In this episode, Eveline Oehrlich sets out to ask the most interesting people in the world of DevOps, a couple of key questions around DevOps, today and in the future.
Eveline is joined by industry experts Jayne Groll, Charles Betz, Helen Beal, and Mark Hornbeek to speak on the subject of DevOps and where it is in the present and where it will be.
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Read – Predictions 2023: DevOps Will Become The Norm
Transcript
Narrator 0:02
You’re listening to the Humans of DevOps Podcast, a podcast focused on advancing the humans of DevOps through skills, knowledge, ideas and learning, or the SKIL framework.
Eveline Oehrlich 0:17
This is the Humans of DevOps Podcast, and I’m your host Eveline Oehrlich. I set out to ask the most interesting people in the world of DevOps, a couple of key questions around DevOps, today and in the future. But before we go there, and for those of you who know me as an industry analyst, here are some data points in a 2021 Accelerate State of DevOps. It shows that for the first time, high and elite performers make up two thirds of respondents compared to 2019 report where low and medium performers made up 56% of respondents in 2022, according to our research at the DevOps Institute, 58% have actually adopted DevOps in that year. From a vertical perspective, 73% of healthcare companies have adopted DevOps as of 2021. That’s from Red Gate software. 451, Alliance said that 44% of respondents of their survey indicated that they have either indicated or initiated the adoption of DevOps practices at their organization as a result of the COVID 19 outbreak. And in June 2022 Charles Betz noted that implementing DevOps consistently reduces time to market increases enterprise agility and makes businesses more resilient. And that high performers in these topics are much further along in the DevOps journey, compared to the laggards. Not the bottom line, the adoption of DevOps keeps rising. And the term DevOps means many things. And it’s one of our guests, which you can hear later mentions. The term DevOps is actually used as umbrella term today. Welcome again to the DevOps human podcast. My guests this week are a variety of thought leaders within the topic of DevOps. Let me tell you who is on here. First, we’re joined by Jayne Grohl CEO of DevOps Institute, who has influenced and shaped DevOps with a team and the work of the DevOps Institute itself. I’m very fortunate to have known Jayne for many years, and under her leadership, DevOps Institute has become a global learning community focused exclusively on all things DevOps. Her mission and data for team, including myself, is to empower the people who power it. This includes not only improving typical skills across best practices, technologies, methodologies, processes, functional knowledge and more but also emphasizes to human aspects and skills. It is with great pleasure to also welcome Charles Betz, Vice President and research director at Forrester Research. Charlie and I met a long time ago and I was fortunate to work with him at Forrester Research. There, Charlie leads forces Enterprise Architecture priority, providing guidance to Enterprise Architect professionals worldwide, on evolving relevant modern and valuable architectural practice. He is deeply engaged in researching the transformation of the it operating model, in particular the impact of agile DevOps and product thinking. He has previously led forces DevOps and enterprise service management coverage. Prior to joining Forrester Charlie was the chief architect at att AT&T signature client group where he was responsible for technical strategy with Fortune 100 clients. Also excited to welcome Helen Beal. She is an I would bet you the most connected person within this industry. Helen is a DevOps coach and strategic advisor. She is co chair of the Oasis value stream management interoperability technical comedy committee, and chief ambassador at the DevOps Institute, where I have the pleasure to work with her quite a bit. She hosts the bright talk day to day DevOps webinar series ism and is an info cute DevOps editor. She is listed in tech beacons, DevOps top 100 lists and one top DevOps evangelist in 2020. In the DevOps dozen awards, outside of DevOps, she’s ecologist and novelist. And last but not least, Mark Hornbeek. A DevOps expert, Mark is CEO and Principal Consultant at engineering, DevOps consulting, and the author of the book engineering DevOps. He has been advising and consulting organizations around the globe on different aspects of DevOps chain, Charlie, Helen, Mark, welcome, and thank you so much. for joining me today on humans of DevOps podcast. With me now is Jane Grohl CEO of DevOps Institute. Jane has influenced and shaped DevOps with her team at DevOps Institute. I am very fortunate to know Jayne for many years, and under her leadership, the DevOps Institute has become a global learning community focused exclusively on all things DevOps. It’s been a pleasure working with and for her over these years as well. Her mission and that of the DevOps institute is to empower the people who power it. This includes not only improving typical skills across best practices, technologies, methodologies, processes and functional knowledge, but also emphasizes the human aspects and skills essential for the role in DevOps. As we know culture and skills are a huge challenge for the above adoption of DevOps, and many other related topics. The DevOps Institute has a large professional network respected certification programs, excellent virtual and in person events, partners, and it is the place to go for IT professionals across all roles to shape and manage the future of it. It Hello, Jayne, how are you?
