Las Vegas 2019

Opening Remarks

The day opens.

GK

Gene Kim

Founder and Author, IT Revolution

Transcript

00:00:02

Good morning, welcome to the six us DevOps enterprise summit. And our second year here in Las Vegas, I am so happy that you're here because we have an amazing three days prepared for you over the next 18 minutes. What I'd like to do is describe the construction of this conference and tell you about what we hope to achieve over the next three days. So the slide advance, right? So why are we here? I think we're here because we all believe that dev ops is important, uh, that we believe that dev ops creates business value and better societal outcomes. And that we believe that dev ops makes our work more humane in 2016 with my coauthors, we wrote the dev ops handbook. And here's the definition that we put of what DevOps is. So this is our definition. It is the architectural practices, technical practice and cultural norms that enable us to increase our ability to deliver applications and services quickly and safely, which enables rapid experimentation and innovation, as well as providing the fastest delivery of value to our customers while preserving world-class reliability, security, and stability, why this is important because so that we can survive and win in the marketplace.

00:01:13

So as much as I like that definition, because it doesn't actually say what DevOps is, right. It does describe the outcomes that we want. Um, I do like that, but I think there is actually a better definition out there and that doesn't come from me. It comes from John smart back when he was a better head of better ways of working at Berkeley's. Now at Deloitte, his definition is better value, sooner, safer, happier. And I think that is such a wonderful definition and it is actually my preferred definition and it's very difficult to argue why that's not a good thing. So kudos to John smarter, who was also here. Um, tell us, look at slide next as well. So one of the things that I loved about the fuse projects was this one line from Eric. He said, I want to improve the lives of 1 million.

00:01:57

It workers over the next five years. And looking back six years ago, I realized that, you know, 1 million, uh, technology workers is actually far from adequate. In fact, I think this is substantiated by the fact that there are according to IDC about 18 million developers in the planet. And it's so I think what this dev ops enterprise community has done so well is show what operations infrastructure can do to enable developers to be productive. How do we elevate their productivity? So they are as productive as if they were at Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google, or Microsoft. So why are we here today? I think we all have a common goal and belief that we can genuinely transform our organizations. Um, we are here to learn what we need to learn, to make the changes that we want to make in our organizations. We meet the people, our fellow travelers that can help us on this journey and something that I've heard over the years that I find very valuable to remind myself is that I'm here because I want to get re-energized to keep up the good fight, right?

00:02:57

I just want to make it one more and to get re-energized to do what I think is the right thing to do. Um, so specifically the goals for the next three days, we're working with the program committee. Our goal is to make this the best DevOps enterprise summit ever. This is a goal that we've been carrying around for four conferences now, and it's actually surprisingly difficult, intimidating when we feel like we've pulled off the best programming. Uh, however, in over the years, I would claim that making this the best summit ever, it's actually easier than I would have thought. And I think it's because the aspirations of this community are so ambitious and grand, that all we have to do is find the right experts to help us achieve those goals. You know, almost makes a phenomenal conference, uh, inevitable. So that is my, my hope I'm going to put out to the universe.

00:03:50

So, uh, first one acknowledged the help of this incredible programming committee, some who have been helping us throughout the very beginning from, from 2014, all of these people work tirelessly to define the objectives, uh, find the right speakers, and I'll describe what they do in terms of leveraging their network and to find the speakers to help achieve the outcomes that I talked about. So specifically the talks that you'll be hearing over the next three days, um, are primarily experienced supports. So the first category of that is repeat experience reports. These are the people who are presented in the past, and we want them to hear how their journey has gone. In other words, it sounded good last year. Was it really good this year? Right? Do we like what we're seeing is a path worth following, or was this something that we definitely don't want to do right now in our own journey?

00:04:40

And so we're going to hear from many repeat speakers and disrupts in about 10% of the programming. One of the things that based on some feedback, we actually reduced the number of repeat experience talks. Um, and so we know from, and so if you actually measure how many people have spoken before that number has gone down from 45% last year down to 25% last year. And so one of the reasons we did that was to make room for new experience reports and specifically the reason why experience reports are so valuable. One of them is that it's a fantastic way to show that dev ops is possible everywhere, regardless of industry verticals, regardless of organizational size, regardless of how old your organization is over the years, we've assembled over 250 case studies by technology leaders showing what they've done. Uh, Jason Cox on the program committee, our friends from Disney, he said, I'm always looking for a new experience to bring back, to show my leadership because it's so helpful to say, even organization X or organization Y are doing dev ops. So I think that's also important and we want experience reports to follow a very specific form. And I'll talk a little bit more about that later. So we have many new experience reports and these represent about 20% of programming.

