an essential part of most software, especially when it becomes enterprise software, it just creates all sorts of problems.

That’s the kind of thing where like you would really like that not to be the case, and that’s one of those things where I feel like, along with the database and some other stuff, it would be great if a Platform-as-a-Service would sort of handle that for you so you weren’t rewriting that stuff.

So I guess what I am saying is looking a Platform-as-a-Service strictly is sort of like component reuse, I don’t really see that big of a deal for it, but if your Platform-as-a-Service is more like you are just writing a plug-in, then you kind of have to be aware of that’s the sandbox you are sticking yourself in.

John Willis: Well, I think that was a great point about the — you don’t want to have to write, like today they are — when you sit down and want to build a business, there are so many abstractions to even build on top of it.

Now, I am a big fan of kind of the roll your own infrastructure as code model, which is harder than building using a PaaS, but I have this — it’s PaaS light, because long as I can build my abstractions, I kind of componentized my infrastructures, if you will, I componentized my web servers, so now I have built it once, it has got its inputs, it has got its outputs, I can put it anywhere I want.

I think that’s a much safer way. I mean, obviously I have the hardest race with Chef, but I mean, I think that’s a much safer way to build, but ultimately what you do want is you definitely want, wherever possible, somebody else to do it. But I think today there is so much opportunity with solutions out there that you can pretty much cherry-pick infrastructure to lay — already built on top of — I mean, to put together a Ruby LAMP Stack on Amazon is pretty freaking darn easy if you Chef, Puppet, or even now CloudFormation.

Now, to make it scalable, a little harder; make it elastic, a little harder, but not incredibly harder. So again, I think I am more of a fan of staying on the do it yourself more than let somebody else do it, but always look for — if somebody has already written that infrastructure for billing, use that open source component, don’t write your own monitor, there are plenty of great monitoring tools. There are pretty of great things out there that you can abstract with and still not be very into the PaaS.

Michael Coté: So you were mentioning like — did we talk about this NoOps business, you said there was some little kerfuffle going on about that?

John Willis: Yeah, there has been a whole bunch on Twitter. There are basically two posts. One was that DevOps is a scam or something like that. The thing is, he makes some okay points. His first point is that agile was a scam and how everybody got so rich on it, now DevOps is the new snake oil.

And I think that, all right, everybody is entitled to their opinion, but if I look at the kind of people that are pulling DevOps, I am like that’s — I am not including myself, I mean, some really — people like — these guys are not salesman, like John Allspaw, Patrick Debois, Andrew Shafer, Adam Jacob, Jesse, Luke Kanies, I mean, these guys are not — they are changing the game out there. I mean, they are doing some real shit. And to just take one sloth and say, well, DevOps is just snake oil sales pitch, like come on, it’s not that simple either way. It’s not as simple to say DevOps solves all problems and it’s not that simple to say DevOps is just some get rich scheme. You know what I mean? It’s neither.

I think, again, a lot of people who are just kind of jumping into the conversation, it’s like cloud two years ago, it was the same thing you saw on Twitter about the cloud, all these people came in and said, what’s the big deal, cloud, we have been doing this for ten years? Yeah, you kind of have but you kind of haven’t.

Michael Coté: Yeah, nowadays all the vendors like to tell you they have been doing it for years too, this stuff, that’s always exciting.

John Willis: So the old Cisco commercial, they are right there. IBM has pretty much owned the — not IBM, Microsoft has owned their silly cloud commercials, but Cisco has, I don’t know if you have seen it now. They have got, we are the guys that connect the clouds. They are more realistic than the Microsoft one.

Michael Coté: Yeah, yeah. Cisco is always weird. I was talking with someone about this around South By South West and it is — Cisco is always annoyingly trying to talk about being a collaboration company and everything and really we just want routers and I guess servers.

They have that video TelePresence stuff which looks impressive, I saw it on 30 Rock! last night they were using it, so that’s good stuff.

I always get being someone who consults with companies about their sort of technology marketing. I was getting frustrated when they market their aspirations a lot more than their here and nows if you will or not even — well now it is a lot more quantitatively but I feel like it’s one thing to speak up to like what you would really like to be doing in the future and everything but you need to make sure you have equal volume on what you are currently doing. I always imagine hoards of conference scores at various tech companies sort of thinking in their head, well this stuff looks great but I have got this laundry list of bugs I would like you to fix with stuff I am already running.

John Willis: Of course the guys who — they get back and then they want to have the like — how come it doesn’t work the way it worked at the conference? Yeah, well, one of the conference had a little bit of extra stuff.

Michael Coté: Yeah, but to be fair, I think Cisco could tell a very incredible story as far as running the networks, so that would be just fine.

John Willis: No, their commercial is actually pretty much it like where the guys connect the cloud, and there is a logic to that but — as opposed to Microsoft ones or some silly, I am going to go to the cloud.

Michael Coté: So going back up at our little hole here to the South By South West thing, let me ask a wrapping up question on that topic. So it’s one of my little hobbies to help people come up with excuses to come to South By Southwest and let me ask you as like a cloud guy if you will, and a recovering normal Ops IT guy like do you think it’s a conference worthy to go to if you are in the infrastructure cloud area?

John Willis: I think it’s a bullet, I mean it’s like – this is the first one I have ever been to and there was some really exciting stuff around IT technology and everybody speaks that language. So I think it’s just going to get better-and-better every year, right?

Michael Coté: Yeah, probably. What I tell people is like a lot of the people who are there, I mean they all need to run their stuff somewhere. So it’s a good idea to go there and kind of see a wide swath of a certain type of customer and I figure it’s more in the small and medium segment, right, like I don’t know if there is a lot of enterprise people who go there, but there is a large volume of people who need to run their stuff whether it’s on — need to run their stuff on the public Internet somewhere and so usually that points towards doing cloud stuff or something else.

And the other thing that’s important to pay attention to is the – no one would use this phrase but as the infrastructure people were kind of tracking the types of workloads and infrastructure I mean, the applications that are running on top of all that, because it does tend to drive a lot of lower level stuff, like I finally got around to — as a somewhat related example, I finally got around to reading one of the posts of my fellow Redmonk’s Steven O’Grady about, he calls it the speaking of link bait, they are coming like data apocalypse or whatever.

And his point is, he was just looking at his own personal usage of his data plan on AT&T and once he discovered that he could watch like NetFlix and his baseball on-demand stuff, it’s like quadrupled or whatever and he costed out how much it would cost to have an unlimited plan and being aware of these huge volumes of data that are traversing around as he gets to in kind of the advice part of his piece. If you don’t see those applications coming they are kind of going to be a shock. A lot of the discussion of South By Southwest is about the types of applications.

And then even more worse, even worse for the point I am trying to make, driving people to needlessly click Reload over-and-over again, or just to use those applications a lot. So there is this sort of peak bandwidth issue that I am sure people will sort out, as all peak issues are sorted out where application writers don’t really care about bandwidth consumption or processor consumption and yet they are driving their users to create and consume more-and-more of it and it’s a nice problem to know about.

John Willis: Well, and I was thinking about South By Southwest and I am obviously have a hammer type of guy, so there was an underlying DevOps theme and he is like, wow, wait a minute, we didn’t get that for yet, but we did, because if you think about all the companies there, like they are all faced with these same problems. They are all like social and big data and media and they are all faced with the same common problem is you’ve got to be able to run IT efficiently and cost-effectively, and these are all the things — and even to the point where Etsy, the reason I came in a day early was Etsy had a craft by code or code by crafting, you were there, where they talked about how they do continuous delivery.

Here they are, right in the middle of South By Southwest Etsy giving like a couple hour presentation and how they do continuous delivery at Etsy, showing a continuous integration, deployment and the room was packed, I mean packed with people, because this is a common like — whether you like it or not, you are in the IT business these days. It goes back to why operations are so important, I mean, whether you like it or not you are in the op business of running operations, and just having your cloud doesn’t solve that, you’ve got to run it effectively, efficiently, and so to me the underlying theme that wasn’t the broadcasted theme or you’d have to be looking for it like a guy like me who sees everything as a nail.

It look like a swarming, everybody is willing to have an infrastructure discussion. I even had this little thing at the Apogee party, there was this party Apogee had with a couple of other companies, there were like three companies that teamed up, had this really soiree party and I was in there and I was wearing my Opscode shirt, and some young guys with ear rings in their noses and eyes and all that – just started talking to them, and they were like what’s the OC stand for, man? And I am like, I said, oh you know that TV show, the OC, and they were like, oh wow, really? That’s cool, and I am like, no, I am just kidding.

And then I said so what is it then? I am like, oh, well we are a company called Opscode, we’ve got this product, and I am trying to explain at the highest level thinking, it’s one of those kind of Christmas party conversations, and he said, oh, is it they were like zoo-keeper, I am like, oh s**t, this kid knows what he is talking about. And then I said, no, I said, you haven’t heard of Puppet. He is like, yeah! I said, well, we have a product called Chef, he says, oh Chef, we use Chef, and I am like, dopey me, trying to be funny about the OC thing. I mean like there were people come up to me and tap me on the shoulder and say, hey, we use Chef, we love your product.

So there was this kind of underlying theme, like anybody who is – all the people are going there – not all the people, but a lot of people are going there, building like high-powered social media, media web or big data type solutions and across the board on all those three kinds has to be lean infrastructure. And most of those people are well aware of kind of the DevOp techniques. So my point is, I had a lot of fun, I had a lot of touch-points with a lot of technology that I love. The Infochimps guy had a nice big data stuff, the Etsy guys had something.s Apogee had an interesting part, I think next year is just going to be even more discussions about infrastructure.

Michael Coté: Yeah, maybe it will have like a track along those lines and everything, I mean I know that they had a fair amount of cloud panels including one that I moderated. So it might be nice if they dug a little deeper if you will.

John Willis: Cloud schmoud. it’s not the infrastructure, dude!

Michael Coté: That’s right, it’s all about the platform as a service.

John Willis: No, it’s not the infrastructure, you haven’t been paying attention.

Michael Coté: So speaking of like cloud like infrastructure stuff, you were telling me, I keep forgetting the name of this IBM thing, but you were telling me you’d come across like a high-scale virtualization automation roll out magic voodoo, what’s the name of it officially?

John Willis: It’s Advanced Virtual Deployment Software.

Michael Coté: There we go.

John Willis: So this is again, IBM shoots themselves in the foot. This name, like if you don’t peel the onion on this, you’ll think, oh jeez, here we go, it looks like a private cloud, I mean it looks pretty darn slick.

Michael Coté: Yeah, when I was at Pulse a few week ago now I was hanging out with an IBM friend of mine, Bill Higgins, who now works at Tivoli and doing all sorts of fun stuff. And he introduced me to the guy doing this project and I got kind of — he was going to do a demo later in the evening, which ended up not working because of VPN issues and all this network stuff.

John Willis: VPN issues.

Michael Coté: That’s right. But anyways, the way he described it, it was kind of like, I am sure you and other listeners have heard of that Dell OpenStack Installer thing, with sitting in the office next to me, Matt Ray worked on that a little bit, and then basically, this thing is somewhat similar in the sense that there is a — you have sort of got a bunch of bare metal laying around and there’s all sorts of like little pixy booting and fun peer to peer stuff to spread things around and automate just sort of — I am wiggling my fingers now doing the sort of magic thing.

All sorts of like configuration magic and provisioning magic which actually looked pretty exciting. They mentioned it in passing in the keynote, but it was the kind of thing where like — and I wrote this up in my Pulse overview thing. I mean, this is the kind of thing where I feel like they should give it like ten minutes on the keynote in a two hour keynote to go over, because everyone will just be like, oh, now I get it. I mean, it will be like a big, even if it is whatever beta released or whatnot, it’s still — that’s the kind of advanced thinking you want to see in this –

John Willis: Yeah, I mean, if I am just coming out with a private cloud that’s ultimately going to pair up against things like Eucalyptus and whatnot, then that’s an interesting start. You know what I mean?

But again, if you like at it and you don’t see that much, you kind of dig little deep and see that — because even the Dell stuff right, so I worked on a little bit with that, Matt did most of the work there, but the Crowbar, I mean, all the Crowbar is, is really kind of — the Dell Crowbar, which is the proof of concept name for their open source project, that it’s just going to — it basically is kick start on steroids.

So you take a rack and just like these machines come online and they will get the bios and if you generate it, the OS will get burned, not burned, but installed.

And what Matt did is put OpenStack on the backend of that to turn — to kind of fulfill, not just the five, six boxes in a rack, but become then an OpenStack cloud controller with nodes in it.

But it sounds like this advanced virtual deployment software is like an OpenStack or a Cloud.com or Eucalyptus. So if that’s what IBM is throwing out there, that could be pretty interesting. IBM writes pretty software.

Michael Coté: No, from the way the demo was — that thing was described to me and the bit of the demo I could see, it was nice. It was sort of like — it was kind of like a right scale kind of thing mixed with a bunch of provisioning and configuration management, and I don’t know, we will see what they do with it.

John Willis: Yeah, I will just go and try to take a look at it and see what — because I am always interested in the IBM angle, I have done so much work with IBM, with particularly Tivoli.

Michael Coté: Yeah, well, also in conference news, I went to the Microsoft Management Summit last week, and that was exciting as an analyst from the angle that I had actually missed going to it last year because we had some family business back then. But it exciting, because they were really cloud crazy there, but in a very a much more defined way than just sort of being very cloud imperative, if you will.

They talked about their Project Concero thing, which is a way of managing your private and your public clouds and things like that, and they had a lot of virtualization stuff. But you can kind of see, and I wrote up kind of a little post along these lines, but you can see there, they seemed to genuinely be working on enabling a lot of private cloud stuff for their customers.

And to be fair, this is the part of the Summit that goes over — the part of — Microsoft has a lot of conferences and this is the one that’s all about sort of on-premise stuff, if you will.

So they weren’t sort of dismissing Azure public cloud stuff, it’s just more like — it’s not exactly their kind of thing at that conference, whereas in a few weeks now MIX is coming up where I am sure we will talk about Azure a little bit, and there is Tech·Ed this summer and so forth and so on.

But yeah, they were a lot more respectable in their cloud talk than I have seen coming from them and even some other vendors, they had a lot of products to speak about.

Now, all that said, it’s not like they were really GA on most of the cloud stuff, if all of it that they talked about, aside from Azure, so it is kind of a, here is what’s coming kind of thing, and you could of course get their Concero — I can’t — your funny way of pronouncing things is messing me up, John. Their Project Concero thing, I think you can get a beta of that or something like that, which sounds good.

And as I wrote up in the post, you know the thing that I would challenge them and anyone else who kind of has a proprietary way of going about this stuff like for Microsoft, the big question is like, so if I wanted to be like a Microsoft cloud developer, right, would I have to use Visual Studio to get like maximum effect and I think figuring out the nuanced answers to that question will sort of point you at that kind of locking that you were talking about earlier, and really there is tons of people who deploy on the Microsoft stack, and it does great for them.

So at some point, one of the many points you get to it makes sense to just go that way, but you know your needs might be more varied and you may not want to become a Microsoft developer if you will, and I don’t think it’s — I don’t quite understand the full openness of their cloud stuff at the moment despite Azure running like Python and Java and things like that. It’s still what it gives down to is that — and you were kind of alluding this earlier, how everyone at South By Southwest, or if you want many people are talking about using Opscode or ZooKeeper are like there is a certain tool belt or tool chain if you will that emerges, and the question becomes how much of that stuff that you can kind of swap in and out versus stuff you’re forced to use to mess with all the configuration metadata.

John Willis: Yeah, no I mean I think about this a lot and I mean again I have this hammering out problem but I look at like these continuous delivery models that seem to be working really well and right now I don’t really from my perspective to me it’s all about how do you officially build a matrix around that, you know what I mean, in other words. And is it Puppet, is it Chef, is it ZooKeeper, there is an interesting guy here in Atlanta called John Winston has written this thing called Nova, and Novas are pretty interesting for ZooKeeper, it’s a Ruby-based implementation with ZooKeeper. And it’s getting a lot of good attraction because ZooKeeper is a little more complex to implement and resisting is really darn simple.