Jayne Groll 6:14
Hello, Eveline. So nice to be here. Thank you for having me.
Eveline Oehrlich 6:18
Yes, thanks for taking time out. From your busy schedule, I know your schedule is always busy, because it’s always really difficult to get a date with you. So I think there is no better person to start out this topic on DevOps now and in the future than with us as CEO. So my first question to you, Jane is what is DevOps today in 2022? If you kind of step back, and think about where are we today?
Jayne Groll 6:46
So you know, it’s very interesting, because I’ve had the privilege of kind of watching DevOps grow up, I’m not one of the original founders or part of the original team. But I did get to see DevOps in 2012, when it still was in its very, very early stages, and was really mostly with technology companies. And if the time there were really kind of two spirits to DevOps, one was the three ways from the Phoenix Project. And of course, I think that helped shape a lot of the culture and the principles around DevOps. And then the other was continuous integration and continuous delivery. And everybody was looking at how do we build these pipelines so that we can start integrating using more agile practices, integrating code that came out of the agile teams, and then downstream trying to expedite some of the activities that happen downstream, before deployment into production. And now fast forward, what 10 years for me, and you see, the DevOps has become an umbrella or recipe that is grafted a lot of other practices. So certainly CI CD is is still at the heart of of DevOps, you know, building the pipelines optimizing open source, really looking at how do we accelerate or shift left a lot of the activities that happen from development into up to deployment. But now we’ve got other practices like Site Reliability Engineering, which is in part of DevOps, right, but got grafted into it as kind of the third piece of the continuum agile DevOps, and now operations in the form of sre. And then we look at other practices that grew up organically, like chaos engineering, like observability, right, that were in power, they weren’t written in the Phoenix Project, they weren’t part of kind of the original spirit of DevOps. But DevOps then kind of became this umbrella of practices and principles, that welcomed other practices into the fold, so that the entire supply chain, the software delivery lifecycle became faster and more frequent, higher quality, and that people individuals started to really innovate in terms of how they can improve that, that experience for themselves and for the consumers of their, their product. So you know, from the early days CI CD and now you know, there’s a wealth of other practices that weren’t written in a book, they didn’t, you know, they weren’t part of a body of knowledge. They just sort of happened. And, and, and now we could call them DevOps, if you want to, right, we could call it development and operations, and really kind of look at this end to end value stream. Instead of just kind of pigeon holing it into a set of practice. It’s really been fantastic to watch.
Eveline Oehrlich 9:43
Beautiful I love your analogy of or the word you said the umbrella, never become an umbrella. That is a great term and I always love your energy on this topic. I can feel it when you when you speak about it. So given what you said, Let’s go look into the crystal ball. If we all we all have one, right? Tell me what you’re thinking in where DevOps will be in the future crystal balls, let’s say two years, maybe three years, because five years, I think it’s a little too far away, but maybe two to three years from now, where do you think DevOps will be then?
