Narrator: 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.

Adam Frank: You know, I've seen a lot of developer advocates,

within companies really kind of start to look internally. One

who is kind of walks in those shoes of a developer is

certainly going to have the best best foot forward.

Eveline Oehrlich: Welcome to humans of DevOps Podcast. I'm

Evelyn early Chief Research Officer at DevOps Institute. Our

podcast title today is cloud native observability developer

happiness. Yes, you can, or Oh, my, if that sounds a little bit

like the Dorsey at Kansas, it is for a reason, because I have

with me, a gentleman who has incredible knowledge across

many, many topics, and I wanted to talk to Him about everything.

But I know we only have about 2025 minutes. So today, we have

with us Adam Frank. He's a senior vice president for

product and marketing at armory. Hello, Adam.

Adam Frank: Thank you so much for having me on.

Eveline Oehrlich: Yes, excited. Like I said, I'm very excited.

So before we get started, I wanted to share with the

audience a little bit on your background. So Adam is

passionate about all things product and design, he creates

influences and greatly improves end to end or e to e, I just

heard somebody say that experiences, he is helping

armory expand and grow by building top shelf product

marketing and design teams that deliver a simple message with a

simple experience. He has over 15 years of product and

development experience, specializing, sorry for that

specializing in building products and strategies for

complex problems, problems that enable digital transformations,

and organizational change to ensure growth and scale for

businesses of the world. Now, Adam is also a DevOps Institute

ambassador, and I believe you are still advisor for financial

services and technology as part of a misery that IO, is that

correct? That is correct. Excellent. Well, welcome again.

And thank you for having the time or taking the time on your

end. I know you are very, very busy. So I really appreciate it.

And I know our listeners are appreciating it as well.

Adam Frank: Yeah, thanks for having me. That's quite the

intro there as well.

Eveline Oehrlich: Yes, of course. And I'm actually

surprised, you know, we haven't actually, I am an ambassador, of

course, as well. But I'm also Chief Research Officer, we

haven't really met in person. So congratulations on being an

ambassador, and thank you for all of your work. Hopefully, we

get to meet in person at some point, because now we can, we

will see. The first thing really, what is the take of

being an ambassador? And how has that helped you as kind of a

little bit of a want to get a little bit more insight on what

ambassadors do to our audience? Tell us a little bit about your

role.

Adam Frank: Sure, sure. So like you said, back in 2020, is

really where I was introduced to the DevOps Institute. Helen Bill

was the first person that I interacted with, and she is

absolutely lovely, she is full of energy. And she really

advocates for the community. So her energy just kind of spilled

onto me to advocate for the community as well. So it's

really about sharing the knowledge sharing the

experiences, the number of courses that the DevOps

Institute has been coming out with lately, and being able to

consult on those courses, provide inputs, ideas, even

right some of the courses, the modules, the chapters, wherever

they may be, and really collaborate with that community

to produce something that will hopefully help other members

that are very interested in the topic or trying to learn. I

think that's the impetus of all of this is that really sharing

knowledge to help others learn and grow within the vast, vast

community that we have in and around DevOps and it in in

general. So it's, it's, it's fantastic to be an ambassador. I

very much enjoyed it. And it's really helped me both from a

networking point of view and understand other people's

perspectives, but also help understand other problems and

things that people are facing as well to come up with and you

know, kind of ideate around solutions to those problems,

along with keeping up with trends and things of that

nature. It's been it's been a wonderful ride so far.

Eveline Oehrlich: Great. Well, thank you for sharing that. And

yes, shout out to Helen. She is absolutely wonderful. She has

Add that that Nick for getting people connected and excited. I

love working with her. So shout out to her super thanks for

sharing that. In terms of a topic, I really want to first

address one I have also researched and studied. So

you've been focusing and doing some work around observability

for a while. Why do you think observability is such a hot

topic today?

Adam Frank: I think we could probably sum it up in in four or

five words. And that would be customer experience and product

lead growth, bring that down to five letters UX and plg. I think

with the complexity and scale of infrastructure and application,

in today's day and age, and the reach from globalization, it's

it's that coupled with the speed of innovation that we are

seeing, one really needs to understand what that customer

experience is, what is that customer experiencing with the

end to end solution that you are providing, as a software

provider as a product service. So being able to not only

understand the system, and how they are interacting and

behaving, but what that customer is feeling what that customer is

doing, that's going to really enable you to make informed

decisions to iterate quickly. To increase your uptime, the way

that we really look at the world is agility, stability, and

security are going to provide the best customer experience out

there. But in order to provide the agility, you need to know

where you're pivoting what you're iterating on. And being

able to do that quickly. In order to provide the stability,

you need to understand the systems and the application and

how they're all interacting to make sure that it is up and

available and ready to go for that customer wherever they may

be. And of course, security, security is top of mind always,

but there's also the other side of it. And that's the cost

savings. So being able to see different areas of the

application that can be tuned, the infrastructure that can be

tuned to also bring cost savings forward is going to be very,

very beneficial for any any, any product in any company that is

that is delivering the services.