There are some things out of the box that don’t happen with ZooKeeper, it has some opinionated models for just doing the kind of things that everybody choose a ZooKeeper for, but anyway the point is that like if you think about the service pipeline, it has continuous integration, it has kind of a unit test model bill, it has test-driven development or behavior-driven development, it has obviously configuration management, a piece like Puppet or Chef or Cfengine and it has kind of a deployment management model, and I think about that model and I am watching companies that are doing this today at lightening speed and delivery models.

So I don’t think much about like how would somebody who has their own kind of model fit into this. I don’t think about that much, you know what I mean? That’s just an out there problem for somebody else to solve.

Michael Cote: Yeah, and two more things on the MMS stuff just for people who care, what are the few more things, one of them and I am kind of summarizing the little post I wrote is there is — they released this interesting product called Advisor like System Center Advisor, it’s basically a SaaS hosted knowledgebase kind of thing to get to like pulling best practices that integrates onto the tool and as long time listeners know I am always fascinated with the idea of sticking any expect of IT management in SaaS, and more importantly like what I would call Collaborative IT Management is this idea of applying like the learnings from community and the web to sort of doing operation stuff, all that craft stuff we were talking about before.

And to be fair like I think the Advisor thing is sort of — not sort of, is locked down to just Microsoft and put its stuff, so it’s not open like the Spiceworks Community is, where similar stuff kind of goes on, and a less than kind of and kind of kind of way, if you will.

Anyways, but it is and lots of people have tried to do this, or a fair amount of people tried to do this in the past, but it is — it’s I haven’t seen a large organization be excited about it in the same way that Microsoft seem to be, so that’s an interesting thing to look at and they also released I think Windows Intune which has been a Beta for a while, and it’s basically from managing client desktops which means desktops that employees use not servers and Microsoft Lingo and it’s a SaaS-based thing.

But what’s interesting is I am pretty sure that they would like to do it for servers at some point, I mean they didn’t really say that but it kind of makes sense, like if it works for clients, one day it should work for servers, and overall that is kind of like some reading between the lines that I was getting is that they would like to do a lot more IT management as SaaS stuff, which I think that’s overall good and I mean like in the OC they are all about managing servers.

John Willis: Yeah, that’s true, that’s nice.

Michael Coté: So a similar sort of thing going on there. But yeah, there is more — you can read more detail on this stuff in the little wrap-up post that I did, but I think overall it was a usually when I have been to MMSs in the past as some people in the audience will attest to its all – well you know what I am talking, about what it’s all about, SML and SDM and MOF and modeling the IT process and they pretty much are done with that in all senses of the word ‘Done’ as they’ve quoted enough of it and they are not really interested in talking about that stuff anymore.

They are more interested in talking about private clouds and things like that, they even mentioned DevOps several times. And Microsoft within the Microsoft world which is always the big caveat, they have a very credible footing to talk about having a unified tool chain if not culture between the application development and the delivery of it. They have some pretty good actual working code to do stuff like that. I don’t know if it’s sort of in production for a bus cell code, but they have good demos and stuff going on there.

So anyways before I make you fully fall asleep, because I know Microsoft, I know Microsoft is about as invigorating to you as drinking a full bottle of cough syrup, so I’ll wrap that up and there is more if you want to read about it.

John Willis: Yeah, so anyway it was going to kind of wrap up a little bit of big news.

Michael Coté: Oh yeah, that’s right.

John Willis: Big news, wow! So I am going to be — this is my last week at Opscode.

Michael Coté: At the OC as it were.

John Willis: At the OC, yeah, there was those kids and all there, the party is on the beach and all just getting too crazy. Yeah, and I am going to be going –

Michael Coté: This means you are not going to be sleeping with your best friend’s mother anymore, right?

John Willis: That’s right, the whole – the volleyball on the beach and best friend’s mothers and all sorts of crazy stuff that goes on at the OC. Now it’s all good stuff, I am going to go over to work with DTO and it’s actually a good fit for. I had some great conversations with Adam Jacob, the Founder of Opscode and we both think it’s a great idea.

Part of what I did last year was a lot in Opscode which was evangelism, kind of like you meet my metaphors. I felt that I was helping build the religion last year and I think I was pretty effective in building the religion and I know Adam and Jesse agree and are very happy to know what I did and now it’s time for Opscode to build the church, if you will. Construct the church and really figure out how the cells, models and they are really building a company.

So that’s part of it. I like the building, the religion and I am really fascinated with the DevOps portion of the next step. I love Chef, I think it’s my favorite product on the market and the infrastructure’s code is absolutely the way this has to be done and when somebody comes up with a better way, so I am big fan, but I think the bigger picture is what we talk about is how do you solve the whole problem and that’s the religion I want to fight this year and are embraced. So it’s all good.

The other part is I really, in heart and soul of me, you’ve talked about this before I am a services guy and Opscode is a product company primarily and I am a services guy. So I really want to go out and build service organizations and that’s –

Michael Coté: Yeah, it sounds like it will be exciting for you.

John Willis: Yeah, it’s exciting and DTO is already a part. I just want to say that DTO is already in partnership with Opscode so we are always talking about working on deals already together.

Michael Coté: So why don’t you tell people what DTO does for those who don’t know?

John Willis: So DTO stands for Dev to Ops, but basically we are a service company. We actually have an open-source tool. We kind of work around the open-source tool chain and the DevOps, we call the DevOps tool chain and we work around infrastructure’s code products like Puppet and Chef, and then also a continuous integration, building models for continuous delivery, release management, help service companies, help provide services to company, help them fulfill kind of what continuous delivery model in the services, very strong Java, very strong DevOps, so good stuff.

Michael Coté: And along with Andrew Shepherd back when they — I think when he worked at Puppet lab still or Reductive Labs as it was called, I think DTO and I think it was Damien and him wrote the — I still show it around as like when people ask me what DevOps is, it’s one of the few sort of things to point at, I think isn’t it the fully automated provisioning tool chain, speaking of IBM names John I think –

John Willis: Yeah, I don’t really –

Michael Coté: It is, that paper came from — it’s like ’09 paper.

John Willis: Yeah.

Michael Coté: It’s been aged now but it’s kind of it gives you — it’s one of the few like I said kind of grounded senses that gives you a sense of what’s going on and I think having — we actually, DTO was a client of ours for a little while back, I guess, in 2010 or something and having done work with them, those guys are very busy actually out there building stuff. So they always — you’ll be simmering in the soup if you will of all this business.

John Willis: Yeah, and that’s the fun thing is that they are delivering real-life continuous delivery models for large customers right now kind of under the radar, people don’t know and they just didn’t — plus the other thing is they recently released an interesting product that fills the gap in the space which is called RunDeck which is — it’s kind of a Run Book Automation, I would say orchestration product, open-source, and it really, really works well with products of Chef and Puppet. So yeah, it’s going to be a lot of fun. I am looking forward to it.

Michael Coté: Well, that will be great.

John Willis: Great stuff!

Michael Coté: You’ll have a good time.

John Willis: Yeah.

Michael Coté: So let me see if I can scrape the bottom of the bucket here before we wrap. I think we can come in at 60 minutes, John. That would be because we are professionals.

John Willis: Yeah, that’s right.

Michael Coté: Well, let me put in a little ad here at the end and then I’ll let you wrap up with anything you have. But I started, speaking of Spiceworks, I started a little project with them where they do this thing every quarter called the voice of SMB IT, I think they put SMB in there.

They also do a lot of things where they have this big pool of data of what people are kind of — they have a giant asset database in the cloud and a bunch of other stuff. So they kind of along with their own surveys, they look over all this data and kind of do what are people actually doing out there and they had one post recently that was like in various sectors like education and construction and manufacturing and software like how much virtualization are people using.

It’s a very short to the point post and there’s also a ranking of hypervisors use which as you can predict is pretty much an order is VMware, Hyper-V and then XenServer are what people are using according to their study.

Anyways, so I am doing a little series with them where I am kind of adding the — I’d like to think that I am kind of like the John Madden color commentary on this where I am just kind of adding some commentary on some of their data posts, and I put the first one up which I’ll put a link to in the Spiceworks Community where — so they did this thing like I said and the lowest users of virtualization were the education sector and the highest user of course was the software sector.

So I talk to some folks that I know including our very own Matt Ray about — he represented the software sector, I talked to this other guy that in West Texas who is kind of — I think he Director of IT for the Winters ISD for Education and I kind of asked them both like so, what’s up with your virtualization usage so you could kind of figure out the extreme ends of the scale there? And it was fun to see what they are talking about and what their plans were with virtualization.

It’s interesting because in the high-end on the software scale like people don’t really even realize that they are kind of using virtualization. I mean they realize they are using it but they don’t think about it as a novel concept, it’s so engrained in software developers’ heads whereas in things like education, it’s still kind of some new magic on the horizon for many people.

So yeah, I am curious to see if anyone has commentary and why or why not they are using virtualization kind of by the sector they are in.

John Willis: Well, I think with Spiceworks you are probably going to skewed view too, because I mean it’s funny, I think there’s still a lot of enterprises that still will — oh yeah, we use Virtualization for test out but not production. There is still quite a few surprisingly that actually still have that kind of little bit of a boogeyman about, you know, well we don’t use virtualization production. Why? No, no, no… we are not sure or its performance we take.

Michael Coté: Yeah, that’s true. Yeah, well that reminds me of a principle I came up when talking with the Microsofties about — they spend a lot of time and I talk with them a lot about dividing up legacy IT versus Greenfield stuff, the legacy stuff which is kind of difficult to get in the cloud way maybe. I kind of derive this principle from them I think which my phrasing is if it ain’t broke, don’t cloud it. We’ll see — I don’t know. It will be interesting to sort out how far the stuff goes just like Virtualization.

John Willis: Well, I am just the opposite like the phrase I want to remove from all IT lexicon is and I am so when I hear it, my cringe is like well how would we be able to do that companywide, John? You don’t?

So like you were talking about the cloud, I would say, when in doubt, cloud it, you know what I mean. I just don’t like, cloud everything –

Michael Coté: So you are saying — so I am typing this in right now. If it ain’t broke don’t cloud it versus when in doubt cloud it out.

John Willis: Yeah, like I am not really sure what the hell, let’s throw it into cloud.

Michael Coté: And I think there’s another phrase that we could say versus — for what is it? Like build on top of cloud and let ops sort it out.

John Willis: Yeah.

Michael Coté: That’s right. Cloud it all and let ops sort it out.

John Willis: Yeah — no I think that but that’s why a little bit of my pet peeve is that kind of, I am not yelling at you but that whole like when in doubt don’t cloud it and that is it goes back to the whole, people think it’s a binary thing. It’s like cloud or nothing, like we can’t do that because it would just destroy our organization.

Michael Coté: Yeah, yeah, oh that reminds me of another sub-project that I have going on. Have you noticed I started these sub-projects whenever I actually do them? It’s very exciting.

John Willis: Yeah.

Michael Coté: But I emailed you about this one too but for the listeners, I want to — I actually have some input from people and I am kind of just waiting for permission from their people to use it. So it’s a just kind of a matter of paperwork if you will, but I am trying to gather just at this very moment, if you will, being this year or something. Like when people are building a public or a private or a hybrid or a dancing or maybe an elephant cloud, whatever kind of cloud do you want to call it, like I am very curious about –

John Willis: The black cloud.

Michael Coté: There you go. I want to know like the exact kind of like infrastructure they are using from like servers to routers to their wiring and the infrastructure. Like there was one thing that I thought was really missing from the Microsoft management thing.

Being a software company, it’s fine, and they have partners with HP and Dell to be their cloud partners or whatever, which is cool, but I think at this point in the cloud world, especially if this whole private cloud thing is going to take off, I mean we really need — and by ‘we’, I mean people on the buying side of the fence. We really need to sort of out what that means hardware-wise because I mean I kind of feel like there’s sort of this — the iceberg under the water is like, oh yeah, all those datacenters, you are going to need to totally replace all those guys with these crazy cloud boxes and that’s — I don’t know, I don’t feel like there’s quite enough conversation going on about below the software layer of cloud stuff in the private cloud area.

So I am curious for people who are doing anything that they would consider cloud, I don’t really care of the orthodoxy of it, like what the hardware situation looks like. I would appreciate any input people have.

John Willis: There you go. Good!

Michael Coté: So we are only two minutes over the 60 minutes, John, which means that we are professionals with icing on top.

John Willis: There you go.

Michael Coté: Do you got anything else you want to throw up there before we wrap up on this fine Monday?

John Willis: No, I think that’s it. It’s good.

Michael Coté: So are you officially with the DTO now or do you have a little –

John Willis: No, Monday — I’ll start Monday.

Michael Coté: So you can say anything crazy this week that you want, but come Monday, you are a company man.

John Willis: That’s right. Well, I can’t — yeah, I guess like that, I don’t know. But yeah, we’ll see, it all under adventure.

Michael Coté: All right, well that sounds good. I am going to look forward to all of your new IM names and Skype names and email names.

John Willis: Yeah.

Michael Coté: Every time John has an organizational change, he generates a bunch of new identities for me to keep track of. So that will work out well. Well, thanks as always for everyone for listening and we’ll see everyone next time.

Disclosure: see the RedMonk client list for clients mentioned.

At SXSW this year, we finally got a chance to talk with Ernest Mueller about the dev/ops work he’s been up to at National Instruments. He’s written about the topic over at his blog TheAgileAdmin.com and spoken about various aspects – it was great to get our own chance to grill him about the topic.

Download the episode directly right here, subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatcher to have episodes downloaded automatically, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

Transcript

As usual with these un-sponsored episodes, I haven’t spent time to clean up the transcript. If you see us saying something crazy, check the original audio first. There are time-codes where there were transcription problems.

Michael Coté: Well, hello everybody. This is another special South by Southwest edition of the IT Management Cloud Podcast. As always John Willis and I are here. We’ve got a guest with us, a local Austinite and why don’t you introduce yourself?

Ernest Mueller: Well hello, I’m Ernest Mueller. I’m a Web Systems Architect for National Instruments here in town.

Michael Coté: What do these National Instruments guys do? I know they are sort of like Goldman Sachs best place to work or something like that. No, no not Goldman Sachs, whoever does that.

Ernest Mueller: Forbes.

Michael Coté: There you go.

Ernest Mueller: That’s right. Well we make both hardware and software for data acquisition, industrial control, kind of test and measurement. One of our big, our big software product is called LabVIEW which kind of most engineering students over the last however many years have used in college. And some of the trivial uses of our dark powers are the LEGO MINDSTORM NXT, a control block that makes the LEGO Robots, we do the software that the kids used to program.

Michael Coté: Okay, so you do controlling stuff and measuring the stuff I guess like –

Ernest Mueller: Exactly, exactly.

Michael Coté: And, I mean you are a technology company, but you are sort of like a old school technology company not like a software company.

Ernest Mueller: That’s right, that’s right, desktop software, and hardware, and both embedded hardware like few J stuff, and parts to put in your PC and dedicated chassis and then that sort of thing.

Michael Coté: And have you sort of worked there all of your professional life or?

Ernest Mueller: No, no, when I graduated long, long ago, I would work in FedEx Corporate IT for number of years. Then I worked for an internet startup in Memphis, Tennessee. And, then I moved up to Rhode Island for a little bit, did some consulting and then I got opportunity, moved back down here on the Texas –

Michael Coté: So before we get into the technical stuff, like you know few episodes ago I went off on a tangent about burgers and fanny packs. So, you know let me ask you about Rhode Island. So now maybe John has something quite sincere from that neck on the woods if you will. But the only impression I have on Rhode Island –

John Willis: Yeah, yeah, I mean yeah.

Michael Coté: The only question I have about Rhode Island is from this one episode of the Sopranos, where they have the cousins who live in Rhode Island. And, ever since then it’s stuck in my head that Rhode Island is a little weird. And, like so is Rhode Island kind of like weird?