Jayne Groll 10:18
So my biggest concern about DevOps is that it falls into the category of frameworks. Because, you know, as you know, in DevOps, we have kind of trends, patterns, fashions that we like, you know, it’s been a total it’s been agile, it’s, you know, pick a framework, right, we, we’ve kind of embraced and adopted it, I would love to see DevOps, which some people talk about talk to somebody yesterday, they said, Well, we have a team doing DevOps, right. And that scares me because it becomes something that the developers do Agile, and there’s a team doing DevOps, and there’s a team doing sre. And so it falls into the same bucket of practices that, you know, had their day in the sunshine, and then eventually faded away. I like to think of DevOps as an umbrella or even a recipe, right, so that when we look at it in the future, your recipe and my recipe, we may both make the same food, but your proportion of ingredients or your your quality of ingredients may be different than mine. And your outcome may be different than mine, but at the end of the day was still trying to bake a cake. Right, so So I would like to think that the term DevOps kind of, you know, grows up into something, well, sort of, like, you know, generally accepted it principles, my husband’s a CPA, and they’ve got generally accepted accounting principles, I would love that future, to be this, this kind of ecosystem of not only agile and DevOps and SRE, but other things that come along, that just makes sense. And that as an organization from a scale perspective, because I think that’s the challenge today is, you know, organizations have experimented with this thing called DevOps or agile or Essary. But scale is a really, really big issue. And I think if we kind of look at this as an umbrella or a recipe or generally accepted it principles, then I think that it has a longer ability to deliver value, and that it isn’t just today’s fashion trend. And tomorrow, some new framework comes out that somebody defines and, you know, we throw out this and we bring something else. And I think DevOps has a lot of sustainability. If we really look at it as kind of supply chain management, or generally accepted it principles or something along those ways. That may be wishful thinking, truthfully, you know, it, we love our frameworks. But I do think there’s one other thing, I think that’s very important, you know, Evelyn, where you and I sit, it feels like the organizations we talk to have maturity, and they’ve been doing stuff in there moving forward, I think there’s a lot of organizations that are either at the gate, or just opening the gate to start experimenting with this thing we call DevOps. So I also think the next three to five years, those that have started down the journey are struggling with scale. But I also think we have to be very sensitive to the fact that not everybody is there, right? There were those that are still like, I know, we need to do something helped me. So I think more education, I think more training, I think more commonality between the different teams, I think an understanding of what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, humans need that. I think for those organizations that are just kind of getting started, we have to recognize them, we have to nurture them, we have to support them, but with continuous opportunities to learn and not not fatigue them because those organizations are fatigued, which is probably why they haven’t crossed the gate yet. You know, they they’ve done things in the past. They’ve spent a lot of money in the past. And now we’re telling them do something different. So I think the next three to five years, hopefully we see those organizations move as well.
Eveline Oehrlich 14:10
Great vision. I like it. I absolutely agree. Super, thank you again, for your time. This has been very insightful. Happy to have you on. I will let you go back to your day job. And again, we heard from Jayne Groll, CEO of the DevOps Institute. Thank you again, Jayne. Thanks, Eveline. I’m also today with Charlie Betz or Charles Betz. At four star I’ll let Charlie introduce himself. But a quick little highlight Charlie and I actually met way before for so I want to say what year was that? Charlie? Was that in?
Charles Betz 14:44
It could have been as early as 2007 or eight. Yeah.
Eveline Oehrlich 14:48
That sounds about right. I think you were at a particular financial institution. And I was already forced or and I think we talked about and of course architecture so quickly. Tell us what are you doing today, Charlie?
Charles Betz 15:00
Well, currently, I’m the vice president and research director for Enterprise Architecture at at Forrester. So I’ve kind of come full circle after going through a number of interests and roles, including enterprise service management and DevOps. I’ve come back to my roots.
Eveline Oehrlich 15:20
Excellent. excited to have you here. And the question really, I have for you today, where do you think DevOps is today in 2022? Give us your thoughts.
