Enterprise Initiatives

Our guest on the podcast this week is Ben Bernstein, CEO and Co-founder of Twistlock. We discuss the myths surrounding the security of applications in containers in the cloud and advice for people just starting a container initiative.

We discuss why Vanguard went to the public cloud, the value of DevOps and best practices for IT leaders who are just getting started on their cloud initiative.

Our guest on the podcast this week is Issy Ben-Shaul, Co-Founder & CEO at Velostrata. We discuss the difference between hybrid cloud and multi-cloud. Hybrid is anything that’s not just one cloud provider, which includes multi-cloud. Multi-cloud is a strategy where some workloads are running on one cloud, some on another. One trend we see is that big enterprises are splitting workloads more and more between at least two major public clouds for a multi-cloud strategy. According to Gartner, 70% of enterprises will be implementing a multi-cloud strategy by 2019. Some do it because they are mandated by regulators to have more than one cloud. Others are deciding they can’t put all eggs in one basket and want the flexibility to use multiple different vendors. Companies used to look at cloud as a data center and it was all about IaaS. Now it’s becoming more and more abstract: PaaS, containers as a service, microservices, functions as a service, IoT developer kits, and edge computing are just the beginning. It see

Our guest on the podcast this week is Don Duet, President and COO at Vapor IO. We discuss the many definitions floating around for what edge computing is. Some call it fog computing or MEC (mobile edge computing). It is simple. It is a perspective that as the shift goes from wireless networks and person-to-person interaction to machine-to-machine interaction, underlying architectures must change along with that shift. For things like IoT and distributed data, they require reliability and speed at the source. Increased embeddedness from IoT to healthcare, finance to automotives requires lower latency and need solutions that are mass-scaled to meet distribution requirements. There are many use-cases for edge computing. Many often think first of Fitbits or Amazon Echos. However, it is transforming enterprises and changing entire business models based on the access to real-time data on the edge. It’s used in places like industrial IoT where sensors and sound collection takes place in factories. Managing these at

Our guest on the podcast this week is Shannon Williams, Co-Founder and VP, Sales at Rancher Labs. We discuss how Kubernetes has won the war as a leader in orchestration. However, it is still not easy to use or maintain. We explore what organizations need to consider to build operational efficiencies around the technology. Kubernetes, Docker, and containers are very different from something like VMware and Amazon in terms of adoption. When new technology comes into an organization, they usually would quickly become an IT-led project. With containers, they are more like Puppet, Chef, and Ansible. They pop up in clusters around the organization, started directly by DevOps teams, developers, and users.  A lot of times they already exist scattered around an organization and need a framework or logic to manage it all. That is what Rancher does, they act as a services platform to help manage many clusters. Key Considerations for Kubernetes We talk about the key considerations organizations need to think about when t

Our guest on the podcast this week is Brian Gracely, Director of Product Strategy at Red Hat. Brian discusses a small bank in Ohio and how they have a business use-case for Kubernetes. Because Kubernetes was built to manage Google-sized technology, it is surprising that there is a reason to apply it to a small brick and mortar bank just starting with web and mobile. What they noticed in the switch is that because customers get paid on Fridays and are more likely to check if they got paid on their personal mobile device, as soon as they launched mobile their Friday traffic soared. For just one fifth of business days, Fridays received ten times the amount of traffic as any other day. This unexpected spiky traffic pattern was a great use-case for Kubernetes. Kubernetes was built to deal with problems like that, even at small businesses. We also look at the state of the big three orchestration engines: Kubernetes, Mesos, and Swarm. Kubernetes and Mesos began as internal projects from larger companies. Mesos began

We discuss RightScale’s State of the Cloud report analyzing trends in the cloud. RightScale helps customers adopt cloud by helping them with a cloud management and optimization. This is the sixth year of the report so we can start to see trends over time now and there were a few interesting takeaways this year. In the report, RightScale asks two big questions for enterprises. First is about cloud strategy and what their intention is on cloud – to use private, public, or combinations of those. Second, they are asked about what they use today for private or public clouds. From a strategy point of view, people are still focused on multi-cloud with a special focus on hybrid cloud. In strategy, there was a shift away from private-only strategies. Fewer people were saying they plan to use only private cloud or multiple private clouds as their strategies. On adoption, there was a slight drop in people who are already using private cloud from 77% last year down to 72% this year. This may indicate companies who had tr

Our guest on the podcast this week is Gene Kim, DevOps expert and author at "The Phoenix Project" and "The DevOps Handbook." We discuss “The DevOps Handbook”, which was started over five and a half years ago and released in October 2016. Gene co-wrote the book with Jez Humble, Patrick Debois, and John Willis. The book includes over 48 case studies that range from unicorns like Google, Amazon, Facebook, but also horses like Nordstrom, Target, and Capital One. Many of the case studies came from the DevOps Enterprise Summit. The book has discussions of both greenfield and brownfield deployments, even touching on mainframes. The most common question enterprises ask about DevOps is: Where do we start? “The DevOps Handbook” starts with a chapter on starting with DevOps by picking the right value stream. The research started by looking at where successful unicorns and horses started with their DevOps initiatives. They also look at the failed DevOps initiatives to learn what to avoid. Failures can be categorized in t

Our guest on the podcast this week is Jim Ford, Chief Strategic Architect at ADP. We discuss Docker adoption, DevOps, and security for a company as big as ADP with over 630,000 customers, 35 million users in 100 countries, and 55 million stored social security numbers. We see how DevOps processes and security is never a completed initiative and can always be improved. We also see how DevOps at ADP varies significantly across projects and seems to mold to the team using it.