Ernest Mueller: Rhode Island is a little weird they take inordinate pride in how many times their governor gets indicted. Of course, I guess we are not all that different down here. But, yeah it was an odd place, but good Italian food.

John Willis: We love the burgers, plenty good burgers there?

Ernest Mueller: No, not really.

Michael Coté: What’s your impression of Rhode Island?

John Willis: I don’t know; it’s a place that you cut through sometimes when we are going up North.

Michael Coté: All right, all right, so we got that.

Michael Coté: When I’m going in to office venue, I have to go through — but of course and you know that whole Nantucket Moby Dick, it’s a very odd scene, its one of the — that’s perhaps the best part of the whole book is the whole Rhode Island scene like what you are going to do. So I know John, you have — why don’t you launch and do it John?

John Willis: Yes, so I was thinking about this, so, you know, we’ve been following each other for a while here you’ve been in DevOps, since DevOps was put through but the –

Michael Coté: All right, go ahead.

John Willis: The, I guess I was thinking about just kind of introducing what are your thoughts about DevOps, but I guess I was thinking more about, since you do work for a large enterprise what does DevOps really mean, and with a spin from an enterprise view in your view?

Ernest Mueller: Well let’s see, from an enterprise view I don’t know that the over all view is any different than the normal DevOps view. It is somewhat more complicated to implement sometimes. But, the whole concept of bringing your development folks and your web operation folks together and actually embedding on a team together to deliver a product is really the core concept there. Scale becomes the issue, just like with Agile in general. In Agile methodology it sounds all simple, you got your small gang of developers, you embed the business on a — if you are in the DevOps you embed an operations person on them and you go, and if you have an eight person company that’s — it’s reasonably straight forward to understand how to do that.

Maybe you are dealing with 5000-person company like we are, the path to get there is little more oblique. And, to be honest we — the way we got our feet wet was like green fielding an internal team with both developers and operation staff and who are on it, to get knowledgeable enough in it that we could then perhaps figure out how to spread it to the rest of the organization. You have to do a small project first.

Michael Coté: You have do small projects first.

[0:05:02.6]

Michael Coté: Right, right.

John Willis: So, Michael thinks that we were all full of crap when you were to talk about culture, at the previous episode if you will. So like — well school about why DevOps, what actually in more like his point as we tend to say, like in 0:05:23 world we use culture as this kind 0:05:26 okay, I am going to stop talking now, we are going to throw the culture out there, like why is this — why do we 0:05:31 about kind of behavior and culture in DevOps?

Ernest Mueller: Well, because I think it’s the grease that makes the wheels turn right. There are many, many opportunities for friction in any organization and the more moving parts you have for example, in bigger organization more opportunities for friction you have.

If people approach a process from an attitude of collaboration, then things are probably going to work out all right. If they are approaching process being, kicking and screaming or hostilely or reluctantly, they will innovate ways to make it not work, and I think one of the difficulties especially with operation staff is historically we’ve been trained to accomplish certain goals. Those goals are availability, but unfortunately sometimes more importantly cost efficiency, and reduction of risk, and once you do that for a while that becomes part of your DNA.

Well, so if you just get thrown on to a team with the goal of let’s deliver shipping products, you really have to be bought into that from a cultural point of view or else you’ll just drag your feet and that’s the big, I mean having had to go through that transition myself as an operations person, I understand if it is — it is difficult that it’s not nothing and there was a interesting post early on OpsOps.

It’s like before DevOps we need OpsOps, because the nature of the burden that’s been put on IT infrastructure departments, it’s not like they’re all happy and collaborative with each other and hate developers, right. They pretty much have been siloed, and sub siloed, and thought to defend their sub silo and that’s a hard thing to get over it.

Michael Coté: Yeah, I mean that’s the point that I like to make with a lot of people is the moral lapse as I would call this. They are only the creation of their situation, I mean they’re doing what they’re been asked to do.

They are how they are because yeah they were made that way, people fall to that. Yeah, I mean I think, I think that’s one thing that John got me thinking about when we are talking about the, my hatred of the cultural argument is that it is like thinking about, and you are kind of touching on this, this is thinking about instead of doing service management, doing a product management, kind of having that by and to like own the stuff.

I think that is, it’s like, more so than just like subtle trickery with words. It does like change what you think about as an ops person, what it is you are doing like –

Ernest Mueller: Absolutely.

Michael Coté: You are not just — you are not just satisfying SLAs and up time, you are not keep something up and running, you are looking at how I can make this product better, this thing better than on running.

Ernest Mueller: That’s a very good point because we had experimented with ITIL and then eventually visible ops, and had started to try to bring that sort of structured service management approach to our work when that 00:08:51 in our R&D department, run a team that’s developing SAAS products, but I was in our IT department heading up our systems side of our corporate website and we tried to push the service management aspect. We have a lot of friends in the business, the Director of Web Marketing was very supportive of setting FLAs, and figuring out how to accomplish them.

But, in the end we only achieved success to a certain degree despite the fact that, we have a lot of great people working there in all the different sectors, and it became apparent to me, our team was always, we were all respected, but we were always the bottleneck. Eventually I kind of got sick of being the bottleneck, I said, look there has to be a different way of doing things, we have optimized our processes as much as we can.

We developed the systems development process that we would use to engage development teams, very waterfall.

[00:10:02]

But brought together many years with expertise and streamlining it, but even so we couldn’t achieve the pace of delivery that the business wanted and then when you stepped back and looked at it was not unreasonable.

Michael Coté: And I mean, can we go into like why, if you’re taking a service management type of approach where and correct me where I’m kind of wrong, where you’re sort of focused on providing some SOAs that you have, and providing the infrastructure that something runs on. You’re kind of providing, I don’t know, the infrastructure stuff runs on, I’m repeating myself. But I mean, what would happen that would cause you guys to be a bottleneck like because you’re doing like ITIL or Visible Ops — a service oriented –

Ernest Mueller: Well, yes, I don’t think it’s, I don’t think we were a bottleneck, because we were doing ITIL and Visible Ops is just those things were not sufficient to stop us from being the bottleneck, because we had — we have like a 100 programmers to a team of like six ops guys.

Michael Coté: So, it’s not that they were slowing things down. It was more than they weren’t sufficient to give you the tools to move at the speed the development wanted?

Ernest Mueller: That’s right, they absolutely held. Right, we had a great kind of internal initiative where we sat down with our senior development managers and the business managers and we put together these, kind of, core goals and SLAs.

It was great because it aligned a lot of the things like hearing the business people say that performance and uptime are two of the top five things they care about, right, helped us make that case to the development teams, and to other business teams that frequently were pushing for release even if they knew something was terribly wrong.

So, it was very helpful, but we just kept bumping up against a kind of glass ceiling where we just — we couldn’t hit that higher rate of speed that when you stepped back, and looked at the pace of delivery, you still said, hey that some just seems wrong there, why it does take that long.

Michael Coté: I guess, I mean it probably is actually a metric in various processes or whatever. But it’s not a metric you hear too about it. It’s the — I don’t know time to deliver new features –

Ernest Mueller: Well, absolutely.

Michael Coté: Or something, I don’t know what you’d call that.

Ernest Mueller: That was the source of one of the — kind of, more bitter arguments surrounding that whole effort. We came up with this kind of five killers that were important to the business was performance, availability, total cost of ownership, and then fairly we call that became proportion between new development and maintenance, and agility.

One of the senior development managers that kept trying to axe Agility, he is like well, how do you put a metric on that, how do you like — and I said, we go back and talk to the business director, I guarantee if we asked him which one of these five things was most important, he would say that one. So, even though we can’t come up with a sound metric for it, I don’t really care.

So that’s true, it’s hard because what — you start getting, you start going down the rabbit hole of feature points, lines of code, it’s all BS right and in the end you have to kind of wet your finger and stick it up to the air and say, so feel like the wind is moving fast enough, no it doesn’t.

Michael Coté: And have you come across people measuring something like that John like its sort of like, I mean I don’t know I would almost think it’s sort of like business guy wants something, never mind the scale of it necessarily, and is kind of like some measurement of how quickly relative to the scale of it that you can get into production.

John Willis: Well, I think if you start looking at like the companies that like are boasting their deploys per day. I mean that’s definitely, I mean that’s a sign of agility. I mean to some who aren’t — we talked about it in the flash podcast and some who are not ready to fulfill all the pieces of that that could be a disaster like, it’s just like, okay we’re going try to do 30 deploys a day, right. That ain’t going to work if you don’t have faster developing, if you don’t have some type of goal-oriented monitoring or just some, all the things implies that make that type of pipeline work.

But, I think that becomes — but I’ve been a big fan of the finger in the air, feel where the way wind is blowing. I’ve been saying it like we used to talk about clouds in the early days, and I’d say, well, it’s just a cloud, it’s just a cloud, I tell you. I can’t tell you what makes the cloud but I could tell you when I see one.

[00:15:00]

And I think that — I think that that’s the — like you will know you’re agile, you will know that your business is agile, when you’re agile, I mean it will be clear, right. I mean look at 00:15:13 you look at — and a 00:15:15 it goes into velocity of innovation. The stories where these companies can, like a marketing guy can get on a phone with the developer guys and say, I got a big deal right now, and then you can show these guys this feature and they can put it together on a couple of hours, and they launch it with the feature flag, the only that customer sees it. You know, that’s our job, right. I mean that’s our job, –

Michael Coté: Yeah, yeah. I mean that kind of scenario is — it always drive developers kind of by rate, but I think that’s because kind of joins back into the thread of conversation, it’s because traditionally that’s a very dangerous thing to do, to have the sales person developer connection.

John Willis: Yeah, right traditionally, but, I mean, this is all about like breaking down a lot of tradition –

Michael Coté: Yeah, exactly.

John Willis: Like doing 30 deploys a day gets people sick, right 00:16:13 when you here the first time. But, having a sales guy — a marketing guy call a development guy and say I want this, that like breaks all the rules of traditional. But in a new world, it’s pretty freaking full — I was telling Ernest earlier today, I was in this trading company recently, where they have the developer’s and the trader’s path, they sit next to each other all day long and a developer like he says, why did you do that, the trader says, well, normally I have to do three steps to get this. It is like hold on and it’s a new world, I mean I think that’s –

Ernest Mueller: That’s a good point. I think the problem that someone is faced with from an enterprise point of view is how much does that scale, right, because when you are — so many of the start ups are very narrowly focused and, they are being encouraged to be very narrowly focused as at a king of the, Lean: King of the Apps Show down — South by Southwest, people are going up and showing their apps and giving their spiel and getting fatigued.

Michael Coté: Like, this is an app that tracks the growth of a potato plant.

Ernest Mueller: Well, exactly and so,

Michael Coté: Not any plant, potato.

Ernest Mueller: So, one guy showed his app and Robert Scoble was like, Yeah, you need to take half of your features out. I said, well, okay, hold on. I could see he needs a simpler interface right but I have got 20 Apps on my phone to do one thing, that when I step back, I think why don’t I have one app that does all these things. How many Google maps mash ups do I need?

Michael Coté: If any thing the apps that I really like, I really want them to do a lot more, like something like Evernote, like I wish you would just — there is this great, this fun little app called Momento that you hook up to all your 00:17:59. It’s like pulls it all and you can see like, for this day you take to these places in first grade put this, took these photos and its fun, right. But like that’s kind of thing we were like, oh, I wish, I wish Evernote gets that and like stored it, like so I would like it to do a whole lot of stuff.

Then there is another example, there is this Instagram application. It’s fun, it’s like a fun way to take pictures and it’s kind of like I want that to integrate with everything. I don’t want it to be it just takes some pictures anyways.

Ernest Mueller: Well and that’s a — and that’s the dilemma so.

Michael Coté: It’s the individual enterprise requirement process. I wanted to do everything right now.

Ernest Mueller: Right, because, it’s just on our website, right. We have like 300 applications in production, right. It’s not we don’t do one thing; we do a lot of things and too much segmentation right, breeds chaos. In fact, that was one of the challenges that my web systems team faced, was the business team was siloed by, here is E-commerce, ECRM support community on down the line, and they would all do things differently, and so it’s hard to get together standards, and make things work. But on the other hand, I think corporate IT has gone too much the other way, right, there is always a balance between centralization, and standards, and innovation.

Michael Coté: Well, let me float this theory that I just was thinking this — as you were talking about this 00:19:28. It almost seems like, so in the past, let me over contextualize this as always, in the past enterprise, I mean like high scale and fast and performance and WebSphere MQ, and all those kind of stuffs, whereas nowadays that’s not the exclusive domain of enterprise, like Twitter does enterprise scale stuff with, and that is not enterprise. I mean whatever, and so it’s almost as if nowadays to the point of what you are saying enterprise kind of means complex.

Ernest Mueller: Absolutely.

Michael Coté: And lots of stuff.

[00:20:00]

Ernest Muller: That is a great insight. So, on our website we didn’t have more than four servers that did the same thing. Internally we might have had somewhere a group of ten servers that did the same thing but, that’s not our — but that’s not the problem we have, we don’t have the Google problem, the Flickr problem, when me and my colleagues go to Velocity, and hear about, oh, here is how we solved this problem for Facebook, like we are jealous that our problem would be that simple, right.

Michael Coté: Right, exactly. That’s kind of something I even thought about till you’re going over it. Is it is, it’s almost a cultural, a business culture problem of — the business doesn’t want to have a simple business, or can’t have a simple business, they have a complicated business.

Ernest Muller: Well, exactly like it, the 00:20:48 coding the scale presentation yesterday, they came out, admitted that they’ve made their application more monolithic so that they can support that higher rate of deploys per day.

They used to be service oriented and basically they’ve smashed it together, and said well, we’ll worry about that later. Then when you have a very large organization where you have you know Oracle ERP systems, and all these other things, it’s really the complexity which is the challenge. We still have the Lotus Notes users, and not because we love it for email, like for just for email be out there tomorrow and we’ll have something else then, but it’s all the little applications.

We have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of little applications because Lotus Notes solved that pluming problem for you, it’s like, hey, I can write this little app. I can distribute it you know from here to Aachen, Germany to Hungary to Tokyo all the places we have offices, great done, right and still nothing has actually emerged to do that as well.

John Willis: Right, right, right. Yeah, I mean that is the reason just to stick with notes. Sure.

Michael Coté: Yeah, I mean that’s interesting — yes, please, that’d be great, thank you. Yeah, so what should we be talking about next John?

John Willis: Well I’m a big fan of your open source projects if you can or your stuff that you’ve been kind of contributing, you want to talk about that?

Michael Coté: Oh yeah, Let’s talk about technology.

Ernest Muller: Sure.

John Willis: Technology, yeah, sure.

Ernest Muller: Sure, well, so we are still working on the open sourcing part, but one of the things that we did when we started this new team to develop software’s as a service products for National Instruments, I made the decision early on that it need to be all Cloud based. The nature of the products that we were developing, for example, let’s say FPGA Compiled Cloud, they all needed to be multi-tenant, they all needed to be scaled very well, and in certain cases with fairly custom algorithms. We knew we needed it to happen quickly.

So we decided that we needed to write a Cloud based provisioning environment that would allow us to really hit that, both the velocity but also the flexibility that we needed.

Michael Coté: To be agile.

Ernest Muller: That’s right. That’s right because –

Michael Coté: Not to be agile, to have agility.

Ernest Muller: To have agility, it’s all different –

Michael Coté: Yeah, to add the L1.

Ernest Muller: Absolutely, because these products, we didn’t know which ones are going to go over well, not go over. We didn’t know how we were going to develop on this true, kind of, agile development story like it’s not like somebody came to us with a clear business case, and they wanted these things to do.

It’s like we’ve, I don’t want to have this thing and is going to run on the cloud, and let’s figure all that out. Right so like one of our major tasks in every sprint is going and grabbing the business guy by the 0:23:58 and shaking him until he tells us what the licensing model should be right.

Alright, it’s like we are doing this utility billing, or what you know shake, shake, shake. So, we were developing the systems infrastructure and code and the business process all at the same time.