Charles Betz 15:33
Well, a lot of the basic technical issues have been solved, you know, in terms of in terms of the market, you know, for, for example, enabling technology. You know, we had a great run of innovation, they’re solving problems, like continuous integration, continuous delivery. And for the most part, these problems are now settled. The, of course, DevOps has never just been about the technology, it’s also about culture process, ways of working. And there things are still very interesting to me. And my coverage, and kind of my call is, you know, at Forrester, we’re, you know, we’re we are encouraged to make the call is really that DevOps has evolved into a conversation around the product centric operating model. You know, there’s a lot that is kind of bound up in that one might say, in terms of the ways of working the expectations for collaboration, the need for well defined and automated services. And the interesting thing to me is that I think, you know, the industry is engaged in this tremendous amount of experimentation. And yet, we still are, in many ways, many people call me and they say, what are the best practices? I’m saying, we don’t even have good practices, we have experimentation and emerging practices right now, in terms of how organizations actually can an optimally organize in a ways that that reflect the DevOps values.
Eveline Oehrlich 17:15
So to us, then, what I hear you say is, there’s still plenty of work to do, right. Yeah. So things for the enterprises across all different verticals, to tackle this, these different things, let’s call them practices. I just read a blog where there was this discussion about, is there something like a best practice, but we’ll save that for another podcast? Yeah, let’s go forward in maybe 2, 3, 4 years, sometimes people say, you know, what’s happening in four years? What can we even predict? We don’t know. Right? And we still here we don’t know. But in your crystal ball at Forrester. And when you think of your customers and your clients, what do you think, where are we with DevOps in three to four years from today?
Charles Betz 18:05
Well, the I think the big challenge right now is getting infrastructure teams up to speed. The product centric conversation has taken root in business and customer facing teams. And this is not just DevOps, you know, this is kind of a convergence of DevOps with Agile. And we see a lot of, I think, fairly effective use of agile and DevOps, when the problem is creating software for business and or customer facing purposes. And by the way, I don’t like the term business versus it but you know, we’re kind of stuck with it. What is the big challenge right now is that the infrastructure, the classic infrastructure and operations organizations, the specialists and what we used to call it forester most maintenance and operations, etc. They’re still struggling. And the challenge is that, in less unless the infrastructure teams get up to speed. Organizations are at risk of losing developers. Developers are no longer patient. With infrastructure teams and services teams that take too long or bureaucratic are heavy handed. They want automation, they want better customer focus, better customer service, and speaking as internal customers in this sense. And that’s the challenge for the infrastructure teams around the world and we know of organizations like nationwide on the record, I can talk about them because they presented at the DevOps enterprise summit about their transformation of their infrastructure team, but there are certain unsolved parts problems that I would predict in four years, we start to see actual, again emerging or at least good practices, defensible practices, maybe not best. And those are going to revolve around the fact that infrastructure teams, there’s a reason that they’re bureaucratic and slow. The reason that we’re starting to really put our finger on and I had a webinar with Nick Kiersten, where we went very deep into this is that the infrastructure teams have been overly single threaded. And they’ve had one person responsible for Personnel Management, their product vision, the engineering problems, and demand and execution management. And if you look analytically, at what a successful Agile transformation does, at the customer facing or business facing layer, they split all those responsibilities out into what we call the X in a box model. But translating the X and A box model to the infrastructure world, is a very hard problem. And to do it correctly, requires having conversations with your infrastructure team and your CFO that guess what, we now need additional people additional skills in the infrastructure world in order for infrastructure to keep up with the application world that is moving so fast. So that was a bit of a deep dive there.
Eveline Oehrlich 21:31
Absolutely good. So the way I look at it, it’s the train and the front end, or maybe it’s a it’s not a train, maybe it’s it’s a different vehicle, but the for the for the forward place where the customers are touching and where there is agility is moving faster than the back. And so yes, those folks, right, so so for those who are listening in, who are in infrastructure, keep working, keep doing what you’re doing, but do it in an improved way. Do it in a DevOps way. I think that’s what I heard you say?