Our guest on the podcast this week is Rob Hirschfeld, Founder and CEO at RackN. We discuss the differences between Docker Swarm and Kubernetes as well as the debate about how many companies use containers the right way. We also look at hybrid and how it can be easy to lift a container from Amazon and move it to Google, but there will still be key differences in networking and storage between the two that make the shift more complex. Last, we talk about the pros and cons of going all in on one vendor.

Our guests on the podcast this week are Luke Kanies, CEO, andAlanna Brown, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Puppet. We discuss key findings from Puppet's 2016 State of DevOps Report. The report separates high performers by key metrics: deploy frequency, lead time for changes, mean to to recover, and change failure rate. Puppet found that high performers had 200x more frequent deployments than low performers, and 2,555x faster lead times. We look at how IT can take notes from the lean manufacturing model, especially in moving security and quality forward so that they can be closely involved in the initial design of features to avoid future issues.

Our guest on the podcast this week is Kim Weins, VP of Marketing at RightScale. We discuss RightScale’s recent State of the Cloud Report, taking a deep dive into DevOps and Docker adoption. Adoption is increasing across the board for configuration management tools such as Chef, Puppet, and Ansible, but Docker has seen the greatest growth since last year. Last year 13% of the teams surveyed were using Docker, while this year 27% are using it and 35% reported they plan to use it in the future. At this rate of growth, Docker could take the lead on widespread adoption as soon as next year. We also see a trend in large enterprises embracing DevOps, sometimes with more enthusiasm that SMBs. RightScale has taken their own steps to migrate to Docker to save costs and we see how they were successfully able to make the switch.

Our guest on the podcast this week is Michael Heflin, CEO at Sensuron. We discuss Sensuron’s research on fiber optic sensing, which is sure to change the game for internet of things in multiple industries from aerospace to energy to medicine. These sensors may be expensive now, but in less than ten years they are predicted to be offered at a consumer-level price. Small data, or data directly from sensors, is becoming increasingly important as internet of things spreads more widely.

Our guest on the podcast this week is Heather Andrus, Managing Director at Radius. We discuss hardware development for internet of things, overcoming the challenges of getting a new device to work reliably and scaling production. Cloud data storage will be a key factor in the future of hardware and connected devices.

Our guest on the podcast this week is John Dulchinos, VP, Global Automation and 3D Printing at Jabil. Up until 2016, 3D printing was only used for creating models, however on the immediate horizon is a new generation of printers that will allow you to print parts with the quality for real end use. We discuss how designs can be optimized in a number of hours, accelerating the product introduction process. We also discuss how 3D printing will impact traditional manufacturing and design for consumer goods from athletic shoes to internal bone structure and what this means for its corresponding industries

Our guest on the podcast this week is Damon Edwards, Founder atDTO Solutions and SimplifyOps and one of the early thought leaders in the DevOps movement. We discuss why Bimodal IT is the problem, not the solution. It is true that if technology moves too quickly an organization can lose control, but that does not mean the opposite is true and that an organization is completely safe if it moves very slowly. Large enterprises who have been successful at implementing DevOps practices include Ticketmaster, Nordstrom, and unicorn companies like Amazon who have been able to build DevOps processes from scratch as they grew.

Our guest on the podcast this week is Solomon Hykes, Founder and CTO at Docker. We discuss Docker’s upcoming third birthday and how they have been able to grow an entrepreneurial and engineering-focused team that moves quickly. We look at innovations in internet of things and the importance of Docker’s recent acquisition of Unikernel Systems.

Our guest on the podcast this week is Sean Hull, a cloud solutions architect specializing in data & DevOps at scale. We discuss the five tech challenges on Sean’s mind from issues with Docker, Redshift and Hadoop, to DevOps automation, to too much hardware and Amazon’s disruption of VC’s. Sean blogs weekly on his Scalable Startups blog. Find him on twitter at @hullsean and LinkedIn.

Our guest on the podcast this week is Rob Hirschfeld, Founder and CEO at RackN. We discuss hybrid devops and why the hybrid cloud is here to stay. We talk about the importance of abstraction layers in allowing each team to use whichever vendor works best for them while continuing to be supportable. We debate the security of containers versus private cloud and how the discussion is changing with the emergence of new companies that monitor security overall and will not run a container with a vulnerability.

We discuss how the industrial and consumer IoT worlds are beginning to collide with technologies such as the Apple Watch and Microsoft Kinect. We also look at the growth of IoT in 2015, specifically focusing on the increase of acquisitions and mergers in the semiconductor space. Finally, we consider the transcendence of drones, robots and augmented reality into mainstream movements in 2016 and beyond.