00:05:56

So, uh, another type of extremist report we're looking for are those extreme reports that span the business and technology divide. Specifically, if you look at the obstacles are in the way of this community succeeding, increasingly they're outside of the classic dev and ops value stream, and they are people in product leadership, business leadership, project management, information, security, legal, and compliance. Um, and so we have been seeking over the last several years driven primarily by Courtney Kissler, uh, from Nike. Uh, we want to have technology leaders presenting with their business counterparts, and we don't want to just someone proximate to, or barely acknowledging the existence of, we want the business leaders who are rabid fans, who are genuinely grateful that their technology organization and their technology counterpart is helping them achieve all their grandest goals, dreams, and aspirations. And so these traditionally had been the toughest ones for us to find.

00:06:51

Um, and I'm so delighted that again, we are presenting more of these experience reports this year than any year prior. So this includes two exits from BMW, Christoph brink, Ralph Ultram, they'll be presenting about what they are calling the biggest change to how businesses conducted at BMW in 20 years, Fernando Conoco and Benjamin grim from Adidas will be talking about how a benders game represents the business side of.com. Talking about what the value that technology is bringing for them. We have the CEO and CFO from Compuware telling us from the telling us from the CFO's perspective, how does technology help and how do we talk to people like him? We have a team from Comcast, a us bank. And so titles, aren't the most important thing. But I think the fact that we have such senior people speaking shows that our work matters to people who matter.

00:07:43

And so I'm hoping that I'm so delighted that we have this as part of the programming. Um, we have another part of, uh, the conferences, which is overcoming ways of working. I think so much of the stories told to heroic journeys told by this community are one's rebellion, a small group of rebels, trying to overthrow a very powerful ancient order who have very clear ideas of the way they want things done, which is the way we did it 20 years ago. And so we have a whole bunch of talks, especially with subject matter experts from InfoSec compliance, ITL, project management and audit. And the goal is to better understand their world and better understand how we can get them on board or in some cases better compete with them. One thing I'm really, really delighted about is something we're doing that you're gonna see tomorrow on the plenary stage, which is the big four audit panel without a doubt.

00:08:34

Uh, one of the top impediments voiced by this community is the biggest impediment in the way, the biggest obstacle to people who are shutting the initiative down is compliance, internal audit, maybe even external audits and regulators. And so thanks to Sam Guckenheimer from Microsoft and Dr. Topo pal program committee. We are going to have all representatives from all big four auditors onstage, essentially. Myth-busting right. How dev ops is unsafe, impossible to secure, impossible to, uh, uh, to audit. And I think that these are not the consultants. These are actually people from the assurance and at the station side, showing that how it's good for them and because they still want customers over the next 50, a hundred years. It's good for you. So I'm so delighted that we're going to have that tomorrow. And we're also going to have to, for people who are interested in this, we're going to have another session in the breakouts called ask an auditor. Anything you can ask, anything you want to take off your badges, do not tell what organization you are from. And I, here's a way for you to get some genuine help dealing with your auditors. Um, and, uh, Sam and Topo will be helping you achieve all your goals there. And we are so excited by that. The last category of talks is applause for the auditors.

00:09:54

The last category of talks is bringing in the expertise we need. Um, and this is drawing upon the bodies of knowledge that we need in order to achieve our goals. And so in previous years, we've brought in central figures from the lean community safety culture. Um, we brought in people who helped bring the, build, the automated testing culture at Google, the person who, uh, helped drive the engineering of Amazon prime. Now the instantiate transformation at Microsoft, uh, this year, our focus is on bringing in people from organizational learning. We have the chief people officer from Kronos, where for five years, their main goal was to make Kronos one of the best places to work at the highest levels of the company. Uh, Dr. Andre Martin, I was chief learning officer at Nike and target. He's now VP of people dev at Google, teaching us about employee engagement, uh, about organizational learning to teach us how we can leverage people like them.

00:10:44

And of course, Dr. Nicole and I will be sharing the latest state of DevOps report with Dr. Dustin Smith, Dr. Christina MASAC, famous for her burnout work should be back on day three and Dr. McPherson on the continuation of the project to product journey, we have next generation operations. Um, and what is amazing about these talks is these are how I think that truly show how the best days of operations and infrastructure are not behind us, but they are indeed ahead of us all describing what they're doing to make developers productive. So the last thing I'll talk about in terms of program goals is announcing the launch of the unicorn project that's coming out on November 26. Thank goodness. And this book is really inspired by and dedicated to the achievements of the DevOps enterprise community. Um, and you know, I would describe like, why do I think there's, uh, w what's the why behind this book?

00:11:45

I think it's because you can do all the things in the Phoenix project, but there's this still the absence of understanding of all the invisible structures needed to truly developer productivity that some of the organization has stuck in decades of technical debt. This is orthogonal problem of how do we get data to where it needs to go. So just like how the DevOps community identified, how do we get code to where it needs to go in production? There's this whole other universe of data. It's a stuck in the electronic data warehouses in systems of record. How do we get that? Where it needs to be, which is in the hands of developers doing the daily work, there's still such strong opposition to support these new ways of working. And I think there's ambiguity in terms of what behaviors we really need from leaders to support a transformation like you're doing.