So, what we ended up doing, we have this thing called PIE and, my colleague Peco Karayanev is the main developer on it. You’ll always see us wondering around as a unit, he’s not here because he at a wedding today. But it stands for Programable Infrastructure Environment and what we wanted to do and especially because we just gotten into DevOps, and we are trying to internalize what, how we could really maximally collaborate with our developers we said, hey we need our provisioning to not simply be automated, right.

To be programable it needs to be something you can code and you can code too and so –

[00:25:00]

Michael Coté: And who is the “you” in that case?

Ernest Mueller: The developers writing the more kind of the functional parts of the system and ourselves, right. So, the operations guys have always wanted to have more automation, but we tend to want automation in ways that makes sense to us, but not ways that make sense to a developer, and in the end that sort of self service is the goal. We did — it’s in the side, but in our role in IT, we did two big implementations where we really pushed a lot of stuff to self service to our developers. There was this Splunk Log Management Implementation, and then OPNET Panorama like APM tool implementation where we put them in and we pushed the maximally to the developers instead of having them do the Ops tools and in each of those cases –

Michael Coté: Like the SA guys are talking about.

Ernest Mueller: Exactly, so a huge response like actually saying, hey, this isn’t a thing we’re going to do anymore, we’re going to expose it to you, so you can do it. Like that’s when we got into it — that’s when people were seeking us out instead of us finding them.

Michael Coté: So like rattling on that a little bit, like what is it that it made the developers interested in that, what excited this. That direct, that direct access, and direct ability to see how their own handiwork is working in the production environment. And so was it they — like what you’re saying there I just want to sort of observe their handiwork, but was it bad or was it also like so that they could guide in those problems?

Ernest Mueller: Absolutely, I mean that was our goal, right. I mean our goal was to get them to diagnose problems, but that’s not what got them to open Gooey and click on it in the first place.

Michael Coté: They were just curious.

Ernest Mueller: That’s right. It’s like, oh, I wrote this thing, I cast it over the wall. The admins occasionally yell at me about it, what is it really doing and, if I pull open live log-tailing and then go hit it, what am I going to see because — they don’t necessarily no, right.

Michael Coté: What were you’re saying?

John Willis: I was saying, I think it’s like giving them a lot of a control, I was down and self services is about breaking that barrier of — we throw it over the wall, ask question on the wall, get the –it’s the e-mail version of the communication, right, whereas give me the control –

Ernest Mueller: That’s right and a lot of it is just enabling my people to be doing value-added work, right. Carving up log files, and sending them to a developer is one key-work, that’s why we invented computers, right. That’s not something that a highly skilled person should be spending their time on, and by doing that sort of self service we didn’t free up people’s time to hopefully innovate a little bit more, yeah.

Michael Coté: It’s like when people asked me where something is, and I just want to tell them to look it up on Google Maps.

Ernest Mueller: Exactly. I mean move on to similar high value activity in their life. So recurring back up to PIE, so we device the system, and essentially there is some XML based system model, which is somewhat familiar to those who have looked at Amazon Cloud Formation. It’s kind of like that, except it, except it’s more generic. It’s not just for Amazon, right, it’s more a generalized system model. From that we use that as a — as kind of documents for our developers to collaborate with the system administers, all right. It’s like you’re building out your actual system, and how the applications are distributed and all that.

Michael Coté: Because, the developers are saying, here is the type of server that needs to run, and here is the kind of resources, the speed when it’s in production, which it gets to the point of that programable infrastructure or whatever it is. It’s you got the developers to specify the infrastructure, their applications needs to run on.

Ernest Mueller: That’s right.

Michael Coté: And its part of what they’re coding.

Ernest Mueller: Well, exactly and as part of that also we have kind of quickened replacement, so that if an application needs something that’s box specific or environment specific that can all get filled in from configuration that’s part of that model.

So, we got into a point where you could spin up an entire, we call them cloudlets because nobody has really come up with a better word, right. It’s a specific multi-server, multi-role, instance of one of our applications, maybe it’s a dev environment, and maybe it’s a test environment, right. But, spin up an entire cloudlet off of that model without manual prevention. Both, kind of bringing up the cloud systems and getting core software on them and doing application deploys, kind of getting it all, already to run.

[00:29:55]

Then we have a — we use a ZooKeeper based registry which when all the systems, as they come up, they register with it and is used to hook events, and do orchestration amongst the servers. Finally enough like — this is one of the things we’ve been not entirely of our own volition but we’ve been moving some of our applications to Microsoft Azure.

Those are the two things that they have that really are very forward thinking when you create your app, there is a model that describes, and then there is a runtime registry they call it the Fabric that knows what’s going on, and you can hook for events and those two concepts –

Michael Coté: The AppFabric stuff, right? Oh yeah, that’s more like the bus that runs.

Ernest Mueller: Yes, well, yeah with their branding and sometimes a little hard. Yeah, but there is essentially a Azure Fabric API that, it’s like Amazon Instance Metadata, but then also dynamic stuff, also events.

Michael Coté: That’s right, yeah, I forget like Fabric is one of the, Fabric is a term they used in 00:31:07 they kind of mean everything. So, basically they are using ZooKeeper as sort of a combination, a combination asset database catalogue and orchestration engine.

Ernest Mueller: Well, exactly so the concept of a CMBB is all been busted, right like –

Michael Coté: I mean you told, right, I don’t know.

Ernest Mueller: We tried, we poked around with them in IT for a longtime, and finally we just ran screaming. So we are somewhat, a 100% of our systems aren’t cloud, we actually have a couple on from a system integration with this but because they’re mostly cloud. We said, hey, we really need something that it just –

Michael Coté: You’ve got a hybrid cloud. That is fantastic.

Ernest Mueller: We do. That is just super highly dynamic so instead of, yeah instead of writing things down in the database, or sort of running discovery or whatever, we have a model that describes what the system should look like. We spin it up, and registry knows what the system does with the client. Sometimes people confuse those two things, right. When you only have half of that equation, well here is my config and certainly my tool eventually get it to that config, it’s like yes well maybe but maybe not. There’s monitoring right, the monitoring is a course-grained.

John Willis: Who is that?

Michael Coté: It’s Roger Ebert.

Ernest Mueller: Oh, yeah Roger Ebert.

Michael Coté: Awesome, there he goes.

John Willis: I’ll see if he wants to come in DevOps.

Michael Coté: I don’t think he can talk anymore unfortunately, yeah. But otherwise I’m sure he would.

Ernest Mueller: He’s got more opinionated.

Michael Coté: Sorry to be interruption.

Ernest Mueller: No problem –

Michael Coté: But, see you have the real state of the things, and the desired state of things. And, again it’s because when you are — nodes or whatever come up, they register with the ZooKeeper, for instance you have –

Ernest Mueller: Exactly, especially because of the dynamic scaling in the cloud right. So the model is probably not the right place for how many app servers do I want, like because that’s not something I care about our priority, I want there to be as many as there is traffic, right. So, that’s something within the registry can do and that’s –

John Willis: Well, I mean this is the problem, I think you guys, now when I see this all over, this idea that people are, I mean the products like Chef and Puppet, cfengine deal with the model state, but like so you decide okay, there is thing called the web server, configuration then can be involved in having instances of that, and typically they don’t, right. And then even the state of 00:33:53 of things that come and go, right. So, I think there really is a second home, for a new kind of solution, like you guys are doing, it has to sync with the model space, but also with a separate problem solution, which is state awareness you know.

Ernest Mueller: Well, exactly. And I think like we wouldn’t have to wrote our own kind of simple provisioning as part of PIE, but eventually I see it integrating with, integrating with Chef and Puppet were not, because it’s, it tries to abstract things one level higher, right. So, we kind of referred to it as the tool belt for the tool chain, because you end up getting all these tools, and they all have their own –

Michael Coté: That’s a good metaphor.

Ernest Mueller: They all have their own models. They will have their own ways of interacting with them, but I want one canonical, right. I’m never going to teach my developers to read Chef recipes, and Nagios configs, and all the, I mean that’s why we have ops guys, right, who are experts in a hundred different 00:34:56 apps config format.

[0:34:58.9]

So, I want to be able to construct one model that, and the thing that we like about our model, it goes down to the application level, like hey, there is — there is this service here, it talks to this service over on this other tier, on this port, right.

Michael Coté: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ernest Mueller: We automatically generate Amazon Security Groups out. It’s like this needs to talk to that on port 443, okay, that will be automatically opened and –

Michael Coté: I mean, you guys are going to have like the dream of a scene to be on those, right that you’re modeling everything including the actual state of things, down to which ports are connected to what he does and 00:35:37.

Ernest Mueller: Exactly, and so it’s been good, like it’s — it’s not as fast as it could be, although some of that is because we’re using –

Michael Coté: And, then so you guys are going to source that, is what the –

Ernest Mueller: Well we’re going to — we’ve gotten kind of management 00:35:51

Michael Coté: That would be the first thing as open source or?

Ernest Mueller: Not the very first but probably the most substantial item like they’ve actually been working on open source like a little stream capture tool, that one of our programmers in Hungary, wrote which is pretty cool. But, this is a kind of a bit larger than that.

Michael Coté: And, then so also, if I remember you guys are kind of window-shop right –

Ernest Mueller: That’s right.

Michael Coté: — like how would you describe the makeup of your platforms?

Ernest Mueller: Okay, that’s a good point. So, on our IT side, right, our website it was 90% Linux, Java et cetera. But all of our desktop development is fundamentally Windows based, right, lot of .Net, a lot of stuff like that. So, for these Software as a Service products, we are having to bring both worlds together to a degree. So for example our FPGA compiled cloud, the thing that powers it is LabVIEW FPGA, which primarily –-

Michael Coté: Is that something like C and C++ or something like that?

Ernest Mueller: Right, right.

Michael Coté: So, which of course you can only work here on Windows.

Ernest Mueller: Yes, well, and that’s another reason that we ended up needing to develop our on solution was we needed both UNIX and Windows support. And, that’s considered to be a myth for whatever reason in the industry. I know that Chef has recently gotten decent Windows support, but –

Michael Coté: Yeah, I know, I mean, I see this all the time in the management start up innovation spaces that Windows is the last thing people think about, or one of the last thing for whatever reason.

Ernest Mueller: Well, absolutely –

Michael Coté: I think it seems to be that you have to do Microsoft program in the Windows, and a lot of the people who are programmers and startups don’t do Microsoft coding.

Ernest Mueller: That’s right, I mean, it’s a little bit of a, it’s kind of religious — because I made this point at the Austin Cloud User Group, I took a show of hands, it’s like okay, who here has to deal with both UNIX, and Windows systems, and everybody raises their hands, right. That’s a reality. You’re a six person startup, great, you can afford to pick the one specific platform, and do whatever you want, but that’s not with the rest of the world –

Michael Coté: I think, that’s what startups deal.

Ernest Mueller: Exactly, Mac client, Linux server are good to go. So, we needed both, and now that we’re bringing up a product on Microsoft Azure, our path to do that, because actually been simplified, because we’re going to take our model and essentially compile it down to the Microsoft Azure model. Now that Amazon has come out with cloud formation, we’re like, oh, well we can essentially perform an extract of our model to various domain specific model and great, we can use it.

Michael Coté: Are you finding that kind of cross-platform support is working out with sort of across EC2 and Azure and like you’re kind of alluding.

Ernest Mueller: Yes, so right now, we have Windows and Linux support on Amazon and we’re working on adding support for Azure. The most, really the most challenging part was just understanding Azure in the first place, which the majority of that is cutting through the Microsoft marketing message to –

Michael Coté: You got to cut through fabrics.

Ernest Mueller: Yeah, to what it actually is, and once you understand what actually is, and you’re like, oh, okay, yeah, that seems doable, right. So that’s where we are right now, we’re building that up.

Michael Coté: I guess, another way of asking the question is, in doing sort of SaaS and Cloud stuff, how aware are you having to be — I’m running Linux, so I’m running Windows, like where does that bubble all the way up to the top so to speak or is it more like I’m running on a service somewhere.

Ernest Mueller: Well, so something somewhere has to know about it, but we try to keep that encapsulated as lower level as possible0. So yes, in the model there is a service and then there is a machine spec.

[0:40:04.5]

That machine spec says, hey, this is Linux or Windows because you probably going to want to know whether you are 00:40:11 to it, or not doing something not offered to it, but it allows the developers do not have to worry about, about that when they’re — because the developers are the ones that you really want interacting with the model most of the time.

Because we set it up, you are like okay, server tier, memcache tier, database tier, and then we don’t have to do that much fiddling with it. It’s the developers that then fiddle with it time after time again, oh, new version, new version for my application, oh, I need to switch it from HTTP to HTTPS, because I finally got around to doing that, and we are trying to give them maximum flexibility to do that without really even having to involve us. In fact the HTTP, HTTPS is a fun example we have.

One of the developers, it’s like, okay, I need to change — I need to change my colors for our licensing from HTTP to HTTPS. I said, great, here go right there in the model and change it. He said, oh, okay, then he is like, okay, well now I need to — I need to call the DBAs and get that calls that’s coming up from our Oracle licensing system to be HTTPS.

Well, that’s spawned two weeks worth of phone calls, and meeting and, cajoling.

Michael Coté: This is John’s theory, you’re involved in Oracle DBA, your agility metric down.

Ernest Mueller: Well, you know, cajoling with the DBA is trying to get it figured out, what about the Oracle Wallet Manager like and that’s for two weeks, and the developer and he is like, oh, okay I see why we’re doing this, now like click it, completely clicked with them all, like I see you are all just doing weird crazy stuff. I understand the value now.

Michael Coté: Yeah. So, somebody asked another interesting measuring question is, well interesting to me I guess, is how often it does a developer’s — how often does a developer drive the infrastructure towards 00:42:03 like a developer like put something in the model or says, You know 00:42:06 like, oh, I guess we need get this new kind of infrastructure like, oh! Now, we need to get a new server for I think, I need just for the profile or something.

Ernest Mueller: A good but we’ve tried to keep it at a pretty, pretty collaborative level with the group with that we have greenfielded. We’ve been very lucky, we essentially have an Applications Architect; a Systems Architect myself, and then a number of developers, and App Developers, and then head of a Systems Developer right. Because we are all working as part of the same sprint and same step review process with all of that –

Michael Coté: The same team more or less.

Ernest Mueller: Exactly that, that when somebody starts coming up with something and needs a spec to be reviewed, myself and the application architect look at it. And I say, hey, that’s not going to fit on our current one, and sometimes that gets complicated.

I mean we recently had a engaging discussion right about, we are working on a product that does a lot data upload to the cloud, and we had conflicting dev and ops requirements about it, right the developers are like, hey, I really want one Rest API, that I can, that I can get in post and delete the same API.

And I said, well we really have to split them out into different servers because we need the data collection to be extremely high up time, extremely low late, and its going to be stable.

Michael Coté: Yeah, now that’s a good example.

Ernest Mueller: And, we are going to be adding other stuff to the reading, and that’s going to be very.

Michael Coté: Yeah, and that’s exactly along of the lines of a potential example. It’s sort of like, well, if you architect the system this way, we are going to need to get CDNs and we got to put a load balancing thing over here and like we are going to need a 100 gig Ethernet instead of a 10 thing that we — I mean it’s kind of like — that would be the kind of collaboration between development, and operations, I would expect to see a lot of this, sort of development people being kind of not aware of the infrastructure that their architecture is driving.

You know exactly what you’re saying, if you have you’re reading and deleting on the same service that implies a lot, and depending on your throughput about your enterprisingness of that service. But if you separate them, then maybe you could get some leeway that an operations person might understand this better a lot more than a developer would.

Ernest Mueller: Absolutely, and so our ability to really collaborate on those issues, and sometimes they’re very sticky. I mean we’ve been talking through authentication issues, and how are we going to do multi-cloud authentication, and ideally integrated with our legacy user repository.

Michael Coté: That thing, you know, are using 00:44:51 or something.

Ernest Mueller: Exactly that’s where we are going, and that takes a lot of iterating, right because a lot of times the developers think, well, why can’t it be simpler, why can’t I just call from Azure to Amazon across the Internet, every time somebody makes an API call, all right.