Eveline Oehrlich: That it's really a balancing effort. And

an outside in perspective, right. As you said, from a

customer experience, perspective, we're rolling out,

we're coming in from that perspective, making sure we have

the velocity, we have the stability, and we have the

security because my that's essential. But at the same time,

we know budgets aren't that big this year, according to Gartner,

I think there's a 5.3% rising in IT budget. So that's not a lot

in terms of spending. So having that balance is where

observability fits right in. That's a great, I love that that

could be actually a nice, a nice graphic. All right. Now, of

course, this has to do with the digital pace, right, the pace of

transformation, no matter if it is in healthcare in industries,

verticals, governments, whatever they are, we see that pace

continues as CEOs have that on their, on their sleeve as a

strategic initiative continuing, particularly after pandemic. And

that causes. But while we have a pace of fast and agile and

stable and secure, there's also a significant challenge around

the taking of debt that creates, we also have skill gaps, and we

have not enough talents. And that makes everything a little

bit more complicated. But really what I want to get to is the

technology stack is, as you mentioned, I think you said that

is becoming more and more complex. And it's becoming more

and more complicated. And I'm assuming you're seeing that with

your clients. So when I step back and think about our focus

on the on the in the listening mode, maybe we have some leaders

and of course, we have individual contributors who need

to rethink their technology stack. How should they? So this

is a two part question first, how should they rethink their

tech stack today? Where and what can they do to consolidate the

tech stack? What are your thoughts on that?

Adam Frank: Great, great question. Yes, every day, we

every day both as a company ourselves and with our

customers. We see this every day. The pace of change is the

fastest that it's ever been. And it is not slowing down. I don't

see we don't see it slowing down anytime soon. So yes, every day.

I think some of the first things that leaders can start to do is

really Staying close to the trends and the best practices

that are out there. But one also needs to not just make a

decision, because it's the new shiny object, it's the new shiny

toy. But is there any return on investment with updating their

tech stack, they'll begin to think five years, 10 years out

down the road, but also in that short term, and is there

actually going to be returned to do this not everything needs to

be promoted to a cloud native piece of software. Sometimes

things just can't, the way that they were written, you know, we

talked to I talked to a customer not too long ago, and they're,

you know, 42 year old software company with millions of lines

of code, supporting over 20 different languages at this

point. And by the time that they rewrote this, they may be 42

years in the future, and they will just have to rewrite it all

again. So it doesn't necessarily make sense to replace everything

within the tech stack. I had a great conversation with Kelsey

Hightower a couple of weeks ago. And you know, he and I both

firmly believe that Kubernetes is here. Kubernetes is certainly

here for a while. And, you know, with that, and the promise of

cloud native is always been cheaper, faster, more stable. So

I think one thing that leaders can can definitely do is embrace

the declarative nature of Kubernetes and future oriented

solutions that are really embracing the declarative

nature. No, that's also offering simple experiences for people.

But when it comes down to a really careful planning, not

over analyzing, and making informed decisions quickly, to

be able to fail fast on which aspects of your tech stack you

are replacing, don't try and do it all at once. Nobody ever

wants to do that just target specific areas. And that

portion, start with that portion that really enables you to move

quicker. And we definitely advocate when people are looking

at different parts of their tech stack. What's What's your CI CD

pipeline looking like? What's that process look like? Can that

be one of the first things that you target that will then enable

you to move much quicker with the rest of your stack. And of

course, don't force anything down on your developers make

sure that they are part of the process, they are making part of

the decisions with you. Because they are going to be the ones

that are going to have to benefit and use all of this. At

the end of the day.

Eveline Oehrlich: That gets me to my next question. Great. What

is it called a hook into my next question, developer experience.

We have heard about this. And I have to admit, Adam, I am an

infrastructure and operations. I wouldn't say geek, because I'm

kind of an old an old guys or a geezer I guess that's the way to

say it. But I started out and I you know, and developers to me,

were always kind of a strange animal. This is like 1994, that

dates me, right. But anyway, just a little bit on that. And

but that's not why we're here, I wanted to ask you, we hear a lot

about developer experience keeping developers happy. And as

I said, I'm an IMO myself, but I also covered developer and

infrastructure operations. As an analyst. We have made really

great progress with DevOps and SRE and many other press best

practices and developers, we know they don't want to do

operations. So how do we keep these developers happy? You

already mentioned some ideas there relative to C, ICD. We'll

get there in a little bit later. But what are some things our

folks can do? Even if their developers keep themselves

happy, right, Heather, and others to keep the developers

happy?