00:12:26

And so this is based on all the stories coming out of the DevOps enterprise community. And one of the things that really struck me as one of the key learnings was, you know, this is not just a technology problem. This is a business problem. One of the best evidence of this came from . He is now the chairman of Nokia. He joined in 20 2008. And does this passage in is phenomenal. Cause one of the best books I've read in last five years, he said when he was a board director and at Nokia in 2010, he learned that the Symbian OS that all their phones relied on to compete with Apple's iPhone took 48 hours to build. He said, when he learned that from the VP of strategy, it felt like being hit in the head with a sledgehammer because he knew because he was a founder of F secure is a technologist.

00:13:12

She knew that if it took two days for a developer to know whether change worked, it would have to be redone. Then there was a fundamental and fatal flaw in their architecture that doomed near-term profitability and long-term viability. And this is why they abandoned Symbian OOS and went to windows mobile, right. Because they knew there was no hope there. And so they didn't make it, but every one of the tech giants did. Right. Um, so there's Microsoft when, after the summer of worms in 2002, um, after ninja and code red bill gates put out the famous memo that says if any developer has to choose between security or a feature, always choose security. That was the Genesis of the year-long security stand down, a feature freeze that hit every product line across Microsoft. And this is what every tech giant has done with eBay, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Twitter, LinkedIn Etsy, all of them understood that technical debt is a potential existential risk.

00:14:07

And so that's what I think the core goal of the feeds project is to help elevate that. Um, and so in the feeds project, we had the three ways, the four types of work and the five ideals are what we're using the unicorn project locality. And simplicity's the first idea. The second idea is focused flow and joy. The third is improvement of daily work, the fourth of psychological safety and the fifth is customer focused. So I'll be bringing that up over the next three days. Um, and so maybe I'll just mention as anyone who's created something where there's a product, a book, a, you can probably relate to the doubt and the remorse and the guilty feel of all the things you want to do, but couldn't fit in. And I certainly went through that. Um, but I have to say over the last couple of days, I've been listening to the audio book version, uh, listening for errors so that we can ship it with the book.

00:14:57

I love it. I'm very happy with the way it came out. I find myself laughing out loud at the absurdities that we all put up with in this community and the heroic acts required to get from here to there. So Fernando Granada, who'll be speaking there this morning. He said he liked a hundred times better than the Phoenix project, which I love. And then Chris Mallory from Compuware and he said, it is the civil war novel that every technology and business trailblazer must read. So thank you for the DevOps to this community for our community, gave me the courage to write this book and really target developers. So let me share with you, uh, my risky move. Uh, this is what your support gave me the confidence to do my highest aspiration for the book is that it is read by developers and it's good enough does read by technology leaders.

00:15:45

And maybe it will be good enough to be read by business leaders. Um, and I think that's the community. We need to activate to know how important our work is and to support that. That's why I've decided to aim for the national bestseller lists and have it listed alongside the books that they read. And so, uh, and I think it's within reach, looking at the opening week of DevOps handbook. I think all we need is a two X high-performance and you know, this is possible. So over the next three days, you'll hear about all the things we're doing to help make it as compelling for you to, to make that possible. So one of those is that we'll be doing, I'll be doing a book signing we'll all of you will be getting a unicorn project book, the first people to touch it from at 6:00 PM today. So thank you CloudBees.

00:16:34

So before I turn it over to my friend, Jeff, let me just tell you about something that is very important to me. I love conferences. In fact, if you look at the speakers community, uh, in the early years of this conference, almost every one of them. I met at a conference, almost all my coauthors. I met at a conference. And so I think conferences have tremendous value if you knew, if you can use the time. Well, but there's some things that I don't have that I have felt at a conference, such as the feeling that all the people you want to talk to are at the other side of a velvet rope, that you cannot cross, that you find yourself in situations where you look around a crowd of people, but you don't know who you should be talking to. Um, so our goal in the programming is to create as many ways for you to connect to who you need to get to you.

00:17:18

The first is every speaker should have as the last slide. Here's what I don't know how to do. Here's the help I'm looking for. Um, and here's a way for you to help someone who's broadcasting help they're looking for, right. Then you may find like me that that may lead to friendships and relationships that last for decades. So that's one thing that we're doing. Um, and we're doing a whole bunch of other things to make sure that we can create a community that already is so good at this community that is actively helping each other mutually exothermic. So to help make that happen. Let me invite out Jeff gala Moore, a long time friend of the dev ops enterprise community he's co-founder and CTO, CIO, chief technology, and innovation officer at Accella. So come on out and tell us what we've done.