[0:45:14.9]

It’s like, hey, so, multiply the availabilities together, and you’ve got extra performance like you have to continuously explain it especially we’ve — one of our biggest challenges, we brought web developers over with us to see this team, but we’re working with our traditional desktop software developers for a lot of the product functionality. They’re right, it’s historically very much been a, you just test in your lab.

It’s not well what about if you’re over a low latency connection, what about fault testing, if the network just goes down for 20 seconds and then comes back, does your thing completely freak out because cloud rebooted, is not –

Michael Coté: And it will, whatever.

Ernest Mueller: — as its 0:46:00 you know a solution in a SaaS environment right, and so that’s been one of the biggest challenges to kind of teach and inform, but when people see it they really get into it. One of our LabVIEW FPGA developers happened to cross the video of from Velocity about Facebook, and how many deploys a day they do. And he came wandering over to us, hey, have you guys doing this. Like, yeah, we are at the conference, but we like that you’re excited about that.

Michael Coté: Yeah, now, I was with my friend Charles from the Drunk & Retired podcast, one of his employees here Daniel. And at the 0:46:37 thing last night, they had that same kind of reaction of like wow that looks great. I mean, instead of like thinking about like how I could use that in my job.

So, it is, whereas much as we spend like blowing up, sucking in air about talking about DevOps, it’s important to remember that not every –developers are up on developers stuff, they’re not necessarily up on operations theory and stuff. There is a lot of things to show them that are fun. Well, I only had one more thing to ask, I don’t know if you wanted to –

Ernest Mueller: Yeah, absolutely.

Michael Coté: It was basically, this is the responsible analyst would be asking this question. So we’ve gone over this exciting like technology and practices and stuffs. So, then when you go back to the guys who have lapels, which is going to be one the dress codes for ANI, business people must have lapels, they can be grabbed and shaken.

So, when you go back to the lapel guys like when they look at what you guys have done or see the effects of what you guys have done like — how do they assign business value to it. Like to them what it is like, how do they come to the conclusion hopefully. That all the shaking you’re doing of them and the time and money you’re spending on it is paying off like what’s the business value for it.

Ernest Mueller: Well, actually there is two answers to that, one is that we’re reasonably lucky, and that we don’t have a lot of lapel guys like our CEO is still the electrical engineer that started the company and so our — my management chain is all people with engineering degrees right. So to a degree that streams on some of the communication issues.

Michael Coté: And they probably also have an implicit sort of faith and technology if you will.

Ernest Mueller: Well, absolutely true, and they were willing to let us prove it, right, so –

Michael Coté: Yeah, exactly.

Ernest Mueller: When we did it we — I mean we developed and delivered two software as a service products over the course of one year, and it’s hard to argue with that, it’s hard to argue that in terms of agility. It’s like, hey, we had to spend extra time and effort on making this PIE thing, that directly have a customer impact, but look, we can just, now, we can just stamp these things out.

Michael Coté: So, that was the first thing, is that they gave you the time to establish a foundation.

Ernest Mueller: Yes.

Michael Coté: And, then the way that they rated the success of that is that you could then, is that you then had agility, and that you — in a relatively small amount of time you could put out two releases because you built this. And, so there was business value there and that you could get more stuff out.

Ernest Mueller: Exactly.

Michael Coté: And then I mean is there — and then there’s actual sort of — how are they running their business side of it differently sort of selling the product, or selling whatever it is based on because it’s built this way.

Ernest Mueller: Well so –

Michael Coté: Or is it just that it’s a SaaS, people want to access stuff as a SaaS?

Ernest Mueller: People want to access stuff as a SaaS, like there’s a big cloud, by cloud and we do that too. And customers, to a degree they just want it to work, but on the other hand, they just want it to work right, if you’re overcapacity on a given day, or you’re down on a given day, that spooks people off because with our systems we’re talking about things where people are submitting extremely valuable intellectual property, right.

[00:50:01]

So far FPGA compiled cloud, people are like, hey, you know the things I am compiling, you know, the things that we generally have corporate espionage, people trying to get out of us, right, and I am outsourcing it to you on the cloud, saving my files there, I am saving my data there, is this really, is this really rock solid and secured.

Now, the good thing is we’ve really haven’t had a lot of trouble selling people on that, like you kind of hear that well, like cloud security is the big bug there. Well, it is if you don’t have your act together with cloud security, right, but, and it was the first question out of the mouths, out of our customers, right well what about security.

We can say, hey, we are doing this, and doing this and we have the CISSP on staff, and there is how we make sure nobody ever sees your data, and then they are like, okay, fair enough like they are not just, like – that are not just random spooked.

Michael Coté: They had to make sure you got it covered internally.

Ernest Mueller: Exactly yeah.

Michael Coté: That’s sounds like another — your value, is basically your customer’s base, they want to outsource that infrastructure of compiling things to you and they want some service to do this for, and they want to own it all.

Ernest Mueller: Absolutely it’s humbling having come from IT, but the people that come to us with big dollar opportunities, and they say, yeah and I wanted to do this because, you know I am smart and I program and I could have done it myself, but I would have to go to get a server from IT and I would rather give you all a briefcase full of money. That’s — gets messed up from one point of view, but we’ll take it from the other point.

Michael Coté: So, you are sort of enabling some of your customers, I won’t say all, maybe does all, but to basically do rogue IT to not to deal with their own IT departments to get their job done?

Ernest Mueller: It’s very true, I mean or at least or at least a different sort of engagement, right. If you consume it as a service even if your IT department is engaged and has oversight on that, it has to be less of a bottleneck, it takes less time to evaluate a SaaS vendor and then to build out a system.

Michael Coté: Yeah, the same SaaS dynamics that works in the CRM and application space work in the FTP or whatever.

Ernest Mueller: Absolutely the hardcore engineering people, there is all kinds of mobile apps, it’s like here is an oscilloscope on your iPhone. I mean it’s the exact same social media, mobile cloud, they are just as compelling to propel our heads as to whatever the course 00:52:42

Michael Coté: It’s not FPG, or is that – it is FPGA.

Ernest Mueller: FPGA.

Michael Coté: There you go, it’s not a first person anyway. I am way beyond my theme, once there is three dimensional objects involved. All right, well 00:52:56 is there anything else you guys want to talk about. I think that was great, I mean didn’t wanted to sit down for a while and just kind go over.

Ernest Mueller: Yeah, thanks for having me.

Michael Coté: — what you guys doing, I think it’s nice to talk to someone who is implementing all these technologies and practices and a business of doing it, not just sort of the tooling and all that kind of stuff so, so great and I appreciate it.

Ernest Mueller: Thank you.

Michael Coté: We’ll see everyone next time.

Disclosure: see the RedMonk client list for clients mentioned.

While running around SXSW, I caught up with IBM’s Noah Kuttler to discuss the happenings at IBM’s Tivoli conference, Pulse. Also, be sure to check my trip report from this year’s Pulse – there’s some good discussion in the comments.

Download the episode directly right here, subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatcher to have episodes downloaded automatically, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

Transcript

As usual with these un-sponsored episodes, I haven’t spent time to clean up the transcript. If you see us saying something crazy, check the original audio first. There are time-codes where there were transcription problems.

Michael Coté: Alright, well hello everybody again, it’s another special South by Southwest edition of the IT Management and Cloud Podcast. And we got a guest here, John and I are still here at The Driskill Bar, so you can hear the lovely soundtrack. Why don’t you introduce yourself?

Noah Kuttler: Hi! I am Noah Kuttler and I work at IBM, and I am in Integrated Service Management Marketing.

Michael Coté: You were just saying you had been at IBM like 10 years or so right? Like what do you have been doing that whole time?

Noah Kuttler: Well, I’ve often been called The Wandering Jew of IBM Austin, because –

Michael Coté: Like those purple ivy plants, right?

Noah Kuttler: Pretty much. Well, I seem to have a new manager every other month, but actually I’ve been consistent over the past couple of years working for Cameron, who you probably know.

Michael Coté: Oh! Right, right sure.

Noah Kuttler: He is a great guy, and yeah, I worked in pSeries, I was an Offering Manager for the P630 and for the P610. I worked on SMP projects in pSeries then worked in Deep Computing for about three years, doing business intelligence, everything in marketing from strategy, offerings, channels, you name it.

Michael Coté: Right, right.

Noah Kuttler: Then, moved over to Tivoli organization, I think about three, three-and-a-half years ago and have been working on this integrated service management marketing team, where we are really trying to champion the category of integrated service management and promote that with our customers.

Michael Coté: Why don’t you tell us what integrated service management organization is to the Tivoli organization?

Noah Kuttler: Sure. Many of you folks listening to this have individual Tivoli products. TSM or you have Maximo products maybe and integrated service management is where we talk about service management extending across many things.

It’s still the visibility control and automation that we’ve always been talking about and that seems to resonate with our customers and with folks like you who are analysts, but when we talk about integrated service management, we not only talk about the data center, we also talk about industries, so industry-specific solutions and there is lot of Maximo in there.

Michael Coté: This is I mean the way, correct me if this isn’t the path that it is, but the way I explain this to people is, you know, imagine if everything was IP addressable then, if you can manage a network you can manage everything, essentially what that is.

Noah Kuttler: Exactly and I would even point people to the blog that you wrote post pulse, because you transmitted all of that information very well and probably better than us, but yeah, and everything is transmittable, and then that also leads to something we call design and delivery, which Pete Marshall is working on.

Design and delivery is about well, if everything is IP addressable and everything is intelligent, well then the software and the services that you are creating, you maybe needing to think about creating those a little bit differently, so that development isn’t throwing those things over the wall to ops, and they’re using different tools and different processes.

They’re able to communicate issues back and forth a little bit better.

Michael Coté: I mean, this has been a big theme for — well all of software group for a while, but for Tivoli is the — what do you want to call like industry framework or solution, I mean, it’s had lots of names and it’s basically, I don’t know, I mean the way I look at it is, it’s finding new markets for IBM software brands that are more, that are not, what is it, they are not traditional IT markets.

Another way of looking at it, is if everything is a computer nowadays that — you can do complier stuff, then you can get into that. In the rational brand, you have the buy and sell a lot, which brings them into system stuff, which is doing non-IT stuff and you guys bought — I always call it Maximo, but it was actually MCO is that what it or –

Noah Kuttler: MRO, MRO.

Michael Coté: It was MRO, which got into keeping track of people’s pencil holders, just anything, valves and things like that?

Noah Kuttler: Yeah, and it really is fantastic, because if you think about it, the assets of IT are such, because that’s what was available to time. Your computers are what they manage, but now you have an iPhone, I have an iPhone, these things can be, these things should also be managed. They should also be a part of the enterprise, but then also things like a building, you know, everything in a building can be instrumented and we can start to control that.

Michael Coté: And then, so do you guys have — like what’s the partnership angle when you’re doing this kind of stuff, and the reason I ask this is because, I mean traditionally IBM doesn’t do stuff outside of its own domain, that’s kind tautologically putting it.

Noah Kuttler: Right, certainly.

Michael Coté: Sort of like, you don’t live outside, you live — your home is your house anyways. And so, like in building, I mean I know you guys partner with Johnson Controls and ultimately people like that. So, do you guys sort of have like the bevy of partners that you go with in various things or are you more trying to sort of takeover those things? Like what’s the strategy that you go in there with?

Noah Kuttler: Well, that particular area I don’t know personally, because I’m not dealing with that. I do know that we do have a number of partners like you said, Johnson Controls that we deal with. And it’s kind of a mix, we have a number of different business partners that we work with that all play in different areas and then there are some things that we go alone where we go with our services organization as well, but your point about Johnson Controls, that was a good example of they make the chips that go into buildings and some of that type of thing and we did a partnership with them where we turned Armonk and Rochester into smarter buildings.

Michael Coté: Right, right.

Noah Kuttler: And, yeah, you probably –

Michael Coté: Yeah, and I guess the other thing that — the other premise or theory or whatever your operating theory being that, I hate to use a word like substrate or wide space or something, but there is this area of need for management to software that didn’t really exist before.

Various executives and keynotes kind of a pulse and other kinds of maintenance that when it came to whether it’s managing a building or managing a factory or managing a pin holder, there really wasn’t the ability to manage it before.

Now, that kind of exists, and there is sort of a vacuum of software that yourself and others could kind of fill as well.

Noah Kuttler: Right, well let’s look at it like this. If you think about the budget of any customer or anybody listening your budget that’s a pot of money, it’s not getting bigger, it’s getting smaller, if anything.

IT budgets sometimes are reducing year-to-year, even budgets that are allocated are reducing. If you think about your average building, there was a great speech that President Obama or for us our President the U.S. President Obama gave at Penn State where he was talking about smarter buildings and he had mentioned us there.

One of the statistics he used that 45% of the energy in the United States goes to buildings or halls. So, outside of payroll, buildings become one of the largest expenses to a company.

So, if you think about yourself and you think about your dwindling IT budget, it’s basically just going into the ether on heating and nonsense like that, whereas if you had an intelligent building, you’re doing smarter buildings that might allow you as an IT organization to have more money or to do things more intelligently with the type of services that you offer.

Michael Coté: Yeah, it reminds us of a conversation I had with one of our clients, Syntela who basically they have, what do they have? They have software that helps you sort of monitor and if not monitored directly, you can figure out and estimate how much power usage various servers have and things like that.

Then kind of cross that with how much power you’re getting in, and the whole point being that you want to optimize the power that you’re using. And back when there was the barrel of oil, and whatever it used to be back when everyone suddenly went green freaky, and then it came down, and everyone kind of forgot about it.

Like, he was saying that a lot of the issues that when they talk with some people, that the IT people are kind of like, “Why do we need this for? We don’t pay that bill.” But then he said that there are some stories of people where, they’re like, we’ve got like a petabyte of storage sitting on the loading dock, because we don’t have the electrical capacity to plug it in.

It’s kind of like well, there you go, there is your problem. It’s like — and the point there being that there’s almost and without getting myself down in too many rabbit holes, I’ll line them up here. But, it’s almost as if in order to do your IT job, it may start to become necessary to do these other things, like worry about power management and things like that.

Know that we have to worry about the power coming in here, because then we can’t plug in our drives.

Noah Kuttler: You have to be a citizen of the world per se.

Michael Coté: Right, right.

Noah Kuttler: It’s funny you say that because, before I was with IBM I was with a small software company in New Jersey and we were about 15 people. When I tell you that I did about everything, I can tell you I did about everything.

In fact, in addition to being the marketing director there, I was the exchange administrator, which how those two jobs fall into the same category is beyond me. But, it’s made me hypervigilant to the fact that all these things are important to know about.

So, I remember being on the phone with someone at IBM, and they said to me, “Oh, such and such is free.” I said, “Oh great, then let’s do that.” The woman says, “Okay, I need your division and your department number.” And I said, “Lady, anytime someone asks you for division and department number, it’s not free.” I’m getting billed for it in some way, shape, or form.

So, those types of shadow budgets that people don’t think about, they factor in.

Michael Coté: Yeah. Why don’t we yeah, I know that make sense. It is like, it’s funny that in the previous episode that we had just five minutes ago as it were.

Noah Kuttler: Right.

Michael Coté: We were talking about how people need to have a sense of purpose or kind of be more plugged into the business. And then may be this is another example of it is kind of being aware of what’s going on beyond your cubicle and like how or what you are doing plugs into that and impacts, all right and –

Noah Kuttler: Well, the DC Water guy at Pulse, and I forget the gentleman’s name and I apologize to him, but the customer that we had from DC Water even talked about it with — when they provided a service back to the end customer as well as internally, all of a sudden they had all of these people throwing money at them saying, “Hey, can you do this project, can you do this?” And when you become valuable to the organization by providing them the things that they need, they are going to make sure you are well taken care of.

Michael Coté: Yeah, yeah.

Noah Kuttler: You know.

Michael Coté: Yeah, I mean it just — that’s the challenges of taking that leap of faith. They are doing — we are doing this project is getting like into that point, but it is –

Noah Kuttler: No question.