Charles Betz 22:00
That’s well, but let me let me, let me, let me let me refine that a little bit. It’s not enough to tell the infrastructure people just work smarter, work harder, work faster, they’ve been told that their whole life. And speaking as somebody who’s worked a lot with infrastructure teams, it’s in some ways, not fair. The problem is that, let me just put a real fine, a real basic point on it. We don’t give infrastructure teams, product managers. The infrastructure team leader is typically a functional specialist, like a DBA, or a network specialist or a cloud specialist, they rise up through the ranks, they know their domain, but they don’t know the first thing about product management. They don’t think in customer centric terms. And the thing is, is you cannot load all that work onto one person. Yep, you have to you have to break apart the people management, the engineering management, the product vision for that platform. And these now need to be different responsibilities. And the infrastructure augment starts to need to mirror its application customers. But this Eveline, this is not going to be easy, because you’re going to the CFO and saying, these infrastructure teams composed of specialists led by a specialist who’s rose up through the ranks, they now need an a more diverse set of characters, leading the team so that they can be more responsive to the application teams. And of course, the CFO is just going to see, you know, dollar signs or euro signs, depending on your continent. And it’s not gonna be an easy conversation.
Eveline Oehrlich 22:19
It’d be interesting to look at the job descriptions of those folks. Right. So what we’re saying also is, I guess that’s what I hear you say it’s a significant redefinition of what the infrastructure engineer needs, needs to be doing. Excellent. This is great role
Charles Betz 23:55
is getting a lot of discussion. Yeah, the role that’s getting a lot of discussion is technical product manager.
Eveline Oehrlich 24:01
Ah, interesting. Okay. Maybe just something technical product manager will be doing a lot of work around at the DevOps Institute, as you might know, a relative to skills and skill development and role definitions and things like that. So that is certainly something I have to have on my to do list. This has been a great conversation, Charlie, thank you so much. My pleasure. Yes. Stay in touch be well, you too. Don’t worry about us. You’re the DevOps Institute. Thank you so much. And hopefully I get to see you. Next time. I come to Minnesota my daughter actually moved. She moved to from St. Paul, Minnesota. We went to the Japanese restaurant remember where you and your wife and then was with us? We went there the first time since then she loves it and she seems to go there all the time. So when I come there next time you go
Charles Betz 24:58
Yeah, we’ll go to box drop away. And we will we will go to Zambia. Yeah.
Eveline Oehrlich 25:01
And it’s my treat. I think you tweeted last time. So next time will be my tweet,
Charles Betz 25:05
Remember, but of course, all right.
Eveline Oehrlich 25:06
Thank you so much. Take care. Thanks, everyone. Bye. Bye.
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Eveline Oehrlich 25:46
And now, we are actually with Helen Beal, who is one of the thought leaders of DevOps, and many, many other topics. Helen has covered DevOps, I think, forever, ever since I joined the topic, DevOps Helen has been in it. So great to have you on our podcast today, Helen, Hello, how you doing?
Helen Beal 26:05
Hello, I am fantastic, thank you, and delighted to be here and chatting with you again, as always,
Eveline Oehrlich 26:11
Likewise, and it was great just recently seeing you in person, that was a bit. So that was really fun. The, as you’ve been in the space for quite a long time, and as I mentioned, disorderly during this, I really, really want to know where if you think about the journey we’ve been through, right, starting in 2008, or some people live, you think earlier, where are we in this topic of DevOps today? In 2022? What would you say?
Helen Beal 26:39
Yeah, sort of 13 or so years in, I’d say DevOps is definitely mainstream, I’d say there probably isn’t an enterprise in the world that doesn’t know about DevOps and isn’t trying to do DevOps at some level. But I’d also look to puppet state of DevOps report from last year 2021, which talks about the middle layer, and the fact that lots of organizations are stuck in that middle level of performance in terms of adoption, and capability. So whilst it’s really well established now, and I think most people think it is the the way of working that we use, if we want to operate in a digital economy, we still have some ways to go to fully adopt all of the practices, and really benefit from the promise it’s made to us in terms of speed of delivery, quality of delivery, and super happy customers, because they’re just having such great experiences.
