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September 15, 2016

The Next DevOps Enterprise Live Chat is Set and It’s Going to Be Awesome!

DevOps Enterprise Summit San Francisco 2016

Can you believe that the DevOps Enterprise Summit San Francisco (#DOES16) is only two months away! This year, we’re thrilled to have many speakers (representing Docker, Capital One, Nationwide, GitHub, Heroku and more) coming back for a second, or even third, time to share new insights related to what we consider to be one of the most challenging, yet rewarding experiences for people to undergo –   DevOps transformation journeys.

To give our community a preview of what’s to come this November, we’re hosting a live, one-hour video chat discussion with our founding partner, Electric Cloud, and several gentlemen who’ve lived and breathed DevOps and IT transformation experiences for years. Their breadth of experience and knowledge always seems to astound us. Please join us as we welcome Carmen DeArdo, Technology Director at Nationwide Insurance; Mark Imbriaco, Co-Founder and CEO at Operable (previously of GitHub, Heroku, 37Signals); Topo Pal, Director and Platform Engineering Fellow at Capital One; and John Willis, Director of Ecosystem Development at Docker, Inc.

DevOps Enterprise Summit

Gene will be leading the discussion on “How Do Large Enterprises Do DevOps?” on Wednesday, September 28, at 11:30am PST/2:30pm ET.

Be sure to add the event to your calendar »

Reminder: I you haven’t registered for the event yet, don’t delay. Despite having more space this year at a larger venue, DOES16 has sold out each of the last two years!

Don’t forget to add the event to your calendar »

What’s Top of Mind?

Ahead of the live video chat, we were able to catch up with Mark, Topo and Carmen to ask them a few pressing questions, read on for their interesting responses!

1)     What’s the biggest misconception about DevOps?

Mark: The biggest misconception is that embracing DevOps has a negative impact on security. Automation and DevOps go hand in hand, reducing the likelihood of manual errors when building environments. Beyond automation, a key tenet of DevOps is a focus on improved visibility. Mature security organizations have recognized for a long time that prevention and access control alone are not enough, and this focus on visibility results in processes that are often fundamentally more auditable.

Topo: The biggest misconception is that DevOps is a “thing” that you can implement by buying some new shiny tools and hiring some consultants and new associates with the word “DevOps” in their job titles.

Carmen: I think the biggest misconceptions are that DevOps is primarily about the application of technology when we know that a lot of DevOps success is based on culture and application of Lean principles. Another is that DevOps is focused on reducing the lead time starting with code commit when really being responsive to business needs has to be focused on reducing the total time from the customer concept or hypothesis of what they believe could add value to the delivery of that capability.   Many organizations spend a majority of their lead time (and costs) prior to cards ever getting into the backlog of an agile team.

2)     How should business leaders decide which performance metrics are important for their situation and why?

Mark: It’s important to recognize that the key metrics are likely to change over time. For example, a common first early metric is the time that is required to provision a new environment or to deploy an application, in order to drive improved engagement from developers. As more applications are deployed, perhaps access to telemetry becomes more of a pain point and it becomes useful to track the number of metrics that are being collected for each application. DevOps is all about iteration and learning, so the key is to constantly evaluate your processes and interactions for opportunities to improve or signs of friction.

Topo: Usually there is no single metrics that alone can clearly indicate business performance. From DevOps perspective, I think few metrics become essential: Cycle Time, Mean Time to Recovery and some measure of a flow rate (Feature Flow Rate, Number of deployments per day per developer, Number of commits deployed to production etc.)

Carmen: Business leaders need to determine what the important drivers are for them to add value for their customers. In some cases, it needs for a system to be more reliable while in others, it needs to be able to experiment with different user experiences or products that can improve business outcomes.   We have over 20 business areas and for each of their products, this could vary at any given time. That’s why it’s important to provide a delivery capability that can allow the business to balance risk and speed to determine what course is best for them.

3)     If DevOps was a Halloween costume, what would it be and why?

Mark: I’ll go with the classic horse costume because it requires the head and tail to be working in sync. No comment about whether Dev or Ops is the tail.

Topo: Horse. Why? Because we do not necessarily need to find a Unicorn.

Carmen: The first thing that comes to mind is the Flash costume that Sheldon wore in Big Bang Theory. It’s Lean and mean, and of course, FAST! What could be better than that? J

Trust us, you don’t want to miss what additional insights Mark, Topo, Carmen, John and Gene will be sharing on September 28.

Add the event to your calendar »

For more background on the panelists, see below!

Gene Kim

Gene Kim is a multi-award winning CTO, researcher and author. He is the founder of Tripwire and served as CTO for 13 years. He has written three books: “The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win,” “The Visible Ops Handbook” and “The DevOps Handbook.”

Gene is a huge fan of IT operations, and how it can enable developers to maximize throughput of features from “code complete” to “in production” without causing chaos and disruption to the IT environment. He has worked with some of the top Internet companies on improving deployment flow and increasing the rigor around IT operational processes. In 2007, “ComputerWorld” added Gene to the “40 Innovative IT People to Watch, Under the Age of 40” list, and he was named a Computer Science Outstanding Alumnus by Purdue University for achievement and leadership in the profession.

@RealGeneKim | https://itrevolution.com/

John Willis

John Willis has worked in the IT management industry for more than 35 years. Currently, he is Director of Ecosystem Development at Docker, Inc. Prior to Docker Willis was the VP of Solutions for Socketplane (sold to Docker) and Enstratius (sold to Dell). Prior to Socketplane and Enstratius Willis was the VP of Training & Services at Opscode where he formalized the training, evangelism, and professional services functions at the firm. Willis also founded Gulf Breeze Software, an award winning IBM business partner, which specializes in deploying Tivoli technology for the enterprise. Willis has authored six IBM Redbooks for IBM on enterprise systems management and was the founder and chief architect at Chain Bridge Systems.

@botchagalupe | https://gist.github.com/botchagalupe/984acf7b7ffeeb287ffe

Topo Pal

Tapabrata Pal has 20 years of IT experience in various technology roles (developer, operations engineer, and architect) in the retail, healthcare, and finance industries. Over the last three years, Tapabrata has served as director of Capital One’s Enterprise Architecture group and led the company’s DevOpsSec initiatives. He is currently director and platform engineering fellow and is focused on next-generation infrastructure. Previously, Tapabrata spent some time in academics doing doctoral and postdoctoral research in the field of solid state physics.

@TopoPal | https://www.capitalone.com/

Mark Imbriaco

Mark Imbriaco has spent the past 20 years working at some of the most interesting and innovative companies in the industry, including 37Signals, GitHub, and DigitalOcean before moving on to become Co-Founder and CEO at Operable. You can also find him talking about various DevOps topics at conferences and elsewhere online

@markimbriaco | https://operable.io/

Carmen DeArdo

Carmen DeArdo, technology director at Nationwide Insurance, is responsible for driving continuous delivery utilizing DevOps, lean and agile techniques across mobile, distributed and mainframe and other technologies. This includes recommendations and implementation of technologies integrated across the development life cycle to drive variable speed IT.

@carmendeardo  | https://www.nationwide.com/

 

- About The Authors

Trusted by technology leaders worldwide. Since publishing The Phoenix Project in 2013, and launching DevOps Enterprise Summit in 2014, we’ve been assembling guidance from industry experts and top practitioners.

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