Michael Coté: That is like — I think there is sort of an intersection of easy things to say and also the helpfulness of it. And I think that’s the thing, that’s a good, the thing that this concept is at that point of, if you are successful at like making whoever you are delivering your service to happy, they are going to ask for more of it, right? It kind of does beg the question of like well, how do I do that or whatever, but it is kind of — there is no arguing about it, if you could pull it off, then it’s going to work for you.

Noah Kuttler: A great consultant once said to me, there are three steps to being a great consultant. It’s understanding the problem, delivering on-time and under budget, asking for more work.

Michael Coté: That’s right, definitely. Now, that makes sense.

Noah Kuttler: Yeah.

Michael Coté: So lets, I mean lets talk about the Pulse Conference itself for a little bit. I mean, what would you describe the agenda of it, like what the themes were or whatever?

Noah Kuttler: The theme was integrated service management, and it really was a valid communicating both the broader story, but you know one of the things that I would point out is that we are not forgetting about the data center customers by any means. What we have done is, we are working on progression paths, and entry points, so that if you are a TPM customer and you’re really just interested in, “I need to get a better virtualization strategy going on.”

We have those solutions and those are available to you, and we actually — the reason I mentioned TPM is because we had a new announcement around Federated Image Management, but that’s not here or there.

Michael Coté: Right, right.

Noah Kuttler: But, I’m sorry, it’s so transparent how much of a marketing guy I am, because I’m just like plug and you know but –

Michael Coté: And that’s — I mean when people go to a conference, let’s say you are going to conference, they want to know about the analysis stuff, right.

Noah Kuttler: Well, and also I was the one that was the cat herder for that list. That list that you probably saw when the 00:13:13 where they showed the list of — I was the one that cat herded that, so that’s why I know that. But it’s also about the broader perspective of service management when you start to think about industry solutions, you start to think about design and delivery and you start to think about things like intelligent network, metering network management.

I was you know roll off of that one, where like real time asset locator for healthcare. Where you are starting to think about services that are offered, that are not traditional IT, but there are things that IT can implement that are going to provide value to the business.

Michael Coté: Yeah. I mean, it’s Internet of thing stuff, right?

Noah Kuttler: Yes.

Michael Coté: That’s the other moniker.

Noah Kuttler: Yeah. And, I really like that as a concept as well.

Michael Coté: Yeah. I mean, to your point of the data center stuff, I mean the thing that I notice is — while on the keynote it was very focused on integrated service management stuff or whatever to be all proper in my phrasing.

Noah Kuttler: Right.

Michael Coté: If you went down to like the 00:14:15 it is like little boost, it was like, you can like throw a rock, or I guess like whatever else you would have. There would be people who are just like, here is image management, here is service things, like all the technical products were actually down on the floor that you just have to kind of go dig them up.

Noah Kuttler: Because that never goes away.

Michael Coté: Right, right.

Noah Kuttler: At the end of the day there is a bill of materials that needs to be addressed in terms of what the customers are using and again, there are some customers that are very gung ho that are saying yeah, we’re going to do real time asset location for healthcare and we are ready to go. There are other customers that just say, “Give me my TSM, let me be happy and move on.”

Michael Coté: And so, while you are the integrated service guy here, like since you did cat herd the other the list of announcements, like can you sort of like go over what those other announcements were?

Noah Kuttler: Sure. There were a number of different product announcements one of the most exciting things that’s happened recently is, where we’ve taken the big fixed products, and those are now officially the Tivoli Endpoint Manager product. So, that was a really nice announcement.

Michael Coté: Yeah, I mean that was a very practical pragmatic bite and that was in 2010, right, when you guys got that. It’s just desktop management patching or endpoints but you know –

Noah Kuttler: Right, and, you know, the thing and I’ll be honest with you, the thing that I love about the acquisitions that we make is the — in addition to new technology and new things that come in from there, we also get great new people. And there are people that come in that provide very unique or different perspectives that we then as maybe longer term IBM or start to learn from and start to incorporate their thinking, so that’s also good to have those folks in there.

Michael Coté: Right, right. So you had the BigFix announcement and well –

Noah Kuttler: Right, the BigFix announcement, we had Tivoli Provisioning Manager, where we talked about a federated image management.

Michael Coté: That’s the thing that — was that the thing that was in beta that –

Noah Kuttler: Oh, I’ll get to that, but federated image management, part of that is there were some — there were two really good cloud announcements. And I’m laughing because when you asked about it, the name was a code name and now it’s another name.

Michael Coté: Yeah, yeah. That’s why I didn’t ask by name, because I think there are many different names for it.

Noah Kuttler: You know, this is not “ask for it by name” type of situation unfortunately. We refer to it internally as high-scale low-touch.

Michael Coté: That’s right.

Noah Kuttler: That’s what’s in beta, and Jamie talked about that in her keynote and really what we are — it kind of says what it is, and is what it says, whereas if you’re doing a cloud environment and you are doing an image rollout, you don’t have time to configure all those things. It needs to be “boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.”

So, high-scale low-touch deployment is about that, making it very simple to rollout and implement those images. Now, the other thing that we talked about was a tech preview of the hybrid cloud integrator that’s based on cast iron technology.

That is about services that are public and/or private and having those as a kind of just a service catalog where you just pull from those, it doesn’t matter if they are public or private they’re all in the service catalog. We also talked about Tivoli Storage Manager for virtualized environments and we have some really good features there in terms of the way we backup with VMware.

It’s a lot more efficient, it’s a lot quicker.

Michael Coté: Then, there was some security stuff, which is something I don’t pay really close attention to, so I often miss but –

Noah Kuttler: Yeah, the security — it was a security intrusion prevention device. It’s a new box, as an old hardware guy, shiny metal always catches my attention and so –

Michael Coté: That’s right or black metal maybe I don’t know.

Noah Kuttler: Yeah, well yeah, exactly the black yeah. But yeah, it actually won an award at RSA. It’s the GX50 700 I believe was the product name.

Michael Coté: Good IBM name, yeah.

Noah Kuttler: Let me tell you. If there is anybody that knows how to name things and I’m not being sarcastic either you know, personal computer, you’re welcome.

Michael Coté: GX2000.

Noah Kuttler: You’re welcome exactly. So, we had a couple of those announcements, we also had some announcements around like I said, real time asset locator. We did a statement of direction around smarter cities, and then also ran smarter buildings, and so yeah, so a number of them we’re starting to think, there’s anything that was –

Michael Coté: Yes, I remember there was basically some virtualization stuff, and there was the high-touch or low-touch high-thing, and I mean that was kind of interesting.

Noah Kuttler: There was a network manager bundle that we had with OMNIbus, and that was also a nice thing. They kind of bundled a bunch of those products together and the nice thing, it’s funny. The nice thing about the network manager is you know, I referred to it on the blog, the intelligent network — crap I always screw up this name, Intelligent Metering Network Management Product.

Michael Coté: There you go.

Noah Kuttler: Which is around smarter — thank you, which is around smarter grids and smarter electricity. That’s one of those, I refer to it as the Reese’s peanut butter cup, two great tastes that taste great together, because you have the Maximo, which is the asset management and you have the network products, which is around the networking.

You put those together, and you have this great product for reading these meters, and the efficiencies on the network for reading those meters at a home site, as opposed to having to send out a guy or a girl that’s being chased by dogs, and God knows what –

Michael Coté: The truck rolls, and all that business.

Noah Kuttler: Oh yes, truck rolls, I love that.

Michael Coté: That was another, I think, I mean, if having followed like all this integrated stuff at Tivoli for like three years or so now. There is a certain lexicon of — there is a kind of like truck roll, CenterPoint Energy, San Francisco always, DC Water now is one, but there is, yeah like similar things that pop up. It’s fun to catalog those.

I spoke to myself and forgetting what I was going to say next, which is always exciting for me, but I mean, what was I going to say? I had one last thing I was going to talk about, terrible, terrible that I have forgotten it.

Noah Kuttler: Oh, I thought terrible was like a code name for something.

Michael Coté: No, no, no, that’s my own project code names.

Noah Kuttler: Okay, well, yeah we have many acronyms at IBM.

Michael Coté: Oh, I know what you are going to say, because there was also, I forget, I think, it was like the business service community, but there is some community site that you guys –

Noah Kuttler: Oh yes.

Michael Coté: You actually launched it, it’s kind of a soft launched a few weeks ago. But it’s kind of like developerWorks for ops people or something.

Noah Kuttler: Danny will kill me, because I forgot about it, but yeah, and the reason I forgot about it, was because it was in — as I look at the chart in my head. It’s on the bottom there under a kind of a cross thing.

Service Management Connect, is a site that we put on developerWorks and Service Management Connect, the reason that that’s important is, this is Subject Matter Experts at IBM, business partners, you as customers, all of these people coming together to collaborate and share content and share technical content.

It’s not just IBM who is providing content, it’s customers providing content, it’s interaction and collaboration, so it’s really building a community.

Michael Coté: Yeah.

Noah Kuttler: And one of the things around this community that’s in service management connect is the Request For Enhancements tool.

Michael Coté: Yeah, right, right, right.

Noah Kuttler: And we’ve been starting to role that out, so customers can vote on features that they want in products, vote them up, vote them down, comment on them, which is a really great feature.

Michael Coté: Yeah, yeah. I mean, it would be great if in the enterprise management space, you guys could help create as lively a community, that for example Spiceworks has a small and medium community.

Noah Kuttler: Right.

Michael Coté: And kind of bring beyond like these forums, bring the layer of functionality of sharing best practices, and technologies, like you were saying, kind of like voting on features, because it is I don’t know, I continually on this podcast complain here and there, but it is hard to find that body of that community around operation stuff. It’s easier to find in the developer world. So, I mean, hopefully that will work out.

Noah Kuttler: Yeah. Business service management was the first area that we’ve launched and we’re going to launch other areas around it. But yeah, it’s one of the things that I found fascinating and Pulse was the — the Tivoli user group that we have online that 00:23:02 is now managing. Then, like our customer lounge, one of the biggest things that people wanted to do was the customer connection thing, where we were putting customers like in oil and gas, finding them other oil and gas customers, so they could sit down and talk to those folks.

Michael Coté: Yeah, SAP has a community like that. I think that’s pretty popular, it’s called the business process exchange or something and you know, it’s always a little dicey when you get people on the same industry who are theoretically competitors swapping how they run their businesses.

Noah Kuttler: Right, but, right.

Michael Coté: And then, there is also some IT — it’s a little more complicated than infrastructure, but I don’t know, it is nice to be able to facilitate talking to peers.

Noah Kuttler: Yeah, in the developerWorks community, that’s something that we’ve been doing for quite some time is kind of opening that up to customers and getting them involved and interacting. And so, I think that this is kind of the next step, and I hope that it’s a community that is engaging.

Michael Coté: Yeah, yeah, you know, yeah, we’ll see, I mean, it takes a lot of work to make that happen, but you guys have the resources.

Noah Kuttler: Certainly, certainly.

Michael Coté: Well, great, well. I mean, you know, you had reached out so, like I had to do this podcast. And I think it was a good idea to like to sit down and kind of rehash it over kind of what was going on there. I think there is always a lot of confusion about what Tivoli is doing talking about waste water management now. Hopefully, it’s helpful to people who care about Tivoli to, kind of, like get new ideas, new explanations of that.

Noah Kuttler: Well and one thing I would say is, that it’s very interesting, so, you know Ivor Macfarlane, right?

Michael Coté: I think so, yeah, yeah.

Noah Kuttler: Okay. So, Ivor runs a simulator workshop that we do in person. Now, one of the things that we were showing at Pulse was this virtual stimulator game.

It’s a game that we developed with G2G3, because they also helped us with the simulator, the impersonator, but it’s this game that we do online where customers have projects that they have to pick. Then they have to figure out what the solutions are that they are going to put in and all of the time they are losing money, they are losing their stake in the field that they are in.

The game kind of will lead people to maybe you want to do one of these workshops. It’s a four-hour workshop, we do it in person, people take different roles CMO, CFO, CIO. What is astounding is, when you come out of the game, you start to have to a realization of how much larger the problem could potentially be.

The way that I talk about it with people is, it’s kind of like twitter people can tell you about twitter till they’re blue in the face.

Michael Coté: You got it steep in the soup.

Noah Kuttler: Until you have that one scenario and for me, the scenario was a certain Telco, who will remain nameless, was billing my mother for three boxes that they never installed for a television service. She was very frustrated, and I said to her, “Mom, I’m going to go on twitter. I’m going to see what I can do.” I put the name of the company up at fail, about a little while later I get a contact form a person there, she says, “Hi! My name is Jenny send me your mother’s information.”

I sent it to my Mom, they get a dedicated rep that’s working with her and yeah, it took some time, but eventually they got it off of her bill.

Michael Coté: Yeah, yeah, that’s not too shabby.

Noah Kuttler: So my mom calls me up, and she is just like shellshocked, she says, “I don’t know what I would have done, if you hadn’t done this.” She is like now I understand what this twitter thing is that you’ve been talking about.

Michael Coté: Yeah, yeah. No, it’s like reintroducing people into the whole scheme of things talking with each other.

Noah Kuttler: Yeah and so yeah, the Tivoli products, and you know working on those in the data center is something that we continue to do, but as our customer start to see their needs go outside of the data center, then we want to have those solutions and we want to have integrated service management across all of that. And so, that’s what we were doing.

Michael Coté: Yeah, now that makes sense. Well, great well thanks for being a guest here.

Noah Kuttler: Oh, no problem. No problem. Thank you. And next time we have to do like over Rudy’s or something local, you know –

Michael Coté: That’s right. We’ll have some food in a hotter place than this. It’s getting kind of cold in here.

Noah Kuttler: Yeah, I was going to say — I think we are sitting like right under the air vent.

Michael Coté: Definitely.

Noah Kuttler: I mean that’s under the –

Michael Coté: It’s kind of 00:27:27 kind of keeps you up.

Noah Kuttler: Is that a how or is that — what’s that hanging from the wall?

Michael Coté: Over here?

Noah Kuttler: Yeah.

Michael Coté: Yeah, it’s a longhorn.

Noah Kuttler: Okay, that is a longhorn hanging from the wall, because we are in Austin and of course that just makes sense.

Michael Coté: You just inherit those and your wife doesn’t want them so you bring it to work. That’s what you do. All right, well on that note, we’ll see everyone next time.

Disclosure: see the RedMonk client list for clients mentioned, including IBM.

Recently, people have been talking about dev/ops as more than technology, but as culture. In this episode, I play a bit of the irate straw-man to suss out exactly what that means in more detail. We recorded this during SXSW 2011 at the lovely Driskill bar, so pardon the background noise.

Download the episode directly right here, subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatcher to have episodes downloaded automatically, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

Transcript

As usual with these un-sponsored episodes, I haven’t spent time to clean up the transcript. If you see us saying something crazy, check the original audio first. There are time-codes where there were transcription problems.

Michael Coté: Hello everybody! It’s a special edition that we are recording of the IT Management Cloud Podcast. We are here at South by Southwest in the lovely Driskill Bar, where dedicated podcast listeners will know we recorded, not you and me necessarily, but I have recorded many episodes in here. So what do you think of the South by Southwest so far, John?

John Willis: Pretty cool, makes me want to live in Austin.

Michael Coté: Well, you actually said you wanted to live in like San Marcos or something, right?

John Willis: Yeah, so it’s –

Michael Coté: Because you are staying down there.

John Willis: Yeah, I am staying there, because I couldn’t get a hotel last minute, so I am staying at a hotel in San Marcos. I actually flew into San Antonio because the price of airfare was half price. On the way there I was thinking, being halfway between San Antonio and Austin might not be a bad gig.

Michael Coté: Yeah, definitely! Like I was saying, there are a lot of people who live up and down I35 there.

So you got here yesterday and ostensibly you are some sort of like IT cloud guy, and as I recall, the South by Southwest is about like Foursquare and Twitter. So how are these things joining together for you? What’s going on here?