Eveline Oehrlich 27:36
Do you see any regional differences? Or do you see, is that a global thing when you say it’s mainstream? Or do you see anything different in in a particular region?
Helen Beal 27:46
Yeah, I mean, I don’t know the data on that. But that there’s a feeling that I get from my ambassadors, which I think is quite interesting. So as you know, DevOps Institute in that Chief Ambassador role I have, we have about coming up to 250 Ambassadors across six continents. I think I’m in sixth, I mean, all the continents except Antarctica, which is obviously mostly populated by penguins, and researchers. So we’re not really anticipating having any ambassadors from there. But we do have ambassadors from nearly every country. And some countries have surprised me when we’ve received applications. So for example, Nepal was one and you wouldn’t naturally think, oh, Nepal, we know their big business doing like laser tech, but it’s it really has to, as far as I can tell, reached everywhere, I think, you know, there are nations and markets that have led and for that we’d probably look to, obviously North America, and Europe and parts of Asia, particularly India, and Singapore is kind of Intertek leaders and China. And Japan has big tech leaders as well. But I don’t know what about you, you. You’ve probably seen more data than I have on this. What do you think?
Eveline Oehrlich 28:54
Yeah, I would agree. I think I think you hit it on the nail, I think. I love your comment on the Antarctica. So if there is anybody out there listening to us, from the Antarctica, and you are in DevOps, you should connect with Helen, she’s looking for an ambassador, it’s great government. Now pull out your crystal ball and think down the road. Maybe sometimes people say strategic is two or three years depends on I don’t know, if, in our crazy life and crazy world if two or three years is even possible, right? But pull out your crystal ball and share with us what do you think where this is in maybe two to three years from today? So 2025 2026, something like that. Where do you think that DevOps will be done?
Helen Beal 29:38
So I mentioned the data from the puppet state of DevOps report 2021. And this kind of frozen, middle, bit confusing using that word, that terminology because we often use it to talk about management layers, but the idea that we’ve got a lot of enterprises that are kind of stuck in their DevOps adoption and are yet to realize the promises that DevOps has made them It won’t surprise you at all, I’ve learned to hear that I’m going to say that I think there’s a key to unlocking this problem. And that key is value stream management. So value stream management very much emerging in a kind of new renascence. Obviously, it’s been around since the 1950s. Or earlier, you know, if you can go all the way back to materials and information planning in the Venice Arsenal in the 1400s. So we could go back that far. But that issue management is very much having a renaissance right now, that was kind of triggered by some work done by Forrester in around 2018, so around four years ago. And the reason it’s new and different now to what it’s been before, is because of what we’ve done in DevOps. So we have spent the last 13 years or so learning about how to build DevOps tool chains. And those DevOps tool chains are giving us access to data about value streams, digital value streams, in a way that we just haven’t been able to. And even at the advent of DevOps, you know, back in the day, we were only just starting really to do things like automated builds, and automated testing and continuous delivery. So it’s all relatively new. So in 2025, my hope would be that we would see organizations embracing value stream management, which sometimes I call the next evolution of DevOps. Sometimes I say that DevOps is like the toolkit that delivers on what VSM is trying to achieve. So the the outcomes that it’s looking for are enabled by DevOps practices. But either way, I’d like to see, I’d like to see that middle layer of organization and capability improving. And I think the adoption of VSM is the thing that is going to make that shift. And if we look at that data, it’s four years so far consecutively, that it’s not really changed. So we could go another four years with it not really changing. If we don’t do something new. And I think that’s something new is VSM.
Eveline Oehrlich 31:51
Is there a specific place people can learn more about VSM? What, where would you want them to?
Helen Beal 31:56
So I would point them at the value stream management Consortium, which is at VSM consortium.org. Just yesterday, we released our state of VSM report 2022. So are second in that annual series. And of course, Evelyn and I were lead researchers on that report. So we hope if you get a chance to read it, that you’ll enjoy it.