Adam Frank: Yeah, I think, in two words, empowerment and

transparency, with more emphasis on the empowerment side of

things, developers really want to focus they want to create,

they want to innovate, they want to solve complex problems, and

then want to see the benefits that those complex problems, the

solutions to those complex problems are providing for their

their users. So they need a platform, they need a tool base,

that's going to really provide them the confidence and make

their lives easier. They don't want to be stuck in those loops

of maintaining different pieces of infrastructure or figuring

out how to get their software delivered to production. You

know, why things are failing, all that kind of stuff. So

they're going to be happiest when they're coding when they're

solving complex problems, when their code is being shipped out

to production in a nice, easy and simple fashion that they can

fully control with that transparency that I had

mentioned, ops, ops also wants to focus, create, innovate, but

also has to enable and obfuscate the complexities that come along

with some of this. And really instrument for visibility and

stability. I mean, coupling all of that together. And having

close relationships with developers. That's really

started to really start to see things and that velocity take

off, you really start to see things come to fruition and, and

make the lives of developers much happier. Some of the things

that I've seen people do to really bring us together is

start a dedicated UX program, sorry, a dedicated developer

experience DX program went in there, that has a very strong

emphasis on improving that developer experience. So they're

evaluating tools or evaluating processes, they're including the

developers in all of the decisions, all of the

evaluation. So they can all make informed decisions together, and

really drive that experience to where they want it to be. And at

the end, when you do have happy developers, you're going to have

higher retention, your velocity is going to be higher your time

to market all that kind of great stuff. So it's a really, really

great area of focus and improve on within your company.

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Eveline Oehrlich: A little side, turn down the Dorothy's past,

you said developer experience program. So what kind of skills

does somebody like that need to have?

Adam Frank: You know, I've seen a lot of developer advocates,

within companies really kind of start to look internally, to

bring these programs to date, they definitely need the skills

to understand the life and the day of a developer, what a

developer is experiencing, they definitely need the tools to

understand or the experiences to understand what some of these

tools are, what some of these processes look like, having

somebody come in off the street without any development

experience whatsoever, it would be a very tough job for them to

improve that developer experience. So one who is kind

of walks in those shoes of a developer is certainly going to

have the best best foot forward.

Eveline Oehrlich: Great idea, I'm actually going to add that

to my upskilling report. As a potential idea in the area of

start WM process, it's not really in tech, federally, and

in total, just kind of all override. Excellent idea. I love

that skill building. That's the next topic I want to explore

with you. So we talked a little bit about it already. But I'm a

little biased, maybe because of where I come from, but I won't

tell you which bias I have until you answered the question. So

what do you what do you think is the most is the must have skill

building category? Is it around people or humans? Is it around

technology? Is it around best practice models and frameworks?

Is it leadership? Or is there anything else?

Adam Frank: Yeah, I mean, given the the title of this podcast, I

can probably guess, where were you lean in this? My guess is

correct, I would lean the same way. I think a good mix is

always a sound strategy, you'll always need a level of

leadership that can believe in what you're doing, they can

inspire others and they can, they can downright execute

against your strategy and your plan. But the right people can

learn tech, so I always believe that starting with the humans

starting with the people, and the rest kind of comes together.

When you have people that are have a willingness to learn,

they have have the ability to foster great relationships with

people collaboration, communication, all that kind of

good stuff. A lot of that stuff is is a lot more difficult to

teach in people than the actual tech is and the best practices

the best practices will come from learning what the new tech

is and and having those people that are very capable and very

willing so I always believe starting with people is the

right choice

Eveline Oehrlich: you know music to my ears, but you will be some

you will be surprised as I have been for the last five years in

doing this research that organizations particularly IT

teams are hiring for technology skills. That's to me right maybe

it is it maybe it's a it's a it's a muscle they have trained

for many many years where they where they think that they need

to bring and hire for technology skills. To me sometimes shakes

shake my head because Absolutely I agree with you. It has to be

Around to humans and the empathy and the collaboration and the

problem solving the communication. Because without

that, it makes it very difficult. But as I said, in, in

the research, that's not what it's saying, I've been beating

the drums on that. And maybe this is the year where we can

maybe make a little bit more, you know, an inroad on that.

Anyway, I have another two part question. This is now into, of

course, your favorite topic of continuous integration versus

continuous deployment. Give us your thoughts on these two very

important topics. And relative to each other, I hear sometimes

there are folks talking it interchangeably. And I remember,

you know, having conversations with they said the same, it's

not the same, it's different. And here's why. So what are your

thoughts on those things, and then I have another part, but

I'll hold that until we're done with that.