John Willis: Oh, jeez, hit me out with a question. I don’t know for any of that stuff, Michael, and by the way, this is John Willis.

Michael Coté: That’s right.

John Willis: johnmwillis.com.

Michael Coté: You have probably been drinking plenty of the water, picking up the –

John Willis: They got a Bloody Mary bar here and it’s only 1 o’clock. So we are doing the Cloudies Award Tuesday night. So I primarily came in for that.

So I had, near the end of last year, Dave Nielsen, who runs CloudCamp had asked me if I would want to put the Cloudies, kind of contribute it — I don’t know if people know me, I run these really just silly Cloudy Awards in 2008-2009. I give out awards for somewhat meaningful, but somewhat silly things, and David asked if we could do it through the CloudCamp.

So he is having a big old party Tuesday night by the Dining Guys (ph), they are sponsoring it. So I am coming in for that, to kind of be the co-host of that. But I looked at the schedule and there was some really cool kind of party events.

Michael Coté: Yeah, like last night we went to the Etsy Ops con fab. I have been trying to use the word con fab a lot. I don’t know what that means.

John Willis: So Etsy was — they did a presentation on how they do continuous delivery and code by design I guess is what they call it.

Michael Coté: It was pretty good. It was detailed with — it could have been a lot more detailed, but it was detailed enough. Then they spoke for like an hour.

John Willis: Yeah, it was enough to cover in an hour. Probably if you have never really kind of seen the gory details of all that stuff, it would seem kind of confusing at a high level. But they went through — Etsy’s John Allspaw, the kind of king of DevOps most people consider, was the guy at Flickr who kind of started, not started, but really drove the multiple deployments today, at Flickr, and really kind of changing the way people look at just deployments in general.

And he has taken a part of the team that was at Flickr and himself, they have really done it to perfection at Etsy. They went over this, kind of idea, they do like 30 deploys a day.

Michael Coté: At Etsy?

John Willis: Yeah. That continuous delivery model.

Michael Coté: Did they say what’s in those deploys, because I mean, I am not an Etsy user, but I don’t feel like I have heard that there are like 30 new big features that they have?

John Willis: No, and that’s the whole thing. That’s the whole idea of this continuous delivery is small chunks of code. A lot of — there is a lot of philosophy behind the continuous delivery model, things — when people see it first they are like, I can never do that, or my God.

When I present — I have been doing some presentation on continuous delivery, and the first thing I do is I ask people, how many people have seen the movie ‘Saving Private Ryan’? People raise their hands, and I am like, remember that first five minutes where you just thought this was the most horrible thing and you were going to walk out of the movie. That’s what I tell them, like be prepared for this when you hear about doing 50 deploys a day.

But yeah, I mean, they do small coaching. It’s an idea of getting completely out of this idea of like building up releases, even like two week releases, and always delivering from trunk and I think like 15 lines of code would be a production deploy.

Michael Coté: I guess, I came in maybe a third of the way through when they were talking about dashboards and monitors a lot.

John Willis: You were eating a burger at that burger joint?

Michael Coté: That’s right, Casino El Camino, and I had to wait an hour for that. It’s a good burger. And I should have gotten a medium rare. It’s a tip, don’t get it medium, get it medium rare, because it’s juicy anyways.

The part of the safety net they went over was as, they have a lot of monitoring and log analysis and stuff going on for all of that stuff. So they are basically deploying knowing that they are going to need to be checking for errors and finding things like that.

The other thing that was interesting about it, and John is probably chuckling to himself a little bit, because after the talk I railed against how it was a terrible talk. But that’s about it.

John Willis: You didn’t say that. You had a lot of questions about it.

Michael Coté: That’s right. But another thing that is clear is that, they use a lot of sort of custom things, because they are using a lot of advanced — well, advanced technology is the wrong word. There needs to be a word for like using MongoDB or using a NoSQL technology or using — and it’s not unsupported. I don’t know what this body of stuff is, but it’s sort of like open source infrastructure that’s not mainstream, right?

John Willis: Yeah.

Michael Coté: They are not using like WebSphere or they are not even using Tomcat for things that vendors would be supporting so they have to fit out a lot of that stuff to monitor on their own. And consequently, they have built, as you were saying, some nice monitoring things like Statsy and other stuff.

John Willis: Well, what’s interesting; a couple of things. The one point I wanted to make about their ability to do delivery. I mean, I think any company that you see that talks about doing this continuous delivery, the first thing they are going to talk about is, there are some really important points like, don’t even try this unless you are going to invest heavily in test driven development, and you are going to really have tight code coverage.

And then some companies even try to start thinking about immune system, like predeploy immune systems and really going all out on kind of behavior driven monitoring, behavior driven or test driven development and all that. So if you have that stuff, then this idea of being able to do that, then you put yourself in a kind of a bulletproof position.

But to your point about just technology in general, it’s funny, I think that it’s — we are seeing kind of — it’s funny, when we first started talking about like open source tools, there was this kind of migration of open source. Early on, we saw things like MySQL and JBoss and stuff like that. And everybody was like predicting the next wave to be the IT infrastructure stuff, and in some ways it was kind of a false start.

We saw Zenoss, and not that those aren’t great products, but we saw this wave, but we didn’t solve anything. What we are seeing now though is this like third wave of not so much product with technology, it’s technology that’s leaking out from large corporations.

Like, for example, one of the things that made Statsy interesting is a time series database called Graphite, that was developed at –

Michael Coté: Yeah, and you have nothing but praise for that; I need to look into it.

John Willis: It’s pretty cool! It was developed at Orbitz. So what we are seeing is this leakage of things that large — in this case it was Orbitz, but large companies like Amazon and Google and all these companies that kind of did their own, they wrote their own solutions from massively scale infrastructure and we are starting to see a lot of variations or leakage of those technologies that they had to build, because there was nothing out there to solve their problem.

Now it’s becoming commoditized. I mean, this is a — to take a program Chef, that’s what we say is, not that Chef came from Amazon, but a lot of our guys came from Amazon. So we like to think that the kinds of things that Amazon were doing, we have commoditized.

Michael Coté: Yeah, and building on that. We have talked about technology from high scale web stuff for a while now, and I think what’s interesting is there are companies trying to figure out how they would apply that to the way they run their business.

For me like that’s kind of an interesting thing to sort out, because it is interesting to think how — wow, that’s a tall Bloody Mary.

John Willis: Yeah, they do a good job here.

Michael Coté: They left about a fourth of a cup space for you to put some tomato juice in.

John Willis: Well, what’s cool is they have got like — I guess because South by Southwest is international, they have got the clamato juice. So man, you put me in heaven here.

Michael Coté: You can take a Michelada, maybe you should try that.

John Willis: Because the only place I ever get like clamato or what they call a Bloody Caesar is in Canada. So I am in heaven.

Michael Coté: Yeah, you should try, I mean, after this one, a beer and you can have a Michelada.

John Willis: Well, the thing is the bar here is, you have got to take a picture, they have got like every — you name it and you’ve got like asparagus — so that’s my lunch, man.

Michael Coté: I mean, you are pretty much set, right?

John Willis: I am just piling it on. So, yeah, just piling in all the vegetables with your Bloody Mary or your Bloody Caesar.

Michael Coté: So anyways, I interrupted myself, because I realized that talking about Bloody Mary would be much more interesting than whatever I was rambling about.

John Willis: Bloody Caesar.

Michael Coté: That’s right. But yeah, that’s the thing that I am looking forward. I just want to see how normal people use these technologies.

(00:09:57)

It’s almost like — and there is a good confluence of the demand for mobile applications to do SaaS based or cloud based things that I think kind of drives the need for that. They didn’t exist so much when these high scale technologies were out there. So if more normal companies want to have a mobile site, whether it’s for their internal employees or external employees, and if they want to have external facing things, then you sort of need to run your stuff this way.

John Willis: It’s funny, because it’s a lot about what DevOps is all about, like is the — a lot of what’s going on now is — I get a lot of questions like how do you do this?

Like you look at an Etsy and another company that I am a big fan of is Wealthfront, used to be KaChing, and you look how they are doing this continuous flurry, and it’s amazing, but it’s like purpose-driven, you know what I mean? It’s like, how do you get a large corporation to change to that and the answer is, it’s hard, because it’s cultural — it’s across the board, it’s not just the tool.

You don’t just like say, okay, you guys go use Graphite now, done, end of story, right? It’s like these guys have purpose, they are a startup, Etsy, those guys are like pretty excited about what they are doing, every one of them.

11:11, the guy who is dumping metrics into the Graphite database, he was up there. They are all pretty damn excited about what they are doing, and I think that’s the secret sauce is, how can the enterprise –

Michael Coté: I mean, would you call that sort of like a passion they have or like what or is it more that they have a more defined — like you were saying they have a purpose, like they have more defined roles of what they are doing?

John Willis: Yes. So I have been reading this guy, like I have been trying to do a little more research on kind of DevOps culture, just because I got into DevOps for the technology, pure, but what became a fascinating part of the discussion of DevOps is that I didn’t think I would get this interested and is the DevOps, the culture part of it, the behavior patterns.

So I have been doing a little research and there’s some guy — I can’t remember his name right now. He is a guy that goes into large corporations and tries to change behavior and leadership patterns, and one of things he says that he tries to –

Michael Coté: Is this one of those five effective habits or –

John Willis: It’s one of those kind of guys.

Michael Coté: One of those guys?

John Willis: Yeah. He has written like a bunch of books. I can’t think of his name right now, but he has got a blog that he runs on leadership on Forbes.

Anyway, so one of the things he talked about that I realized that — so all the stuff I have been learning about like DevOps culture and behavior, then I started reading this guy, taking it from this kind of leadership and large corporations, and the one thing that would seem common is that, you see that one of these you have got the force of this sense of urgency, and they go into big companies and tries to get this sense of urgency. It starts at the top and it kind of explodes down, and I think that’s the thing that startups have.

Startups live and die by the sense — you wake up in the morning — you don’t sleep the whole night, there is a sense of urgency. And as you grow, you start losing that sense of urgency. Like these transitions from — like you are a guy that handles like 15 different things and then you hire a guy that’s going to do marketing and now you only do ten things and then you hire a guy that does. And the sense of urgency starts becoming siloed by definition.

And that’s the beauty of these companies like Etsy and Wealthfront is, they still figure out how to grow by keeping that, whether it’s purpose or urgency, and if you don’t have that, again, like you were asking me like, well, I don’t see much in — I am paraphrasing what you were asking me about the logging and monitoring, so big deal. You collect a lot of metrics and you graph it, right?

Michael Coté: Right.

John Willis: And I was actually fumbling on how to explain, no, it really is a big deal, but I can’t tell you why. But I think it is, it has got to go back to that behavior or the culture that like, if you have got that, then the purpose of — why do you put something like, not to pick on Zenoss, but put Zenoss in and just collect data, big shit. Like, go ahead and have a purpose and then figure out from that purpose or urgency why you want to collect data, now shit happens.

Michael Coté: Yeah, yeah. No. I mean, that’s another nice thing about the Etsy presentation is, they are very application focused, which I mean, correct me if I am wrong, but my perception is, a lot of IT management is — it’s very — this is like the old saw, but it’s very siloed, in that you are not necessarily focused on an application or even a service, you are kind of focused on whatever your part is.

And to have that bigger — that sense of purpose or application, if you will, like we worry about people be on the list things to buy and sell things to buy. Or there is the old cliché about Amazon, the only thing we watch is how much people are buying, that’s our number one metric. Like that is like a nice practical way I think to connect the management and monitoring that you are doing to some sense of purpose, like why do we have all this crap.

(00:14:59)

John Willis: Right. You start from a purpose driven — like the guys at Wealthfront talk about monitoring, but they don’t think of this monitoring for monitoring’s sake, they monitor for behavior or they monitor for business behavior or business goals. They call it Business Goal Monitoring.

Again, it sounds clichéd. There is a lot to it, and I think the key — the more and more I think about it like, I think about the sins of IT software is that we just never focus. We talk the big game about process and people and all this stuff.

I get this famous saying now — famous, I made it up, so it’s famous in my head, but it’s something that you will love I know is that — people were asking me about ITIL. What is ITIL in DevOps? And I said, it’s funny that ITIL is about process over people.

Michael Coté: Right, right, right.

John Willis: Right, no doubt about it. ITIL is like, you are so broken, put this in and at least you won’t be broken. May not be perfect, but at least you are broken anymore.

But what DevOps is about — what’s the beauty of DevOps is, it’s about people first, process second. It is all about the people and then once the — even process. We don’t come in and just say, DevOps is process, rule number one, put this on.

People try to say continuous delivery is DevOps. Well, with like bad culture or like putting continuous delivery model in will be a freaking disaster.

Michael Coté: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, to give you a chance to eat a little bit.

John Willis: No, I am good, I am good.

Michael Coté: Let me go on a little monologue. The other thing I was railing about while we were waiting for that burger was how I always get upset about how –

John Willis: You are like — your life kind of revolves around burgers. I mean, it has taken me a couple of years to get this, but like your slide decks have burgers in them.

Michael Coté: I love a good burger.

John Willis: Your metaphors are burgers.

Michael Coté: Yeah, yeah. I think it’s just — I think Lord Sandwich was on. Delicious piece of meat and you get good pieces of bread and you basically have your side, it’s kind of a complete handheld efficient meal, and it’s delicious. And you get French fries with it.

I have a mixed relationship with French fries. I feel like French fries are kind of a crap food. Like I could be spending my time eating something better, and yet, they are delicious. I am not a big fan of the potato. That’s the whole thing.

John Willis: What’s like — yeah, I think I agree on the potato. I mean, you can have a good two pair carrot, and the hamburger is like the top dog. Maybe it’s like Batman and Robin, right?

Michael Coté: Oh yeah.

John Willis: The fries are Robin.

Michael Coté: It’s sort of like — like so for example, let me highlight why I think French fries are — I think French fries are — they take up space that could be taken up by something better. For example, have you ever had like sort of deep fried Polenta Sticks?

John Willis: No.

Michael Coté: See, that’s good. That’s a good sort of thing. I sort of like — I don’t think it would cost anymore to have Polenta instead of like French fries, if it kind of had the same supply chain mechanics behind it, right?

John Willis: Right. It would really screw to say that, but yeah, it would e all right.

Michael Coté: Anyhow, so we were waiting for the burger and I was saying how — I get upset when DevOps people are talking and things are going on, they are like, well, it’s just all about culture. Like DevOps is all a cultural thing, and of course I exaggerate to make a very narrow point. So it’s much more nuance than that.

But what I do and let me think, the reason that I like that is because back in the, I don’t know, late 90s, early 2000, when people were like arguing all hot and heavy about agile development. The same way they early on are kind of arguing about DevOps and talking about it, like the same thing would come up and it would drive me crazy.

You would be talking about like, well, how do we do this and how do we introduce it, and this, that, and the other, and people are trying to figure out like — well, a large part of people were trying to shoot down the idea because they just want to keep doing what they are doing.

And other people are like, I really like these ideas and I am going to go back to work, and it’s just not going to work, and like help me figure out how to make it work.

And then the thing that would — kind of like a dead end of helpfulness would be like, well, it’s really a cultural issue for agile. You have got to change the culture. You have got to — and then as an individual contributor, as a small fry, you are kind of like, so what you are telling me is the CEO needs to come in and mandate it to happen.

Kind of like — and again, I haven’t really gone to DevOps, but in agile world it’s sort of like, if you are telling me I need to change the culture that means, A, I am going to do a lot of work that I am not going to be compensated for. B, I am going to be doing a lot of work. C, I don’t have the power to change culture, like I am basically going to have to do something.

(00:20:01)

And so that’s kind of where my reaction with DevOps come from, and the more nuanced thing is, if culture means, now we are going to spend a lot of time talking about processes and procedures and best practices and how you effect changes and/or we are also going to say, yeah, like the whole organization has to kind of like change the way it thinks about running the business, just like any big organizational change, and that’s really difficult. Then that’s acceptable, definitely.