Eveline Oehrlich 32:18
Great. Well, thanks, Helen. This was great. Appreciate your thoughts. And again, for those out in the end RTR if you have any interest in DevOps, but of course, everybody else reach out. We’re here to help and particularly, Thanks, Helen, your thought leadership has brought this space and many other spaces quite ahead. So thanks.
Helen Beal 32:39
Thank you. It’s a very joyful experience. So thank you.
Eveline Oehrlich 32:43
And now I’m here with Mark Hornbeek who is a an expert in DevOps as well, Mark and I have done some work together on a variety of chapters in our skill books. And so great to have you also here with us, Mark. Hi, how are you doing?
Mark Hornbeek 33:00
I’m good. More information for another day, but I’m good today.
Eveline Oehrlich 33:05
That’s great. So my question for you as well is what is DevOps today in 2022, you’ve been in this space for quite some time. So share with us your thoughts.
Mark Hornbeek 33:15
So I can only say that my you know, I can only relate my own experiences. I’m immersed in DevOps, you know, pretty much every day, and have been for many, many years. But as kind of a practitioner mostly at the strategic level guiding companies and other things of that level. So you know, what I see happening today, mostly, with my clients, I have quite a large number of active clients, and I, you know, in the context of guiding their DevOps practices, so it’s, when I talk about think about DevOps today, I think about what they’re asking for and what they’re doing. And so it’s really relaying actual day to day experience of what I see people doing today versus in the past. So fundamentally, I see kind of three channels of practices. So what we call DevOps, which is really big D and little O, where companies are still really trying to master and mature there are CI CD practices. And even though those terms have been around a long time, I still find that even the large enterprises are struggling to really, you know, make an efficient CI, let alone CD process so that that’s still true. More and more are maturing, but there’s still a lot of maturing yet to do in DevOps, see ICD, but those that have got to some better level of maturity, are now engaging more with SRE practices to complement their dev, big D. Little ops practices with product, what I call production operations, being more smart about how they couple their dev activities with their production activities. And then dev SEC ops. And I started to list them in this order. Again, I’m only relaying my own experiences. But I see, you know, most of my clients that are big organizations, they then attack all this security integrations with with DevOps and sre. So really, I see a maturing happening along the lines of those kind of three channels, DevOps with CIC, D, SRE, and Dev SEC ops. But there’s still somewhat separate projects, they’re not as integrated as you might think they could be at this point, at least with the clients I’m dealing with. How are they doing that? Again, from my own experiences, directed roadmaps, a lot of training. foundational level training is always a good thing place to start and immersive learning, through projects and other you know, activities like that. And those a lot of tools, consolidation efforts, especially the big enterprises that have grown up through acquisitions, or allowing their different teams to experiment with DevOps. And they ended up with a plethora of different types of tools. And now they’re finding out that to really get to the next level of maturity, they need to consolidate to a more common tool base. Along with that, there’s a lot of migration to the cloud, the in embracing infrastructures code to try to make their pipelines more efficient. And at this stage, also, there’s a lot of focus on metrics. But they’re really again, kind of focused areas about metrics, different parts of the digital value streams have different metrics. And people are still struggling to understand, you know that there are different kinds of metrics that need to be ultimately integrated together to provide the big picture. There’s, you know, people expert in certain areas or the other. So, the dev side CI, the CD, the deployment, which is different than delivery. And of course, production is all of these things, have different types of metrics, and I see organizations still struggling to understand the breadth and depth of all of those metrics. And if you don’t have right metrics, then it’s hard to really evolve to higher levels of maturity, to try to understand what’s really going on at the big picture level, when you think about things as an entire, you know, end to end system. So that’s kind of DevOps today, in my, in my world, you know, there’s still a lot of learning about CIC, D, a lot of good projects, probably, from what I’ve seen, less than half, certainly less than half of the organizations have achieved what I call, you know, high level of CI, CD performance. And most of them are still kind of beginners with CI or CD with sre. And dev SEC ops, the security organizations are still highly siloed. For the most part, they’re focusing more on the production side of security, and learning more about the dev side of security. So to me, that’s kind of the state of the practice. Okay, it’s not the state of the art. I mean, there are certainly lots of you know, unicorns are doing a lot more than that. Right. But when I, when I think about today, I think about the state of the practice,
Eveline Oehrlich 38:06
At the enterprise level. So really continuously evolving the journey, even after it was introduced in 2008. So if I give you a crystal ball mark, and we move fast forward, maybe three years, you know, strategic thinking three years, maybe five years, depending on which of course, industry vertical, where do you think these enterprises will be three to five years out? Still, of course, maturing, but will they will there ever be done is done? What’s the next what’s the next stage for for those who are kind of in the middle or more on the higher level of maturity?