Adam Frank: Excellent, definitely not the same thing.

However, hand in hand, it's very, very difficult to have one

without the other, you know, almost impossible, continuous

integration and continuous deployment. They're like peanut

butter and jelly. I mean, these two are just absolutely made for

each other a match that is like no other. But they are very,

very different. Continuous Integration is really about

producing the highest quality artifacts as quickly as you can.

Continuous Deployment is about getting that artifact out to

production, and to your users as safely and as soundly as

possible. So to two very different things. However, they

do work hand in hand, when we look at continuous integration,

this is really where most people start. And this typically been

around a little bit longer, taking in a lot of the build and

test automation to produce that artifact. And I think it's

really only been the last couple of years, that continuous

deployment is starting to catch on more and more, giving people

that competitive advantage to iterate quickly, to understand

that a user is more accelerate the time to market, all of that

kind of really great stuff. So that's absolutely needed. And to

have a sound strategy back to the agility, the stability and

the security. That's really where continuous deployment

comes in, giving you the ability to get that code out to your

users quickly, but to be able to do it safely and soundly. So you

can control the blast radius, no, look at 5% of your user

base, you can start to shift traffic between different users.

But ultimately getting that code out there. And really empowering

back to empowering and making developers have a great

experience, empowering them to deploy on commit, and having

that confidence to be able to do that. And having that

transparency to watch that code go through Dev through staging,

you know, on to production.

Eveline Oehrlich: Well, just something on the side. For those

who don't know, peanut butter and jelly for us, Europeans, it

is red wine and chocolate. Right? Just FYI. But so armory

provides products and solutions in that space. Tell us a little

bit about what you guys have to offer in that area.

Adam Frank: Yeah, absolutely. So we specialize in continuous

deployment. And in particular, we have a declarative model,

we're deploying out to Kubernetes. And in fact, we were

the first and still the only that I'm aware of that has a

declarative model that actually orchestrates that deployment

across all of your Kubernetes clusters and environments. No

matter how many you have. It's really at any scale. So you

know, hooking up to continuous integration like GitHub using

GitHub actions. So empower developers to be able to deploy

on commit, and orchestrate that deployment. Throughout dev

tests. We integrate with things like security scanning,

integrate with logging solutions, observability

solutions to be able to run automated Canary analysis. So

you understand, is this change affecting my user base? How is

it affecting my user base? Is it close to the baseline baseline

is the same, all that kind of really good stuff, to really

help our customers accelerate their time to market? You know,

move quicker, have that agility that they need to understand

their users and their user base, iterate quickly. But do it in a

nice, safe, sound and reliable way? Wow,

Eveline Oehrlich: great. You are really wicked smart about all

these topics. I love it. This is great. We could continue. But I

have been looking at the clock and it's amazing how quickly 25

minutes pass. So I have a closing question has nothing To

Do With CI CD, or maybe a little bit with peanut butter and jelly

or red wine and chocolate, but what do you do for fun if you

don't do what you do at your teams as an ambassador or

otherwise? What do you do for fun, Adam?

Adam Frank: Yes, sir. Certainly closer to the red wine and

jelly. Having grown up in Canada, you really need to do

something throughout the winter months. So since it is the very

beginning of March, the sun is starting to shine. But there's

still snow on the ground here. I very much enjoy snowboarding.

I've played hockey for a lot of my life and playing sports. But

most importantly, I have a beautiful daughter who has

almost a year and a half, and a fantastic wife and partner. So I

very much enjoy spending a lot of my time with them. And just

watching her grow right now is one of the funniest things that

that I could possibly do with my dad.

Eveline Oehrlich: Oh, fantastic. That is fantastic. Embrace it,

because they grow up fast. I have two daughters myself, and

they are 25 and 27. And oh, well. I love them. But they're,

they're their own. This has been fantastic conversation. Thank

you so much for talking to us and sharing your wealth of

knowledge, your excitement and your I can hear the passion. And

I could hear the little accent there. There's another thing we

have in common. I used to live in Colorado, I love to ski and I

have an accent because I'm from Germany. And um, this has been

great. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for the pleasure. We

have been talking to Adam Frank, Senior Vice President, product

and marketing at armory. Adam again, wonderful. Enjoy.

Hopefully the upcoming weekend soon have some fun with your

daughter. And here is again humans of the ops podcast is

produced by DevOps Institute. Our audio production team

includes Julia pape, and Brendan Lee. I am humans of DevOps

podcast, executive producer evolutionarily. If you would

like to join us on the podcast, please contact us at humans of

DevOps podcast at DevOps institute.com. I cannot imagine

a longer email address and that anyway, I'm Evelyn, I'll talk to

you soon.

Narrator: Thanks for listening to this episode of the humans of

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