But I feel like if you just kind of say culture kind of offhandedly, that’s kind of a way of saying, screw you, it’s culture.

John Willis: Yeah.

Michael Coté: But like you were just walking through a bunch of things, that we are like the iceberg under the water.

John Willis: Yeah. So in other words, you are saying what I am saying is a bunch of shit, right?

Michael Coté: No, no, no. And to put it another way, whenever someone says that some sort of technology driven thing requires a cultural change, it just begs the question, okay, what is the way that we change the culture? I always try to avoid begging the question sort of statements.

John Willis: A couple of points I will make. One is, I think one of the things that I learned early on from Lloyd Taylor, who is a DevOp guy. He used to work with Google, he like ran Op for Google. Had some really interesting positions in the Valley. He says, and I firmly believe this, you don’t change culture, you change behavior.

Michael Coté: Right.

John Willis: So if you look at it from like how do you change behavior and what are the things that can force behavior change? One technique I think is this idea of sense of urgency, like leadership trying to drive a sense of urgency. Hey, this project is urgent. By the way, wake up everybody, we are getting our ass kicked for the first time ever in this division.

I think the do now, ask forgiveness later behavior change works. We have seen — in the cloud we have seen classic examples of that. The Best Buy Blue Shirt Nation is a great do now, ask forgiveness later. Those guys went and changed — and they changed the culture. I mean, they put in a Drupal website that made it available to all the guys.

Michael Coté: And this is, correct me if I am wrong, but basically there was a bunch of employee or some employees at Best Buy and they have essentially set up their own community site.

John Willis: Yeah, they got tired of all the storage doing the –

Michael Coté: To sort of swap best practices and –

John Willis: Yeah. And what turned out a year-and-a-half after, the board started looking — going to like, before we put this out, let’s check with the Blue Shirt Nation, see if they –

Michael Coté: Right, and nowadays this would be considered like, oh, this is Enterprise 2.0. I mean, this is like social business essentially.

John Willis: I talked to those guys. I saw an interview of them, I get confused. And they were asked like, what if you had to ask for corporate approval? They were like, never would have happened. The famous ‘New York Times’ story in the cloud where they did like four terabytes and whatnot, whatever it was, like that’s another do now, ask forgiveness later, right?

Michael Coté: Yeah.

John Willis: So there are two ways to approach it. They had phenomenal success, now the culture has changed in ‘New York Times’ that cloud is okay.

We have talked about stories where Tivoli self-service story I have told many times, where these guys just changed the cultural behavior of how monitoring and self-service went.

So I think that’s another approach is, take a project that’s so broken or everybody is so mad at, change it, and then if it works, they will come. The behavior — other groups would be like, wow, how comes those guys are doing so cheap so well?

Michael Coté: Getting into that ask for forgiveness later mentality, I mean, it gets back to what you were saying earlier. You first have to establish a sense of purpose, because you sort of have to know what you are going to do and then ask for forgiveness. Like you can’t sort of — if you are kind of a passive IT person who is just kind of like responding to service requests and responding to tickets, you are kind of — there is not really that opportunity to take a risk and do something. Like it’s almost as if you have to think like, oh, here is something that the business isn’t asking me for.

John Willis: Right.

Michael Coté: Or maybe the business could be asking you for something, and here is a nontraditional way that we could satisfy that request, but just like with you, I mean, the Blue Shirt thing is a good example. It’s almost as if like you have to find someone to come up with a project out of the external channels, just because you are not going to be given the opportunity to do that.

It’s almost as — I mean, this — and this gets to a bigger philosophic question of like, what the hell is the point of a big company if everyone is always telling you to subvert the big company, to do stuff in big company?

But I mean, it is as if — I mean, that’s another cultural thing is, you almost want somehow the big company to kind of have that mentality in its employees is, we are going to establish stable business processes that we know are reliable and make money and we don’t screw with. But there is also some percentage of whatever that we want you to experiment and try new things out, because that’s going to be where we are going to come up with new stuff.

(00:25:03)

John Willis: Well, I think that’s part of the culture too. I mean, there are a couple of other patterns that I was going to mention is, a pattern I see a lot, which seems to work is take an Ops guy and put him in the Dev team. So that’s another one where kind of forcing –

Michael Coté: What do you think of that Bandolera thing, just a little break? So this lady just walked by, and they sell these in Austin, and I think they make them here. It’s basically like a fanny pack that you wear like a Bandolera and it seems — here is the whole issue, we will get back to practices and everything, but this is the South by Southwest special edition.

The whole issue is, you are familiar with the merse, the man purse? I mean, that’s a great idea, like I don’t want to carry around a big gigantic — like I want a purse, purse is wonderful, but you can’t do that. I don’t know. I am not secure enough in my identity that I can carry around a merse.

John Willis: I have got a cure for that.

Michael Coté: What’s that?

John Willis: Flat 50 in short.

Michael Coté: So this Bandolera thing is kind of like, it’s another way to kind of go for that, and I was thinking about it. It seems — and the alternative is the journalist’s vest, the fishingman’s vest, but that’s out too. Basically, the middle ground I have found is a sports jacket. One of the main reasons I wear a sports jacket, other than it kind of like makes people like think that you are better, is it has a lot of pockets in it, you can put stuff in there. Anyways –

John Willis: I am like — my next life, definitely sports jackets, all the way, from 20 on, next life, about 20 I am going to have like a killer set of like those plaid ones and really –

Michael Coté: Oh yeah.

John Willis: Not fancy color ones, but the browner or dark black.

Michael Coté: I think some plaid, I think you would do good in a sports jacket. So I was interrupting about introducing practices and patterns.

John Willis: Well, it’s kind of crossing functions, like in other words, put an Ops guy in Dev and have him like on a dotted line, to like the VP of Engineering, and it causes some interesting changes. I have seen it.

So I think there are ways to kind of — innovative ways that force behavior changes and when it works, then it becomes a groundswell, right? So I think that’s –

Michael Coté: And similarly, in the agile world, I think at about the point where people were running around talking about culture, there was this deluge of books of patterns, like people love doing agile patterns and, again, they were bittersweet — there should be a word that’s bittersweet, but it’s like frustrating sweet, it was like frustrating sweet to read because you would read this and you were like, that is totally the way people need to operate and run.

But it’s also like la la fantasy, like how am I going to — it’s like, how do you go in and get people to care about their dev?

And then the other dead end answer, and this is like a retrospective, sort of like I bet this stuff will come up again, and it even came up during the Etsy thing, the other dead end reply after culture, and then the counter reply to the counter reply as well, you have got bigger problems. That’s the other one, that once I hear that I like go off the wall, because it’s like, you don’t get it, it’s not that I have bigger problems, it’s that those are the problems I have.

John Willis: Here’s the reality, and this is the theme that I have had since the beginning of this, which is, the technology and the opportunities for companies are that, the more you ignore this crap, the more likely you are going to go out of business. And I don’t care who you are, we talk about this all time, there’s a boat that’s going this way and a boat that’s going this way, and back in the Internet boom, it was just the kind of retailers that got sacked, but the guys who did insurance and banking and all those guys, they were like, oh, that could never happen to us, Barnes & Noble versus Amazon, no problem. But today it’s anybody.

I mean, any business is –

Michael Coté: So let me interject some ideas here. So one of the — we are going to record another episode with an IBMer who is coming along here, or at least I am, I don’t know if you are going to stick around, and we are going to talk about IBM Pulse, so we won’t get into that here. But one of the things that I was delighted to hear one of the Pulse guys talking about is they use this term technical debt, which is sort of, 29:40 that’s one of his big things. He has done very well capitalizing on it, if you will.

Anyway, I think you are brushing up against one of your favorite things that I don’t think really has a phrase, but it’s kind of — it’s almost the opposite of technical debt and it’s like –

John Willis: It’s a business debt.

(00:29:59)

Michael Coté: It’s stuff you are not taking advantage of that can make your business better. Whereas technical debt is like technical decisions you have made that are going to hold you back in the future, because you didn’t do the right thing.

If you can measure the second thing, I think technical debt plus the second thing would be a tremendous forcing effect.

John Willis: There is a debt there. Yeah, partly technical debt, partly business debt, whatever it is. So there are companies now that make so much money and the inefficiencies are like, well, yeah, we can change it, but the story was somebody tried to go into one of the large credit card companies and they just hold case for like cloud and agile operations and infrastructure, but it was very compelling, a lot of money being saved, like billions being saved.

They are like, yeah, that’s great, but I can get one of these genius kids here to shave something — do some algorithms on credit card interest rates and make hundred contacts in a day.

And I would say, well, yeah, I mean, that’s the problem that you run up against in these large companies is that in some case –

Michael Coté: IT is kind of insignificant.

John Willis: Right. Or the significance of changing it compared to like other things they can do to make money.

Michael Coté: As they would say, changes in IT don’t move the needle enough to motivate changing a company.

John Willis: Right. But I think that is a form of debt, and it goes back to that Barnes & Noble and Amazon, they woke up like day one, but everybody else was like, well, we don’t have to be efficient, because — you don’t say that, that way, but you take, for example, I haven’t really followed them too much, but Simple Bank. It’s a startup bank. You know what I mean? And sooner or later those inefficiencies, that debt will pile up, and assuming that it will always be this way, based on what we have seen over the last three to five years of technology changes, it’s a dangerous way to play this game.

Michael Coté: I mean, essentially, it’s that you are not fortifying yourself against disruption. You are not protecting yourself against disruption. Like someone is going to come along and disrupt your business model.

John Willis: And by then it’s too late. Then it’s like, how do you react to — then it might be too late to change the game.

Michael Coté: You don’t have to worry about making noise. This is our guest for the next episode. Yeah, and I guess that’s –

John Willis: I am glad you brought that up, because that’s something I have been — there was a discussion about this last week about the whole — the inefficiencies of the enterprise, but does it really matter, but it’s debt that’s piling up.

Michael Coté: Because I feel like that’s the point things come to when you start talking about it’s culture and whatever is — it’s essentially like, tell me the three graphs I can show the management team that tells them to give me control to make these changes.

One of them is like sort of, whatever, technical. The other one is maybe like this idea of whatever it is, business debt or disruption problems. And I don’t know what the third is. But you need sort of something that’s — if it’s going to be cultural change it’s kind of like, oh yeah, the way we are doing this is crap, even though we don’t really care and we need to do something that gives us the main stuff. And then after that it’s the details of –

John Willis: I think the only thing I see, obviously, how to solve the enterprise cruft, if you will, or whatever, I don’t know. It’s a hard problem. Even Ernest Mueller, who is going to be doing a lot of stuff with us this week, at National Instruments, it’s a hard problem. I mean, you have got years of silos and groups, but I think the only pattern that I see working reasonably well is this idea that the kind of siloed new group, you have got a new project that’s on the horizon, treat it the way Amazon and Google, you build a team.

I heard a phrase at one of the DevOps meeting where they said, products not projects. In the enterprise we tend to think of projects. We put a couple of guys on it. Then when it’s done they go off and do something else, and the project is — whereas, no, no, this is a product, and it lives or dies based on its success. You might spend the rest of your life on that product, or you may transfer to another product, but the group is — these silos and then drive those as purpose driven and –

Michael Coté: Yeah. To wrap up this short episode so we can jump to the next one.

John Willis: I have got to get my Bloody Mary too.

Michael Coté: That’s right. I think that’s a good metaphoric way of thinking about it is, maybe you should transition from service management to product management, and like if you can understand that shift, then that kind of encapsulates a lot of what all the cloud and DevOps people are talking about as far as owning the IT that you are delivering and working with Dev people.

(00:35:00)

And basically because the whole point is, the whole thing that you are always trying to get Ops people to do is have a stake in the business. Like not a stake –

John Willis: A purpose.

Michael Coté: Have a stake beyond getting bonuses. Yeah, a purpose, but be involved in it and own it. And if you are just managing a bunch of services, you don’t really have a stake in it if you are managing a product in the same way.

John Willis: Well, the thing I think is — another promising thing I have heard of is this idea like, a lot of what — if you listen to Etsy and then the Wealthfront guys, they attribute a lot of this like what they are doing to that kind of Lean Startup movement, which actually originally comes from Steve Blank’s ‘Four Steps to Epiphany’ and then Eric Ries, who is kind of a disciple of that.

Michael Coté: Yeah, they had a whole track about that yesterday, over at the AT&T Executive Center.

John Willis: Was it a track or was this –

Michael Coté: The hotel that dare not call itself a hotel.

John Willis: I thought that was just — kind of looked like more like a VC hoopla.

Michael Coté: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Willis: But anyway, so they all kind of — you can trace them back to that kind of Lean Startup. There really Eric Ries has driven pretty hard, but I think what I heard recently was this idea of maybe the Enterprise Lean Startup. Again, that same silo approach.

The next time the enterprise wants to try out a new product, if you will, start it as kind of a — follow all the traits of these really successful lean startup business and do that internally, funded, given like $2 million and cherry-pick a team, build a silo team. And I think make me king for a day, and you are a large enterprise and you ask me how do I even start to kick the ball for DevOps, I would say, that’s what I would do.

Michael Coté: It’s almost as if you want to go back to like 1983 and reread ‘In Search of Excellence’, basically the whole pitch of that book. And there is a great follow on to that book called ‘In Search of Stupidity’, that was written in the 90s. And the whole pitch of ‘In Search of Excellence’ was, I forget the dude’s name, but now he is one of these famous management consulting types, and he profiled a bunch of companies, and I think one of his major conclusions was that at these big companies, they would run, they were entrepreneurial. Like they would allow people to run little products and projects with DevOps. It made sense.

John Willis: You can’t — like if you look at — again, I am a fan boy of these Wealthfront guys and if you look at what they have done in probably less than two years, and probably less than a couple of million dollars, they are a mini E*TRADE.

Here is the thing, so we talk about how does the large companies change, Damon Edwards says this, and I love this, that E*TRADE woke up one day and when they found out that the crust that Ameritrade was charging their customers was less than their internal cost to process trade. Like that’s when you have to wake up and say, holy shit!

Michael Coté: That’s your business debt or whatever your concept is.

John Willis: Right. It’s like, that’s the day, like holy shit, what are we going to do?

Michael Coté: The disruption onslaught.

John Willis: You would rather be in a position where you are at least like we are running some projects and prototypes that — anyway, well, it’s –

Michael Coté: Yeah, I think we have actually come up with some interesting ideas instead of just talking a bunch of crap.

So we are just going to take a break so you can get your Bloody Mary and then we will see everyone in the next episode, which for us would just be a few minutes.

John Willis: Right.

Disclosure: see the RedMonk client list for clients mentioned.

Interview

A full transcript is available as well. Also, see the extended version with 4 minutes more discussion.

Demo

A full transcript is available as well. Also, see the extended demo with 7 minutes more of the demo.

About ARA

The Austin Radiological Association recently changed the IT Management platform it uses to monitor and manage it’s distributed IT and data center. ARA is one of the largest providers of outpatient imaging services and professional services in central Texas serving the majority of area hospitals and thousands of referring physicians in the community. In addition, ARA operates as an outsourced solution provider and manages a turnkey digital imaging application for 10 regional SaaS clients. The company has invested heavily in IT, ITIL service processes and IT automation to support a variety of health care, imaging and business applications.

About AccelOps

I’ve covered AccelOps in the past (July 2009, Sep 2010), but as most good startups in the space, they’ve been rapidly pushing out features over the past year to fit with the evolving changes in IT.

Here’s a recent self-description of AccelOps:

AccelOps integrated data center and cloud monitoring solutions bring unparalleled operational intelligence, service insight, efficiency and security to enterprises and service providers. Delivered as a scalable virtual appliance or SaaS, the AccelOps platform cross-correlates and manages diverse operational data on-premise, off-premise and in cloud environments to provide proactive performance, availability, security, change and business service management. AccelOps enables service delivery with end-to-end visibility, efficient root-cause analysis, reduced MTTR and compliance.

Recently, they started a free trial program, and since they have an option to deploy as a SaaS, it’s pretty easy to check out.

Disclosure: AccelOps sponsored this video.