Mark Hornbeek 38:41
Well, you can look at the elite performers, as Dora calls it or, you know, the, the unicorns to see what they’re doing is as an indicator of where a lot of these other organizations want to get to, ultimately, I think it’s more about the future is more about integrated and, and practices. So rather than having separate, you know, DevOps SRE dev SEC ops, is, I think it’s going to be far more integrated into end continuous value stream orchestration and monitoring, continuous Dev and prod ops. So, you know, SRE and DevOps being more combined quality being looked at as more of a continuous effort from, you know, planning all the way through to production, and especially as you get more mature than a lot of testing and quality analysis going on, even post post release in into the production, deployment environment, and security itself. You know, today, it’s very much kind of bifurcated. Dev SEC Ops is really about vulnerability prevention. Up until prod, it’s kind of like DevOps, it doesn’t really inform that much about what happens in prod, but a certain great set of practices for preventing vulnerabilities getting into prod, but you still have a whole lot of separate security practices in prod, that the SRE and the security folks tend to focus on the most I think moving in the direction of continuous security, integrating the pre prod and prod side of security. So that’s what I see happening, more of an integrated set of practices is more end to end, where there’s more collaboration that’s more efficient, and how that would be served up to I think value stream management platforms are going to have a rise and importance because they have that layer, what I see a lot of people doing is they’re trying to implement things at the CI CD level, but the CI CD level is only one level above that you have value stream management, and that’s where it gets a little easier to orchestrate things at an end to end level. So that layer, whether you call a value stream management ever you want to call it, I think it’s going to become more important. continuous value stream management as a service where you know, ultimately, to be more efficient, you want these things to be available as integrated systems, and served up as a service rather than having to recreate them all the time for your different pipelines and streams. And obviously, you know, there’s the rise of, I’ve seen more and more serious applications of, of AI and machine learning, especially in the continuous observability realm. I think that’s going to become more prevalent. I’ve almost I’ve kind of detected, there’s a tipping point going on there. Where before, there was a lot of trial trial projects, but they’re starting to become more serious with AI and ML applications to things like DevOps, and SRE, especially in the, you know, monitoring and observability area,
Eveline Oehrlich 41:33
We’re seeing the same, we’re seeing the same thing. So you’re saying, just to summarize quickly, you’re saying it is more of a holistic, I’ll call it operating models, as many things are starting to work together, and there is more development and more continuation around this integrated way of doing things. That’s great. Super Well, I appreciate your input. This was super, thanks so much. And again, that was more corn geek, who has done a lot of work in this space. Thanks, Mark.
Mark Hornbeek 42:07
Thank you for having me here. I appreciate it.
Eveline Oehrlich 42:10
This has been extremely educational. Thank you all for sharing your thoughts and predictions. For our listeners, look for an upcoming blog from the DevOps Institute around predictions. Jane, Charlie, Helen and Mark, maybe we can make this a yearly prediction podcast around DevOps. I certainly would love to host you all again. Thank you again. Humans of DevOps is produced by DevOps Institute. Our audio production team includes Julia Papp and Brendan Leigh. I am DevOps human podcast executive producer evolutionarily. If you would like to join us on the podcast, please contact us at podcast at DevOps institute.com. Thank you again, and talk to you soon.
Narrator 42:56
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